250
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th S. XL MARCH 28, 1903.
speare could read such Latin, his know-
ledge of Latin was not "small."
How is it that even the writers of the introductory matter in the First Folio are at loggerheads'over the man of their admiration ? Jonson writes :
And, that he
Who casts a living line, mutt sweat (Such as thine are).
Then Heminge and Condell write : " What he thought he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."
Here we have a direct contradiction that Shakespere "sweated" over his work and that he wrote it with "easinesse." And yet we are asked to believe that Shakspere wrote ' The Merry Wives,' to the order of Queen Elizabeth, in a fortnight ! His calli- graphy, to accomplish this feat, must have been somewhat different from that displayed in the five autographs now extant.
Neither Fleay nor Ingleby attaches any value to " the abundant praise lavished on Shakespeare by Jonson and others in com- mendatory verses after his death." Another contemporary tried his hand on "commenda- tory verses," by the name of Leonard Digges, the Oxford scholar who wrote of Shake- speare certain lines introductory to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's poems lines whichj as Mr. Halliwell - Phillipps acknowledged, were intended to be printed in the First Folio, but were rewritten to suit the occa- sion. No wonder the editors refused them admission as originally written. This is what contemporary Digges says :
Next Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow, This whole Booke, thou shalt find he doth not
borrow,
One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate, Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate, Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane, Nor begges he from each witty friend a Scene To peece his Acts with, all that he doth write, Is pure his owne, plot, language exquisite.
Does MR. WILSON say " Amen " to such " con temporary evidence" as this? Why, it is acknowledged by every Shakespearean com mentator that Shakespeare started his career by doctoring up old plays ; that he took hi plots from older plays and novels, sometimes in toto; and that all but two of the thirty-seven extant plays are known to have been thut constructed. Yet here we have Digges a contemporary "scholar," who must have seer or read the plays, maintaining that he bor rowed nothing, imitated nobody, but that al he wrote was spun from his own brain With an Oxford scholar " like Digges won over by Shakspere, why not Jonson ? It is no
surprising, therefore, to find Dr. Ingleby
contending, in his ' Centurie of Prayse,'
ihat
' it is plain, for one thing, that the bard of our
admiration was unknown to the men of thatage
if, as Mr. Charles Knight concludes, ' he was always n the heart of the people,' that fact speaks more x>r Shakespeare as a showman than for Shakespeare as a man of genius. Doubtless he knew his men ; Kit assuredly his men did not know him,"
or his plays, especially when they ascribed to him "little Latin" and an originality that saved him from borrowing either plot or ideas from previous writers.
As to my reference to Sir Henry Irving, my comparison of the opportunities of our leading actor with those of Shakspere was not to either of them being a " scholar," but to their both being " acting managers." I do not deny that Shakspere was an excel- lent man of business he made his money as a man of business, not as a writer of plays (S. Lee). So did Sir Henry ^pace the later history of the Lyceum ; and if Bacon wanted a man on whom to father his plays, he could not have got a better individual to adopt them than, after Burbage, the best acting- manager of his day " the man of Stratford," as he is styled by Emerson. Bacon might equally well have conferred the honour on Burbage, Alleyn, Henslowe, or even Heminge or Condell, and "the assumption of the authorship" by any one of them woul<} not, I venture to say, "have been received with a howl of derision from his contemporaries,'"' as ME. WILSON suggests.
As to Chettle's so-called apology^ on which MR. WILSON lays so much stress in spite of Lee and Halliwell-Phillipps, I hold, with Staunton and Ingleby, that Chettle's refer- ence was not to Shakspere, for the reasons already given, but to Thomas Nash, who had good cause to " take offence " at being addressed and classed as a friend and collaborator of Greene. Even Chettle, at the end of his famous ' Epistle,' repeats his apology by stating that the ' Groatsworth ' "was all Greenes, not mine, nor Maister Nashes, as some unjustly have affirmed." We cannot but infer, as Staunton says, from Nash's indignant denial, in 'Pierce Penilesse,' of having any hand in that " scald trivial lying pamphlet, cald ' Greenes Groatsworth of Wit,'" and of any but an ordinary acquaintance with Greene, that he was greatly annoyed at the idea of his friends believing him to have been on terms of close companionship with so depraved a character as Greene. The term " young Juvenal " fits Nash exactly. In fact,
