While examining this portrait, the reader should study the lines that describe it in the Shakespeare folio of 1623, a facsimile of which is here inserted.
To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Grauer had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but haue drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was euer writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
B.I.
Plate IX.
VERSES ASCRIBED TO BEN JONSON, FROM THE 1623 FOLIO EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS.
B.I. call the ridiculous dummy a "portrait" but describes it as the "Figure put for" (that is "instead of") and as "the Print," and as "his Picture"; he likewise most clearly tells us to "looke not on his (ridiculous) Picture, but (only) his Booke." It seems, therefore, evident that he knew the secret of Bacon's authorship and intended to inform those capable of understanding that the graver had done out the life when he writes, "Out-doo the life." In the New English Dictionary, edited by Sir J.A.H. Murray, there are upwards of six hundred words beginning with "Out," and every one of them, with scarcely a single exception, requires, in order to be fully understood, to be read reversed. Out-law does not mean outside of the law, but lawed out by a legal process. "Out-doo" was used only in the sense of "do out"; thus, in the "Cursor Mundi," written centuries before the days of Elizabeth, we read that Adam was out done [of Paradise]; and in Drayton's "Barons' Wars," published in 1603, we find in Book V. s. li.
"That he his foe not able to withstand,
Was ta'en in battle and his eyes out-done."
The graver has indeed done out the life so cleverly that for hundreds of years learned pedants and others have thought that the figure represented a real man, and altogether failed to perceive that it was a mere stuffed dummy clothed in an impossible coat, cunningly composed of the front of the left arm buttoned on to the back of the same left arm, as to form a double left armed apology for a man. Moreover, this dummy is surmounted by a hideous staring mask, furnished with an imaginary ear, utterly unlike anything human, because, instead of being hollowed in, it is rounded out something like the rounded outside of a shoe-horn, in order to form a cup which would cover and conceal any real ear that might be behind it.
Perhaps the reader will more fully understand the full meaning of B.I.'s lines if I paraphrase them as follows:—
To the Reader.
The dummy that thou seest set here,
Was put instead of Shake-a-speare;
Wherein the Graver had a strife
To extinguish all of Nature's life;
O, could he but have drawn his mind
As well as he's concealed behind
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But since he cannot, do not looke
On his mas'd Picture, but his Booke.
Do out appears in the name of the little instrument something like a pair of snuffer which was formerly used to extinguish the candles and called a "Doute." Therefore I have correctly substituted "extinguished" for "out-doo." At the beginning I have substituted "dummy" for "figure" because we are told that the figure is "put for" (that is, put instead of) Shakespeare. In modern English we frequently describe a chairman who is a mere dummy as a figurehead. Then "wit" in these lines means absolutely the same as "mind," which I have used in its place because I think it refers to the fact that upon the miniature of Bacon in his 18th year, which was painted by Hilliard in 1578, we read:—"Si tabula daretur digna animum mallem." This line is believed to have been written at the time by the artist, and was translated in "Spedding":—"If one could but paint his mind."