part I

have ever truly cherished “my good opinion of other men’s worthy labours, especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Fletcher, and lastly (without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker and Master Heywood.”

These words written by the third greatest of English tragic poets are very significant, for Webster wrote for the theatre to which Shakspere, the player and play-broker, belonged; yet industry is the only distinguishing mark in Shakspere which he must share with Dekker, and Heywood, hack writers for the stage. Dekker’s many plays attest his copious industry, when we remember that this writer spent three years in prison, and Heywood’s industry cannot be doubted for he claimed to have had a hand and main finger in two hundred twenty plays. Copious industry signifies to the reader the existence of an author not utterly unknown, it is true, but it fails to identify him as the author of the immortal plays. What shall we say then? Were the works called Shakespeare’s but little known? Shakspere’s biographers say that they were the talk of the town. If that is true, then the writer who was commended for industry was not regarded by Webster as the author of “Hamlet,” “Lear,” and “Macbeth,” for Shakespeare’s distinctive characteristics are not individualized from those of Dekker and Heywood, while those of Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher are. In the last four named is perfect interlacement of personality with authorship, but not so in Shakespeare.

John Webster’s judgment of his fellow craftsman was just, “I have ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men’s worthy labours.” Webster never conceals or misrepresents the truth by giving evasive, or equivocating, evidence. He reveals the judicial trait of his character in placing Chapman first among the poets then living, assuming that the name Shakespeare was used by printers and publishers, if not by writers, as an impersonal name, masking the name of a true poet. Sidney, Marlowe and Spencer had then descended to the tomb.

George Chapman’s name has not received due prominence in the modern hand-books of English literature, but he was a bright torch and numbered by his own generation, among the greatest of its poets. He, whom Webster calls the “Prince’s Sweet Homer” and “My Friend,” was not unduly honored by the “full and heightened style” which Webster makes characteristic of him. “Our Homer-Lucan,” as he was gracefully termed by Daniel, is a poet much admired by great men. Edmund Waller never could read Chapman’s Homer without a degree of transport. Barry is reputed to have said that when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high; Coleridge declares Chapman’s version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the “Faerie Queene.” He also declares that Chapman in his moral heroic verse stands above Ben Jonson. “There is more dignity, more lustre, and equal strength.”

Translation was in those times a new force in literature. By the indomitable force and fire of genius Chapman has made Homer himself speak English by translating the genius, and by having chosen that which prefers the spirit to the letter. It is in his translation that the “Iliad” is best read as an English book. Out of it there comes a whiff of the breath of Homer. It is as massive and majestic as Homer himself would have written in the land of the virgin queen. “He has added,” says Swinburne, “a monument to the temple which contains the glories of his native language, the godlike images, and the costly relics of the past.” “The earnestness and passion,” says Charles Lamb, “which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the honor of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised.” It was the reflected Hellenic radiance of the grand old Chapman version to the lifted eyes of Keats flooded with the “light which never was on sea or shore.” This younger poet sang:

“Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen, Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold; Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”

The preface to Webster’s tragedy, “The White Devil,” which contains a slight mention of Shakespeare, was printed in 1612, after all the immortal plays were written and their reputed author had returned to Stratford, probably in 1611, in his forty-seventh year, where he lived idly for five years before his death. John Webster possessed a critical faculty and an independent judgment, but the way he makes mention of Shakespeare shows that he knew nothing about the individual man, or the work, called Shakespeare.

The generous reference to “The laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson” gives a clear idea of the main characteristics of the work of Jonson, who, not having reached the fruition of his renown in 1611, but in the after time, came into Dryden’s view as “The greatest man of the last age, the most learned and judicious writer any theatre ever had.” John Webster writes of “the no less worthy composures of Beaumont and Fletcher” then in the morning of life. They present an admirable model for purity of vocabulary and simplicity of expression and were of “loudest fame.” “Two of Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s plays were acted to one of Shakespeare’s, or Ben Jonson’s,” in Dryden’s time.

There is strong presumptive proof that printers and publishers in Elizabethan and Jacobin times were in the habit of selecting names or titles that would best sell their books. The most popular books or best sellers they printed were books of songs, love-tales, comedies and sonnets of the amorous, scented kind, and it mattered not to publishers if the name printed on the title-page was a personal name, or one impersonal. Title-pages were not even presumptive proof of authorship in the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. The printers chose to market their publications under the most favorable conditions, and some writers chose the incognizable name “Shakespeare” which had been attached to the voluptuous poem “Venus and Adonis.” This was published by Richard Field, in whose name it had been entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1593. There was no name of an author on the title-page, but the dedication was to the Earl of Southampton and was signed “William Shakespeare.” This was the first appearance of the name “Shakespeare” in literature, being the non-de-plume, doubtless, of the writer who gave this erotic poem to the world—“The first heir of my invention.”

Not finding “Shakespeare” in the anthology of his day, the most natural inference would be that all those who wrote under the name “Shakespeare” wrote incognito. We know that Marlowe, Beaumont, Greene, Drayton and many writers of that age wrote anonymously for the Elizabethan stage. Many of the anonymous writings have been retrieved; much, doubtless, remains still to be reclaimed from the siftings of what are named Early Comedy, Early History, and Pre-Shakespearean Group of plays. Mr. Spedding had the good fortune to be the first to demonstrate the theory of a divided authorship of “Henry VIII.,” to reclaim for Fletcher “Wolsey’s Farewell to all his Greatness.” Thirteen out of the seventeen scenes of “Henry the Eighth” are attributed by Mr. Lee (P. 212) to Fletcher. A majority of the best critics now agree with Miss Jane Lee, in the assignment of the second and third part of Henry VI. to Marlowe, Greene and Peele.

The difficulty of identifying Shakespeare, the author poet, with the young man who came up from Stratford, has induced Shakespearean scholars to question the unity of authorship. Mr. Swinburne tells us that no scholar believes in the single authorship of “Andronicus.” Mr. Lee admits that Shakespeare drew largely on the “Hamlet,” which he has attributed to Kyd (P. 182). “It is scarcely possible,” says Mr. Marshall in the “Irving Shakespeare,” “to maintain that the play ‘(Hamlet)’ referred to as well known in 1589, could have been by Shakspere—that is—by the young actor from Stratford. Surely not. We see the question of the unity of the author and authorship involves the question of his identity.” It is evident that the author poet, whoever he was, had, in his time of initiation, “purloyned plumes” from Marlowe, Kyd and Greene, and, when nearing the close of his literary career, according to Prof. A. H. Thorndike, he was a close imitator of John Fletcher—not so much an innovator as an adapter.

What do we know of Shakespeare, the author poet, “The Man in a Mask?” We know nothing, absolutely nothing. No reputed play by Shakespeare was published before 1597, and none bore the name Shakespeare on the title page till 1598. Lodge, in his prose satire “Wits Misery,” dated 1596, enumerates the wits of the time. Shakspere is not mentioned. Dr. Peter Heylys was born in 1600, and died in 1662, thus being sixteen years old when Shakspere, the player died. In reckoning up the famous dramatic poets of England he omits Shakspere. Ben Jonson, in the catalogue of writers, also omits Shakspere, and at a later date, writing on the instruction of youth and the best authors, he forgets all about Shakspere. Philip Henslow, the old play-broker, also in writing his notebook during the twelve years beginning in February, 1591, does not even mention Shakspere. Milton’s poem on Shakespeare (1630) was not published in his works in 1645. This epitaph was prefixed to the folio edition of Shakespeare (1632), but without Milton’s name. It is the first of his reputed poems that was published. Its pedigree was not at all satisfactory. Milton, having been misled by Ben Jonson’s lines on Shakespeare, “And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” writes of

“Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”

Milton’s acquaintance with Shakespeare verse must have been very meager, for had he read “Venus and Adonis,” so classic and formal, he would agree with Walter Savage Lander that “No poet was ever less a warbler of woodnotes wild.” It was never said in the original authorities that a Shakespeare play, or one by Shakspere, was played between 1594 and 1614. There were published in quarto twenty-three plays in Shakespeare’s name—twelve of which are not now accepted—and nine without his name. The folio (1623) is the sole original authority for seventeen plays, but five writers—four of them very inferior men—refer to Shakespeare, antecedent to the folio of 1623.

Search as we may, we fail to find the play-actor in affiliation with poets or scholars. How unlike the literary men of that age; for instance, George Chapman, who had been called the “blank of his age,” and not without reason for, in all that pertains to the poet’s personal history, absolutely nothing is known in regard to his family, and very little of his own private life. Much, however, is known concerning Chapman’s personal authorship of poems and plays for the list of passages extracted from his poems in “England’s Parnassus” or the “Choicest Flowers of Our Modern Poets” contains no less than eighty-one. At the time of this publication (1600), he had published but two plays and three poems. “The proud full sail of his great verse” (Chapman’s Homer) had not at this time been unfurled.

At the time, this first English anthology was compiled and published, thirteen of the Shakespeare plays and two poems had been issued. Nevertheless Shakespeare does not figure in the anthology of his day. Why? The play-actor, William Shakspere, in his life time was not publicly credited with the personal authorship of the plays and poems called Shakespeare’s, except possibly by three or four poeticules, Bomfield, Freeman, Meres, and Weaver, who followed each other in the iteration and reiteration of the same insipid and affected compliments, not one of them implying a personal acquaintance with the author. Some few persons may have believed that the player and play-wright were one and the same person, and were deceived into so believing. This much we do know, that the player Shakspere never openly sanctioned the identification, although he may have been accessory to the deception. It should be borne in mind also that no poet was remembered in Shakspere’s will, as were the actors.

Many writers of that age were communistic in the use of the name “Shakespeare” as a descriptive title, very much like the Italians’ pantomime called “Silverspear,” standing for the collocuted works of not one, but several play-makers. Sir Thomas Brown complained that his name was being used to float books that he never wrote. In the list before us there are forty-nine plays which were published with Shakespeare’s name. Doubtless there were many others: not one in fifty of the dramas of this period, according to Hallowell-Philips, having descended to modern times. Many writers of that age wrote anonymously and pseudonymously. Edmund Spencer, author of “The Shepherd’s Calendar” remained incognito for seven years. Eight years after this work appeared George Whitstone ascribed it to Philip Sidney and a cotemporary writer, mistaking Spencer’s masking name for the author of the works. Spencer committed “The Faerie Queen” to the press after nine years. Only four of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were published in Fletcher’s lifetime and none of them bore Beaumont’s name. Fletcher survived his partner nine years. Robert Burton, author of “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” maintained his incognito for a time, he avers, because it gave him greater freedom. Jean Baptiste Poquelin preferred to be known as Molière. Francais-Marie Aronet won enduring fame as Voltaire. Sir Walter Scott maintained his incognito as the great unknown for years like “Junius,” “whose secret was intrusted to no one and was never to be revealed.” Sir Walter Scott preserved his secret until driven to the brink of financial destruction. Drayton also had written under the pseudonym of Rowland. Who can doubt that the author of “Hamlet,” “Lear” and “Macbeth,” chose to sheath his private life and personality as a man of letters in an impenetrable incognito—“the nothingness of a name.”

Of the thirty-seven plays assigned by the folio of 1623, not one had received the acknowledgment of their reputed author (Shakespeare). Not a single line in verse or prose assented to for comparison and identification, and in the absence of credible evidence of his authorship of certain poems, there can be no authoritative sanction of the assignment.

No person writing on the subject of Shakespeare can write a literary life of the individual man, for player Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon does not offer a single point of correspondence to the activities of a literary man or scholar. The fantastical critics profess to read the story of the author’s life in his works. This is an absurdity, for dramatic art is mainly character creation and cannot be made to disclose a knowledge of his private life. The artist is an observer and paints the thing seen. He, himself, is not the thing which he depicts but he gives the character as it is. In the opinion of the present writer it is a waste of time to attempt to identify Shakspere, the play-actor, with any one of the dramatic personages contained in the plays called Shakespeare’s.

Forty-six years after the death of William Shakspere of Stratford, Thomas Fuller in his “Worthies,” published posthumously in 1662, wrote:

“Many were the wit-combats between him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war.”

Fuller being born in 1608, was only eight years old when player-Shakspere died, and but two when he quitted London. If this precocious youngster beheld the “wit-combats” of the two, he could only have beheld them as he lay “mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms.”

VI.

We have in conclusion decided to focus the interest of the reader chiefly in the attestation of Ben Jonson for the works which were associated with the name of William Shakspere of Stratford. Ben Jonson presents a contrast to William Shakspere, in almost every respect, so striking as to awaken an irrepressible desire to compare the mass of proven facts adduced from authentic records. Being born in the city of London in the early part of 1574, he was ten years younger than Shakspere. He was the son of a clergyman. In spite of poverty he was educated at Westminster School, William Camden being his tutor, to whom Jonson refers as “Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe all that I am—in arts all that I owe.” A recent writer on the subject of Jonson says, “No other of Shakspere’s contemporaries has left so splendid and so enthusiastic an eulogy of the master.” In this statement all must concur, for Jonson is the only writer of eminence among Shakspere’s cotemporaries, who has left words of praise or censure, or have taken any notice, either of Shakspere, or of the works which bear his name; notwithstanding, it was the custom among literary men of the day to belaud their friends in verse or prose, Shakspere in his lifetime was honored with no mark of Ben Jonson’s admiration. Not a single line of commendatory verse was addressed to Shakspere by Jonson, although this promiscuous panegyrist was, with characteristic extravagance, so indiscriminate in sympathy or patronage. What shrimp was there among hack writers who could not gain a panegyric from his generous tongue?

For five and twenty years Shakspere and Jonson jostled in London streets, yet there was no sign or word of recognition as they passed each other by. Writers on the subject of Jonson and Shakspere say that we have abundant tradition of their close friendship. There are no credible traditions. The manufactured traditions, so conspicuous in books called, “A Life of William Shakspere,” are the dreams of fancy, fraud and fiction, used to fill the lacuna, or gap, in the life of the Stratford man.

The proven facts of William Shakspere’s life are facts unassociated with authorcraft—facts that prove the isolation and divorcement of player and poet. The proven facts of Ben Jonson’s life are facts interlacing man and poet. Almost every incident in his life reveals his personal affection, or bitter dislike, for his fellow craftsmen, always ready for a quarrel, arrogant, vain, boastful and vulgar. There is much truth in Dekker’s charge, “’Tis thy fashion to flirt ink in every man’s face and then crawl into his bosom.” He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and wrote his “Poetaster” on him. He was federated in a comedy “(Eastward Ho)” with Chapman, and was sent to prison for libeling the Scottish nobility. Ben Jonson’s personality and literary work are inseparable. Drunk or sober, few have served learning with so much pertinacity, and fewer still, have so successfully challenged admiration even from literary rivals, with whom at times he was most bitterly hostile, and at other times, indisputably open-handed and jovial.

Ben Jonson had a literary environment always for there is perfect interlacement of man and craft. He became one of the most prolific writers of his age occupying among the men of his day a position of literary supremacy. “In the forty years of his literary career he collected a library so extensive that Gifford doubted whether any library in England was so rich in scarce and valuable books.” From the pages of Isaac De Israeli we read, “No poet has left behind him so many testimonials of personal fondness by inscriptions and addresses in the copies of his works which he presented to his friends.” But of all these, as strange as it must seem to the votaries of Shakspere, not a single copy of Jonson’s works is brought forward to bear witness of his personal regard and admiration for Shakspere, and we may add that there is no testimonial by Shakspere of his regard and personal fondness for Ben Jonson, although many of the literary antiquaries have unearthed in their researches facts or new discoveries, which they have brought forward as new particulars of the life of William Shakspere. These, if not incompatible with authorship, are surely divorcing Shakspere, the actor, from Shakespeare, the author poet. They but deepen the mystery that surrounds the personality of the author of the immortal plays—“The shadow of a mighty name.” At the same time they disclose the true character of Shakspere the actor, money-lender, land-owner and litigant, which is affirmative of John Bright’s opinion that “any man who believes that William Shakspere of Stratford wrote ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear’ is a fool.”

The student reader will perceive that Jonson’s verse does not agree with his prose, and that his “Ode to Shakespeare,” which Dryden called “an insolent, sparing, and invidious, panegyric,” was not the final word of comment which is contained in Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries”—a prose reference in disparagement of Shakespeare, the writer, while laudatory of the man whom he may have believed was identifiable with the play-wright. We believe he was mistaken in so believing. Ben Jonson was vulnerable most in his character as a witness. The reader must therefore be indulgent if we make some remarks upon the credibility and competency of this witness. The elder writers on the subject of Jonson and Shakespeare before Gifford’s time (1757-1826) were always harping on Ben Jonson’s jealousy and envy of Shakespeare. Since Gifford’s day the antiquary has been abroad in the land without having discovered anything of a literary life of Shakespeare. As if by general consent, all recent writers on the subject regard Jonson’s attestation, or his metrical tribute, to the “memory of my beloved author, Mr. William Shakespeare, an essential element in Shakespeare’s biography as the title deed of authorship.” Having made him their star witness, we shall hear no more of Jonson’s jealousy and envy of Shakespeare.

A final consideration will show how little Ben Jonson is to be relied on “as attesting the responsibility of the Stratford player for the works which are associated with his name.” There is not a word or sentence in all Jonson’s writings which bear witness to Shakspere as a writer of plays or poems anterior to the Stratford player’s death, as all reference to Shakespeare in Jonson’s verse and prose are posterior to this event. They refute each other and discredit the writer. “Conversations of Ben Jonson with William Drummond” are of great literary and historical value and are important too, as bearing on Ben Jonson’s competency and credibleness as a witness. The Drummond notes were first printed by Mr. David Lang, who discovered them among the manuscripts of Sir Robert Sibbald, a well known antiquarian. “Conversations,” as we have it on the evidence of Drummond, is in accord with almost every contemporary reference to Jonson and internally they agree with Ben Jonson’s own “Discoveries.” There should be no controversy in regard to the justice of the Scottish poet’s criticism. From the notes recorded by Drummond we learn, “He (Ben Jonson) is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth.” The conversations recorded by Drummond took place when Jonson visited him at Hawthornden in 1618-19 and disclose the fact that “Rare Ben” was a vulgar, boastful, tipsy backbiter, who black-guarded many of his fellow craftsmen. The last circumstance recorded of Ben Jonson is where reference is made to his display of self-worship at the expense of others. In a letter dated from Westminster April 5, 1636, James Howell describes a Solem supper given by Jonson at which he and Thomas Carew were present, when Ben seems to have drenched himself with his favorite canary wine. Howell writes,

“I was invited yesternight to a Solem supper by B. J. whom you deeply remember. There was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial welcome. One thing intervened which almost spoiled the relish of the rest. Ben began to engross all the discourse to vapour extremely of himself and by vilifying others to magnify his own muse. Thomas Carew buzzed me in the ear that Ben had barreled up a great deal of knowledge, yet seems he had not read the ‘Ethiques’ which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self commendation. But for my