He and I were looking
at some of Dickens's MSS. They were full of erasions and
corrections. I said, "How unlike Scott!" whose first draft of his
novels exactly answered to the players' description of Will's "copy."
My friend said, "Browning scarcely made an erasion or change in
writing his poems," and referred to Mr. Browning's MSS. for the
press, of which examples were lying near us. "But Browning must have
made clean copies for the press," I said: which was as new an idea
to my learned friend as it was undreamed of by the Players:- if what
they received from him were his clean copies.
The Players' testimony, through Jonson, cannot be destroyed by the
"easy stratagem" of Mr. Greenwood.
Mr. Greenwood now nearly falls back on Bacon, though he constantly
professes that he "is not the advocate of Bacon's authorship." The
author was some great man, as like Bacon as one pea to another. Mr.
Greenwood says that Jonson looked on the issue of the First Folio
{259a} "as a very special occasion." Well, it WAS a very special
occasion; no literary occasion could be more "special." Without the
Folio, badly as it is executed, we should perhaps never have had many
of Shakespeare's plays. The occasion was special in the highest
degree.
But, says Mr. Greenwood, "if we could only get to the back of
Jonson's mind, we should find that there was some efficient cause
operating to induce him to give the best possible send-off to that
celebrated venture.
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