FINAL NOTE

There is one argument in support of the contention that Bacon was the author of Venus and Adonis which seems to me to deserve more attention than it has hitherto received.

It was, I believe, first put forward by the late Reverend Walter Begley, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, in his book, Is it Shakespeare?[114]—a work which every one interested in the Shakespeare problem ought to read, because it is replete with both information and amusement, and there is hardly a dull page in it. The argument is derived from the Satires of Marston and Hall, our early English satirists, of the sixteenth century, who wrote in bitter vein the one against the other. Both of them have a good deal to say concerning one Labeo, which is a pseudonym for some anonymous writer of the time. Now in 1598 Marston published a poem founded on the lines and model of Venus and Adonis, which he called “Pigmalion’s Image” (sic)—a love poem, not a satire—and as an appendix to it he wrote some lines “in prayse of his precedent Poem,” where “Pigmalion” had, according to the old legend, succeeded in bringing the image he had wrought out of ivory to life, and in this appendix occur the following lines:

Now compare the following lines from Venus and Adonis (199-200):

Here we have Labeo’s complaint almost word for word, and we are reminded that at the end of Venus and Adonis there was the “strange metamorphosis” of Adonis into a flower, quite as strange as that of “Pigmalion’s Image.”

Is it not clear, then, that by Labeo is meant the author of Venus and Adonis? It may be said, of course, that it was not the author, but Venus who complained that Adonis was “obdurate, flinty,” and relentless, but that is a futile objection, for Marston evidently puts the words of Venus into Labeo’s mouth, and it can only be the author of the poem to whom he alludes.

Who, then, was Labeo? Well, “these University wits,” as Mr. Begley writes, “were steeped in Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, and thence brought forth a nickname whenever an occasion required it.” Now in Horace we read:

and we learn that M. Antistius Labeo was a famous lawyer, who, it is said, by too much free speaking had offended the Emperor Augustus.[115]

But what more have we about this sixteenth century Labeo? Well, Bishop Hall in his satires mentions him several times, and reflects upon him as a licentious writer who takes care to preserve his anonymity, and, like the cuttle-fish, involves himself in a cloud of his own making. Thus in the second book of his satires, which he called (after Plautus) Virgidemiæ, i.e., a bundle of rods, Hall attacks Labeo in the following words:

and he ends this satire thus:

From these lines we may infer, as Mr. Begley says, that Labeo did not write alone, but in conjunction with, or under cover of, another author, and also that he did not write “cleanly,” but in a lascivious style, such as the style of Venus and Adonis, it might be.

But there is a further passage in Hall’s Virgidemiæ (Book IV, Sat. 1) which I must quote:

It would take too long if, in this note, I were to attempt the explanation of this “Sphinxian” passage, as Dr. Grosart called it, but the general meaning seems clear enough, viz.: “I, the Satirist, whip Labeo, but Labeo merely laughs at me, for he knows he can shift the blame, and the punishment, on to another whose name he makes use of, while he himself lies, like the Cuttle, in the Cloud of his own vomiture.”[116]

Then, writes Mr. Begley, “Labeo is the writer of Venus and Adonis; and as there is every reason to think that Marston used the name Labeo because Hall had used it, we are therefore able to infer that Hall and Marston both mean the same man. We, therefore, advance another step, and infer that the author of Venus and Adonis did not write alone, that he shifted his work to another’s name (certainly a Baconian characteristic), and acted like a cuttle-fish by interposing a dark cloud between himself and his pursuers.”

But what proof or evidence is there that Labeo stood for Bacon? Well, Marston’s Satires were published, with his “Pigmalion’s Image,” in 1598, several months after Hall’s first three books of Virgidemiæ had appeared, and in his Satire IV, entitled Reactio, Marston goes through pretty well the whole list of writers whom Hall had attacked, and defends them, but, curiously enough, he seems to take no notice of Hall’s attack on Labeo, though that attack was a marked and recurrent one. But, says Mr. Begley, “Labeo is there, but concealed in an ingenious way by Marston, and passed over in a line that few would notice or comprehend. But when it is noticed it becomes one of the most direct proofs we have on the Bacon-Shakespeare question, and, what is more, a genuine and undoubted contemporary proof.” What, then, is that proof? It is found in a line addressed by Marston to Hall:

That is to say: “What, did not even mediocria firma escape thy spite?”—or we might translate: “What, was not even mediocria safe (firma) from thy spite?”

“Mediocria firma,” therefore, stands for a writer, and one who had been attacked by Hall. And who was that writer? Of this there can, surely, be no doubt. “Mediocria firma” was Bacon’s motto, and we find it engraved over the well-known portrait of Franciscus Baconus Baro de Verulam, which appears at the commencement of his Sylva Sylvarum. Moreover, it is a motto which has never been used except by the Earls of Verulam or the Bacon family. “Mediocria firma,” therefore, stands for Bacon. But is “Mediocria firma” identical with “Labeo”?

Well, “Labeo,” as used by Marston, stands for the author of Venus and Adonis. Of that, I think, there can be no doubt. And Hall’s “Labeo,” the elusive author of a lascivious poem, who writes under a pseudonym and who is always prepared to shift the responsibility upon somebody else, seems eminently characteristic of Francis Bacon. And it is Bacon, under the guise of “Mediocria firma,” the spiteful attacks upon whom in Hall’s Satires are deprecated by Marston. In fine, it seems to be eminently probable, though it cannot be said to be absolutely proved, that “Labeo” and “Mediocria firma” are one and the same.

The above is but a brief outline of the argument put before his readers by the late Walter Begley, and I have no space to elaborate it further in this note. I should like, however, to add one final word. If Bacon was the author of Venus and Adonis, then he was also the author of Lucrece. Well, for myself, I should not be at all surprised to find that he was, in fact, the author of that long, wearisome, tedious, and pedantic poem, where the outraged matron, “après avoir été violée autant qu’on peut l’être,” like Candide’s Cunegonde, and “pausing for means to mourn some newer way,” at last “calls to mind where hangs a piece of skilful painting, made for Priam’s Troy,” the contemplation of which leads to a prolonged train of reflection concerning Ajax and Ulysses, Paris and Helen, Hector and Troilus, Priam and Hecuba, etc., etc., all of which is singularly out of place in the mouth of Tarquin’s unhappy victim. Nor would I, in this connection, omit to refer to that long and curious and unwanted passage concerning heraldry which we find in an earlier part of the poem (lines 54-72), and upon which Mr. George Wyndham remarks that: “Whenever Shakespeare in an age of technical conceit indulges in one ostentatiously, it will always be found that his apparent obscurity arises from our not crediting him with a technical knowledge which he undoubtedly possessed, be it of heraldry, of law, or philosophic disputation.”

Here, in conclusion, I would advert to a passage in this stilted poem which is curiously illustrative of “Shakespeare’s knowledge of a not generally known custom among the ancient Romans.” When Tarquin has forced an entry into the chamber of Lucrece, we read: “Night wandering weasels shriek to see him there,”—a line which for a long time puzzled all the commentators. For what could weasels be doing in Collatine’s house or in Lucrece’s chamber? At last, however, some scholar directed attention to the note on Juvenal’s Satire XV, 7, in Mayor’s edition, where we learn that some animal of the weasel tribe was kept by the Romans in their houses for some purpose or another; and referring to Facciolati’s Dictionary, we read: “Mustela, γαλὴ, animal quadrupes parvum sed oblongum, flavi coloris, muribus, columbis, gallinis infestum. Duo autem sunt genera: alterum, domesticum quod in domibus nostris oberrat, et catulos suos, ut auctor est Cicero, quotidie transfert, mutatque sedem, serpentes persequitur,” etc.

The Romans then, it seems, had no knowledge of the domestic cat, and had domesticated an animal of the weasel tribe which they kept in the house to kill mice or it might be snakes, and for other purposes. Now, this is just the sort of out-of-the-way and recondite information which Bacon would have delighted in. But does any sane and reasonable man suppose that Will Shakspere of Stratford had ever heard of the “night-wandering weasel” in an ancient Roman house? The Baconian authorship of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and, I would add, the Sonnets, may be rejected as “not proven,” but the idea that these works were written by the player who came to London as a “Stratford rustic” in 1587, is surely one of the most foolish delusions that have ever obsessed and deceived the credulous mind of man. O miseras hominum mentes, O pectora cæca!

THE END. Cahill & Co., Ltd., London, Dublin and Drogheda.

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