Diana
Price's new Unorthodox Biography of Shakespeare points out that
Jonson, on
whose shoulders the First Folio’s hoax must rest, confesses, openly, to having
hidden the name of someone from us in Epigram 77 which reads:
To one that desired me not to name him
Be safe,
nor fear thy self so good a fame,
That, any way, my book should speak thy name:
For, if thou shame, rank’d with my friends, to go,
I am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
Let us see if we can agree on what the epigram says.
First it appears to imply, that Jonson is addressing a living person, for
it would not make since to write this to someone who was already long dead. If he were dead Jonson would have written, “To the memory
of one who desired me not to name him.” Or
words to that effect. The next two
lines:
Be
safe, nor fear thy self so good a fame,
That, any way, my book should speak thy name:
Imply
that whoever he cannot name risks something important if he does name him,
namely his “safety.” Which is
the meaning of the phrase “be safe” and “fear.” Where it not
for metrical considerations Jonson might have written “rest safely your secret
is safe with me.” However this
analysis will not do for the rest of the couplet, which is a bit of light humor
at the expense of the unfortunate one, for in these phrases Jonson turns the
tables on his friend (and us) by implying that including his name in his book
might diminish the honor in his friend’s name, rather than vice versa.
It’s a nice touch. We know
however its just a rhetorical touch because the next two lines:
For, if thou shame, rank’d with my friends, to go,
I am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
tell
us that it is “shame,” and one must say, the hidden shame of his unnamed
friend, that is the problem. A
shame that most certainly lies with Jonson’s friends and not the friends
of the Unnamed.
For
those of us who have read the Sonnets we know the poet bewails a “hidden
shame” that ties him to “Mr. W. H.” A
shame that makes it impossible for “Mr. W. H.” to “acknowledge” the poet
with “public kindness without taking that honor from thy name.” A situation that implies that “Mr. W. H.” is the poet’s
illicit son. Whatever that case may
be, it is fairly obvious, upon reflection, that Jonson does have
“Shake-Speare” in mind. But as
I’ve mention this analysis does not please Ms. Price, so she did not trouble
herself to go this far.
Worse, I think, Price misses a very important point, one that shipwrecks
her analysis, under which she place the unknown party among the nobility,
peerage or aristocracy and then concludes his association with Jonson might not
be seen quite proper or kosher with this nobleman’s friends.
This will not wash, because Jonson assures us the hidden shame, that has
attached itself to his anonymous friend, lies among Jonson’s
friends, not among Mr. Anonymous' chums. He writes “thou shame, rank’d with my
friends.” So Price’s
worldview has caused her to turn Jonson’s words, and their clear meaning,
upside down. She supposes the shame
to rest among the genteel of the upper classes, whereas in fact Jonson assures
us the shame lies among Jonson’s friends.
But wait, we have not gone as far as the Epigram supposes we might.
We shall now discover that the poet does name the man who he could not
acknowledge because of that man’s hidden shame.
But first we should notice that these two lines:
For,
if thou shame, rank’d with my friends, to go,
I
am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
Mean:
For, if your shame, as it is ranked with my friends, were to go, I would be
more ashamed to have you thought my foe.
Ergo: were the unnamed freed of his “hidden shame” his fame would be
more than that of Jonson’s and, under these circumstances, Jonson would not
like to be thought his [~your] foe.
Now this is not very suggestive of any Jacobean other than a long-lived
Christopher Marlowe, who from concealment, or as a hidden poet and expatriate,
wrote the works of Shake-Speare and talked Jonson into ushering them into print
under a pseudonym. We know, for
example, that Marlowe’sThe Jew of Malta did not materialized until
1633, when it was dedicated to Thomas Hammon, Marlowe’s classmate from both
the Kings School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the dedicatee boasting
of a life-long friendship between the two throughout the “long compass” of
their years, both men nearing seventy that year.
Luckily the case for Marlowe is much stronger than mere supposition, even
when it is back by a dedication such as the one attached to The Jew of Malta and
ostensively signed “Thomas Heywood.” Let
us consider the Epigram again:
To
one that desired me not to name him
Be safe,
nor fear thy self so good a fame,
That, any way, my book should speak thy name:
For, if thou shame, rank’d with my friends, to go,
I am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
As
it turns out there is but one poet’s name that fits the rhyme of this epigram.
Have you guessed it? (I’ll
give you a hint, I didn’t suffer myself to write this essay because it was
Oxford or Bacon.) Let’s insert it
where it belongs and see how it reads:
To
one that desired me not to name him
Be
safe, nor fear thy self so good a fame,
That,
any way, my book should speak thy name:
For,
if thou shame, rank’d with my friends, to go,
I am more ashamed to have thee thought Marlowe.
Notice
it works nearly as well if Marlowe is substituted for
“to go,”
For,
if thou shame, rank’d with my friends, Marlowe,
I am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
Lest it be thought that I too have succumbed to the tunnel vision of the true believer, I should point out that Jonson does mention Marlowe’s name, and even in the First Folio’s dedication to “Shakespeare.” However this sort of mention, which placed Marlowe safely among the dead, i.e., Kyd and Lyly, can hardly be the same as mentioning Marlowe as the author of the First Folio or even the surviving author of The Jew of Malta . No Jonson’s epigram 77 is more certainly a public confession about authorship information withheld, hidden because the author was besmirched with a shame or public scandal among Jonson’s friends. Price, in painting in her paradigm, would have us believe that Jonson was protecting a high born friend, but, as we have seen, this is not the case at all. Jonson was, at this time of his life, a highly respected poet, poet laurel, about to be entombed in Westminster Abby. He openly associated with the Pembrokes, Prince Henry and other well-to-do peers. So Price’s analysis that there were peers who could not be seen associating with Jonson fails the acid test. If the reader knows a period writer whose name rhymes with “foe” and “to go,” other than Marlowe, the name should be brought forth for consideration.
Otherwise we have presumptive evidence that the man Jonson declined to name, because of his hidden shame among Jonson's friends, was Christopher Marlowe, the man who wrote the First Folio and the poems attributed to Shakespeare.
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