Destitute as I am of legal training, I leave this notable way of disposing of the evidence to the judgement of the Bench and the Bar, a layman intermeddleth not with it. Still, I am, like other readers, on the Jury addressed,—I do not accept the arguments. Miror magis, as Mr. Greenwood might quote Latin. We have already seen one example of this argument, when Heywood speaks of the author of poems by Shakespeare, published in The Passionate Pilgrim. Heywood does nothing to identify the actor Shakspere with the author Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood. I shall prove that, elsewhere, Heywood does identify them, and no man knew more of the world of playwrights and actors than Heywood. I add that in his remarks on The Passionate Pilgrim, Heywood had no need to say “by W. Shakespeare I mean the well-known actor in the King’s Company.” There was no other William Shakspere or Shakespeare known to his public.
It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen above, that the allusions “disprove the theory that the true authorship was hidden under a pseudonym.” That is an entirely different question. He is now starting quite another hare. Men of letters who alluded to the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is my position. That they may all have been mistaken: that “William Shakespeare” was Bacon’s, or any one’s pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question; and we must not allow the critic to glide away into it through an “at any rate”; as he does three or four times. So far, then, Mr. Greenwood’s theory that it was impossible for the actor Shakspere to have been the author of the plays, encounters the difficulty that no contemporary attributed them to any other hand: that none is known to have said, “This Warwickshire man cannot be the author.”
“Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to Shakspere, real or supposed,” says the critic. [138a] He begins with the hackneyed words of the dying man of letters, Robert Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592). The pamphlet is addressed to Gentlemen of his acquaintance “that spend their wits in making plays”; he “wisheth them a better exercise,” and better fortunes than his own. (Marlowe is supposed to be one of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but such suppositions do not here concern us.) Greene’s is the ancient feud between the players and the authors, between capital and labour. The players are the capitalists, and buy the plays out and out,—cheap. The author has no royalties; and no control over the future of his work, which a Shakspere or a Bacon, a Jonson or a Chettle, or any handyman of the company owning the play, may alter as he pleases. It is highly probable that the actors also acquired most of the popular renown, for, even now, playgoers have much to say about the players in a piece, while they seldom know the name of the playwright. Women fall in love with the actors, not with the authors; but with “those puppets,” as Greene says, “that speake from our mouths, these anticks, garnished in our colours.” Ben Jonson, we shall see, makes some of the same complaints,—most natural in the circumstances: though he managed to retain the control of his dramas; how, I do not know. Greene adds that in his misfortunes, illness, and poverty, he is ungratefully “forsaken,” by the players, and warns his friends that such may be their lot; advising them to seek “some better exercise.” He then writes—and his meaning cannot easily be misunderstood, I think, but misunderstood it has been—“Yes, trust them not” (trust not the players), “FOR there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide” (“Player’s” in place of “woman’s,” in an old play, The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, &c.), “supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”
The meaning is pellucid. “Do not trust the players, my fellow playwrights, for the reasons already given, for they, in addition to their glory gained by mouthing our words, and their ingratitude, may now forsake you for one of themselves, a player, who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of yours” (including Marlowe’s, probably). “The man is ready at their call” (“an absolute Johannes Factotum”). “In his own conceit” he is “the only Shake-scene in a country.” “Seek you better masters,” than these players, who have now an author among themselves, “the only Shake-scene,” where the pun on Shakespeare does not look like a fortuitous coincidence. But it may be, anything may happen.
The sense, I repeat, is pellucid. But Mr. Greenwood writes that if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare “it seems clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author he is attacked.” [140a] As an actor the person alluded to is merely assailed with the other actors, his “fellows.” But he is picked out as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the players, “for there is” among themselves, “in a player’s hide,” “an upstart crow”—who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of theirs. He is, therefore, necessarily a playwright, and being a factotum, can readily be employed by the players to the prejudice of Greene’s three friends, who are professed playwrights.
Mr. Greenwood says that “we do not know why Greene should have been so particularly bitter against the players, and why he should have thought it necessary so seriously to warn his fellow playwrights against them.” [141a] But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us. In addition to gaining renown solely through mouthing “our” words, wearing “our feathers,” they have been bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will, in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; “yes, for they now have” an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their own fellowship. Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene wrote as he did. He says nothing about the superior financial gains of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have been the “only” cause of his bitterness. Greene gives its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later, in his verses “Poet-Ape” (Playwright-Actor). Moreover, Mr. Greenwood gives Greene’s obvious motives on the very page where he says that we do not know them.
Even Mr. Greenwood, [141b] anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits that the words “supposes himself as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you,” “do seem to have that implication,” [141c] namely, that “Shake-scene” is a dramatic author: what else can the words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene write blank verse?
Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying “it is clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author that ‘Shake-scene’ is attacked,” [142a] concedes [142b] that it “certainly looks as if he” (Greene) “meant to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himself able to compose, as well as to mouth verses.” Nothing else can possibly be meant. “The rest of you” were authors, not actors.
If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should “Shake-scene” alone be selected for a special victim? Shake-scene is chosen out because, as an author, a factotum always ready at need, he is more apt than the professed playwrights to be employed as author by his company: this is a new reason for not trusting the players.
I am not going to take the trouble to argue as to whether, in the circumstances of the case, “Shake-scene” is meant by Greene for a pun on “Shake-speare,” or not. If he had some other rising player-author, the Factotum of a cry of players, in his mind, Baconians may search for that personage in the records of the stage. That other player-author may have died young, or faded into obscurity. The term “the only Shake-scene” may be one of those curious coincidences which do occur. The presumption lies rather on the other side. I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously struggling for his case says that, even assuming the validity of the surmise that there is an allusion to Shakspere, [143a] “the utmost that we should be entitled to say is that Greene here accuses Player Shakspere of putting forward, as his own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another” (the Great Unknown?). I do more than demur, I defy any man to exhibit that sense in Greene’s words.