Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown - Andrew Lang

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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 [11a] 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—and also is spelled otherwise, as “Shackspeare.” In March 1594 the actor’s name is spelled “Shakespeare” in Treasury accounts. The legal and the literary and Treasury spellings (and conveyances and mortgages and wills are not literature) are Shakespeare, Shackspeare, Shake-speare, Shakespere—all four are used, but we must regard the actor as never signing “Shakespeare” in any of these varieties of spelling—if sign he ever did; at all events he is not known to have used the a in the last syllable.

      I now give the essence of Mr. Greenwood’s words [13a] concerning the nom de plume of the “concealed poet,” whoever he was.

      “And now a word upon the name ‘Shakespeare.’ That in this form, and more especially with a hyphen, Shake-speare, the word makes an excellent nom de plume is obvious. As old Thomas Fuller remarks, the name suggests Martial in its warlike sound, ‘Hasti-vibrans or Shake-speare.’ It is of course further suggestive of Pallas Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, for Pallas also was a spear-shaker (Pallas ὰπὸ του πάλλειν τὸ δόρυ); and all will remember Ben Jonson’s verses . . . ” on Shakespeare’s “true-filed lines”—

      “In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

       As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.”

      There is more about Pallas in book-titles (to which additions can easily be made), and about “Jonson’s Cri-spinus or Cri-spinas,” but perhaps we have now the gist of Mr. Greenwood’s remarks on the “excellent nom de plume” (cf. pp. 31–37. On the whole of this, cf. The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 293–295; a nom de plume called a “pseudonym,” pp. 307, 312; Shakespeare “a mask name,” p. 328; a “pseudonym,” p. 330; “nom de plume,” p. 335).

      Now why was the “nom de plume” or “pseudonym” “William Shakespeare” “an excellent nom de plume” for a concealed author, courtier, lawyer, scholar, and so forth? If “Shakespeare” suggested Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom and of many other things, and so was appropriate, why add “William”?

      In 1593, when the “pseudonym” first appears in Venus and Adonis, a country actor whose name, in legal documents—presumably drawn up by or for his friend, Francis Collyns at Stratford—is written “William Shakespeare,” was before the town as an actor in the leading company, that of the Lord Chamberlain. This company produced the plays some of which, by 1598, bear “W. Shakespere,” or “William Shakespeare” on their title-pages. Thus, even if the actor habitually spelled his name “Shakspere,” “William Shakespeare” was, practically (on the Baconian theory), not only a pseudonym of one man, a poet, but also the real name of another man, a well-known actor, who was not the “concealed poet.”

      “William Shakespeare” or “Shakespere” was thus, in my view, the ideally worst pseudonym which a poet who wished to be “concealed” could possibly have had the fatuity to select. His plays and poems would be, as they were, universally attributed to the actor, who is represented as a person conspicuously incapable of writing them. With Mr. Greenwood’s arguments against the certainty of this attribution I deal later.

      Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education and wide reading, the choice of name might have been judicious. A “concealed poet” of high social standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting the plays of contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies from their owners, the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, through that knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will Shakspere. He might then rewrite and improve them, more or less, as it was his whim to do. The actor might make fair copies in his own hand, give them to his company, and say that the improved works were from his own pen and genius. The lie might pass, but only if the actor, in his life and witty talk, seemed very capable of doing what he pretended to have done. But if the actor, according to some Baconians, could not write even his own name, he was impossible as a mask for the poet. He was also impossible, I think, if he were what Mr. Greenwood describes him to be.

      Mr. Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to London, does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his name. But, if he were educated at Stratford Free School (of which there is no documentary record), according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps “he was removed from school long before the usual age,” “in all probability” when “he was about thirteen” (an age at which some

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