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
manuscript book Discourses an affectionate but critical page on
Shakespeare as a man and an author. Always, in prose, and in verse,
and in recorded conversation, Ben explicitly identified Shakspere
(William, of Stratford) with the author of the plays usually ascribed
to him. But the Baconian Judge Webb (in extreme old age), and the
anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others, choose to interpret
Ben's words on the theory that, in 1623, he "had his tongue in his
cheek"; that, like Odysseus, he "mingled things false with true,"
that THEY know what is true from what is false, and can undo the many
knots which Ben tied in his tongue.
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