THE CLOUDS AROUND SHAKESPEARE.'

In The Catholic University Bulletin for December, 1909, I devoted five pages to an analysis of Father O'Neill's pamphlet, Could Bacon have written the Plays? At the end of that review I penned the following paragraph:

"One wonders whether Father O'Neill, having seemingly settled to his own satisfaction the point as to whether Bacon could have written the Shakespeare plays, will take the next obvious, though not necessarily logical, step, and essay to prove that he did write them. Should he do so, he will be a strong accession to the ranks of the Baconians."

Well, if we are to draw inferences from his latest publication, the distinguished Professor of English Language and Philology in University College, Dublin, has made considerable progress in the anticipated direction. He is not yet an out-and-out Baconian: he professes in fact to hold a position somewhere between the contending Stratfordian and Baconian armies; but that position is no middle one, for he is evidently much nearer to the insurgents than he is to the standpatters or regulars.

That he has not definitely joined the Baconians may indeed. be of some significance. In the pamphlets he has so far published he has attempted to prove two things, namely, (1) that Bacon could have written the plays, and (2) that Shakespeare could have written neither the plays nor the poems. Is he now seeking a via media? Will he, Warwick-like, set up yet another rival claimant to the literary throne? In a Postscript to his Clouds Father O'Neill quotes Professor Dowden thus:

1 The Clouds Around Shakespeare. A Lecture Delivered before the Royal Dublin Society, February 22nd, 1911. By the Rev. George O'Neill, S. J., M. A., Author of "Could Bacon have written the Plays?" Dublin: E. Ponsonby, Ltd., 116 Grafton Street. Pp. 38. Price 6d.

"The Shakespeare of each portrait-painter resembles the Shakespeare of the rest with quite as close a resemblance as portraits commonly possess which are drawn from a real face at different points of view by artists 'indifferent honest,'

and then goes on to say:

"I am quite ready to accept this view. But what actual living Elizabethan personage do these consentient portraits fit? That is the question towards answering which the present lecture and its predecessor (Could Bacon have written the Plays?') are intended to help.”

It is possible that we are on the eve of a startling three-cornered controversy.

However that may be, what at present clearly emerges is that Father O'Neill, if not exactly pro-Bacon, is most emphatically anti-Shakespeare. With mingled feelings, but much more in sorrow than in anger, do I chronicle this fall from grace. We of the true Shakespeare faith can ill afford to lose so keen a contestant, for, as I pointed out on a former occasion, the Dublin Professor is a doughty champion, wielding the weapon of a pitiless and inexorable logic with a deftness and a skill that enable him with ease to pink an opponent who is even for a moment off his guard.

A perusal of his latest publication will make this plain. A piece of writing more destructive of Shakespeare's claims has never before been put together in so small a compass. To the mind of one unacquainted with the arguments per contra it could not fail to carry conviction: nay, even to one who was acquainted with those arguments, but who was not at the same time a skilled dialectician, it would probably give reason for pause and supply material for doubt. Father O'Neill produces his general effect by bringing together into a compact whole some of the strongest reasonings of the anti-Shakespeare school. He lays no claim to originality of research, he puts forward no discoveries of his own. What he does show is singular mastery in the art of submitting closely knit arguments, great ability in his method of presentation, and wonderful powers of lucidity and condensation.

Of necessity in a scheme like this we are brought over more or less familiar ground. The unreliability of the portraits of Shakespeare; the puzzling character of Ben Jonson's various references to him; the improbability that an uneducated man like Shakespeare, whose youth was so wild and erratic, whose later life was spent in sordid money-getting and in petty lawsuits, who so far as records show never owned any books, should have written poems and plays that evince wide reading and an intimate acquaintance with practically all forms of ancient and modern learning; and the display of authorities on one side of the question or the other these are the materials, handled with consummate skill, out of which Father O'Neill has constructed his really splendid mosaic of argumentation.

Beginning with the portraits, he discards them all but the engraving by Martin Droeshout which appeared on the titlepage of the folio edition of the plays published in 1623. Concerning this picture he states the opinion that, although highly eulogised by Ben Jonson, it is "no representation of any human face whatever, but the portrait of a mere mask," and that it presents to us the front of one shoulder and the back of the other. This is nearly, if not quite, a restatement in another way of the declaration by Sir Edwin DurningLawrence, whom Father O'Neill mentions among his authorities, that the Droeshout portrait is "cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask." 2

Both Sir Edwin and Father O'Neill lay particular stress on Ben Jonson's lines printed on the fly-leaf opposite to this portrait in the folio of 1623. These lines, which are a sort of puff preliminary, written presumably to order and not under any feeling of inspiration, are very ordinary and display no special merit. They have the advantage, however, of appearing to most people to possess a particularly plain meaning and to be incapable of being twisted or tortured into any cabalistic symbol for the shrouding of deep mysteries. As I find they are not very well known, it may be useful to set them down here:

Bacon is Shake-Speare, by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bart. New York, 1910. Pp. viii+286. See Chap. II., p. 23.

66

To the Reader.

This Figure, that thou here feest put,
It vvas for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Grauer had a ftrife

With Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but haue dravvne his vvit
As vvel in braffe, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that vvas euer vvrit in braffe.
But, fince he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.

B. I.

Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, by interpreting "hit" in line 6 to mean "hid" and "out-doo the life" in line 4 to mean doo-out the life" and that again to mean "shut out the real face of the living man," draws the conclusion that the verses and portrait taken together" clearly reveal the true facts, that the author is writing left-handedly, that means secretly, in shadow, with his face hidden behind a mask or pseudonym," and that "the real face is hidden." 3 Of a piece with this conclusion is Sir Edwin's further deduction that, because Ben Jonson's lines, from "To the Reader " to "B. I.," both inclusive, contain in all 287 letters-that is, if, with him, you count the two w's in line 8 as four letters but each other w as one letter the "Great Author" meant to reveal himself to the world 287 years after 1623, namely, in 1910, the date of Sir Edwin's work, Bacon is Shake-Speare. That surely is argumentation run mad. Father O'Neill has the good sense not to commit himself to the acceptance of either of these fantastic conclusions, contenting himself with merely putting the following conundrums:

"What is the meaning of this riddling effigy? Why does it show us a mask? Why does it face both ways at once? And what was Ben Jonson's real mind about it when he wrote those ambiguous laudatory verses?

Obvious answers to his questions would be that the effigy is no riddling one at all, that it does not show a mask, that it

Op. cit., Chap. II., p. 29.

Op. cit., Chap. II., pp. 29, 30.

does not face both ways at once, and that Ben Jonson's laudatory verses, whatever else they are, are by no means ambiguous. Droeshout was a very young man in 1623—about 22 years old-and he never attained to any great eminence in his art. The faults in his engraving, as pointed out and I think exaggerated by Father O'Neill-the "horizontal plane of collar, appalling to behold," the neck which "must be about a foot long behind," the chest suggesting "the last stages of consumption," the "bulging forehead," and the "wooden expression of the countenance "-may lawfully be attributed to the want of experience and skill of the engraver, who, in addition, may have been drawing from a poor picture or from a picture of Shakespeare made up for a part in some play. As for the shoulders, I lay no claim to being a sartorial expert, but at the same time I must say a careful examination of the plates printed by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence in his book fails to convince me that this portion of the case has been made out. Is he, or is Father O'Neill, or is any of us sufficiently acquainted with the costume of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age to be able to dogmatise concerning its fine points and details? I could, if I chose, judging merely by the shape of the outer garment, raise exactly similar doubts about the portrait of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in the National Gallery, or the portrait of Ben Jonson in the Bodleian Library.

It is scarcely necessary to point out the extreme improbability of the existence of a conspiracy between Jonson, Droeshout, Heminge and Condell, Blount and Jaggard, and the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery to foist upon the reading public so gross a deception as the Baconians must of necessity attribute to them in this whole matter of the folio of 1623; or the extreme difficulty of keeping secret a conspiracy which was shared by so many, if it did in reality exist.

Father O'Neill gets away from the subject by the statement that "Portraits, however, are, after all, of minor importance in so momentous an inquiry"; and perhaps, without further elaboration of the point, we may as well take him at his word.

Noting the general agreement that exists among Baconians