If the Great Unknown were dead in 1623, his negligence was as bad as Will’s.  If he were alive and revised his own work for publication, {231b} he did it as the office cat might have done it in hours of play.  If, on the other side, he handed the editorial task over to Ben, {232a} then he did not even give Ben a list of his genuine works.  Mr. Greenwood cites the case of Ben Jonson, a notorious and, I think, solitary exception.  Ben was and often proclaimed himself to be essentially a scholar.  He took as much pains in prefacing, editing, and annotating his plays, as he would have taken had the texts been those of Greek tragedians.

Finally, all Baconians cry out against the sottish behaviour of the actor, Will, if being really the author of the plays, he did not bestir himself, and bring them out in a collected edition.  Yet no English dramatist ventured on doing such a thing, till Ben thus collected his “works” (and was laughed at) in 1616.  The example might have encouraged Will to be up and doing, but he died early in 1616.  If Will were not the author, what care was Bacon, or the Unknown, taking of his many manuscript plays, and for the proper editing of those which had appeared separately in pamphlets?  As indolent and casual as Will, the great Author, Bacon or another, left the plays to take their chances.  Mr. Greenwood says that “If the author” (Bacon or somebody very like him) “Had been careless about keeping copies of his manuscripts . . . " {232b} What an “if” in the case of the great Author!  This gross neglect, infamous in Will, may thus have been practised by the Great Unknown himself.

In 1911 Mr. Greenwood writes, “There is overwhelming authority for the view that Titus Andronicus is not Shakespearean at all.” {233a} In that case, neither Bacon, nor the Unknown, nor Ben, acting for either, can have been the person who put Titus into the Folio.

CHAPTER XII:  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.