What the advantages may have been we try to estimate later.
Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will “could have learned but little there. No doubt boys at Elizabethan grammar schools, if they remained long enough, had a good deal of Latin driven into them. Latin, indeed, was the one subject that was taught; and an industrious boy who had gone through the course and attained to the higher classes would generally be able to write fair Latin prose. But he would learn very little else” (except to write fair Latin prose?). “What we now call ‘culture’ certainly did not enter into the ‘curriculum,’ nor ‘English,’ nor modern languages, nor ‘literature.’” [17a] Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that “removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress—it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments.” [17b] Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship to a butcher or draper, but doubts the poaching, and the frequent whippings and imprisonments, as in the story told by the Rev. R. Davies in 1708. [17c]
That this promising young man, “when he came to London, spoke the Warwickshire dialect or patois is, then, as certain as anything can be that is incapable of mathematical proof.” [17d] “Here is the young Warwickshire provincial . . . ” [17e] producing, apparently five or six years after his arrival in town, Venus and Adonis . . . “Is it conceivable that this was the work of the Stratford Player of whom we know so little, but of whom we know so much too much? If so we have here a veritable sixteenth-century miracle.” [17f] Moreover, “our great supposed poet and dramatist had at his death neither book nor manuscript in his possession, or to which he was legally entitled, or in which he had any interest whatever.” [17g]
If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a patois could write Venus and Adonis, manifestly it was inconceivable in 1593, when Venus and Adonis was signed “William Shakespeare.” No man who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor’s authorship; ignorant as he was, bookless, and rude of speech. For such a Will as Mr. Greenwood describes to persuade the literary and dramatic world of his age that he did write the plays, would have been a miracle. Consequently Mr. Greenwood has to try to persuade us that there is no sufficient evidence that Will did persuade, say Ben Jonson, of his authorship and we shall see whether or not he works this twentieth-century miracle of persuasion.
Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an enthusiastic Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not easily pass for the Author. [18a] But his own bookless actor with a patois seems to him, as author of Venus and Adonis, almost inconceivable. Yet, despite Will’s bookless rusticity, this poem with Lucrece, which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into English by 1593, was regarded as his own. I must suppose, therefore, that Will was not manifestly so ignorant of Latin as Mr. Greenwood thinks. “I think it highly probable,” says this critic, “that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford” (where nothing but Latin was taught) “for four or five years, and that, later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able to ‘bumbast out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as ‘Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief.’ Nay, I am not at all sure that he would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man as George Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better. But it does not follow from this that he was the author either of Venus and Adonis or of Hamlet.” [19a]
Nothing follows from all this: we merely see that, in Mr. Greenwood’s private opinion, the actor might write even better than George Wilkins, but could not write Venus and Adonis. Will, therefore, though bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of literature, in partnership with Wilkins. We have merely the critic’s opinion that Will could not write Hamlet, even if, like Wordsworth, “he had the mind,” even if the gods had made him more poetical than Wilkins.
Again, “he had had but little schooling; he had ‘small Latin and less Greek’” (as Ben Jonson truly says), “but he was a good Johannes Factotum; he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, ‘bumbast out a blank verse.’” [19b]
The “Johannes Factotum,” who could “bumbast out a blank verse,” is taken from Robert Greene’s hackneyed attack on an actor-poet, “Shake-scene,” published in 1592. “Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief,” is from an epigram on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601–16?). If the allusions by Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by 1592, had a literary ambition so towering that he thought his own work in the new art of dramatic blank verse was equal to that of Marlowe (not to speak of Wilkins), and Greene reckoned him a dangerous rival to three of his playwright friends, of whom Marlowe is one, apparently.
If Jonson’s “Poet-Ape” be meant for Will, by 1601 Will would fain “be thought the chief” of contemporary dramatists. His vanity soared far above George Wilkins! Greene’s phrases and Jonson’s are dictated by spite, jealousy, and envy; and from them a true view of the work of the man whom they envy, the actor-poet, cannot be obtained. We might as well judge Molière in the spirit of the author of Elomire Hypocondre, and of de Visé! The Anti-Willian arguments keep on appearing, going behind the scenes, and reappearing, like a stage army. To avoid this phenomenon I reserve what is to be said about “Shake-scene” and “Poet-Ape” for another place (pp. 138–145 infra). But I must give the reader a warning. Concerning “William Shakespeare” as a “nom de plume,” or pseudonym, Mr. Greenwood says, “Some, indeed, would see through it, and roundly accuse the player of putting forth the works of others as his own. To such he would be a ‘Poet-Ape,’ or ‘an upstart crow’ (Shake-scene) ‘beautified with the feathers of other writers.’” [21a]
If this be true, if “some would see through” (Mr. Greenwood, apparently, means did “see through”) the “nom de plume,” the case of the Anti-Willians is promising. But, in this matter, Mr. Greenwood se trompe. Neither Greene nor Jonson accused “Shake-scene” or “Poet-Ape” of “putting forth the works of others as his own.” That is quite certain, as far as the scorns of Jonson and Greene have reached us. (See pp. 141–145 infra.)
If an actor, obviously incapable of wit and poetry, were credited with the plays, the keenest curiosity would arise in “the profession,” and among rival playwrights who envied the wealth and “glory” of the actors. This curiosity, prompting the wits and players to watch and “shadow” Will, would, to put it mildly, most seriously imperil the secret of the concealed author who had the folly to sign himself “William Shakespeare.” Human nature could not rest under such a provocation as the “concealed poet” offered.
This is so obvious that had one desired to prove Bacon or the Unknown to be the concealed author, one must have credited his mask, Will, with abundance of wit and fancy, and, as for learning—with about as much as he probably possessed. But the Baconians make him an illiterate yokel, and we have quoted Mr. Greenwood’s estimate of the young Warwickshire provincial.
We all have our personal equations in the way of belief. That the plot of the “nom de plume” should have evaded discovery for a week, if the actor were the untutored countryman of the hypotheses, is to me, for one, absolutely incredible. A “concealed poet” looking about for a “nom de plume” and a mask behind which he could be hidden, would not have selected the name, or the nearest possible approach to the name, of an ignorant unread actor. As he was never suspected of not being the author of the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a country ignoramus, manifestly incapable of poetry, wit, and such learning as the plays exhibit. Every one must judge for himself. Mr. Greenwood fervently believes in what I disbelieve. [22a]
“Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves at all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays . . . ” says Mr. Greenwood.
Very few care now. They know the actors’ names: in vain, as a rule,