When Shakespeare is mentioned as an author by contemporary
writers, the Baconian stratagem, we have seen, is
to cry, “Ah, but you cannot prove the author
mentioned to be the actor.” We have seen
that Meres (1598) speaks of Shakespeare as the leading
tragic and comic poet ("Poor poet-ape that would be
thought our chief,” quoth Jonson), as author
of Venus and Adonis, and as a sonneteer. “All
this does nothing whatever to support the idea that
the Stratford player was the author of the plays and
poems alluded to,” says Mr. Greenwood, playing
that card again. {155a}
The allusions, I repeat, do prove that Shak(&c.),
the actor, was believed to be the author, till any
other noted William Shak(&c.) is found to have been
conspicuously before the town. “There is
nothing at all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire,
had any personal knowledge of Shakespeare.”
There is nothing at all to prove that Meres, native
of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge of nine-tenths
of the English authors, famous or forgotten, whom he
mentions. “On the question—who
was Shakespeare?—he throws no light.”
He “throws no light on the question”
“who was?” any of the poets mentioned
by him, except one, quite forgotten, whose College
he names . . . To myself this “sad repeated
air,”—“critics who praise Shakespeare
do not say who Shakespeare was,”—would
appear to be, not an argument, but a subterfuge:
though Mr. Greenwood honestly believes it to be an
argument,—otherwise he would not use it:
much less would he repeat it with frequent iteration.
The more a man was notorious, as was Will Shakspere
the actor, the less the need for any critic to tell
his public “who Shakespeare was.”
As Mr. Greenwood tries to disable the evidence when
Shakespeare is alluded to as an author, so he tries
to better his case when, in the account-book of Philip
Henslowe, an owner of theatres, money-lender, pawn-broker,
purchaser of plays from authors, and so forth, Shakespeare
is not mentioned at all. Here is a mystery
which, properly handled, may advance the great cause.
Henslowe has notes of loans of money to several actors,
some of them of Shakespeare’s company, “The
Lord Chamberlain’s.” There is no
such note of a loan to Shakespeare. Does this
prove that he was not an actor? If so, Burbage
was not an actor; Henslowe never names him.
There are notes of payments of money to Henslowe after
each performance of any play in one of his theatres.
In these notes the name of Shakespeare
is never once mentioned as
the author of any play.
How weird! But in these notes the names
of the authors of the plays acted are never mentioned.
Does this suggest that Bacon wrote all these plays?
