In his epigram ‘To William Camden’ Ben Jonson praised his friend and former schoolmaster in the following lavish manner:
What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things!
What sight in searching the most antique springs!
What weight, and what authority in thy speech!
Man scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teach.
Jonson’s anaphoric praise locates Camden’s scholarly merits in both his deep knowledge of the past and his mastery of eloquence; the list of attributes conjoins his attention to ‘things’ with his historical perspicuity and his proficiency in ‘speech’. Camden is celebrated for matter, knowledge, and style, and then finally, as a result of all these, for his virtuoso pedagogy. The anaphora, moreover, suggests an equivalence between these attributes, emphasizing that it is their combination that earns Camden the accolade of the man to whom Britain owes her ‘great renown and name’ (ll. 3–4) earlier in the epigram. As such, the poem is an entirely fitting tribute to a man who was at once pedagogue, grammarian, antiquary, and historian.
Strikingly, Jonson couches this compliment to his former teacher, first and foremost, in terms of authority, with the anaphora culminating in the hypermetrical ‘and what authority in thy speech’ (l. 8). Authority in early modern English commonly denoted the ‘power to influence the opinion of others, esp. because of one’s recognized knowledge or scholarship’ (OED, s.v. ‘authority’, n. iii. 5[a]), a usage synonymous with classical learning and acknowledged expertise. This is the sense that pertains in Jonson’s poem: Camden’s authority as a writer and scholar is predicated on his historical learning, his plumbing ‘antique springs’. That authority, moreover, is also inextricably linked with classical and humanist learning: the second line of the second couplet is an imitation of Pliny the Younger’s praise for his friend the Roman lawyer Titius Aristo (nihil est quod discere velis quod ille docere non possit [1.22.2]; see Haynes 2003, p. 71), mimetically enacting the very combination of matter, knowledge, and style for which Camden himself is praised. In characteristically Jonsonian fashion, that praise of Camden’s authority also, therefore, ends up being an act of self-aggrandizement and commendation of his own authority and learning. As Lawrence Lipking has noted, speaking of Jonson’s better known poem ‘To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’, Jonsonian eulogy frequently turns back as much on the poet as on the object of his praise (Lipking 1981, pp. 142, 144). In the Camden epigram, the hierarchical relation between master and pupil (rather than fellow playwright and poet) is clearer and less contested, but the dynamics of authorization and praise are largely the same—as the opening lines, testimony to Jonson’s own scholarly and writerly authority (‘Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe | All that I am in arts’ [ll. 1–2]), make clear.
It is hardly surprising that Jonson, the archetypal classicizing poet, would have understood authority in this way. Nor is it surprising that he should have praised his schoolmaster as the source of his own authority and as the national writer par excellence. Nonetheless, few people today, certainly outside the academy, would think of Camden in relation to either ‘authority of speech’ or the nation’s ‘great renown and name’. That honour, when it comes to early modern writers at least, would normally be afforded instead to the man Jonson described in his conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden as wanting ‘art’ (Jonson 2012, V, p. 361), and whom he famously said had ‘small Latin and less Greek’ (‘To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’, l. 31). It is Shakespeare, not the Westminster schoolmaster, whose face has adorned Bank of England banknotes, an imprimatur that sets the seal of monumental authority on both the promissory notes themselves and the cultural figure displayed upon them (Holderness 1988a, p. xi). Furthermore, it is Shakespeare, not Camden, whose texts have provided the archetypal testing material for new media and technologies; when Thomas Edison, for example, tested his inventions, including the electric pen that he patented in 1876, he habitually turned not to the monumental opening of the Britannia, but to the much more familiar, quasi-proverbial opening soliloquy of Richard III (Galey 2014, pp. 170–172). And it is Shakespearean monuments and inscriptions, not Camdenian ones, that decorate public spaces and buildings across the western world: from Giovanni Fontana’s 1874 marble statue, which stands in Leicester Square in London (Engler 2011, p. 439), to the motto (misquoted) from The Tempest (‘WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE’ [cf. 2.1.246]), which is carved on a plinth on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the National Archives in Washington, DC (Garber 2008, pp. 284–285; Galey 2014, pp. 49–52). Shakespeare’s words—indeed, his material presence alone—it seems, bestow considerable cultural capital, monumentalizing purpose, and linguistic authority. Camden and Jonson, by contrast, certainly in the modern era, have rarely been put to such edifying purposes. 1
Jonson’s epigram reminds us that Shakespeare’s contemporaries would not necessarily have anticipated these developments. Certainly, for much of the seventeenth century, it would have been by no means apparent that his works would be afforded the position of unique cultural authority that they have come to possess. Indeed, until Nicholas Rowe’s biographical essay, ‘Some account of the life of Mr. William Shakespeare’, which prefaced his 1709 edition of the Works, Shakespeare’s plays were generally afforded no more authority than those of contemporaries such as Jonson or Fletcher, the other playwrights of the era whose works appeared in Folio collections, and to whom Shakespeare was most often compared (De Grazia 1991, pp. 33–48). The same went for the fate of the plays on the stage. As Michael Dobson has noted, by the 1630s, just a decade after the publication of the First Folio, the number of plays in regular repertory had been reduced to perhaps just five: Hamlet, Othello, Julius Caesar, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and 1 Henry IV (Dobson 1992, p. 2). Moreover, even in the Restoration era, when Shakespeare did start to return to the centre of English literary culture, many of the plays were performed only in heavily revised and substantially rewritten versions—a curious coming together that, as Dobson has also observed, reveals ‘that adaptation and canonization, so far from being contradictory processes, were often mutually reinforcing ones’ (Dobson 1992, p. 5). Initially, at least, perceptions of Shakespeare’s authority (or rather lack thereof) were such that his texts were freely available to later playwrights for adaptation and appropriation; it was only in the early eighteenth century that some kind of recognizable authorial authority began widely to obtain (Dobson 1992, p. 61).
In fact, to some of Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century readers, his later position as the figure of ultimate cultural authority would have come as a very great surprise. The critic and historian Thomas Rymer, for example, whose trenchant views in his 1693 A Short View of Tragedy; It’s Original, Excellency, and Corruption. With Some Reflections on Shakespear and other Practitioners for the Stage (1693) are often seen as the embodiment of leaden-footed and rules-obsessed neoclassical criticism, would certainly have been shocked. For Rymer, the problem with Shakespearean drama in large part is its lack of authority, the departure from its classical and modern sources, which leads to what he identifies as its unreasonableness and unnaturalness. 2 Speaking of Othello, Rymer observes that ‘Shakespear alters it from the Original in several particulars, but always, unfortunately, for the worse’; in illustration of this, he cites the description of the titular character as ‘the Moor of Venice: a Note on pre-eminence, which neither History nor Heraldry can allow him’ (Rymer 1693, p. 87). Julius Caesar fares little better, with Rymer particularly critical of the blooding episode (3.1.106–111) and Brutus’s visceral language there: ‘For, indeed, that Language which Shakespear puts in the Mouth of Brutus wou’d not suit, or be convenient, unless from some son of the Shambles, or some naturall offspring of the Butchery’ (Rymer 1693, p. 151). The issue for Rymer, then, is a matter of decorum, but also a question of probability and reason: at this moment, he suggests, Brutus speaks less like a member of the Roman nobility and more like a common butcher or slaughterman. He also points out, in a telling parallel with his criticism of Othello, that Shakespeare’s scene is unauthorized by ‘History’ (p. 150): that is to say, unauthorized by Plutarch’s Lives, the principal source for the play.
Few critics now would now object to Othello on grounds of heraldic probability; nor would many be troubled by Shakespeare’s departure from Plutarch to dramatize the moment when Brutus’s Republican ideals most starkly unravel in the face of political reality. Furthermore, few modern critics would share Rymer’s hotheaded indignation: at the moment when he condemns Shakespeare for departing from ‘History’, he speaks of ‘Shakespear’s own blundering Maggot of self contradiction’ (p. 150). Indeed, the choleric and invective that characterize his criticism have almost invariably met with revulsion and/or ridicule. As John Dryden observed in 1693, in a letter to his friend and fellow critic John Dennis, ‘[a]lmost all the Faults which he has discover’d are truly there; yet who will read Mr. Rymer, or not read Shakespeare? For my own part, I reverence Mr. Rymer’s Learning, but I detest his Ill-Nature and Arrogance’ (Vickers 1995, p. 86). Nonetheless, Rymer’s views were echoed, albeit in a less strident form, by many who valued the authority of the ancients, and the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action. These included Dryden himself, whose Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) would set the terms of Shakespearean criticism for at least a century.
Intemperate and ‘pedantic’ as it is (see Eliot 1932, p. 97), Rymer’s criticism does still remind us of the extent to which the issue of authority was at stake in the seventeenth-century reading and reception of Shakespeare. 3 One of the principal reasons for this was because, from the First Folio onwards, Shakespeare was very much identified as the poet of nature rather than art, as Margareta De Grazia has compellingly shown (De Grazia 1991, p. 46). John Heminges and Henry Condell initiated this view, characterizing Shakespeare as a spontaneous author who wrote without revision, and whose ingenuity enabled him to invent without the artfulness customarily associated with conceptions of genius in the early modern era or, indeed, the inkblots linked with scribal and authorial correction: ‘His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers’ (Shakespeare 1623, sig. A3r). Leonard Digges then reinforced this view in his commendatory...