The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories [122]
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? WHY WRITE I STILL ALL ONE, EVER THE SAME, AND KEEP INVENTION IN A NOTED WEED, THAT EVERY WORD DOES ALMOST TELL MY NAME, SHOWING THEIR BIRTH AND WHENCE THEY DO PROCEED? Oh, know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument; So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.
*Webb, pp. 125,156,235,264. Judge Webb is fond of his discovery.
The lines capitalised are thus explained by the Judge: 'Here the author certainly intimates that Shakespeare is not his real name, and that he was fearful lest his real name should be discovered.' The author says nothing about Shakespeare not being his real name, nor about his fear lest his real name should be discovered. He even 'quibbles on his own Christian name,' WILL, as Mr. Phillipps and everyone else have noted. What he means is: 'Why am I so monotonous that every word almost tells my name?' 'To keep invention in a noted weed' means, of course, to present his genius always in the same well-known attire. There is nothing about disguise of a name, or of anything else, in the sonnet.*
*Webb, pp. 64,156.
But Judge Webb assures us that Shakespeare himself informs us in the sonnets that 'Shakespeare was not his real name, but the noted weed in which he kept invention.' As this is most undeniably not the case, it cannot aid his effort to make out that, in the Folio, by the name of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson means another person.
In the Folio verses, 'To the Memory of my Beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What he has Left Us,' Judge Webb finds many mysterious problems.
Soul of the Age, The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage, My Shakespeare, rise!
By a pun, Ben speaks of Shakespeare as
shaking a lance As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.
The pun does not fit the name of--Bacon! The apostrophe to 'sweet Swan of Avon' hardly applies to Bacon either; he was not a Swan of Avon. It were a sight, says Ben, to see the Swan 'in our waters yet appear,' and Judge Webb actually argues that Shakespeare was dead, and could not appear, so somebody else must be meant! 'No poet that ever lived would be mad enough to talk of a swan as YET appearing, and resuming its flights, upon the river some seven or eight years after it was dead.'* The Judge is like the Scottish gentleman who when Lamb, invited to meet Burns's sons, said he wished it were their father, solemnly replied that this could not be, for Burns was dead. Wordsworth, in a sonnet, like Glengarry at Sheriffmuir, sighed for 'one hour of Dundee!' The poet, and the chief, must have been mad, in Judge Webb's opinion, for Dundee had fallen long ago, in the arms of victory. A theory which not only rests on such arguments as Judge Webb's, but takes it for granted that Bacon might be addressed as 'sweet Swan of Avon,' is conspicuously impossible.
*Webb, p. 134.
Another of the Judge's arguments reposes on a misconception which has been exposed again and again. In his Memorial verses Ben gives to Shakespeare the palm for POETRY: to Bacon for ELOQUENCE, in the 'Discoveries.' Both may stand the comparison with 'insolent Greece or haughty Rome.' Shakespeare is not mentioned with Bacon in the 'Scriptorum Catalogus' of the 'Discoveries': but no more is any dramatic author or any poet, as a poet. Hooker, Essex, Egerton, Sandys, Sir Nicholas Bacon are chosen, not Spenser, Marlowe, or Shakespeare. All this does not go far to prove that when Ben praised 'the wonder of our stage,' 'sweet Swan of Avon,' he meant Bacon, not Shakespeare.
When Judge Webb argued that in matters of science ('falsely so called') Bacon and Shakespeare were identical, Professor Tyrrell, of Trinity College, Dublin, was shaken, and said so, in 'The Pilot.'
*Webb, pp. 125,156,235,264. Judge Webb is fond of his discovery.
The lines capitalised are thus explained by the Judge: 'Here the author certainly intimates that Shakespeare is not his real name, and that he was fearful lest his real name should be discovered.' The author says nothing about Shakespeare not being his real name, nor about his fear lest his real name should be discovered. He even 'quibbles on his own Christian name,' WILL, as Mr. Phillipps and everyone else have noted. What he means is: 'Why am I so monotonous that every word almost tells my name?' 'To keep invention in a noted weed' means, of course, to present his genius always in the same well-known attire. There is nothing about disguise of a name, or of anything else, in the sonnet.*
*Webb, pp. 64,156.
But Judge Webb assures us that Shakespeare himself informs us in the sonnets that 'Shakespeare was not his real name, but the noted weed in which he kept invention.' As this is most undeniably not the case, it cannot aid his effort to make out that, in the Folio, by the name of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson means another person.
In the Folio verses, 'To the Memory of my Beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What he has Left Us,' Judge Webb finds many mysterious problems.
Soul of the Age, The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage, My Shakespeare, rise!
By a pun, Ben speaks of Shakespeare as
shaking a lance As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.
The pun does not fit the name of--Bacon! The apostrophe to 'sweet Swan of Avon' hardly applies to Bacon either; he was not a Swan of Avon. It were a sight, says Ben, to see the Swan 'in our waters yet appear,' and Judge Webb actually argues that Shakespeare was dead, and could not appear, so somebody else must be meant! 'No poet that ever lived would be mad enough to talk of a swan as YET appearing, and resuming its flights, upon the river some seven or eight years after it was dead.'* The Judge is like the Scottish gentleman who when Lamb, invited to meet Burns's sons, said he wished it were their father, solemnly replied that this could not be, for Burns was dead. Wordsworth, in a sonnet, like Glengarry at Sheriffmuir, sighed for 'one hour of Dundee!' The poet, and the chief, must have been mad, in Judge Webb's opinion, for Dundee had fallen long ago, in the arms of victory. A theory which not only rests on such arguments as Judge Webb's, but takes it for granted that Bacon might be addressed as 'sweet Swan of Avon,' is conspicuously impossible.
*Webb, p. 134.
Another of the Judge's arguments reposes on a misconception which has been exposed again and again. In his Memorial verses Ben gives to Shakespeare the palm for POETRY: to Bacon for ELOQUENCE, in the 'Discoveries.' Both may stand the comparison with 'insolent Greece or haughty Rome.' Shakespeare is not mentioned with Bacon in the 'Scriptorum Catalogus' of the 'Discoveries': but no more is any dramatic author or any poet, as a poet. Hooker, Essex, Egerton, Sandys, Sir Nicholas Bacon are chosen, not Spenser, Marlowe, or Shakespeare. All this does not go far to prove that when Ben praised 'the wonder of our stage,' 'sweet Swan of Avon,' he meant Bacon, not Shakespeare.
When Judge Webb argued that in matters of science ('falsely so called') Bacon and Shakespeare were identical, Professor Tyrrell, of Trinity College, Dublin, was shaken, and said so, in 'The Pilot.'