Only fourteen years before, this Ben Jonson had published the verses which made William Shakespeare. Only fourteen years before he had asserted—what the world has taken his word for, and never questioned from that day to this—that his "best beloved" William Shakespeare had been the "soul of the age"—"not for an age, but for all time"—and his works "such as neither man nor muse can praise too much!" We have no means of knowing the precise date at which Ben Jonson's grief for his dead friend cooled, and his feelings experienced a change. But he leaves behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoranda, this catalogue "of all the wits" living in his day, who, in his opinion, "could honour a language or help study," and in this catalogue he inserts no such name as William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare, the name—not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that—only, about fourteen years ago—he had deemed worth mentioning among men "born about this time;" but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! Had the "Discoveries" preserved an absolute silence concerning William Shakespeare, the passage we have quoted might, perhaps, have been considered a studied and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on the part of Jonson, made for reasons best known to Jon-son himself. But they are not silent. They devote a whole paragraph to William Shakespeare—but in the proper place; that is to say, not among "the wits who could honour a language or help study," but among the author's personal acquaintance. This is all there is of this paragraph as to the real William Shakespeare:
I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "would he had blotted out a thousand!" which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candour (for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any). He was (indeed) honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power, would that the rule of it had been so too! Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he said in the person of Cæsar—one speaking to him—"Cæsar, thou dost me wrong;" he replied, "Cæsar never did wrong, but with just cause," and such like; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than pardoned. *
That is every word which a man who "loved him" could say of William Shakespeare!—that he was a skilled and careful penman, "never blotting out a line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to be checked; that, in playing the part of Cæsar on the stage, somebody interpolated the speech, "Cæsar, thou dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response; ** and that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted out a thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand Shakespearean lines!—a thousand of the priceless lines of the peerless book we call "Shakespeare!"
* "Works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. 91.
** Possibly this may have occurred in playing the very
version of the "Cæsar" we now possess, though there are, of
course, no such lines to be found there.
Fancy the storm which would follow such a vandal proposition to-day! Ben Jonson does not specify which thousand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of the writings of his "soul of the age," the man "not of an age, but for all time!" And yet it is on the uncorroborated word of this man Jonson that we build monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel about the spelling of his name! If there is not a strong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from having been an admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of the day (we have history as authority for that), was poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to Shakespeare; he was a stock actor on the rich managers boards, and could not take the bread out of his own mouth. But the poor scholar, and still poorer actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert fling at the rich charlatan:
"Though need make many poets, and some such
As art and nature have not bettered much,
Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age:
Or purchase your delight at such a rate