Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown. Lang Andrew
an individual human being, apparently of the male sex. As to the name by which he was called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is “agnostic.” He himself is not Anti-Baconian. He does not oust Bacon and put the Unknown in his place. He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon may have contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work. To put it briefly: Mr. Greenwood backs the field against the favourite (our Will), and Bacon may be in the field. If he has any part in the whole I suspect that it is “the lion’s part,” but Mr. Greenwood does not commit himself to anything positive. We shall find (if I am not mistaken) that Mr. Greenwood regards the hypothesis of the Baconians as “an extremely reasonable one,” 13 and that for his purposes it would be an extremely serviceable one, if not even essential. For as Bacon was a genius to whose potentialities one can set no limit, he is something to stand by, whereas we cannot easily believe – I cannot believe – that the actual “Author,” the “Shakespeare” lived and died and left no trace of his existence except his share in the works called Shakespearean.
However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we cannot, as in Bacon’s case, show how he was occupied while the plays were being composed. He must, however, have been much at Court, we learn, and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology. Was he Sir Edward Coke? Was he James VI and I?
It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the “Anti-Willians” in a shape which will satisfy them. The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible. I can only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to understand them. I conceive the Baconians to cry that “the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature, attributed to a man named William Shakespeare.” Of a man named William Shakspere (there are many varieties of spelling) we certainly know that he was born (1564) and bred in Stratford-on-Avon, a peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant country town. There is absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford boy of his standing) ever went to Stratford school. His father, his mother, and his daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand. As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death inform us, he was a butcher’s apprentice; and also a schoolmaster “who knew Latin pretty well”; and a poacher. He made, before he was nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls “ante-nup.” He early had three children, whom he deserted, as he deserted his wife. He came to London, we do not know when (about 1582, according to the “guess” of an antiquary of 1680); held horses at the door of a theatre (so tradition says), was promoted to the rank of “servitor” (whatever that may mean), became an actor (a vagabond under the Act), and by 1594 played before Queen Elizabeth. He put money in his pocket (heaven knows how), for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best house in his native bourgade. He obtained, by nefarious genealogical falsehoods (too common, alas, in heraldry), the right to bear arms; and went on acting. In 1610–11 (?) he retired to his native place. He never took any interest in his unprinted manuscript plays; though rapacious, he never troubled himself about his valuable copyrights; never dreamed of making a collected edition of his works. He died in 1616, probably of drink taken. Legal documents prove him to have been a lender of small sums, an avid creditor, a would-be encloser of commons. In his will he does not bequeath or mention any books, manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth. It is utterly incredible, then, that this man wrote the poems and plays, so rich in poetry, thought, scholarship, and knowledge, which are attributed to “William Shakespeare.” These must be the works of “a concealed poet,” a philosopher, a courtier moving in the highest circles, a supreme legist, and, necessarily, a great poet, and student of the classics.
No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a legist, a scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all the other qualifications so the author of the plays either was Francis Bacon – or some person unknown, who was in all respects equally distinguished, but kept his light under a bushel. Consequently the name “William Shakespeare” is a pseudonym or “pen-name” wisely adopted by Bacon (or the other man) as early as 1593, at a time when William Shakspere was notoriously an actor in the company which produced the plays of the genius styling himself “William Shakespeare.”
Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding and of expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody, I have now summarised the views of the Baconians sans phrase, and of the more cautious or more credulous “Anti-Willians,” as I may style the party who deny to Will the actor any share in the authorship of the plays, but do not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.
Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side of the controversy is The Shakespeare Problem Restated, by Mr. G. G. Greenwood (see my Introduction). To this volume I turn for the exposition of the theory that “Will Shakspere” (with many other spellings) is an actor from the country – a man of very scanty education, in all probability, and wholly destitute of books; while “William Shakespeare,” or with the hyphen, “Shake-speare,” is a “nom de plume” adopted by the Great Unknown “concealed poet.”
When I use the word “author” here, I understand Mr. Greenwood to mean that in the plays called “Shakespearean” there exists work from many pens: owing to the curious literary manners, methods, and ethics of dramatic writing in, say, 1589–1611. In my own poor opinion this is certainly true of several plays in the first collected edition, “The Folio,” produced seven years after Will’s death, namely in 1623. These curious “collective” methods of play-writing are to be considered later.
Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory that “William Shake-speare” (with or without the hyphen), on the title-pages of plays, or when signed to the dedications of poems, is the chosen pen-name, or “nom de plume,” of Bacon or of the Unknown.
Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has written 14 on the name of the actor, and the “nom de plume” of the unknown author who, by the theory, was not the actor. Let me first confess my firm belief that there is no cause for all the copious writing about the spellings “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare” – as indicating the true but “concealed poet” – and “Shakspere” (&c.), as indicating the Warwickshire rustic. At Stratford and in Warwickshire the clan-name was spelled in scores of ways, was spelled in different ways within a single document. If the actor himself uniformly wrote “Shakspere” (it seems that we have but five signatures), he was accustomed to seeing the name spelled variously in documents concerning him and his affairs. In London the printers aimed at a kind of uniformity, “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”: and even if he wrote his own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent. Lawyers and printers might choose their own mode of spelling – and there is no more in the matter.
I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where quotations are indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr. Greenwood’s researches. “The family of William Shakspere of Stratford” (perhaps it were safer to say “the members of his name”) “wrote their name in many different ways – some sixty, I believe, have been noted.. but the form ‘Shakespeare’ seems never to have been employed by them”; and, according to Mr. Spedding, “Shakspere of Stratford never so wrote his name ‘in any known case.’” (According to many Baconians he never wrote his name in his life.) On the other hand, the dedications of Venus and Adonis (1593) and of Lucrece (1594) are inscribed “William Shakespeare” (without the hyphen). In 1598, the title-page of Love’s Labour’s Lost “bore the name W. Shakespere,” while in the same year Richard II and Richard III bear “William Shake-speare,” with the hyphen (not without it, as in the two dedications by the Author). “The name which appears in the body of the conveyance and of the mortgage bearing” (the actor’s) “signature is ‘Shakespeare,’ while ‘Shackspeare’ appears in the will, prepared, as we must presume, by or under the directions of Francis Collyns, the Stratford solicitor, who was one of the witnesses thereto” (and received a legacy of £13, 6s. 8d.).
Thus, at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it is spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the title-pages