Ch. 12: Ben Jonson and Shakespeare

The evidence of Ben Jonson to the identity of Shakespeare the author with Shakspere the actor, is "the strength of the Stratfordian faith," says Mr. Greenwood. "But I think it will be admitted that the various Jonsonian utterances with regard to 'Shakespeare' are by no means easy to reconcile one with the other." {237a}

It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood's forty-seven pages about the evidence of Jonson. But, first, whenever in written words or in reported conversation, Ben speaks of Shakespeare by name, he speaks of his WORKS: in 1619 to Drummond of Hawthornden; in 1623 in commendatory verses to the Folio; while, about 1630, probably, in his posthumously published Discourses, he writes on Shakespeare as the friend and "fellow" of the players, on Shakespeare as his own friend, and as a dramatist. On each of these three occasions, Ben's TONE varies. In 1619 he said no more to Drummond of Hawthornden (apparently on two separate occasions) than that Shakespeare "lacked art," and made the mistake about a wreck on the sea-coast of Bohemia.

In 1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to Drummond he also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had panegyrised in an epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again to praise in the commendatory verses in the Folio. He spoke still more harshly of Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, and Tyraeus! He told an unkind anecdote of Marston, with whom he had first quarrelled and then made friends, collaborating with him in a play; and very generously and to his great peril, sharing his imprisonment. To Drummond, Jonson merely said that he "beat Marston and took away his pistol." Of Sir John Beaumont, brother of the dramatist, Ben had written a most hyperbolical eulogy in verse; luckily for Sir John, to Drummond Ben did not speak of him. Such was Ben, in panegyric verse hyperbolical; in conversation "a despiser of others, and praiser of himself." Compare Ben's three remarks about Donne, all made to Drummond. Donne deserved hanging for breaking metre; Donne would perish for not being understood: and Donne was in some points the first of living poets.

Mr. Greenwood's effort to disable Jonson's evidence rests on the contradictions in his estimates of Shakespeare's poetry, in notices scattered through some thirty years. Jonson, it is argued, cannot on each occasion mean Will. He must now mean Will, now the Great Unknown, and now--both at once. Yet I have proved that Ben was the least consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion, and on his humour at the moment. This is a commonplace of literary history. The Baconians do not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows it, ignores it, and bases his argument on facts which may be unknown to his readers. We have noted Ben's words of 1619, and touched on his panegyric of 1623. Thirdly, about 1630 probably, Ben wrote in his