or
most people, no serious problem exists regarding the authorship of
the Shakespeare plays and poems, which began to be printed towards
the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The plays first appeared in small
quarto sized books with no author's name to them. IN 1598 Francis
Meres, a Divine and M.A. from Pembroke College, Cambridge, announced
in his Palladis Tamia tht the author of twelve named plays was
William Shakespeare. In that year also, the plays Richard II,
Richard III and Loves Labours Lost were reprinted with the
name William Shakespeare (or Shake-Speare) on the their title
pages.This double evidence of authorship obviously satisfied the
majority of theatre goers, but one captious critic, who evidently
knew the player Shakespeare who in 1596 had performed in his first
play, was convinced that this "fellow" was not the true author. In
fact, he was so incensed at this apparent fraud that he made
Shakespeare the subject of a most vindictive lampoon in his next play
Every Man out of his Humour, first played in 1599. The man was
Ben Jonson, who has been accused of being jealous of Shakespeare as
an author. Whether this was so or not, a personal attack on an
apparently successful writer would seem to be the worst possible way
of gaining recognition in the theatre, unless it was that Ben was
aware that other discerning critics were also sceptical about this
recent imposture. It is known that at this time one or two gentlemen
in Court circles were writing plays, and other poetry for that
matter, and publishing them under other names, and it is probable
that Jonson was exercising his vitriolic wit not only at the expense
of the man Shakespeare, whom he describes in his play as an
"essential clowne ambitious to become a gentleman," but also at the
expense of the anonymous author who had picked on this most unlikely
character to act as his nom-de-plume.Ben Jonson, who was genuinely critical of "Shakespeare's" style, was able to extract much fun from the Plays as they appeared. In some of his later plays he almost tells us the name of the man whom he suspected as being the real author, though evidenly he thought it would be unwise to reveal this openly. In 1616, however, when the first edition of Jonson's collected works was published, the play Every Man out of his Humour was reprinted. In one comic scene Sogliardo, the "essential clowne," who elsewhere in the play is clearly shown to represent the actor Shakespeare, is encouraged to impersonate a gentleman of quality in order to court the lady, Saviolina. She is prepared in advance for this meeting and is told that the mysterious gentleman is a kinsman to Justice Silence. His good qualities are described by Sir Puntavolo in terms which epitomise certain contemporary descriptions of Francis Bacon. This speech is so printed that the initial letters of its lines read POET CANBO F, which could hardly make things clearer &emdash; Shakespeare acting as counterfeit for F. BACON, the poet.
