BACONIAN ESSAYS
BACONIAN ESSAYS
BY
E. W. SMITHSON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND TWO ESSAYS
BY
SIR GEORGE GREENWOOD
LONDON
CECIL PALMER
OAKLEY HOUSE, 14-18 BLOOMSBURY ST., W.C. 1
F i r s t
Edition
C o p y-
r i g h t
1 9 2 2
CONTENTS
ERRATA.
(Corrected in this etext.)
Page 17 line 12 for “hat” read “that.”
” 19 line 13 from bottom for “Spain” read “Spa in.”
” 38 line 7 ” ” for “Magwell” read “Mugwell.”
” 169 line 13 ” ” for “swet” read “sweet.”
” 193 line 10 from bottom for “tilt-hard” read “tilt-yard.”
BACONIAN ESSAYS
INTRODUCTORY
Henry James, in a letter to Miss Violet Hunt, thus delivers himself with regard to the authorship of the plays and poems of “Shakespeare”[1]:—“I am ‘a sort of’ haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me.”
Now I do not for a moment suppose that in so writing the late Mr. Henry James had any intention of affixing the stigma of personal fraud upon William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Doubtless he used the term “fraud” in a semi-jocular vein as we so often hear it made use of in the colloquial language of the present day, and his meaning is nothing more, and nothing less, than this, viz., that the belief that the plays and poems of “Shakespeare” were, in truth and in fact, the work of “the man from Stratford,” (as he subsequently, in the same letter, styles “the divine William”) is one of the greatest of all the many delusions which have, from time to time, afflicted a credulous and “a patient world.” He believed that when, in the year 1593, the dedication of Venus and Adonis to the Young Earl of Southampton was signed “William Shakespeare,” that signature did not, in truth and in fact, stand for the Stratford player who never so signed himself, but for a very different person, in quite another sphere of life, who desired to preserve his anonymity. He believed that when plays were published in the name of “Shake-speare” that name did not, in truth and in fact, stand for “the man from Stratford,” but again for that same person—or it might be, and in certain cases certainly was, for some other—who desired to publish plays under the mask of a convenient pen-name. And if the authorship of these poems and plays came, in course of time, to be attributed to William Shakspere, the player from Stratford-upon-Avon, who himself never uttered a word, or wrote a syllable, or took any steps whatever to claim the authorship of those poems and plays for himself, but was content merely to play the part of “William the Silent” from first to last, there is, surely, no reason to brand him as a cheat and a “fraud” upon that account, and we may be quite sure that that highly-gifted and distinguished man of literature, Henry James—one of the intellectuals of our day—had no intention of so branding him.
A lady, a short time ago, wrote a book to explain the play of Hamlet in quite a new light, by making reference to the special political circumstances of the time when it appeared, such as the “Scottish succession,” the character of James I, certain events in the lives of Mary Queen of Scots, Burleigh, Essex, Southampton, Elizabeth Vernon, and other historical figures, and producing “detailed analogies between episodes of contemporary history and the play,”[2] and, in reply to certain objections raised by a well-known critic, she essayed to justify herself by an appeal to the doctrine of “Relativity,” which, as she declared with some warmth, had come to stay whether her captious critic wanted it or not!
This lofty invocation of Einstein’s theory of Time, Space, and the Universe—a theory so difficult of comprehension that only a favoured few can even affect to understand it—in support of a new interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, was, certainly, somewhat ridiculous, but the lady was quite right in her contention—which would equally hold good though Einstein had never lived or taught—that in forming our judgments on men long gone, whether of their characters or their actions, or their sayings or their writings, we must ever bear in mind the views, the beliefs, the opinions, and the special circumstances of the time and the society in which they lived. Now, it is well known that in Elizabethan and Jacobean times opinion with regard to what I may call literary deception was very different from what it is at the present day when we at any rate affect much greater scrupulosity with regard to these matters. Such literary deceptions, which in these days would be condemned as “frauds,” were, in those times, constantly and habitually practised, and considered quite venial sins, if, indeed, they were looked upon as sins at all. That is a fact which should never be lost sight of when we are considering problems of authorship, or writings of dubious interpretation (such as some of Ben Jonson’s, e.g.) in those long-gone and very different times.
Now, I am one of those who agree with the late Mr. Henry James, and with the present highly-distinguished French scholar and historian, Professor Abel Lefranc—I refer here to his negative views only—with regard to the authorship of the plays and poems of “Shakespeare.” In my humble opinion (which, to be quite honest, I may say is not “humble” at all!), that the plays and poems of “Shakespeare” were not written by William Shakspere, the player who came from Stratford, is as certain as anything can be which is not susceptible of actual mathematical proof. Who then wrote the plays? (Let us leave the poems on one side for the present). Well, that the work of many pens appears in the Folio of 1623 is surely indisputable. Few if any, of the “orthodox” would be found to deny it. There is little, if any, of “Shakespeare”—whoever he was—in the first part of Henry VI, and, surely, not much more in the second and third parts. Very little, if any part, of The Taming of the Shrew is “Shakespearean.” The great majority of critics exclude Titus altogether. The work of pens other than the Shakespearean pen is to be found in Pericles, and Timon, and Troilus and Cressida, and even in Macbeth. Henry VIII, though published as by “Shakespeare,” was almost undoubtedly the work of Fletcher and Massinger in collaboration.[3] The list might be added to but it is unnecessary to do so. I repeat, the work of many pens is to be found in the Folio of 1623, but there is, of course, one man whose work eclipses that of all the rest, one man who stands pre-eminent and unrivalled, towering high above the others; one man of whom it may be said, as of Marcellus of old, that insignis ingreditur, victorque viros supereminet omnes. Find that man, find the author of Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello—to give but a few examples—and you will have found the true “Shakespeare.” But set your hearts at rest; you will never find him in the man whose vulgar and banal life (in the course of which not one—I do not say generous but—even respectable action can be discovered by all the researches of his biographers) is to be read in the pages of Halliwell-Phillipps and Sir Sidney Lee—the life of which so little is known, and yet so much too much!
Meantime it is amusing, or would be so if it were not so lamentable, to see our solemn and entirely self-satisfied Pundits and Mandarins of “Shakespearean” literature ever trying to see daylight through the millstone of the Stratfordian faith; ever broaching some brand-new theory, and affecting to find something in this Shakespearean literature which nobody ever found before them, but which as they fondly imagine, somehow, and in some way, tends to support the old outworn Stratfordian tradition. Perhaps some “prompt copy” of an old Elizabethan drama is discovered. It is hailed with exultation as affording proof that plays in those times were printed from “prompt copies,” and further cryptic arguments are adduced in support of the absurd theory that the Stratford player dashed off the plays of “Shakespeare,” currente calamo, and handed them over to his fellow “deserving men,” Heminge and Condell, and the rest, with “scarse a blot” upon them, and that the plays were printed from these precious “unblotted autographs.” An old Manuscript Play is found. It is the work of several pens. In it are discovered three pages in an unknown hand. See now! Here is a hand “of the same class” as the “Shakespeare” (i.e., “Shakspere”) signatures! Why, it is Shakspere’s own handwriting! Look at Shakspere’s will—the will in which no book or manuscript is mentioned, but wherein are small bequests to Shakspere’s fellow-players, those “deserving men” Burbage, and Heminge, and Condell, to buy them rings withal, and of the testator’s sword, and parcel-gilt bowl, and “second-best bedstead”—and there you will find three words well and distinctly written in a firm hand—“By me William.” Yes, and the “W” of “William” is so carefully written that it even has “the ornamental dot” under the curve of the right limb thereof! But why, then, are the signatures themselves such miserable, illegible scrawls? Oh, fools and blind! Cannot you see that player William in this case reversed the usual procedure; that he intended to sign the last of the three pages of his Will first (“But why?”—“Oh, never mind why!”); that the poor man was in extremis (true he lived another month after signing, and his Will witnesses that he was “in perfect health and memorie, God be praysed!” Mais cela n’empêche pas); and that he made a tremendous effort, and wrote the words “By me William,” in a fine distinct hand—“ornamental dot” and all!—and then collapsed utterly and could only make illiterate scrawls for his surname, and the other two signatures. But these words, “By me William,” are in the same handwriting as that of the “addition” to Sir Thomas More! What? You say they were manifestly written by the Law Scrivener! What? You say the handwriting of this “addition” differs manifestly and fundamentally from the handwriting of the “Shakspere” signatures (which, wretched scrawls as they are, differ profoundly one from the other), as anybody can see who does not happen to be a “paleographer” with an idée fixe! What? You say that! Yah, fool! Yah, fanatic! What do you know about it, I should like to know![4]
Such is all too frequently the language of the soi-disant “orthodox” to the poor “heretic”; such are “the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes”!
Then we have a man—an “orthodox” wiseacre—who tells us that, without doubt, the “dark lady” of the Sonnets was Mistress Mary Fitton, and we are to subscribe to the belief that Mary Fitton, one of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour, had an intrigue with a common player—one “i’ the statute!” It is nothing to tell the people who have made this wonderful discovery that Mary Fitton was not a “dark lady,” but a fair lady, as her portraits at Arbury show. It is nothing to tell them that, though among the remarkable contemporaneous documents in the Muniment Room at Arbury there is much mention of Mary Fitton’s liaison with that proud nobleman, Lord Pembroke, not a breath is to be discovered of any suggestion of her so degrading herself as to have an intrigue with “a man-player”—one who was a “rogue and vagabond” were it not for the licence of a great personage. No, all this goes for nothing when it is necessary somehow, by hook or by crook, to identify the Stratford player with the author of the Sonnets of “Shakespeare.” O miseras hominum mentes, O pectora cæca!
Then yet another finds this “dark lady” in the person of the wife of an Oxford Inn Keeper, with whom, forsooth, player Shakspere had an intrigue, on his way from Stratford to London, or vice versa, and laborious investigations are undertaken, and many learned letters are written to the Press about this other imaginary “dark lady”—“that woman colour’d ill”[5]—and all the family history of the Davenants is exploited in this foolish quest. Then, again, another makes the discovery that William Shakspere, the Stratford player, had conceived a feeling of violent hatred against “Resolute John Florio,” the translator of Montaigne (who was, by the way, so far as we know, a good worthy man), so he caricatures this hateful person in the hateful (!) character of Jack Falstaff—the Falstaff of King Henry IV! But we don’t hate Jack Falstaff! On the contrary we all love old Jack Falstaff, in spite of his many faults and failings. We can’t help loving him, for his unfailing good humour and his unrivalled wit! “Oh, that is nothing, nothing,” says our critic from across the Atlantic—one Mr. Acheson of New York—who has made this grand discovery. “Will Shakspere of Stratford hated Florio, so he has lampooned him and ridiculed him in this hateful character of Falstaff! Of that there is no possible doubt. I am Sir Oracle, and when I speak let no dog bark![6]”
And so I might go on to multiply the examples of this “Stratfordian” folly. And we, who see the absurdity of all this, are called “Fanatics!” But what is “Fanaticism”? It is the madness which possesses the worshippers at the shrine. These men have bowed themselves down at the traditional Stratfordian Shrine; they have accepted without thinking the dogmas of the Stratfordian faith; they are impervious to reasoning and to common sense; they have surrendered their judgment; “their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their hearts, and should be converted” to truth and reason. Verily, these are the real “fanatics.”
Let me for a moment, before passing on, call attention to some words written by those distinguished “Shakespearean” critics Dr. Richard Garnett, and Dr. Edmund Gosse, in their Illustrated English Literature. They speak of “that knowledge of good society, and that easy and confident attitude towards mankind which appears in Shakespeare’s plays from the first, and which are so unlike what might have been expected from a Stratford rustic.... The first of his plays were undoubtedly the three early comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which must have appeared in 1590-1591, or perhaps in the latter year only. The question of priority among them is hard to settle, but we may concur with Mr. [now Sir Sidney] Lee in awarding precedence to Love’s Labour’s Lost. All three indicate that the runaway Stratford youth had, within five or six years, made himself the perfect gentleman, master of the manners and language of the best society of his day, and able to hold his own with any contemporary writer.”[7]
Now this miraculous “runaway Stratford youth,” came to London “a Stratford rustic,” in the year 1587,[8] and, according to his biographers, being a penniless adventurer, had to seek for a living in “very mean employments,” as Dr. Johnson says, whether as horse-holder, or “call boy,” or “super” on the stage, or what you will. His parents were entirely illiterate, and he left his two daughters in the same darkness of ignorance. We may assume that he had attended for a few years at the “Free School” at Stratford (as Rowe, his earliest biographer, calls it), although there is really no evidence in support of that assumption, but it is admitted even by the most zealous and orthodox Stratfordians that he “had received only an imperfect education.”[9] But I will not again recapitulate the facts (real or supposed) of this mean and vulgar life. Let the reader, I say again, study it in the pages of Halliwell-Phillipps, and Sir Sidney Lee.[10]
And now let us consider for a moment that extraordinary play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, which, as we have seen, “appeared” in 1590 or 1591, according to Messrs. Garnett and Gosse, but of which Mr. Fleay writes: “The date of the original production cannot well be put later than 1589.” It was, as the “authorities” are all agreed, Shakespeare’s first drama, and it is remarkable for this fact, among other things, that unlike other Shakespearean plays it is not an old play re-written, nor is the plot taken from some other writer. The plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost is an original one.
And now let us see what Professor Lefranc, who has made a very special study of this play, has to tell us about it, premising that I do not cite his remarks as “authoritative,” but merely as a clear statement of the facts of the case by one who has exceptional knowledge of the history of the time in which the action of the play is supposed to take place.
“Everybody knows,” he writes, “that the scene of this very original comedy is laid at the Court of Navarre, at a date nearly contemporaneous with the play, when Henri de Bourbon was the reigning sovereign of this little kingdom, before he became Henri IV of France.... That the author of Love’s Labour’s Lost knew and had visited the Court of Navarre is at once obvious to anyone who will study the play without any preconceived hypothesis and who takes the trouble to learn something about the history of this little Kingdom of Nérac.... All the explanations which have been given of this play, the first of the Shakespearean dramas, in order to bolster up the theory of its composition by Shakspere the player at the very outset of his career as a playwright, as also every element of the comedy itself, and every known incident in the life of the Stratford player, prove the impossibility of his being the author of it. All these theories and hypotheses put forward during the last 120 years are of such total improbability, indeed of such miserable tenuity, that some day people will wonder how they could possibly find acceptance for so long.”
M. Lefranc cites Montegut, a French Shakespearean scholar and a critic of noted insight and perspicacity, who writes: “It is extraordinary to see how Shakespeare is faithful even in the most minute details to historical truth and to local colour,” and he proceeds to demonstrate that many allusions in this wonderful play of Love’s Labour’s Lost cannot be properly understood or appreciated without reference to the memoirs of the celebrated Marguerite de Valois, who is herself the “Princess of France” of the comedy (in the original edition called “The Queen”[11]), who comes with her suite to visit Henri at his Court of Nérac. The Princess of France, then, was originally Queen Marguerite of Navarre, and this comedy represents her as coming to rejoin her husband at Nérac to endeavour to regain his love, and to settle many questions relative to her dowry of Aquitaine. That this journey actually took place, that Marguerite paid a long visit to the Court of Navarre where a series of entertainments were held in her honour, and that the question of her dowry in Aquitaine was then discussed at length is established by the Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois.[12] The author, then, had in his mind events of contemporaneous history which had taken place at the Court of Navarre, and with which he appears to have been personally familiar. The memoirs, too, throw light on several passages of the drama which would be obscure without them. Take (e.g.) Act II, Sc. 1, where Biron asks Rosaline, “Did not I dance with you at Brabant once?” Here we have an allusion to the visit of Marguerite to Spa in 1577, of which a full account is given in her Memoirs, where she tells of balls at Mons, Namur, and Liege, all in a country which was at that time constantly spoken of as Brabant. Again, in Act V, Sc. 2, there is an obscure allusion, which seems to be satisfactorily explained by a reference to the story of the unfortunate Hélène de Tournon, related by Marguerite in her Memoirs. Further, in Act V, Sc. 2, we have an allusion to the manner in which Henri of Navarre, the “Vert Galant,” wrote, prepared, and sealed his love letters, as though the author was familiar with the amorous King’s poetical letter addressed by him to the “Charmante Gabrielle” d’Estrés; while the circumstances described in Act I, Sc. 1, are explained in the light of fact by a letter from Cobham to Walsingham dated from Paris in June, 1583.
But it would take far too much time to dilate further upon this, the first of the Shakespearean plays. I can only refer my readers, for further light, to Professor Lefranc’s work Sous le Masque de William Shakespeare.[13]
Yet we are required to believe—nay, we are “fanatics” if we do not believe—that this extraordinary play was composed by the “Stratford rustic” some two years after he had “run away” from Stratford, and, further, that he composed two other remarkable comedies, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, just about the same time! Verily this is a faith which does not remove mountains, but simply swallows them whole—a faith which appears to me more worthy of Bedlam than of the intelligence of rational human beings. On the other hand, there is no difficulty whatever in believing that this unique play—which shows that the author of it was not only a “perfect gentleman, master of the manners and language of the best society of the day,” but also one familiar with the doings, and “happenings” and amusements and entourage of the Court of Henri of Navarre at Nérac on the occasion of the visit of Marguerite de Valois to that Court—was written by a man who lived and moved in a very different sphere of society from that in which Shakspere of Stratford lived and moved, but who was desirous of concealing his identity as a playwright under a convenient mask-name.
Yet, as M. Lefranc truly says, “L’hétérodoxie dans ce domaine [the “Shakespearean” authorship to wit] a paru jusqu’à présent aux maïtres des universités et aux érudits, une opinion de mauvais goût, temeraire et malséante, dont la science patentée n’avait pas à s’occuper, sauf pour la condamner.”[14] But he continues—I will now translate—“I am convinced that every one who has preserved an independent opinion concerning the Shakespeare problem will recognise that the old positions of the traditional doctrine can no longer be maintained.... The laws of psychology, and, what is more, of simple common sense, ought to banish for ever the absurd theory which would have us believe in an incomparable writer whose life was absolutely out of harmony with the marvellous works which appeared in his name. It is time to take decisive action against that immense error, and against the incredible naiveté upon which it rests.”
“Simple common sense.” Aye, but when I spoke not long ago to a well-known writer, who is a Stratfordian enragé, of “common sense” in this matter, what was his reply? “Oh, damn common sense!”—a characteristic interjection which might well be adopted as the motto of all the “Stratfordian” highbrows of the present day.
But, adds Professor Lefranc, “If many still refuse to admit the existence of a Shakespeare problem, yet the time is at hand when nobody will any longer venture to deny it, unless he is prepared at the same time to deny all the evidence in the case. It is clear that a new era of Shakespearean study has recently presented itself. Scepticism with regard to the Stratford man is spreading in spite of the resistance of the multifarious defenders of the old tradition. A number of beliefs, accepted for many years as dogmas, are disappearing every day. The rock of credulity is crumbling away. The Stratfordians will, sooner or later, be reduced, under the pressure of a more enlightened public opinion, to change their tactics and modify the assumptions of their creed. In truth, speaking generally, the best-established reproach to which the learned men who have concerned themselves with Shakespeare, according to the rules of Stratfordian orthodoxy, have laid themselves open, is not so much that they have maintained the traditional doctrine with regard to the poet-actor, but rather that in the face of the innumerable enigmas which are involved in the history of his life, and his [supposed] works, and even of the text of those works, they have never had the candour to admit even the existence of all these obscure problems. At every step in Shakespearean study these difficulties and incoherences are encountered, but these learned men affect not to see them.... Truly, in view of such superb assurance, the lay reader could never imagine the existence of all the gratuitous assumptions, the naïve assertions, the inadmissible interpretations that are to be found in the works of these gentlemen, which the public have been accustomed to accept as infallible authorities. Yet, even the most famous and the most admired amongst them would have to yield to an investigation conducted according to the simple rules of the art of reasoning, that is to say of sound common sense. The hour has come when the representatives of the ‘Shakespearean’ dogma will have to change their attitude. They will have to renounce both their silence and their credulity. Above all, they will have to admit the necessity of inquiries, and discussions hostile to their creed, to make a tabula rasa of many points, and to take in hand once more the investigation thereof ab imis fundamentis, resolutely putting away those prejudices which have so long blinded them to the truth.”
So writes Professor Abel Lefranc, with much more to the same purport and effect, and, in my judgment, he writes both wisely and well. But if he really believes that our hidebound Pundits and Mandarins of the Stratfordian faith will ever “put away those prejudices which have so long blinded them to the truth,” and give impartial consideration to the facts of the Shakespeare Problem in the light of reason and “commonsense,” I fear me he reckons without his host and is destined to be very sadly undeceived.[15]]
We are brought back, however, to the question: Who, then, is the real “Shakespeare”? That is a question which I have never attempted to answer. It has been quite sufficient for me to confine my arguments to the negative side of the Shakespeare Problem. The positive, or constructive side I have hitherto been content to leave to others.
Now, there is a large number of persons, many of them rational and intelligent men and women, of quite sound mind and understanding, who believe that the real “Shakespeare” is to be found in the person of Francis Bacon. But there are “Baconians and Baconians.” There are the wild Baconians who find Bacon everywhere, but especially in ciphers, cryptograms, anagrams, acrostics, and in all sorts of occult figures and emblems[16]—those who believe amongst other things, that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth, that he lived in philosophic concealment many years after the date usually assigned as that of his death, that he wrote practically all the English literature worthy of that name of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, and that he hid his “Shakespearean” manuscripts in the mud of the River Wye or some other equally inappropriate and ridiculous place, where no sane man would ever dream of looking for them.
The wild and unrestrained “Baconians” have, undoubtedly, done great injury to the cause which they desire to advocate; and not only have they injured that cause, but they have greatly prejudiced the discussion of the Shakespeare Problem as a whole. For in such cases we are all liable to be “tarred by the same brush,” and the sanest of “Anti-Stratfordian” reasoners has, unfortunately, not escaped the back-wash of the ridicule which these eccentrics have brought upon themselves.
There are, however, “Baconians” of another class—the sane “Baconians” who are content to argue the matter—and some of them have argued it with great knowledge and ability—in the calm light of reason and common sense. Of these one of the sanest and ablest was my friend the late Edward Walter Smithson, whose little book Shakespeare—Bacon. An Essay,[17] published anonymously some three and twenty years ago, attracted no little attention, and did much to help the cause in support of which it was written. He published, however, nothing more on the subject till 1913, in November of which year there appeared in The Nineteenth Century an article from his pen entitled “Ben Jonson’s Pious Fraud.” The greater part of this article I have quoted by way of preface to his essay now published on Jonson’s Masque of Time Vindicated,[18] and it may be as well to cite the commencement of it at this place:
The writer is one of those persons who consider it highly probable that Shakespeare was at first a mere pen-name of Bacon’s, and regard Shakspere, Shaxper, or Shayksper—easily mistaken for Shakespeare—as the usual patronymic from birth to death of an illiterate actor: he thinks, moreover, that there must have been some sort of understanding between the poet and the actor (resembling perhaps that between Aristophanes and the actor Callistratus), and conjectures that it may have covered proprietary rights or shares in theatrical ventures.
When and how I came by such views can be of little or no interest to anyone but myself. To prevent misconception, however, it may be well to explain that my conversion dates from 1884-5. An essay of mine (Shakespeare-Bacon, Sonnenschein, 1900)[19] belonging in substance to 1885, would have been published long before the date of actual publication but for the appearance of a portent called the Great Cryptogram, which put me out of love with the subject. My earliest suspicions were suggested not by heretics—Mr. W. H. Smith, Lord Campbell, Lord Penzance, and the rest—whose opinions were absolutely unknown to me, but, if memory serve, by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps and the New Shakspere Society (of which I must have been an early member). Since 1885, I have tried to keep in touch with what orthodoxy has had to say for itself, and against us. Some of our opponents regard Ben Jonson as their prophet. To him they fly for counsel and comfort. They throw his sayings at our heads whenever they get a chance. In the index to Mr. Lang’s Shakespeare-Bacon and the Great Unknown (1912) Ben Jonson’s name takes up more space than even Shakespeare’s. According to Mr. Lang “it is easy to prove that Will (i.e. the Stratford man) was recognised as the author by Ben Jonson.” If this were true there would be no Shakespeare question at all, none at least so far as I am concerned. But it is not true. Ben Jonson—whose Works ought to be familiar to all students of Shakespeare—is in fact what lawyers would call a difficult witness, and to assert that he is on the side of orthodoxy is simply to beg the question.[20]] Some of Mr. Lang’s admirers will have it that he has crushed Mr. G. G. Greenwood much as a motor-car might crumple up a bicycle. But a reading of Mr. Lang’s book leaves me in doubt whether Mr. Greenwood’s main contentions (The Shakespeare Problem Restated) are anywhere shaken, and I am not likely to be very strongly biassed in Mr. Greenwood’s favour, seeing that he ostentatiously disclaims being a Baconian. Mr. Greenwood indeed may be said to have quitted Stratford for good and travelled a great many miles. Where he pulls up it is not easy to say, but he does pull up somewhere—perhaps where the rainbow ends. Mr. Lang, though he refrains from imputing imbecility to Mr. Greenwood, is apparently unable to be quite so lenient to Baconians. He explains, or would like to explain, the Baconian views of Lord Penzance and Judge Webb as partly due to senile decay. How he accounts for the views of Lord Campbell,[21] Mr. George Bidder, Q.C., and others of less note does not appear. When an unfamiliar theory happens to be at grips with a popular one, the habit of thinking and calling an opponent infatuated or not more than half mad is easily caught. Bacon did not escape it, but he took care to give it a turn which saved it from mere brutalité. In his day two notable theories were at loggerheads, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, with Galileo for the Copernican Achilles. Convinced that the Sun moved round the Earth, Bacon smiled at his opponents for doubting the immovability of our planet and dubbed them “car-men,” “terrae aurigas,” chauffeurs, in other words. No other student of The Advancement of Learning (1605), written be it remembered when Bacon was fully mature, will be surprised at this. Bacon avowedly took “all knowledge for his province,” and The Advancement is a comprehensible survey of that province—as Bacon understood it. Of mathematics he probably knew little or nothing. It is an open question whether Induction owes anything to the Novum Organum. His acquaintance with the phenomena of nature (as distinct from human nature) was derived for the most part from poets and men of letters. More significant still, his splendid natural gifts were not adapted to scientific research. His true province in short was literature, above all, poetry. And here it may not be amiss to note (1) that John Dryden’s appreciation of Shakespeare—in whom, says J. D., are to be found “all arts and sciences, all moral and natural philosophy”—coincides as closely as may be with the traditional estimate of Bacon, and (2) that Shakespeare seems to have been of one mind with Bacon upon the motion of the Sun round the Earth.
With the tons of printed matter on the Baconian side, my acquaintance has always been of the smallest. In a recent pamphlet by Sir E. Durning Lawrence, that gentleman with the aid of a newspaper called The Tailor and Cutter labours the point, already sufficiently obvious, that the figure which does duty as frontispiece to the first folio of Shakespeare must have been meant for a caricature.
What the Shakespeare theory is needs no telling. It is developed in Biographies, Lives, and so forth, within the reach of every one.
The Bacon theory on the other hand is still in the rough. “You may well say that,” an opponent exclaims. “You, Baconians, differ among yourselves almost as widely as you differ from us. With some of you it is an article of faith that Bacon looked for fame (poetical) to after ages, and took unheard-of pains to secure it. Baconians who hunt for ciphers, key-numbers and so forth, not only in books, but even under the river Wye belong to this class. You on the contrary have convinced yourself, I know not how, that Bacon intended his secret to die with him. What are we to do? How can we help thinking that there is no such thing as a passably authentic Baconian theory?” My acquaintance with Baconians, I reply, is far too limited to justify any important attempt at sketching an authoritative theory. My object is less ambitious. It is to set down, as briefly and simply as possible, by way of introduction to Ben Jonson, certain probable constituents of a reasonable Baconian theory.
(a) Shakespeare was a pseudonym adopted by Bacon to mask his personality whenever he created or “made” for the stage.
(b) The date at which Bacon gave up writing for public theatres coincided pretty nearly with the beginning of his rise to high place in the State.
(c) By the year 1623 (if not earlier) Bacon’s friends and admirers must have become very uneasy about the fate of his still unpublished plays. These plays had long been hidden away from the public eye. What if the veil should never be lifted? Lest that should happen, publication, and the sooner the better, must have been eagerly desired by all lovers of literature. The conditions were not unpromising. Softened by misfortune, Bacon would be open to entreaty, and publication just then would put it in the power of influential friends to minister with perfect delicacy to the more urgent needs of the fallen man, “old, weak, ruined, in want, a very subject of pity.” Provided that his true name could be for ever kept from contact with the “family” of her who had once been his “mistress,”[22]] his consent or rather acquiescence might be hoped for. Values it is true, literary and poetical values especially, were no longer what they had been in the days of the late Queen. But a parent’s affection for the offspring of his brain is never perhaps wholly uprooted. Even so, the task was one for a master of literary craft. But the thing had to be done and that quickly, if it was to be of any use to the great man who, to quote Jonson’s Discoveries, had “filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compar’d or preferr’d either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” No considerable help was to be looked for from Bacon himself. The lie downright was to be avoided if possible; but the motive being perfectly clean, economy of truth and suggestion of untruth were neither of them barred. The pseudonym was ready to hand, and the players Heminge and Condell were not likely to deny their names to any prefatory matter whatever which the editor might think fit to invent.
(d) Among the notable persons who openly interested themselves in the publication of the First Folio were the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Montgomery, and Ben Jonson. But it is safe to say that they were not the only promoters of the undertaking, and in my opinion King James (himself a poet in days gone by), Prince Charles, and some alter ego of Bacon’s (possibly Sir T. Mathews) were of the number.
(e) A private printing press may have been among the tools habitually employed by the author. Heminge and Condell in the First Folio are made to say: “We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare) a blot in his papers.” As an allusion to the use of a press this statement would pass muster.[23] It occurs in the prefatory matter, thoroughly Jonsonian, which seems to have served as receptacle for what he preferred to put upon other shoulders than his own.
(f) As for Shakspere—the man who emerged from and returned to Stratford somehow and somewhen—he while he lived was a nobody outside Stratford, and by the year 1622 must have been almost forgotten even there, except as a good sort of fellow who, having made money in London, had invested it in Stratford with a view to enjoying the congenial society of its artless natives. His Apotheosis probably began with the publication of Jonson’s own Ode.
“Guesswork!” exclaims one. “Mere figments of the brain!” says another. Well, where is the theory which does not consist of such material? Take away from any orthodox life-story of Shakspere all figments of somebody’s brain, and what remains? According to Professor Saintsbury, “almost all the received stuff of his life-story is shreds and patches of tradition, if not positive dream-work.”
Here it becomes necessary to say a word in explanation of the present work. The late Edward Smithson left by his Will a sum of money to myself and a friend who prefers to remain anonymous, with the suggestion that it might be made use of in the endeavour to ascertain—to use his own words—“the true parentage of Shakespeare (not Shakspere),” meaning thereby, as there can be no doubt, that such sum might be employed, if thought well—for there was no definite trust attached to it—in furtherance of the quest of the true “Shakespeare,” whether he might be found in Francis Bacon (as he himself thought was the case) or in some other writer of the period in question. Moreover, he had left in type certain “Baconian” essays, which, although he gave no specific directions to that effect, it was known that he desired to be published as his last words on a matter in which he was so deeply interested, and these, at the request of his wife who survives him, I have supervised and prepared for publication. Here a difficulty presented itself. Some of these essays deal, to a certain extent, with the same subject matter, and, consequently, the reader will find in them a certain amount of repetition. At first I thought it might be possible to avoid this by collating the various manuscripts, and fusing them together, as it were, into one volume. It soon became apparent, however, that such “fusion” would lead to “confusion,” and would be detrimental to Mr. Smithson’s work. I trust, therefore, that the recurrence of various arguments, or sentiments, in the following essays, will meet with generous toleration on the part of the reader. After all, a certain amount of repetition is, sometimes, likely to do more good than harm. The famous Mr. Justice Maule, while still at the Bar, was once arguing a case before three Judges, one of whom, finding the distinguished counsel somewhat prolix on this occasion, and inclined to repeat his arguments, exclaimed testily: “Really, Mr. Maule, that is the third time you have made that observation!” “Well,” replied Maule, quite imperturbably, “there are three of your Lordships!” To repeat an argument once for each Judge on the Bench was, then, in this great advocate’s opinion, quite a right, proper, and useful thing to do. I am in hopes, therefore, that there may be the same justification for a considerable amount of repetition in the case now presented to a court—that of the reading public—which, it is hoped, may consist of many more Judges than those addressed by Mr. Justice Maule.
I would make this further observation with regard to Edward Smithson’s Essays, though perhaps it is hardly necessary to make it. Although it has been a pleasure to me to edit them, so far as they required editing at all, I have, of course, no responsibility for the arguments or the opinions expressed in them. Mr. Smithson, in the passage I have quoted above from his article in The Nineteenth Century, says that I “ostentatiously disclaim being a Baconian.” I am sorry if that disclaimer was made “ostentatiously,” but speaking now, after the lapse of many years, and I trust without a shred of “ostentation”—which, certainly, would be very much out of place—I must say that I am still unwilling to label myself as a “Baconian.” It was, I think, Professor Huxley who said that, if asked whether he believed that there were inhabitants in Mars, his reply would be that he neither believed nor disbelieved. He did not know. This is the “agnostic” position in which I find myself with regard to the hypothesis that Bacon is the true Shakespeare. I really do not know. Nevertheless, an astronomer who had adopted Professor Huxley’s position concerning the possible existence of inhabitants in Mars, might without prejudice to that agnostic position, find himself impelled to set forth certain arguments which seemed to him to tell in favour of such a possibility. In the same way it occurred to me some years ago to write certain essays on the Baconian side of the case, two of which I now venture to publish as a sequel to those of Mr. Smithson’s authorship. I recognise that there is much that may quite fairly and reasonably be urged in favour of the Baconian case. Merely to ridicule that case appears to me to be indicative of folly rather than wisdom on the part of those who adopt such an attitude. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, I am far from thinking that the Baconian authorship of any of the plays or poems published in the name of “Shakespeare” has been actually proved. That Francis Bacon had, at any rate, something to do with the production of some of these plays and poems is, at least, a very plausible hypothesis. As Professor Lefranc writes, “Que l’auteur du théâtre Shakespearien ait été en rapport avec Francis Bacon, c’est ce que nous avons toujours été porté à admettre pour bien des raisons,”[24] and in support of that hypothesis I may be said to hold a brief pro hâc vice in the two “Baconian” Essays which I now venture to publish. But that is all. I endeavour to keep an open mind upon this, as upon many other doubtful questions. Professor Lefranc himself has shown, with great learning and conspicuous ability, that a strong case can be made in favour of William Stanley, Sixth Earl of Derby, as the author of some, at any rate, of the “Shakespearean” plays, and more especially of that extraordinary play Love’s Labour’s Lost.[25] But the constructive side of the “Shakespeare Problem” I must be content to leave to younger and abler men, and such as have much more time to devote to it than I have. With regard, however, to “the man from Stratford,” as Mr. Henry James styles him, or the “Stratford rustic,” as Messrs. Garnett and Gosse do not hesitate to characterize him, his supposed authorship may, and, indeed, must be, set aside as one of the greatest and most unfortunate of the many delusions which have, from time to time, imposed themselves upon a credulous and “patient world.”[26]
I cannot conclude this note without a brief reference to two articles which have lately appeared in the Quarterly Review (October, 1921, and January, 1922), under the heading of “Recent Shakespearean Research,” by Mr. C. R. Haines. I can find little or nothing that can be recalled “recent” in them unless we give a quite unwonted extension to the meaning of that word. Mr. Haines even includes such vieux jeu as the Plume MSS. in his “recent” Shakespearean Research, but they certainly contain some very remarkable statements. I will, however, here content myself by quoting the following letter which I sent to the Nation and Athenæum after reading the first of these articles, and which appeared in that paper on November 26th, last:
“RECENT SHAKESPEAREAN RESEARCH.”
Sir,—In an article under the above heading in the October number of the Quarterly Review, Mr. C. R. Haines writes (p. 229): “There cannot be the smallest doubt that Shakespeare [i.e., William Shakspere, of Stratford] was possessed of books at his death. One of these, with his undoubted signature [my italics], ‘W. Shr.’ is still extant in the Bodleian Library.... A second, Florio’s version of Montaigne (1603), bears the signature ‘Wilm Shakspere,’ which is with some reason regarded as genuine.”
Now Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, who, I believe, is generally considered our foremost “paleographer,” has told us that the “Florio’s Montaigne” signature is an “undoubted forgery” (I have in my possession a letter of his addressed from the British Museum in 1904 to the late Sir Herbert Tree, and kindly forwarded by the latter to me, in which Sir Edward so states); and the same high authority writes in “Shakespeare’s England” (Vol. I, p. 308, n.): “Nor is it possible to give a higher character to the signature, ‘Wm She.’ (not ‘W. Shr,’ as Mr. Haines prints it) in the Aldine Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ 1502, in the Bodleian Library.”
How in the face of this Mr. C. R. Haines can assert that the book referred to, in the Bodleian Library, bears Shakespeare’s “undoubted signature,” or that the “Florio” signature is with reason regarded as genuine, I am quite unable to understand.
A further question is suggested by the following passage in Mr. Haines’s article. Alluding to the suit of “Belott v. Mountjoy,” he writes: “From this suit we also learn an interesting by-fact, namely, that Belott and his wife, after quitting the Mountjoys, lived in the house of George Wilkins, the playwright, who had the honour of collaborating with Shakespeare in ‘Pericles,’ and possibly in ‘Timon.’” Here I would ask what particle of evidence is there that the “George Wilkins, Victualler,” mentioned in the action, was George Wilkins the pamphleteer and hack-dramatist? It is true Professor Wallace has told us that, although “we have known nothing about Wilkins personally before,” he thinks that “more than one reader with a livelier critical interest in these [Shakespearean] plays may be able to smell the victualler” (Harper’s Magazine, March, 1910, p. 509); but, really, we can hardly be expected to put implicit confidence in the deductions of Dr. Wallace’s olfactory organ. What warrant, then, has Mr. Haines to characterize as a “fact” that which is only guess-work and assumption? For my part, I can no more “smell the victualler” in the author of “The Miseries of Inforst Marriage” than I can “smell” (as did Professor Wallace) the French official Herald in Mountjoy of Muggle Street!
One more question and I have done, though many more occur to me. Mr. Haines invites our attention to “The Plume MSS., which gave us the only glimpse of John Shakespeare at his home, cracking jests with his famous son” (p. 241). May I respectfully ask him if it is not the fact that this pleasant picture of John Shakespeare rests upon the (alleged) statement of Sir John Mennes, and that Sir John Mennes was born on March 1st, 1599, whereas John Shakespeare died in September, 1601, so that the infant Mennes must, presumably, have been taken from his cradle in Kent, in his nurse’s arms, for the purpose of interviewing that “merry-cheeked old man,” of which interview he made a record from memory when he had learnt to write?
I trust Mr. Haines will enlighten a perplexed inquirer as to these matters in the second article, which, as I gather, he is to contribute to the Quarterly Review on the results of “Recent Shakespearean Research.”—Yours, &c.,
George Greenwood.
I turned, therefore, with some interest to Mr. Haines’s second article, but, alas, I found no enlightenment therein. He has treated my questions with a very discreet silence. Well, no doubt “silence is golden”—in some cases. But such is “Shakespearean” criticism at the present day, of which these articles are a very instructive and characteristic specimen. I am aware, of course, that if I were to offer a paper in reply to them, however conclusive that reply might be, and even if it were quite up to the literary standard of the Review in question, it would be at once returned to me by the editor—if not consigned to the “W.P.B.”—for the all-sufficient reason that the writer is guilty of vile and intolerable heresy (to wit that he shares the conviction of the late Henry James—and many others alive and dead—that the author of Hamlet and Lear and Othello was actually a well-educated man, of high position, and the representative of the highest culture of his day), and is therefore taboo to the editors of all decent journals. Id sane intolerandum! Indeed, with the exception of the editor of the National Review—to whom the thanks of all unprejudiced and liberal-minded men are most justly due—I know of no editor of an English quarterly or monthly magazine, since the lamented death of Mr. Wray Skilbeck, who does not maintain this boycott as though it were a matter of moral obligation, just as but a few years since they boycotted the Free-thinker and the Rationalist. They freely open their columns to attacks upon the “Anti-Stratfordian,” but on no account must he be allowed to reply.
Whether such an attitude redounds to the credit of English literature it is not for me, a “heretic,” to say. I would only venture to refer the reader to the observations of Professor Abel Lefranc—a scholar and critic of European reputation—upon this matter, in whose judgment it seems that such an attitude with regard to an extremely interesting literary problem is not only absurdly prejudiced and narrow-minded, but one which—I tremble as I say it—makes some of our literary highbrows not a little ridiculous in the eyes of men of common sense and unfettered judgment.[27]
THE MASQUE OF “TIME VINDICATED”[28]
The following extract from Mr. Smithson’s Article in The Nineteenth Century of November 1913, headed “Ben Jonson’s Pious Fraud,” may well stand as a preface to his now published Essay on Jonson’s Masque of Time Vindicated, which was written by him in the year 1919. The reader may also be referred to Chapters VI and VII of his Shakespeare-Bacon, published in 1899.
It is odd that we Baconians, differing as we do from our opponents in so many points, should agree with them so entirely on one—the supreme importance of the testimony of Ben Jonson. This paper is mainly concerned with two of his utterances, the Ode in the First Folio, and the Prince’s Masque. Both the one and the other belong in point of composition to the same period, 1622-3. We will begin with the Masque completed no doubt a few months earlier than the Ode. In my opinion they were vital parts of one great scheme of which Bacon, i.e., Bacon-Shakespeare, was the subject.
The genesis of the Prince’s Masque was probably on this wise: assuming that Bacon was bent on disowning his plays, the publication of them, however generous in intention, could at best be only a left-handed compliment to him. Consequently if the scheme was to yield any true satisfaction to its originators (or any suitable consolation to Bacon regarded as the victim of malicious if not disloyal persecution), it would have to give scope for some direct (ad virum) expression, in their own persons if possible, of love and admiration for their hero. A prince brought up in the court of James the First would be sure to decide that a Masque was the thing and Ben Jonson the man. As the audience would necessarily be select and discreet (Court influence being potent), the risk of disclosure was not serious; and even if it had been, Jonson’s skill would have been equal to the task of hoodwinking any probable audience. On this occasion luck helped cunning. In the nick of time, George Wither, a “prodigious pourer forth of rhime,” happened to publish a volume of Satirical Essays in rhyme, with a ridiculous dedication of the thing to himself as patron and protector. This I fancy gave Jonson just what he wanted—a red herring to draw across the scent.
The Prince’s Masque had another, and for our purpose far more significant title—Time Vindicated to Himself and His Honours. Time, no Time of long ago, but the age that was then passing, had been slandered, taxed with being mean and dull and sterile, and the intention of the Masque or Pageant was to refute these calumnies in presence, not of an inquisitive world, but of Time’s living ornaments (as well as himself). If report speak true, it was presented on the 19th of January, 1623—the Sunday in that memorable year which fell nearest to Bacon’s birthday—presented in circumstances of unprecedented splendour, “the Prince leading the Measures with the French embassador’s wife.” The Masque (as given in Jonson’s Works) is sub-divided into Antimasque and Masque proper.
Fame, the accredited mouthpiece of the author, is by far the most important personage in the Antimasque. Her first business is to proclaim that she has been sent to invite to that night’s “great spectacle,” not the many, but the few who alone were worthy to view it. An inquisitive mob nicknamed The Curious at once begins to heckle Fame. A thrasonical personage called Chronomastix, a caricature compounded in unequal proportions of George Wither and the Ovid Junior of Jonson’s Poetaster, then appears on the scene. Chronomastix, I may say in passing, seems to have deluded John Chamberlain, for he (J. C.) tells a correspondent that Jonson in the Prince’s Masque “runs a risk by impersonating George Withers as a whipper of the times, which is a dangerous jest.” At sight of Chronomastix The Curious jeer at Fame for not recognising their idol, while Chronomastix himself has the effrontery to call her his “mistress,” and tells her it is for her sake alone that he “revells so in rime.” Fame retorts (in effect): “Away thou wretched Impostor! My proclamation was not meant for thee or thy kind; goe revell with thine ignorant admirers. Let worthy names alone.” Chronomastix is furious, brags of his popularity, and appeals to The Curious to “come forth ... and now or never, spight of Fame, approve me.” The stage direction here runs: “At this, the Mutes come in.” The first Mute, an elephantine creature, meant of course for Jonson himself, is about to bring forth a “male-Poem ... that kicks at Time already.” (Jonson’s Ode to Shakespeare was probably ruminated, if not written, at the very time that this “male-Poem” was struggling to be born.) The second Mute, a quondam Justice—reminding one of Justice Clement in Jonson’s earliest comedy—is in the habit of carrying Chronomastix about “in his pocket” and crying “‘O happy man!’ to the wrong party, meaning the Poet, where he meant the subject.” (This I take for a hint at the confusion of mind that must have existed among lovers of the drama as to who Shakespeare really was.) The succeeding pair of Mutes are, the one a printer in disguise who conceals himself and “his presse in a hollow tree, and workes by glow-worm light, the moon’s too open”; the other a compositor who in “an angle inhabited by ants will sit curled whole days and nights, and work his eyes out for him.”[29] The fifth Mute is a learned man, a schoolmaster, who is turning the works of the caricature Chronomastix into Latine. (“Some good pens”—as we learn from his letters—were at this time engaged in turning Bacon’s Advancement of Learning into Latin, the “general language.”) The sixth and last Mute is a “Man of warre,” reminiscent of Gullio in the Return from Parnassus, who it may be remembered worships “sweet Mr. Shakspeare,” talks “nothing but Shakspeare,” etc. Not one of the Mutes ever opens his mouth, and all that the audience knows of them is told by The Curious, whose function is to connect the Antimasque with the Masque and act as nomenclators for the elephantine poet and his suite. The Mutes came, or seemed to come, at the bidding of Chronomastix, in order to snub Fame for having insulted him. But Chronomastix himself is the person actually snubbed by them, seeing that they ignore him utterly. As for Fame, she treats the Mutes very coolly, her only comment being “What a confederacy of Folly is here!”
Following hard on this observation (of Fame’s) comes a dance, in which The Curious adore Chronomastix and then carry him off in triumph. Afterwards The Curious come up again, and one of them, addressing Fame, asks: “Now, Fame, how like you this?” Another chimes in: “He scornes you, and defies you, has got a Fame of his owne, as well as a Faction.” A third adds: “And these will deify him, to despite you.” Fame answers: “I envie not the Apotheosis. ’Twill prove but deifying of a Pompion.” (If The Curious had scented what Fame was about, a retort like this would have been enough to let them into the secret. But this hint, as well as her previous taunt, “My hot inquisitors, what I am about is more than you understand,” was lost on them and they continue their futile cackle.) Fame gets rid of The Curious at last by means of the Cat and Fiddle, who, according to the stage direction, “make sport with and drive them away.”
Relieved of the presence of all who were unfit to view the “great Spectacle” now on the point of being exhibited “with all solemnity,” Fame at last lets herself go: “Commonly (says she) The Curious are ill-natured and, like flies, seek Time’s corrupted parts to blow upon, but may the sound ones live with fame and honour, free from the molestation of these insects.”
The stage direction here runs: “Loud musique. To which the whole scene opens, where Saturne sitting with Venus is discovered above, and certaine Votaries coming forth below, which are the Chorus.”
Addressing the King, Fame announces that Saturn (Time) urged by Venus (emblem of affection) had promised to set free “certaine glories of the Time,” which, though eminently fitted to “adorn that age,” had nevertheless for mysterious reasons been kept in “darknesse” by “Hecate (Queene of shades).” Venus puts in her word; assures Time that the liberation of the “glories” is a “worke (which) will prove his honour” as well as exceed “men’s hopes.” Saturn answers her gallantly and then addressing the Votaries says: “You shall not long expect: with ease the things come forth (that) are born to please. Looke, have you seene such lights as these?”
This is the very climax of the Masque. “The Masquers (so runs the stage direction) are discovered and that which obscured them vanisheth.” The Votaries exclaim with rapture: “These, these must sure some wonders be.... What grief, or envie had it beene, that these and such had not beene seene, but still obscured in shade! Who are the glories of the Time ... and for the light were made!”
(Who were these “glories” whom Fame, the Prince, Ben Jonson, and the rest had with difficulty rescued from the underworld, in whose behalf inquisitive intruders had been excluded, about whom absurd mistakes of identity had been made, and who according to Fame were destined to play parts in the “apotheosis” of a pumpkin?[30] The only answer that occurs to me is that the spectacle consisted essentially of a selection from among the dramatis personæ who were about to figure in the First Folio, especially characters out of the sixteen or twenty then unpublished plays.)
The Masque ends with an exhortation to charity, the final words being:
Man should not hunt mankind to death,
But strike the enemies of man.
Kill vices if you can:
They are your wildest beasts:
And when they thickest fall, you make the Gods true feasts.
(Bearing in mind that Bacon was probably regarded by the audience as an ill-used man, this exhortation sorts well with what I take to be the true interpretation of the Masque. So does the motto with which it opens. In that motto Martial bids ill-natured censors to leave him alone and keep their venom for self-admirers, persons vain of their own achievements. From first to last, therefore, Time Vindicated seems to have been deliberately adjusted to Bacon.)
The second part of this quasi-national scheme for doing honour to Shakespeare-Bacon falls now to be considered. The First Folio was published, it would seem, towards the end of 1623. Though not entered on the Stationers’ Register till November, it may well have been on the stocks before that, for the difficulties of collecting, arranging with interested printers, editing, adapting (The Tempest for example), and so forth, must have been extraordinary. The volume is introduced by some doggerel, signed “B. I.,” which tells the reader:
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein, etc.
Derision and mystification, twin motives or causes of the guy Chronomastix, are equally the motives of this grotesque “figure.” Whether this were also intended to parody the doggerel inscribed on Shakespeare’s gravestone in Stratford Church may be open to doubt. That inscription runs:
Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare
To digge the dust encloased heare;
Bleste be the man, etc.
Warned by “B. I.” that laughter is in that air, we turn to the famous Ode itself which is signed “Ben: Ionson”(not “B. I.”) This Poem opens with a significant hint that the “name” Shakespeare, as distinct from his “book” and his “fame,” was a delicate subject to handle. After having assured himself with much ado that Shakespeare’s (true) name is now in no danger, Jonson proceeds to inform him that he (Shakesspeare) is alive still, “a moniment without a tombe.” Then comes the line: “And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” which is generally mistaken for a categorical statement that Shakespeare lacked Latin, whereas it should be understood as equivalent to “Supposing thou hadst small Latin,” etc. The word “would” in the next sentence (“From thence to honour thee I would not seek”) shows this to be the reading.
Then come the triumphant verses in which, after having challenged “insolent Greece or haughtie Rome” to produce a greater than Shakespeare, Jonson exclaims:
Triumph my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth, etc.
(Compare this with what Jonson wrote of Bacon not many years later: Bacon “is he, who hath filled up all numbers; and performed that in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. In short, within his view and about his times were all the wits born that could honour a language, or helpe study. Now things daily fall, wits grow downe-ward, and Eloquence growes back-ward. So that hee may be named, and stand as the marke and akme of our language.... Hee seemed to mee ever, by his worke, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration that had beene in many Ages.” The similarity between the two eulogies strikes one the moment they are brought into juxtaposition, and this helps to explain the exclusion of the Ode from the collected Workes of Ben: Jonson: 1640-1.)
After this rapturous outburst the mood changes, and we are bored by a number of didactic lines about the need of toil and sweat as well as genius, “for the good poet’s made as well as born.” The passage is one among many symptoms of Jonson’s long-standing quarrel with Shakespeareolators—a quarrel which at a later date found expression in the Discoveries—for refusing to see that the carelessness of their idol was at times not less conspicuous than his genius. Satisfied with having vindicated his own consistency, Jonson goes on to declare that each “well-torned and true-filed” line of Shakespeare’s “seemes to shake a lance as brandished at the eyes of ignorance.” (Obviously, therefore, Jonson had in view a peculiar kind of ignorance, one which the mere technique displayed in the First Folio would, but for a misunderstanding, have put to flight. The quondam Justice of Time Vindicated who was wont to cry “O happy man! to the wrong party,” suggests the misunderstanding in question. What, moreover, are we to make of the “stage” shaking and “lance” shaking and brandishing? How reconcile this punning upon shake and spear with the opening lines of the Ode which breathe forth reverence for “thy name.” It had been difficult, short of direct statement, to give plainer indications that Jonson was out for a juggle with a pair of names, one of them an alias.)
On the heels of the lance-brandishing jest comes the passionate utterance: “Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were to see thee in our waters yet appeare, and make those flights upon the bankes of Thames, that so did take Eliza and our James!” (Here suggestio falsi is carried to the verge of the lie. What Jonson would have us think he felt about Warwick and its Avon is one thing. What he actually thought may be gathered from a fragment of rather later date in which he jeers at “Warwick Muses” for choosing a “Hoby-horse” as their favourite mount—“the Pegasus that uses to waite on Warwick Muses,” etc. Be this as it may, the ethics of the case would cause him no uneasiness. A secret had to be kept in deference to the wishes of one whom Jonson regarded as almost the greatest and most admirable of men, one too whose right to an incognito no living man of letters was likely to dispute.)
Jonson’s yearning to see Shakespeare once more “upon the bankes of Thames” is suddenly arrested by a vision. Turning his poetic eye upwards and catching sight of the constellation Cygnus, he affects to be thrilled by the conceit that Shakespeare had been metamorphosed, “advanced” to a higher sphere—“the hemisphere” as he calls it. (The Ode belongs, as has been said, to 1622-23. Some ten or a dozen years earlier, Shakspere, preferring humdrum Stratford to London and poetry, had turned his back on the Capital. If this yearning had been uttered in 1612-13, instead of 1622-23, it might have been meant for the Stratford man. So with the vision and the thrill, if we could have referred them to 1616-17, they would have provoked no question. But as things stand, question is inevitable. Had the yearning been kept under since 1612, and why? The vision too and the thrill, what had they to do with the testator of 1616? What more likely than that Jonson had in his mind the social elevation of the wonderful man who long before 1623 had broken his magic wand, doffed his singing robes, and taken leave of the stage for ever?)
The Ode closes on a note akin to despair at the low estate of Poetry ever since Shakespeare had ceased to enrich and adorn it. A similar note, it will be remembered, marks the close of Jonson’s appreciation of Bacon: “Now things daily fall: wits grow downe-ward, and Eloquence growes back-ward” etc. Here again the thoughts of Jonson were evidently running on Shakespeare; for with Jonson Eloquence was Poetry, or rather—to speak by the book—Poetry was “the most prevailing Eloquence, and of the most exalted Charact.”
The contention of this article may be compressed into one sentence: The Prince’s Masque and the famous Ode to Shakespeare were a signal act of homage in two parts to one man, and that man Francis Bacon. The proposition does not admit of demonstrative proof. High probability is all that is claimed, and if the claim be rejected the fault is with the advocate.
Such being the Preface, let us now turn to the further Essay on the Masque of Time Vindicated, which Edward Smithson left for, alas, posthumous publication.
Proprietas denique illa inseparabilis, quae Tempus ipsum sequitur, ut veritatem indies parturiat. De Aug: Scientiarum, 1623.
The year 1623 was a memorable one for literature. First in order of date came a masterpiece of Ben Jonson’s, the Masque of Time Vindicated. This was followed by Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum, an expanded version of his Advancement of Learning, written many years earlier. The finest gift of that year was the First Folio of Shakespeare.
Time Vindicated consists of two violently contrasted parts; jest and earnest, antimasque and masque proper. The most conspicuous figure in the farcical part is CHRONOMASTIX, an enigmatical creature, so greedy of publicity (for fame is denied him) that his only “end” is “to get himselfe a name,” to ingratiate himself with “rumor” (he would have said Fame) as an inspired poet or maker.[31] Chronomastix is escorted by a doting mob of inquisitive adorers, the Curious, who are obsessed by the expectation that they are about to assist at the deification of a great poet, their own incomparable Chronomastix as they fondly imagine. Fame, the mouthpiece of Jonson, derides the Curious at every turn, and when they tell her that Chronomastix “has got a Fame of his owne, as well as a Faction: and these will deifie him, to despite you,” Fame replies: “I envie not the Apotheosis. ’Twill prove but deifying of a Pompion.” The antimasque closes with the ignominious expulsion of Chronomastix and his votaries; obviously because the “great spectacle,” which Time intended that “night to exhibit with all solemnity,” was too august for prying eyes to see.
The Masque proper opens with an address to King James, the gist of which is that “certaine glories of the Time,” till then artificially concealed, were about to be freed “at Love’s suit” or intercession because admirably fitted “to adorne the age.” The climax of the Masque follows this address almost immediately. The stage direction runs: “The Masquers are discovered, and that which obscur’d them, vanisheth.” The Chorus of the Masque is delighted by the vision of the Masquers, and cries out: “What griefe, or envie had it beene, that these, and such (as these) had not beene seene, but still obscur’d in shade! Who are the glories of the Time, ... and for the light were made!”
The essential fiction of Time Vindicated, known also as The Prince’s Masque, is that Time had been reproached with incapacity to produce masterpieces comparable anyway with those of Greece and Rome; and that the revelation of these Masquers was a triumphant refutation of the calumny. To suppose that this result was achieved by the Prince and his companions would be to insult Ben Jonson, the Prince, and all concerned. The all-important feature of the revelation must have been the make-up of the Masquers.
For several months previous to 1623 Jonson’s mind had necessarily been concentrated on Shakespeare; collecting manuscripts; squaring rival publishers; appreciating contributions offered by admirers (Fletcher perhaps and Chapman among others); amending originals, Julius Cæsar for instance; acting as editor-in-chief of the great book; meditating his Ode to “Shakespeare,” the man he lov’d and honoured (on this side idolatry) as much as any. (See Discoveries, 1641, for this italicised passage).
There are many and various indications to justify the hypothesis that the Masque as a whole was a tribute of love and admiration for “Shakespeare.” Here are some of them. (1) Love is the incentive to the freeing of the “wonders”—the “glories”—that so charmed the Chorus of the Masque. Love for “Shakespeare” was probably Jonson’s leading motive for undertaking all the drudgery connected with the First Folio. (2) The mention of “envie” by the Chorus gives one to think. Deprecation of envy is the burden of the enigmatical and portentous exordium of Jonson’s Ode to Shakespeare. (3) For reasons unexplained by his accredited biographers, the plays of Shakespeare had long been held back or secluded, but were then on the eve of publication or disclosure; not indeed “cured and perfect of their limbes”—to quote the editorial figment in the First Folio—but certainly less damaged, and imperfect than even Jonson, at an earlier stage, can have expected. (4) The audience of Time Vindicated is given to understand that “the Bosse of Belinsgate,” a nickname for Jonson, “has a male-poem in her belly now, big as a colt, that kicks at Time already.” In my opinion this Time-defying poem was none other than the famous Ode to Shakespeare. These indications alone are sufficient to justify the above-mentioned hypothesis that the Masque as a whole was a tribute of love and admiration for “Shakespeare.” On no other hypothesis would the title, Time Vindicated, have been appropriate or even excusable. Whereas no other conceivable title would have been so absolutely appropriate, if “Shakespeare” were, as I believe he was, the hero of the Masque; in precisely the same sense, by the way, in which he was the hero of the Ode; the only Poet worthy to be compared, in the words of the Ode, with “all that insolent Greece or haughtie Rome sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.”
Another significant feature of the Masque is the display of anxiety to safeguard the spectacular revelation of the Masquers from the attentions of inquisitive observers, an anxiety which requires the drastic expulsion of the Curious. This anxiety, as I read it, betokened a secret intimately connected with the First Folio. Before developing this contention, it may be well to clear the ground, not only of Heminge and Condell, but also of the Stratford gentleman’s representatives. Heminge and Condell were probably mere dummies who gave Jonson carte blanche to say in their names anything whether strictly true or not, which he thought conducive to the end in view; the prefatory address ostensibly subscribed by them is too Jonsonian to admit of any doubt on this score. As for “Mr. Shakspere,” he had long been dead and buried, and his commonplace Will knows nothing of plays, manuscripts, books, or anything that matters. And as for his representatives—had they been consulted at all—they would have welcomed, rather than vetoed publicity.
The object of these precautions to secure secrecy must have been a persona grata to the King, Prince, and Court; this might go without saying. A significant conjuration against hunting “Mankind to death” suggests that he was also considered, by the Prince among others, a victim of malicious persecution. For other clues we have to go back to the Antimasque. The Curious have contrived to pick up several very useful items of information about the mysterious object in question. They know for instance that he is or has been served by printers and compositors so devoted to him, that they were quite content to “worke eyes out for him,” in dark holes and corners, the better to “conceale” them. They know too that a typical admirer of certain “poems,” which he was in the habit of carrying about “in his pocket,” made the ridiculous mistake of addressing his congratulations “to the wrong party”: to Chronomastix, the “subject” of the Antimasque, whom he mistook for the “Poet.” This blunder is crucial. The secret so ostentatiously safeguarded was a secret of pseudonymity. The Poet of the Masque (and of our quest)—the very antithesis of the blatant poetaster of the Antimasque—was a “maker” who concealed his personality behind a pen-name.
The evidence that Francis Bacon was a “concealed” poet is incontestable. A private letter of his is conclusive, though Aubrey’s corroborative evidence is by no means negligible. Moreover, Bacon, besides being a persona grata at Court, was probably regarded by many notabilities not as a criminal, but rather as a sufferer for the faults of his day and generation. Ben Jonson’s views may be gathered from his Discoveries (1641) where he tells that Bacon was “one of the greatest men ... that had beene in many Ages ... perform’d that in our tongue which may be compar’d or preferr’d to, either insolent Greece or haughtie Rome.... So that hee may be nam’d and stand as the marke and akme of our language.... In his adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength: for Greatnesse he could not want.” Francis Bacon then was the mysterious poet of Time Vindicated. That Bacon was not the only concealed poet of those days is probably true. London might have teemed with concealed poets. But the only concealed poet who satisfies the many other conditions is Francis Bacon. Additional evidence that we are on the right track is supplied by the Antimasque. The “Nosed” ones among the Curious have smelt out apropos of Chronomastix that “a schoolmaster is turning all his workes into Latin.” Now it happens that about 1623 Bacon wrote to an intimate friend: “My labours are most set to have those works ... Advancement of Learning ... the Essays (etc), well translated into Latin by the help of some good pens that forsake me not.” The Advancement of Learning in Latin form, De Aug: Scientiarum, appeared in 1623, dedicated to Prince Charles the dedicatee of our Masque (and Camden, Jonson’s “reverend” master may have helped in the translation—but this is mere conjecture).[32]
The figure Chronomastix is not easy to range or class; for he is not a caricature proper. He salutes Fame with impudent assurance (in the Antimasque) as his “Deare Mistris” and tells her that “he revells so in rime” for no other “end” than “to serve Fame ... and get himselfe a name.” Fame, here as elsewhere, the mouthpiece of Jonson, browbeats the blatant creature: “Away, I know thee not, wretched Impostor, Creatire of glory, Mountebanke of witte, selfe-loving Braggart, ... Scorne of all the Muses, goe revell with thine ignorant admirers, let worthy names alone.” A little abashed by this rebuff, Chronomastix appeals to the Curious for sympathy; tells them that his “glorious front and word at large triumphs in print at my admirers charge”; and finishes his harangue by this invitation to his friends and admirers: “Come forth that love me, and now or never, spight of Fame, approve me.” Chronomastix therefore whatever he be, is the very antithesis of a self-effacing poet or maker. He belongs I think to the same genus as those fantastic portraits, Landru chez lui, etc., lately exhibited in Piccadilly by the National Portrait Society, partly to amuse the public and partly to puzzle quidnuncs. He was a freak in other words, and his function was to amuse outsiders and put curiosity off the scent.
Turn we now from the figure Chronomastix, to the “Figure” which mars the front page of the First Folio: the sorry “Figure ... wherein the Graver had a strife with Nature to out-doo the life”; as “B. J.” (Ben Jonson) significantly informs “the Reader.” “B. J.’s” innuendo does not stop here; he follows it up by explicitly warning all readers to “looke not on” the “picture,” but on the “Booke.” The warning seems almost superfluous; for the effigy cannot be identified with portrait or bust of any human being. Twin brother to Chronomastix, the thing is a freak expressly designed to prevent inquisitive persons, ourselves among others, from scrutinising the fiction then launched on the world.
Reverting once more to the Antimasque and the orgiastic dance at the end of which the Curious carry away their deity Chronomastix: one or other of the deluded adorers taunts Fame in these words: “He scornes you and defies you, h’as got a Fame on’s owne, as well as a Faction, and these will deifie him, to despite you.” Fame replies: “I envie not the Apotheosis. ’Twill prove but deifying of a Pompion.” When these words were spoken, it is quite possible that neither the figure, nor the Ode, nor the prefatory addresses had reached finality. But Jonson’s inside knowledge of the whole project would enable him to forecast important results. One of these results, in my opinion, was that a Pumpkin would be deified by posterity. In this forecast a note of misgiving is perceptible enough; but of spitefulness there is hardly a trace; for after all, the pumpkin is a deserving vegetable—the stress here is on the word deserving, since that is the epithet by which the surviving Burbages, in perfect good temper, described the deceased Shakspere. This apotheosis idea, I may add, is also prominent in the Shakespeare Ode at the point where Jonson pulls himself up: “But stay, I see thee to the hemisphere advanced and made a constellation there.” In the Ode however the apostrophe—half banter, half congratulation—is entirely free from regret or misgiving.
From the point of view of the privileged few who were in the secret, Time Vindicated and the Shakespeare Folio were, I consider, parts of a superlative Act of Homage to the greatest of modern poets. From Jonson’s special point of view they were a pious fraud, in which at the behest of disinterested love and admiration for Bacon, he consented to undertake the chief rôle. After the death of Bacon Jonson’s mood may have undergone some modification. Certain it is that the Ode, his finest poem, is excluded from the first edition, Vol. II, of his collected Works, and that in his Discoveries he tells “posterity” certain truths about Shakespeare which were not even suggested in the Ode.
Hitherto our thoughts have been preoccupied with Ben Jonson. They shall now be devoted more closely to Bacon and the state of his mind and feelings about 1623. In a pathetic letter of his to King James, Bacon comforts himself with the knowledge that his fall was not the “act” of his Sovereign, and then proceeds: “For now it is thus with me: I am a year and a half old in misery ... mine own means through mine own improvidence are poor and weak.... My dignities remain marks of your favour, but burdens of my present fortune. The poor remnants ... of my former fortunes in plate and jewels I have spread upon poor men unto whom I owed, scarcely leaving myself bread.... I have often been told by many of my Lords (of your Council), as it were in excusing the severity of the sentence, that they knew they left me in good hands.... Help me, dear Sovereign ... so far as I ... that desire to live to study, may not be driven to study to live.”
Here it is to be observed that the proceeds of sale of the Shakespeare Folio, “printed at his admirers’ charge,” would help towards relieving the fallen man’s pecuniary distress, whilst the august compliment conveyed by the Masque would tend to soothe his lacerated feelings.
The attitude of a concealed poet to his art is rarely explicit, or concealment would be next to impossible. In this connection I ask leave to quote from an Essay, Shakespeare-Bacon, by E. W. S., published many years ago.[33] The essayist, after having stated that Bacon’s qualifications for dramatic work were of a high order, and that some at least of his recognised Elizabethan output actually were dramatic, runs on: “Moreover, curious as is Bacon’s manner when treating of ‘poesie,’ his manner when dealing with dramatic poetry is more curious still. The Advancement of Learning though not published till the reign of her successor, belongs to the age of Queen Elizabeth, in conception, observation, reflection, and substance generally. In this work, after having mapped out the “globe” of human knowledge into three great continents of which poetry is one, he finds himself face to face with dramatic poetry. Compelled to give the thing a name, he rejects the almost inevitable word dramatic, in favour of the distant word representative. And what he permits himself to say about ‘representative’ poetry, in that the natural, and appropriate place for saying it, seems intended to suggest—what of course was absurdly untrue—that he was all but a stranger to anything in the nature of a dramatic performance. The suggestion too is strangely out of keeping with passages of unexpected occurrence in other parts of the book. For instance, in handling what he calls the ‘Georgics of the mind,’ he describes poetry (along with history) in terms which so admirably characterise the very best dramatic poetry of the age, that it is difficult to resist the conviction that he must have been thinking chiefly of the masterpieces of Shakespeare. ‘In poetry,’ says he, ‘we may find painted forth with great life, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves, how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they are inwrapped one with another, and how they do fight and encounter one with another ... how to set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we use to hunt beast with beast,’ etc. Another of these unexpected passages seems to imply that Bacon, writing at the close of the Elizabethan epoch, was so convinced of the paramount importance of dramatic poetry, as to have forgotten that there was any poetry at all, except what had to do with the theatre. In this passage Bacon has been claiming that ‘for expressing the affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are more beholding to the poets than to the philosophers’—at this point he suddenly breaks off with an ironical: ‘But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre.’[34]
A question that has probably been intriguing some of my readers is: Why did Bacon abandon the poet’s Crown to which his genius entitled him? From among the complex of conceivable reasons it will suffice to pick out three. (1) In dedicating the De Augmentis Scientiarum to Prince Charles, 1623, Bacon writes: “It is a book I think will live, and be a citizen of the world which English books are not.” Again, a letter, of about the same date, to an intimate friend contains this passage: “For these modern languages will play the bank-rowtes with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad, as God shall give me leave, to recover it with posterity.” “Play the bank-rowtes” means, I suppose, put a stop to the currency; and “lost much time with this age” is probably an allusion to pseudonymous work. These and similar passages justify the conclusion that by this time Bacon had convinced himself that English as a literary language, was doomed to go under to Latin. (2) The poet in Bacon, as in Wordsworth and others, had expired with the passing of youth. (3) Bacon imagined himself the Discoverer of a New Instrument or method, by which human life would be so beatified that posterity would revere him as one of its greatest benefactors; if only men of science (such as Harvey) were for ever deprived of excuse for pooh-poohing the Novum Organum, merely because its inventor was none other than Shakespeare, sonneteer and dreamer of dreams.
[Note by the Editor]. There appears to be no doubt that in “Chronomastix” Jonson was lampooning George Wither, whose “Abuses Stript and Whipt, or Satiricall Essayes,” was published by Budge in 1622, (there had been an earlier edition in 1613) and was followed by a poem called “The Scourge.” In “Abuses Stript and Whipt” we find the following lines:
And though full loth, ’cause their ill natures urge,
I’ll send abroad a satire with a scourge,
That to their shame for this abuse shall strip them,
And being naked in their vices whip them.
And to be sure of those that are most rash
Not one shall ’scape him that deserves the lash.
There is also an Epigram to “Time,” in which Wither asks:
Now swift-devouring, bald, and ill-fac’t Time,
Dost not thou blush to see thyself uncloak’t?
Another Epigram is to “Satyro-Mastix,” the last lines of which are:
Then scourge of Satyrs hold thy whip from mine,
Or I will make my rod lash thee and thine.
“Withers Motto” (1621) was “nec habeo nec careo nec curo.” This was satirised by John Taylor, the Water-Poet, in the words “et habeo, et careo, et curo,” and is obviously alluded to in Jonson’s Masque, where “Nose” says “The gentleman-like Satyre cares for nobody.”
Wither, moreover, quarrelled with the Stationers’ Company and the printers (who disapproved of his independent method of business), which also was a subject for Jonson’s ridicule in the Masque:
One is his Printer in disguise, and keepes
His presse in a hollow tree, where to conceale him,
He workes by glow-worme light, the moon’s too open, etc., etc.
In the Dict: of National Biography we are told that “Jonson quarrelled with Alex. Gill the elder for having quoted Wither’s work with approval in his ‘Logonomia Anglica’ (1619), and Jonson revenged himself by caricaturing Wither under the title of ‘Chronomastix’ in the Masque of Time Vindicated presented at Court 1623-4,” and allusion is made to Jonson’s sarcasm with regard to Wither’s quarrel with his printers.
Further, we find John Chamberlain writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, on January 25, 1622-3, as follows with reference to the Masque of Time Vindicated: “Ben Jonson they say is like to hear of it on both sides of the head for personating George Withers, a poet or poetaster he terms him, as hunting after some, by being a Chronomastix, or whipper of the time, which is become so tender an argument that it must not be admitted either in jest or earnest.” (The Court and Times of James the First. Ed. 1848. Vol. II, p. 356.)
These facts seem to have been well known to Mr. Smithson, for not only does he quote John Chamberlain’s letter in his Nineteenth Century article, where he expresses the opinion that “Chronomastix” is “a caricature compounded in unequal proportions of George Wither and the Ovid Junior of Jonson’s Poetaster (as to which see an interesting chapter in Shakespeare-Bacon, headed “A Caricature of some Notable Elizabethan Poet,” together with the chapter following), but among his manuscripts were found certain Notes with reference to George Wither which I cite lower down. It will be seen, however, that he was convinced that Jonson, while lampooning and ridiculing Wither, the scourger of the time, had for his main object the glorification of the Shakespearean drama under cover of a Masque—those glorious works wherein “Time,” which had been vilified by Wither, found its all-sufficient and splendid “Vindication.”[35]]
The following are Mr. Smithson’s Notes to which I have made reference:
“Wither sends
Abroad a Satyr with a scourge;
That to their shame for this abuse shall strip them,
And being naked in their vices whip them.
(Abuses Stript and Whipt. Ed. 1622, p. 305.)
He gives Justices of Peace a warning lest they be put out of the Commission for partiality (p. 318). Ruffling Cavaliars also are touched (p. 320).
In the address to the reader of Shepheard’s Hunting, Wither to some extent recants his disgust at Time—says he has been ‘persuaded to entertain a better opinion of the Times than I lately conceived, and assured myself, that Virtue had far more followers than I supposed.’ Curiously enough, therefore, Wither’s frame of mind in 1622[36] seems to have been similar to that of Jonson in Time Vindicated. The coincidence would help perhaps to mislead the judgment of the time, and may have so commended itself to Jonson.
I don’t think Wither knows why, or by whom he was persecuted. (See Philarate to Willy in Eclogue I, and last page but two of ‘Address to the Reader.’)
He calls Time ‘bald and ill-fac’d,’ ‘shameless time,’ speaks of his ‘deformities,’ ‘blockish age,’ that ‘truth’ in this age gets ‘hatred,’ ‘while love and charitie are fled to heaven.’
He took upon him to scourge Time, and he was certainly arrogant enough, in form at any rate, for Chronomastix.
I therefore take him to have been the stalking-horse or blind used by Jonson, the Prince, and some others, to conceal the true object.”
SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY
[The Notes of this Essay (except those inserted by the Editor) which are denoted by Roman Numerals, will be found at the end of it.]
The recent discovery of an entry in a domestic expenses account book of the Mannours or Manners family has attracted some notice. According to Mr. Sidney Lee[37] the terms of the entry, under the head “Payments for household stuff, plate, armour,” etc., are: “1613. Item 31 Martii to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lorde’s impreso [the terminal o should be a] xliiijs., to Richard Burbadge for paynting and making yt in gold xliiijs.. [Total] iiijliviijs.” An impresa Camden describes as “a device in picture with his motto or word borne by noble and learned personages to notifie some particular conceit of their own,” its nearest modern analogue being the book-plate.[38] Burbage seems to have made, as well as painted, the thing. What there was for Mr. Shakespeare to do is by no means clear. The motto, if motto there were, would to a certainty be designated by the “noble and learned personage” himself. Moreover, some three years later (1616) Burbage appears to have executed a similar commission for the same Earl of Rutland, entirely without assistance. That the clerk who made the entry denied to Burbage the “prefix of gentility” which he bestowed upon “Mr. Shakespeare” is a fact of trivial import. If—to take an imaginary case—Nick Bottom had been living “on his means” at South Place, Stratford-at-the-Bow, this clerk would have dubbed him Mr. Bottom as a matter of course in the same circumstances. Mr. Lee is of opinion that “the recovered document discloses a capricious sign of homage on the part of a wealthy and cultured nobleman to Shakespeare.” If he had suggested that the two-guinea payment to “Mr. Shakespeare” may have been preceded by a hearty meal in the buttery, without exciting any feeling of resentment on the part of either recipient that the meal was not served in the dining-hall, I should have been more disposed to agree with him.
The situation is a curious one. But any serious discussion of it would be premature until we are actually in possession of the “rich harvest of new disclosures” which Mr. Lee teaches us to expect.[39] Meanwhile the Bacon theory regarded as a development of the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s is certainly not crushed, if it be not actually encouraged, by this Belvoir disclosure, since no one in his senses would think of denying the existence of “Mr. Shakespeare” or his acquaintance with Richard Burbage.
In Gilbert Wats’ English version (1640) of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Vicont St. Alban, who is designated as “Tertius a Platone Philosophiæ Princeps,” is represented pen in hand, tall hat on head, a voluminous lace ruff round his neck, in the act of inditing: Mundus Mens Connubio Jungam Stabili.[40] On the opposite page two worlds, a Mundus Visibilis and a Mundus Intellectualis are shown clasping hands across space, in order, no doubt, to give emphasis to the idea of a world and mind connubium. The picture typifies the conception of Bacon which has prevailed ever since. A skater on his way to the Engadine declared he was at a loss to understand why anyone ever went to Switzerland in summer for pleasure. Some of us would have been tempted to smile at the remark. But the prevailing conception of Bacon is probably quite as inadequate as this skater’s conception of Switzerland. The age of Queen Elizabeth probably had no presage—not a hint—that Francis Bacon would ever develop into a “prince of philosophy.” In my opinion the Bacon known to it was not a natural philosopher[1] even in aspiration, but an artist—an artist in words, who, if circumstances, more especially family circumstances, had been favourable any time between 1580 and 1590 would have openly confessed that poetry was his ideal, and declared himself a poet. As it was, he took the line of least friction, and sooner or later acquired the title of “concealed poet.” How far the concealment extended in the early days it is impossible to discover. To Sir Philip Sidney,[2] Sir J. Harrington, and other accomplished young men of their class, the true state of the case was doubtless an open secret.
Professor Nichol (Francis Bacon, Part I), though he thinks that Bacon “did not write Shakespeare’s plays,” considers that “there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they find voice for sentiments, often as nearly identical when they anticipate as when they contravene the manners of thought and standards of action that prevail in our country in our age. They are similar in this respect for rank,” etc. Shelley discerned that Bacon “was a poet,” and Macaulay perceived that the “poetical faculty” was “powerful” in Bacon. Taine held that Bacon “thought as artists and poets habitually think,” that he was one of the finest of a “poetic line,” that “his mental procédé was that of the creator, not reasoning but intuition.” Bacon, then, was essentially a poet, belonged to the same race as Sidney for example. Sidney died young, and his poetic activity ceased some time before he died. Yet Sidney’s poetical achievement has come down to our day. What has become of Bacon’s poetical achievement? Was it also concealed?
Hallam, in the Introduction to the Literature of Europe, confessed he was unable to identify “the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.” Emerson (Representative Men) declared: “The Egyptian verdict of Shakespearean societies comes to mind, that Shakespeare[3] was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man in wide contrast.” It would be easy to adduce other evidence pointing in the same direction. But Hallam and Emerson, unexceptionable witnesses, will serve the turn. On one side, then, we are brought into contact with a poet or maker whose poems elude us. On another side we are confronted with poems whose poet or maker eludes us—some of us. What if Shakespeare were to Bacon what Callisthenes, Aristophanes’ actor-friend, was to Aristophanes? Suppose by way of working hypothesis that such was the case, that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s. In that case his ultimate intention as to dropping or retaining the mask of pseudonymity would be affected by various considerations extending far beyond the family circle. (a) To be “rewarded of” the stage-manager was probably nothing less than degrading to a man of good birth. (b) The conditions under which the hypothetical Shakespeare must have written, were unfavourable to careful work. A man who is half ashamed of what he is doing is hardly likely to do his best, especially when more or less concealed. Certainly many of the plays suffer from faulty construction, inconsistency, obscurity, bombast and so forth, and what is more important, Shakespeare himself[4] was probably quite as conscious of these blemishes as were any of his critics. (c) With us the daily paper exerts a certain influence on public opinion. In Bacon’s day the theatre was one of the most effective means of appeal to any considerable audience, and in that way the name Shakespeare probably got entangled in controversies with which Bacon felt no desire to meddle autonymously.[5] (d) The moral tendency of Shakespearean work published before 1609, Venus and Adonis for example, was not such as to forward any of the hypothetical author’s schemes for place. (e) Early in the seventeenth century Bacon seems to have convinced himself that for purposes of moment Latin was destined to supplant English. He was haunted moreover by fear of impending civil commotions, and augured ill for that “fair weather learning which needs the nursing of luxurious leisure.” (f) Had there been no other considerations than these, Bacon, even after he became Solicitor-General, might have been induced himself to give to the world some at least of his hypothetical offspring really “perfect of their limbes as he conceived them.” It is not to be supposed that he would ever have claimed all or nearly all that passed for Shakespeare’s. Much would have been disavowed altogether, and many of the more inconvenient things would, quite fairly, have been ascribed to collaboration, misprints, inexperience, haste, carelessness, etc. But the action of the ill-conditioned group which in 1609 engineered the publication of the Sonnets of Shakespeare, must have greatly reduced the chance that Bacon would ever consent to edit anything of Shakespeare’s. So far as intimate friends were concerned, the piratical publication, however irritating,[6] would be comparatively innocuous, and as for charitable strangers, they might be trusted to discover extenuating circumstances in the youth of the author and the fashion of the time. But the great indiscriminating public, unaccustomed to make allowances, and led by an enemy like Sir Edward Coke, would chortle over the self-revelations suggested by the book, and put the worst construction on everything. Rather than face such a prospect, Bacon would be willing to pay almost any price, and the price he may be supposed to have paid was to seem to know nothing and care nothing about “Shakespeare” or anything that was his. Adherence to this policy would not necessarily involve any visible change of attitude or conduct. On the contrary, the hypothetical Shakespeare would be urged to hold on his usual course by the fear that any sudden stoppage, of the supply of plays for instance, might arouse suspicions which otherwise would have slept. Parenthetically it may be observed that Bacon had already known what it was to give to the world things—the Essays of 1597—which he would rather have kept back, but was compelled to publish because “to labour the state of them had been troublesome and subject to interpretation.”
The parting between Prospero and Ariel has been thought to adumbrate the farewell of Shakespeare, whoever he was, to Poetry—a view that is plausible enough. It would explain the position assigned to The Tempest in the First Folio, and suggest an interesting answer to the question why Prospero, who “prized his books above his dukedom” threatened—only threatened—to drown a particular “book.” But no one knows within several years when The Tempest was written. Nor is it at all certain that the poem was wholly Shakespeare’s.[41] For anything we know to the contrary, the editor of the First Folio may have interpolated the striking invocation—to mention one passage only—which begins: “Ye elves of hills.”[7] The Tempest then, does not enable us to fix the date of Shakespeare’s practical renunciation of poetry. I say, practical renunciation, because certain passages in Henry the Eighth which feelingly represent the insecurity of greatness might ex hypothesi have been contributed by Bacon just after his fall, though his practical renunciation could hardly have taken place later than 1612.[42] But whether the date were 1612 or somewhat earlier, the hypothetical Shakespeare was amply provided with other interests and pursuits. (a) Rhetoric had long held a high place in his affections. “Rhetoric and Logic,” says he, “these two, rightly taken, are the gravest of the sciences, being the arts of arts,”[8] and what excellence he attained in the former of these arts we know from Ben Jonson. (b) Though poesy, the recreation of his leisure—Bacon would never have allowed that it was anything but a recreation—were denied him, prose, splendid inimitable prose was his to command. (c) The delightful days and months and years which he had spent with poets both ancient and modern, particularly Ovid,[9] might be turned to philosophical account. (d) Historical projects allured him. In the Advancement of Learning, a history—a prose history no doubt—of England from the “Wars of the Roses” downwards is noted as a desideratum, and seems to have been begun. The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622), however, is the only portion of the desiderated history which reached completeness. (e) Legislative projects also attracted him, less strongly no doubt than historical. (f) But at this time the Great Instauration had possessed itself of the chief place in his affection: “Of this I can assure you that though many things of great hope decay with youth,[10] yet the proceeding in that work doth gain upon me, upon affection and desire,” he writes, about 1609, to his bosom friend Matthew. The instauration, say rather transfiguration, of human knowledge—that was the vision which now fascinated him. When the spell began to work it is difficult to determine. Early in the seventeenth century his conception of human “learning” or “knowledge” or “science”—three words to which he attached practically the same meaning—included Poetry, not as an appendix, but as one of three fundamental constituents. Perhaps the word “culture,” with “barbarism” for antithesis, would now come nearest to what he then meant by learning. The Advancement of Learning is the work not of a scholar in the technical sense, but of an omnivorous apprehensive imaginative reader. It is the expression by an artist in words of the serried thoughts of a mind steeped in poetry, deep versed in human nature, but certainly not versed in natural philosophy as understood by his contemporaries—Galileo for example, Gilbert and others. A passage in the first of its two books runs: “No man that wadeth in learning or contemplation thoroughly but will find printed in his heart nil novi super terram.” It is incredible that Bacon can at this time have caught so much as a glimpse of the “New Logic,” “New Art,” or—to give its latest name—Novum Organum, which he afterwards declared was “quite new, totally new in every kind.”[11] But though the Advancement was in fact a plea for culture, in Bacon’s intention it was a serious attempt to grapple with philosophy, an attempt so serious that he afterwards declared the Novum Organum itself to be the “same argument sunk deeper.” Moreover, in my opinion, it was his first serious attempt in that direction, hence its importance to any right apprehension of his genius.[12]
About the year 1609, the philosophical enthusiasm reached a climax. Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturæ, Redargutio Philosophiarum, Sapientia Veterum, and other pieces, some of which Boswell, one of his executors, seems to have called impetus philosophici, were thrown off in rapid succession. As early as 1610, however, he solicits the King to employ him in writing a history of his Majesty’s “Time,” a hint surely that the philosophical impetus had begun to abate. The change, whether it began that year, or a year or two later, is intelligible enough. Science had not claimed him her deliverer. Harvey is reported to have sneered at his philosophy. Gilbert and Napier may have started the sneer; for Bacon obviously undervalued mathematics, and spoke almost contemptuously of Gilbert (whom Galileo fully appreciated). About this time, too, he probably began to suspect that somewhere in the New Art, there lurked a defect which would have to be cured before the apparatus would work. The truth is that in the philosophical work published or privately circulated by Bacon before 1610, though there was much to appeal to the æsthetic side of the human mind, much to stimulate the cultivated layman’s admiration for knowledge, for the devoted student of science there was very little help of a constructive kind, the only kind of help he really needed.[13]
The Sapientia Veterum, 1609, is based on a number of myths selected from the poets and fabulists of antiquity in virtue of a certain congruity with Bacon’s intuitions and predilections. The Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History, his latest work, is based on an assemblage of what by way of distinction might be called facts. The dissonance between the two works is amazing. The Sapientia, which was intended to bespeak a favourable hearing for the New Art, busies itself with venerable fictions. From the Natural History on the other hand, poetry and fable were to have been rigorously excluded. Bacon’s biographer, Rawley, wrote for the first edition of the work (1627), an address “To the Reader,” which winds up: “I will conclude with an usual speech of his lordship’s; that this work of his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as man made it; for it hath nothing of imagination.”
Several years before the Sylva was written, Galileo had censured as paper philosophers certain contemporaries of his, who set about the investigation of nature as if she were a “book like the Æneid or the Odyssey.” One at least of Bacon’s intimate friends, Sir Tobie Mathew, was no stranger to Padua and Florence, and it is quite possible that he may have informed Bacon of these strictures of Galileo’s not long after they were uttered. But, be this as it may, a momentous change must have taken place after 1609, not in Bacon’s aspiration to be the greatest of human benefactors to man, but in his conception of the means by which his vast expectations were to be realised. Had the change been less than “fundamental,” “a good and well ordered Natural History” would not have been described in the Phenomena Universi (1622), as holding the “keys both of sciences and of operations.” After 1612 Bacon became for some eight or nine years so immersed in affairs, as Attorney-General, Privy Councillor—no sinecure then—Lord Chancellor, etc., that it must have been impossible for him to give to his New Logic a tithe of the attention it required. “At this period,” says Dr. Abbott: “there is a great gap in the series of Bacon’s philosophical works. In 1613 he was appointed Attorney-General, and from that time till 1620 no literary work of any kind published or unpublished is known to have issued from his pen. All that he did was apparently to rewrite repeatedly and revise the Novum Organum.[14] The Organum made its appearance in 1620 with a dedication to the King by no means confident of either the worth or the use of his offering. But as he says in the proemium that “all other ambition whatsoever was in his opinion lower than the work in hand,” one would infer that his zeal for philosophy had begun to revive even before the tragedy of 1621. The remaining five years of the great man’s life—“a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more,” he calls it—were more or less distracted with anxieties in no way connected with philosophy. He hoped, nevertheless, to present the old King with a “good history of England, and a better digest” of the laws, and the young King with a history of the “time and reign of King Henry the Eighth.”[15] But after the most distressful sequelæ of his fall had been relieved, his grandiose, imposing scheme for the renovation or transfiguration of philosophy must have regained the position it had held some ten or a dozen years earlier. Without it, life for him would have been a mean and melancholy failure. “God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof ... and not delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out the ordinances which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.”[16] This capacity, this wonder-working exaltation of the mind had been neglected, and all but lost, by reason of the interference of Aristotle and other insolent dictators, and Bacon imagined himself destined to rehabilitate it, to usher in a new era, to endow the human race, not with knowledge alone, but with legions of beneficent arts,[17] and for reward to go down to the ages as pre-eminently the Friend of man.[18] Compared with a vision so magnificent, his youthful dream of a poet’s immortality would seem paltry, stale, and unprofitable. No wonder the old love, poetry, was forsaken. The wonder would have been if for the sake of the old love he had done or permitted or countenanced anything which he thought might possibly prejudice posterity against the new love, his “darling philosophy.”[19]
The more vulnerable points of this tentative theory[20] of Bacon’s relation to poetry seem to be three. First, Bacon’s final perseverence in ignoring his hypothetical offspring. Second, his Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse which, according to Dr. Abbott, “so clearly betrays the cramping influence of rhyme and verse, that it could hardly have been the work of a true poet even of a low order.” Third, the detailed treatment of poetry in the Advancement of Learning is essentially and flagrantly defective. Objection number one—Bacon’s persistent neglect of the plays—is easily answered.[21] The reasons for continuing to ignore them may in the aggregate have been even more cogent at the close, than at the opening of his career. For a Lord Chancellor, one who had been a “principal councillor and instrument of monarchy,” to publish not verses merely, but common plays, would have been a disgrace to the peerage, and ingratitude, if not disloyalty, to the sovereign to whom he owed his many promotions. Amongst the reasons for concealment, which did not exist at the opening of life, two more may be mentioned: one, the publication of the Sonnets, has been sufficiently discussed; the other, solicitude for the Great Instauration, has not. In casting about for an explanation of his frigid reception by contemporary science, Bacon must have hit upon a suspicion, shared maybe by King James,[22] that his true greatness after all lay rather in the domain of poetry than in that of philosophy.[23] Disappointed in his contemporaries, he would turn to the ages unborn, resolved that they at any rate should not start with a bias against his message. Any suggestion therefore, that he should allow his true name to be put to a volume of poetry, so distinguished from versified theology, would be unconditionally rejected.
To the objection founded on the Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse several answers suggest themselves. No artist is always at his best, least of all in illness and old age, and the Translation belongs to 1624 when Bacon was recovering from an attack of a painful disease. In the delightful preface to his select edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, Matthew Arnold writes: “Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him (Wordsworth) with evident unconsciousness of its defects and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.” Yet no competent judge of poetry would think of denying that Wordsworth was a “true poet” of a “high order.”[43] Again, conventional feeling may have been partly responsible for the dullness of this Translation. Dr. Abbott surely underrates the consequence of his admission that “theological verse like theological sculpture might seem to require something of the archaic, and a close adherence to the simplicity of the original prose.” Grant that Bacon was under the influence of some such feeling, and the objection we are considering is virtually answered, such was “Bacon’s versatility in adapting language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose.” Once more, the evidence that Bacon was a “concealed poet” is strong enough to hold its own against every argument that can fairly be urged against it, and to concealment dissimulation is apt to prove indispensable. It was so considered by Bacon, and Bacon’s experience of the device was extensive, if not unique. In a famous Essay he carefully distinguishes between Simulation and Dissimulation, and lets it be seen that he regarded the former as positively culpable, the latter as not only permissible but necessary.[24] A man dissimulates when he “lets fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is.... He that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage.... They will so beset a man with questions and draw him on and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence he must show inclination one way.... So that no man can be secret except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is as it were but the skirts or train of secrecy.” The application is obvious. Bacon’s Translation of Certain Psalms is uninspired, lacks “choiceness of phrase ... the sweet falling of the clauses,” etc! Why? Possibly because the author “is letting fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is!” The fact that a thing so trivial as this Translation should have been published, instead of being reserved for private circulation only—published too on the heels of the Shakespeare First Folio—lends additional probability to this explanation.[25]
Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for the essential inadequacy of the Advancement of Learning in relation to poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In the Advancement, dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name, “dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilst lyric, elegiac, and several other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of the Advancement, however, the De Augmentis Scientiarum, published some eighteen years after the Advancement, not only restores to “representative poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentions elegias, odes, lyricos, etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at the date of the Advancement, Bacon had still to learn what poetry essentially was, a defect which at the date of the De Augmentis he had contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its absurdity, one has only to compare the Advancement of Learning with the Apologie for Poetry by the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with slight additions in 1596.[26] One of the many resemblances involved in the comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely. Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in the Advancement than in the Apologie, inevitably, considering the scope of the Advancement, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In those days, however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an unusually large proportion of the same authors.[27] It may, therefore, be urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to the Apologie for Poetrie geometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only constituents of the science of mathematics. The Advancement of Learning appears to take the same view. (b) According to the Apologie “knowledge of a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is “well doing and not well knowing only.” The Advancement holds “the end and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to “active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to the Apologie “metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. The Advancement defines “metaphysic”—which includes mathematics—as the science of “that which is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) The Apologie censures philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and “school art.” In the Advancement, Bacon condemns “the over early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into acts and methods.” It is a theme on which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, the Novum Organum, a congeries of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against premature systematisation. (e) The Apologie contrasts the necessary limitations of other artists[28] with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is.” The Advancement, in a charming passage, instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) The Apologie holds “that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” The Advancement affirms that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of the Apologie venerated learning—“the noble name of learning,” he calls it—as if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of the Advancement, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent identical, for the first book of the Advancement was a vindication of the dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of “learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of the Advancement that reading it one seems to be continually in touch with Sidney—assuming him to have been author of the Apologie. The effect in my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate—though that is quite possible—but that Bacon when writing the Advancement was thoroughly familiar with the Apologie.
It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of the Advancement, to whatever cause they may have been due—and honest dissimulation is the most likely cause—were not due to ignorance of poetry. Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.
“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to find with the criticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even occurred to me.
For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to that fullness of joy which according to M. Poincaré (Le Science et l’Hypothèse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.
NOTES TO SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY
[1] Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is to be understood in its modern sense.
[2] From Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the secret of some “Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan, and who are better content to suppress the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without their names to it.” The Arte of English Poesie was dedicated to Bacon’s uncle and quasi guardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice: “Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their youth.”
[3] From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two—without prejudice to the question whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form “Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or “Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.
[4] Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and elsewhere—agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays—negatives a mechanical explanation.
[5] In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’s Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex. 1604.)
[6] Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of the Sonnets. Even so they would be serious impedimenta to a Solicitor-General on his way to the Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.
[7] It is obviously borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “Deeper than did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’s Medea, but it seems to me from Act III, Sc. 3, of The Tempest itself. Golding’s English version of the Metamorphoses may well have been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.
[8] Advancement of Learning. “Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”
[9] The idée mère of the Sapientia Veterum—allegorisation—is one which I think no notable man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it to Orlando Furioso (1591), is a reductio ad absurdum of the fashion.
[10] Poetry for example!
[11] The second book of the Advancement—where “rational knowledges” or “arts intellectual” are being discussed—promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into two parts; whereof the one I term experientia literata, and the other interpretatio naturæ, the former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of conjecture. Possibly Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former, experientia literata, we may learn from the De Augmentis Scientiarum, the authorised Latin version of the Advancement of Learning, quite as much as any of us need wish to know.
It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, the Advancement of Learning contains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work—prudentia activa—digested into aphorisms.
[12] The nebulous Temporis Partus Maximus, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s “apparently unacknowledged” Conference of Pleasure, 1592, and Gesta Graiorum, 1594, though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.
[13] According to Professor Fowler (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed experimental science under any obligation at all.
[14] No student I suppose would willingly be without the volume here quoted, “Francis Bacon”, by Edwin A. Abbott.
[15] Rawley’s dedication, 1627, of the Natural History to Charles the First.
[16] Advancement of Learning. Book I.
[17] The art of prolonging life was, he thought, one of the most desirable.
[18] He “bequeathed” his soul and body to God. “For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”
[19] Rawley in the dedication of 1627 uses this expression as if it were Bacon’s rather than his own.
[20] I am not aware that in its integrity it is shared by anyone.
[21] More easily by far than Mr. Shakespeare’s neglect of his supposed poetical issue more especially after his retirement to Stratford. What was there, what would there be in the Stratford of those days with its Quineys, Harts, Sadlers, Walkers, and the rest, to interest a spirit so finely touched as Shakespeare’s? But this is too large a question to be discussed here.
[22] James I is reported to have said of the Novum Organum: “It is like the peace of God which passeth all understanding.”
[23] Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge—history with memory for its organ, poetry with imagination, and philosophy with reason—is well known. When he made this division the poetic use of the imagination was one which few may have known better than he. That he was equally well acquainted with the scientific use of the imagination is highly improbable.
[24] Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest dissimulation.”
[25] Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting something less than admiration of his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of the Sapientia Veterum, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.” His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother tongue.
[26] It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to his Apologie for Poetry (along with the Arte of English Poesie, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’s Apologie—odi profanum vulgus et arceo—touches the motto to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; that King Lear touches the Arcadia; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.
[27] It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in both Advancement and Apologie, that the Apologie endorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one day.” Another of the Apologie’s references to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason,” gives one to think. The Advancement disapproves, it may be added, of tying modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances.”
[28] Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered as arts, whilst poetry ranks as a science.
BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE[44]
Another exasperating lucubration on the Shakespeare problem! We have the Plays themselves. Why disturb a venerable belief by hypotheses incapable of proof, and neither venerable nor even respectable? To answer offhand—Curiosity about the How of remarkable events is not likely to die out so long as intelligent beings continue to exist: Without the aid of hypotheses, science were impossible: Astronomers would still be expounding the once venerated doctrine of a stable Earth and a revolving Sun, a doctrine daily corroborated by the testimony of our eyes. Moreover, the “venerable belief” that Shakspere and Shakespeare were one and the same is mainly founded on the hypothesis that Ben Jonson’s famous Ode to Shakespeare (1623) is all to be taken at face-value. Praise—splendid praise—is unquestionably its dominant constituent; but other ingredients—enigma, jest, make-believe—are commingled with the praise.
The exordium of this Ode consists of sixteen laborious lines:
To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy Booke and Fame;
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho’s right;
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise,
And thinke to ruine, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous Baud, or whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed
Above th’ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore, will begin, etc.
This emphatic disclaimer of any intention to draw envy, ill-will, discredit, on the august name Shakespeare, had a deep meaning, or Jonson would not have given it such prominence. It reads as if addressed to a living person, and the subsequent apostrophe, “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,” chimes with this suggestion. The root difficulty of the passage lies in the obviously genuine conviction of the author that Shakespeare was in danger of being hurt by praise, noble, sincere and universally allowed to be just. As for the assertion that Shakespeare was “indeed above” the reach of harm, it is only pretence. Having dispatched this tiresome business, the eulogist lets himself go:
I therefore will begin, Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome,
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe.
* * * *
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy buskin tread,
And shake a Stage; Or, when thy Sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warme
Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme.
Nature herselfe was proud of his designes,
And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines.
. . . . . Looke how the fathers face
Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which, he seems to shake a Lance,
As brandish’t at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James.
But stay. I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there.
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or Influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which since thy flight fro’ hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despaires day, but by thy Volumes Light.”
Passing by the half serious “Thou art a Moniment without a tombe”, we are pulled up by the line: “And though thou hadst small Latine,” etc. The internal evidence of his poems and plays proves that Shakespeare must have had a regular education, as distinguished from mere smatterings picked up in a village school of the sixteenth century. As to Latin in particular, the etymological intelligence shown in the handling of words derived from that language is almost conclusive. The evidence of contemporaries tells the same tale. “W.C.,” for instance, in Polimanteia (c. 1595) intimates that Shakespeare was a “schollar,” and a member of one of our “Universities.”[45] But there is no need to labour the point of Shakespeare’s culture. Indeed the innuendo of “small Latin” as applied to Shakespeare is sufficiently refuted by other passages in the Ode itself. “All scenes of Europe,” classico-historical as well as modern, owe him “homage.” He was another “Apollo”; each of his “well turned and true-filed lines” was sufficient to enlighten “ignorance.” What then are we to make of a jibe, apparently levelled at Shakespeare, that he was a quite unlettered rustic? Some years after the date of the Ode, and in order, as he says, to justify his “owne candor,” Jonson told “posterity” (as we shall see) that Shakespeare wrote with a “facility” so unbridled that he often blundered.[46] But even then, though his mood in the interval had veered right round from eulogist to candid critic, Jonson dropped no hint that Shakespeare lacked Latin or Greek. The jibe therefore, did not fit Shakespeare, but must have been made to the measure of some one else.
To continue our examination of the Ode. What can Jonson have meant by interspersing it with trashy jests upon the two syllables of the name (no longer august) Shakespeare? “Shake a stage”; “shake a lance, as brandished at the eyes of ignorance.” Was there something irresistibly funny about the name? Again, what sort of ignorance was threatened by the beauty and finish of Shakespeare’s lines? The ignorance of persons who for Shakespeare mistook a man untinctured with literature? The “Sweet Swan of Avon” apostrophe suggests comparison with what, in his Masque of Owles (1626), Jonson wrote about “Warwick Muses.” These charming creatures are there represented as inspired, not by “Pegasus,” but by a “Hoby-horse.”[47] Was this sarcasm reminiscent of the well-known lines which an Oxford graduate informs us were “ordered” by the Stratford man “to be cut upon his tombstone”? Certainly Pegasus was innocent of them. Here they are:
Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
To return to the Ode. The lines which follow the “Sweet Swan” apostrophe are deserving of notice, chiefly because they tell us that King James (as well as Queen Elizabeth) was under the spell of Shakespeare. Then comes the ejaculation: “But stay! I see thee in the hemisphere advanced, and made a constellation there.” Is it possible that Jonson expected his readers—such of them as were not in the secret—to follow him here? To behold Shakespeare, à la Berenice’s hair, translated into the constellation Cygnus? Not he; that were an order too large for credulity itself to honour. What Jonson had in his mind’s eye was not the starry heaven, but the British House of Peers.[48] Such is this famous Ode. It suffers from manœuvres, the object of which had to be kept dark; and this I take to be the reason for its exclusion from the second volume (1640) of Jonson’s Works, where it would have been quite at home amongst the Odes, Sonnets, Elegies and so forth, which go to make up that volume.
Turn we now to Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries, a work written years after the Ode and not printed till 1641, some three or four years after his death. These Discoveries consist in the main of passages lifted from Latin writers, notably Seneca the father (Controversiæ), and entered promiscuously in Jonson’s Commonplace books. The borrowings are often mutilated and always treated without ceremony. For our purpose it is the application, not the accuracy of translation that matters. In quoting from them I shall give italics and capital letters as they appear in the slovenly print (1641), of which I have several copies, one of which by the way is inscribed “J. P. Collier” on the title page. A Discovery concerning Poets, runs thus:
Nothing in our Age, I have observed, is more preposterous, than the running Judgments upon Poetry and Poets; when we shall heare those things ... cried up for the best writings, which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his Tobacco with them.... There are never wanting, that dare preferre the worst ... Poets:.... Nay, if it were put to the question of the Water-rimers workes, against Spencer’s, I doubt not but they [the Water-rimers’] would find more suffrages.
The next Discovery is more to my purpose:
Poetry in this latter Age, hath prov’d but a meane Mistresse to such as have wholly addicted themselves to her; or given their names up to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendred their visits, shee hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their owne professions (both the Law and the Gospel) beyond all they could have hoped or done for themselves without her favour.
From this the reader will gather that under “Eliza and our James,” lawyer-poets who masked their poems—“in a players hide,” perhaps—were likely candidates for legal honours.
The next Discovery but one runs thus:
De Shakespeare nostrat. I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in all his writing (whatever he penned) hee never blotted out a line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand.... I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, for I lov’d the man and doe honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had excellent phantasie; brave notions and gentle expressions; wherein he flow’d with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d.... His wit was in his owne power, would the rule of it had beene so too.... But he redeemed his vices with his vertues.
Another Discovery (p. 99)[49] censures “all the Essayists, even their Master Montaigne.” The slur suggested by this censure upon Bacon is significant. We were wont to believe that Bacon’s fame as a master of English rested securely on his Essays, and perhaps among his acknowledged works no better foundation is discoverable. Jonson’s estimate (to be quoted presently) of Bacon’s achievement “in our tongue,” is at least as high as ours. Yet Jonson does not appreciate Bacon’s Essays. The dilemma seems to be this: either Jonson was writing at random, or he knew of unacknowledged Baconian work which he was not free to disclose.
Another Discovery treats De claris Oratoribus, and among them of Dominus Verulamius[50] in these words:
There hapn’d in my time one noble Speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where hee could spare or passe by a jest) was nobly censorious.... No member of his speech but consisted of his owne graces. His hearers could not cough, or looke aside from him, without losse.... No man had their affections more in his power. The feare of every man that heard him was lest hee should make an end.
On the next page after an appreciative notice of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, which was published almost simultaneously with the Shakespeare Ode, Jonson over-praises and misreads the Novum Organum in these words:
Which though by most of superficiall men, who cannot get beyond the Title of Nominals, it is not penetrated, nor understood; it really openeth all defects of Learning whatsoever and is a Booke; Qui longum noto scriptori porriget ævum.
My object in giving these two quotations is only to show that there is nothing in them to lead up to the arresting praise of Bacon expressed in my next quotation, which comes after a list of English writers or wits, the elder Wiat, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney (a “great Master of wit,”) Lord Egerton, the Chancellor, and runs thus:
But his [the his refers to L. C. Egerton] learned and able, though unfortunate Successor, is he, who hath fill’d up all numbers, and perform’d that in our tongue, which may be compar’d, or preferr’d, either to insolent Greece, or haughty Rome. In short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits borne, that could honour a language, or help study. Now things daily fall; wits grow downe-ward, and Eloquence growes back-ward: So that hee may be nam’d, and stand as the marke and akme of our language.[51]
In order to appreciate this passage, the reader should grasp (1) that Jonson’s mind at the time was full of memories of Bacon; (2) that in a subsequent Discovery—De Poetica—he distinguishes Poetry from oratory as “the most prevailing,” “most exalted” “Eloquence,” and describes the Poet’s “skill or Craft of making” as the “Queene of Arts”; (3) that Jonson, proud of his own métier as poet, would never have allowed, still less asserted, that Bacon had “filled up all numbers,” had he not known that Bacon was a great poet. Where is this wonderful poetry to be found? The answer is ready to hand. The famous writer who, according to the Discovery, had “perform’d that in our tongue” which neither Greece nor Rome could surpass, is the very man who, according to the Ode, had achieved that in English which defied “comparison” with “all” that Greece or Rome, or the civilisations that succeeded Greece and Rome, had given to the World. Bacon is that Man, and Shakespeare was his pen-name.
This hypothesis—that Shakespeare was the pen-name of Bacon—will pilot us through our difficulties. The disclaimer (in the Ode) for example, of any intention to injure the august name need puzzle us no longer. Bacon’s reputation was imperilled by publication of the great Book; for if the Public once got wind that he had trafficked with “common players” his name, already smirched by the verdict of the House of Peers, would have been irreparably damaged. A passage from an anonymous Essay of mine (Bacon-Shakespeare; projected 1884-5: published 1899), may be tolerated here. The Essay, after having suggested that Greene’s allusion to Shakespeare as having a “tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide” pointed to concealment behind an actor, proceeds:
John Davies ... characterises poetry (contemporaneous) as “a worke of darkness,” in the sense of a secret work, not in disparagement: Davies loved poetry and poets too well for that. The anonymous author of Wit’s Recreations, in a kindly epigram “To Mr. William Shake-speare,” says: “Shake-speare we must be silent in thy praise, cause our encomions will but blast thy bayes.” ... Edward Bolton in the ... sketch (or draft) of his Hypercritica, ... after having mentioned “Shakespeare, Beaumont, and other writers for the stage” thinks it necessary to remind himself that their names required to be “tenderly used in this argument.” (accordingly) He ... excluded the name of Shakespeare ... from the published version of his Hypercritica.
To return again to the Ode. Its jests about shaking a stage (compare Greene’s “Shakescene”), shaking a lance, and its ecstatic vision of Shakespeare enthroned among the stars were no doubt intended to amuse the two Earls, and other patrons of the famous Folio.
As for the sweeping accusation in the Timber or Discoveries, that Poetry had been a mean Mistress to openly professed as distinguished from furtive or concealed poets, it would have been unpardonable had the Stratford man been a poet; for William Shakspere, Esq., of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, spent his last years in the odour of prosperity.
Other testimony, quite independent of Jonson’s, to the existence of an intimate relation between Bacon and the Muses, Apollo, Helicon, Parnassus, is abundant enough. Here are a few samples: Thomas Randolph shortly after Bacon’s death accuses Phœbus of being accessory to Bacon’s death, lest the God himself should be dethroned and Bacon be crowned king of the Muses.[52] George Herbert calls Bacon the colleague of Apollo. Thomas Campion, addressing Bacon says: “Whether ... the Law, or the Schools (in the sense of science or knowledge), or the sweet Muse allure thee,” etc. At a somewhat later date, Waller said that Bacon and Sidney were nightingales who sang only in the spring (the reference has escaped me, and memory may possibly deceive me).[53] Coming to comparatively recent times we find Shelley, an exceptional judge of poetry, was of opinion that Bacon “was a poet.” It may possibly be objected that Bacon’s versified Psalms (in English) are not poetical.[54] But these Psalms belong to about 1624, when Bacon—ex hypothesi—had turned his back on poetry for ever. What they prove, if they prove anything, is that Bacon was a literary Proteus who could take on any disguise that happened to suit his purpose, a faculty which no student of Bacon would ever think of disputing.
Inferences drawn from Bacon’s reticence or extracted from his works have yet to be weighed. In the nineties of the sixteenth century he can be shown to have devoted much time and thought to the writing and preparation of a species of dramatic entertainment known as Devices. Even after he became Lord Chancellor, he risked injuring his health rather than deny himself the pleasure of assisting at a dramatic performance given by Gray’s Inn. As a student of human nature, moreover, he had scarcely an equal (bar “Shakespeare.”) And yet he seems to have been ignorant of the existence of any such person as Shakespeare, although that name must have been bandied about and about in the London of his day, especially among members of the various Inns of Court, his own Gray’s in particular.
Neglecting Bacon’s poetical and interesting Devices, I confine my observations to the Advancement of Learning (1605), which though not written in what Waller held to be the singing time of life, reveals (while trying to conceal) the true bent of his genius. The Work was expressly intended to embrace the totality of human knowledge then garnered. Yet with the air of one who had no misgivings about the propriety of his classification he divides his vast subject into three categories, three only, and one of these is Poesie. The other two are History and Philosophie, the latter of which embraces “Natural Science,” divided into “Phisicke” and “Metaphisicke,” “Mathematicke” pure and mixt, anatomy, medicine, mental and moral science, and much besides. The work teems with poetical quotations, similies, allusions. Dealing with medicine the author gravely informs his readers that “the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body, and reduce it to harmony.” He cannot refrain from telling us that the pseudo-science of the alchemist was foretold and discredited by the fable of Ixion and the Cloud. With him, what we mean by endowment of research becomes provision for encouraging “experiments appertaining to Vulcan and Dædalus,” etc. No wonder the Harveys, Napiers, and other pioneers of 17th. century science did not join in that chorus of admiration for Bacon, which seems to have included all 17th century men of letters. Sir Henry Wotton (for example) will have it that Bacon had “done a great and ever living benefit to all the children of Nature; and to Nature herself in her uttermost extent ... who never before had so noble nor so true an interpreter, or so inward a secretary of her cabinet.” One can imagine the laughter with which Galileo would have greeted this preposterous assertion.
Out of sight of philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, etc., and in the presence of poetry, the author is in his element and speaks with authority. In handling the subject of mental culture—“Georgics of the mind” is his phrase—he takes for granted that poets (with whom he couples historians) are the best teachers of this science, for in them:
We may find painted forth, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves; how they work; how they vary; how they gather and fortify; how they are enwrapped one within another; and how they do fight and encounter one with another.
“Poesie,” he says elsewhere, is “for the most part restrained in measure of words,” but in “other points extreamely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination.” Its use, he goes on to say:
Hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things ... and therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind.... In this third part of learning (or knowledge) which is poesie, I can report no deficience. For being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind. But to ascribe unto it that which is due; for the expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are beholding to poets more than to the philosophers’ works; and for wit and eloquence, not much less than to orators’ harangues. But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre.
Why, when he was enumerating the various kinds of poesie, did he eschew the apt word dramatic, and choose the vague word representative instead? Why hurry away from his subject (poetry) by reason of its intimate connection with the theatre? The answer leaps to the eye. For him, poetry, especially dramatic poetry, was like (the name) Shakespeare, under taboo.
The Bacon hypothesis, it may be urged, solves a few riddles. But what of the difficulties it involves? For example, it seems incredible that Bacon should ever have resolved to disown his wonderful offspring; except indeed on the impossible assumption that he, with his unrivalled knowledge of human nature and command of all the arts of expression—that he of all men was incapable of appreciating the children of his brain. Here, once more, my anonymous Essay suggests pertinent considerations:
The emotional chill, which rarely fails to accompany that creeping illness, old age, was one of these considerations. Another was the growth of a widespread feeling ... that English books would never be “citizens of the world,” that Latin was the “universal language” and Latin books the only books that “would live.” But there must have been a “strain of rareness” about Shakespeare’s affection for poetry, which nothing but a new and incompatible emotion could ever have subdued.... With Bacon, affection for literature, especially poetry, came (in time) long before affection for anything like science. Among the various indications of this, not the least interesting is a passage in the De Augmentis Scientiarum (the latinised version, 1623, of the more noteworthy Advancement of Learning, 1605, already quoted):—“Poesy is at it were a dream of learning; a thing sweet and varied and fain to be thought partly divine, a quality which dreams also sometimes affect. But now it is time for me to become fully awake, to lift myself up from the earth, and to wing my way through the liquid ether of philosophy and the sciences.” Of a certainty this beautiful passage was no mere flourish.... It was a pathetic renunciation—the last possibly of a series of more or less ineffectual renunciations—of poetry and an ... aspiration after something else, neither poetry, nor science, nor philosophy, which Bacon towards the close of life was wont to regard, so Rawley informs us, as “his darling philosophy.”
In other words, the Novum Organum, the potent New Instrument that was to enlarge man’s dominion over every province of Nature, was Bacon’s chief solace for an unparalleled renunciation. Posterity, he was determined, should never know that the inventor of that Instrument had once revelled in the play of the imagination, lest men of science should have it in their power to pooh-pooh it as the fabric of a brain that had invented A Midsummer-night’s Dream, and The Tempest.
Bacon and his friends (moved by the fascination of the man, and pity for his fall) would naturally destroy all tell-tale correspondence they could lay hands on. Two private letters, and so far as we know, two only, escaped the flames. One from a bosom friend, Sir T. Mathew to Bacon (“Viscount St. Alban”), bears the following postscript: “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation ... is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” This letter is given in Dr. Birch’s Letters, etc., of Francis Bacon, 1763. Mathew himself made a Collection of Letters which included many of his own to Bacon, but excluded the one just quoted, an exclusion dictated, I imagine, by loyalty to his friend. Montague gives the letter in his Bacon, but I have not found it in Spedding’s Work. The other escape was a letter of Bacon’s to another of his friends, the poet Davies, written some twenty years earlier than Mathew’s letter. In this letter (to Davies), after commending himself to Davies’s “love,” and “the well using of my name ... if there be any biting or nibling at it, in that place” (the Royal Court), Bacon concludes: “So desiring you to be good to concealed poets, I continue,” etc. My quotation is from a copy dated 1657 (bound up with Rawley’s Resuscitatio), in which “concealed poets” is in italics. Spedding gives the words without the italics, and contents himself with saying that he cannot explain them. For another letting out of the secret we have to thank Aubrey’s notebooks, which inform us that Bacon was “a good poet but concealed, as appears by his letters.” Lastly there are the “Shakespeare” and “Bacon” scribbles on the half-burnt MS. of Bacon’s “Device,” A Conference of Pleasure. Possibly the “letters” referred to by Aubrey, or evidence more important, may yet be discovered in libraries unexplored, or explored only by orthodox searchers intent on proving their own case. A library in so unlikely a place as Valladolid seems, about eighty years ago, to have possessed a First Folio of Shakespeare which belonged to and was perhaps annotated by Count Gondomar, a friend of Bacon’s last years.[55]] If Spain held such a treasure so recently what may not Great Britain still hold? Florence, for whose Duke Sir T. Mathew had Bacon’s Essays translated into Italian, contained a copy of this translation not long ago. But my searches there, and in Venice, Milan, Padua, were far too hurried to justify any conclusion as to possible finds in Italy.
It is probably safe to take for granted that Bacon was acquainted with Shakspere; that the relation between them began maybe as early as 1588, and was concerned with playhouse property; that this property was held by Shakspere on trust for Bacon; and that it was sold, perhaps to the trustees, by Bacon’s orders some time before 1613.
The name of “Shakespeare” seems to have made its first public appearance in print with Venus and Adonis,[56] a poem which was dedicated in perfectly well-bred terms to an earl; licensed by an archbishop who had once been Bacon’s tutor;[57] and expressed on its title page patrician contempt for all things vulgar. By whose order was the name Shakespeare printed at foot of its Dedication to the Earl of Southampton? In the dearth of evidence the following guesses may pass muster. They are put into an unhistorical present in order to show at a glance that they, or most of them, are mere guess-work:—About 1592, Bacon makes up his mind to publish Venus and Adonis. Publication in his own name is vetoed by fear of offending powerful friends, his uncle Burghley in particular; and he prefers pseudonymity to anonymity. What he wants is a temporary mask which he fully expects to be able to throw off before long. In this mood, he calls on Richard Field, a London printer hailing originally from Stratford, and recommended to him by Sir John Harington, whose Orlando Furioso Field has just printed. Field happens to mention Shakspere which he pronounces Shaxper. Bacon, already acquainted with the young fellow of that name, decides that a fictitious person, whose name he pronounces Shakespeare, shall be the putative father of his Poem. Little dreams he, poet though he be, that he is thereby preparing a human grave for that immortality of Fame (as poet) which he has begun to anticipate for himself. The Poem appears in 1593; and is followed next year by Lucrece, fathered by the same Shakespeare, and dedicated to the same young Earl. Some years later, the name is stereotyped by Meres’s Commonwealth of Wits, where Shakespeare is mentioned seven or eight times—as the English Ovid; as one of our best tragic and best comic poets; as one of our most “wittie” and accomplished writers, and so forth.[58] A few years later still, Bacon begins to be perplexed what to do with his Shakespeare copyright, and his perplexity rises with every advance in his profession. Before succeeding to the Attorney-Generalship he realises once for all that complications, professional, social, and various, have made it impossible for him to think of fathering even a selection of his poetical offspring. In despair to escape from the impasse, he even talks of burning MSS. But the threat is not carried out. Soon after his melancholy downfall sympathetic and admiring friends, notably the two Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery—Southampton probably stood aloof, memories of the Essex affair still rankling in his mind—take counsel together, expostulate with him, entreat him to let them bear all expenses and responsibilities connected with publication, and to clinch their argument tell him that they have sounded the literary dictator of the day, Ben Jonson, and got his promise to undertake the work of editing, collecting, writing the necessary prefatory matter, and so forth. Bacon yields consent on certain conditions, the most embarrassing of which is that the true authorship of the plays be for ever kept dark—by means of “dissimulation,” if dissimulation will serve; if not, then by “simulation,” i.e., the lie direct.[59] The conditions are accepted with misgivings on Jonson’s part. He is aware that he will have no trouble with Mr. Shakspere’s executors, their interest in the copyrights involved being as negligible as their testator’s had been. And he knows Heminge and Condell well enough to feel certain that they will not have the smallest objection, either to being assigned prominent places in the forthcoming Book, or to his putting into their mouths statements, etc., concerning Shakespeare, which he himself would shrink from uttering. But even so, the task is no sinecure.
Here guess-work ends.
The famous Folio, with its apparatus of Dedication, prefatory Address, Ode, to “my beloved the author,” etc., made its appearance in 1623. The Dedication intimates (with ironical emphasis on the word “trifles”) that the author of these “trifles” was dead, “he not having the fate common with some to be exequutor to his owne writings.... We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians: without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare.”
The Address expresses a wish that the Author had lived to set forth “his owne writings. But since it hath bin ordain’d otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends the office” of collection, etc. This is followed by a statement, probably half jest, half irony, that the Author uttered his thoughts with such “easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot on his papers.” That Heminge and Condell had no hand in either Dedication or Address is sufficiently proved by turns and phrases characteristically Jonsonian. They, I suppose, had given Jonson carte blanche, and he made use of the gift, in the interest of literature which might otherwise have suffered irreparable loss. In this way the fiction of Shakespeare’s identity with Shakspere was so plausibly documented, that Jonson might have spared himself any further trouble on that score. But either to make assurance doubly sure, or to show his dexterity, he set about the writing of his Ode as if the fiction had not been planted already. Some of the Ode’s features need no further comment than they have received. But the “small Latin” and “Swan of Avon” allusions deserve a word or two more. Both passages point at Shakspere and away from Shakespeare. What was their raison d’être? They were exceptionally significant touches to an elaborate system of camouflage, by which posterity, including ourselves, was to be deluded.
Hitherto the accent has been too much on the unessentials of the Ode, and far too little on its beauties. No nobler contemporary appreciation of Shakespeare has reached our ears, and that is a cogent reason for gratitude to its author. Before taking leave of him, I venture to make free with one of his apostrophes. The lines would then run thus:
Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Bacon rise!
In order to correct misapprehensions which may have arisen through my having slipped into positive statements, where ex hypothesi or conditional ones might have been desired, I wish expressly to disclaim any intention to dogmatise. Scientific certainty is out of the question. High probability we may reach, perhaps have reached. But that is the limit. That Bacon was Shakespeare, the only Shakespeare that matters, is merely a working hypothesis. Of other hypothetical Shakespeares who have been put forward, a certain Earl of Rutland would have deserved serious consideration, had he been as able a writer as was his father-in-law, Sidney. The only formidable competing hypothesis might seem to be that of a Great Unknown. But this essentially is a confession of ignorance, and some of its supporters are sceptics who amuse themselves by falling upon every hypothesis in turn.[60]]
BACON AND “POESY”
Baconians hold that Francis Bacon concealed his identity under an alias, and this perhaps is why they are sometimes accused of slandering him, as if the use of a pen-name were a crime and not the perfectly legitimate ruse it actually is. Calumniators of Bacon there exist no doubt, and some of them are disposed to give Macaulay as an instance. Such calumniation, however, is less likely to be found among Baconians than among our orthodox opponents, whose creed effectually bars the way to any true appreciation of the great man. As for Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford, his character was, or should be, above suspicion. The Burbages, exceptionally well-informed and credible witnesses, testify that he was a “deserving” man, and Baconians accept that valuation of the man all the more readily because there is no proof that he himself ever laid claim to anything published or known as Shakespeare’s.
The serious criticism that Baconians have to face may be considered under three heads: (i) The testimony of Ben Jonson; (ii) The popular notion that Bacon was essentially a man of science; (iii) The absence of conspicuous and unmistakable evidence of identity between Bacon and Shakespeare.
(i) In spite of the obvious inconsistency and perversity of Ben Jonson’s various utterances on the subject, and the difficulty of believing that his famous Ode of 1623 could refer except in part to a death which had occurred in 1616, Ben Jonson is commonly regarded as an absolutely conclusive witness against us. An article of mine entitled Ben Jonson’s Pious Fraud, which appeared in the Nineteenth Century and After of November 1913, was an attempt at justification, and the attempt shall not be repeated here. Some of my readers, however, may care to know that in the December (1913) number of the same review an angry opponent charged me with having libelled Ben Jonson, about the last thing of which I, a lifelong admirer of Ben Jonson’s, could really be guilty.
(ii) The second criticism we have to meet is founded on the assumption that Science—Natural Science—set her mark upon Bacon almost as soon as he entered his teens. The main business of this section will be to set forth arguments tending to show that the mark which Bacon actually bore from early youth to mature age, was the sign manual of Poetry. In the nineties of the 16th century, Bacon had serious thoughts of abandoning the legal profession into which he had been thrust, and devoting himself to literature in some form or other. Towards the close of his life, when reviewing his life’s work, he regretfully confesses to having wronged his “genius” in not devoting himself to letters for which he was “born.” In another letter of about the same date, he expresses the same conviction: that in deserting literature for civil affairs, he had done “scant justice” to his “genius.” These are not the words, nor this the attitude of a man who thought and felt that he was born for Natural Science. Possibly so, says an opponent, but if Bacon were really born for literature, how came it that his literary output, until he had passed the mature age of 40, was so small? If you, Baconians, were not blinded by prejudice, you would recognise in Bacon’s literary inactivity during youth and early manhood, something very like proof of a preoccupation with Science. In replying to this argument, I should begin by pointing out that the words “literary inactivity” beg the important question of concealment of identity. Waiving this point for the moment, the presumption of an early preoccupation with Science will be seen at a glance to be incompatible with what we know of Bacon’s attainments in that direction. A speech of his about 1592 in praise of “Knowledge”—a word which covered everything knowable—contains some of his finest and most characteristic thoughts. The praise of knowledge, he declares, is the praise of mind, since “knowledge is mind.... The minde itself is but an accident to knowledge, for knowledge is a double of that which is. The truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one.” Then comes a rhetorical question reminiscent of Lucretius’s suave mari, i.e.: “Is there any such happiness as for a man’s mind to be raised above ... the clowdes of error that turn into stormes of perturbations.... Where he may have a respect of the order of Nature”? “Knowledge,” the speaker continues, should enable us “to produce effects and endow the life of man with infinite commodities.” At this point he interrupts himself with the reflection that he “is putting the garland on the wrong head,” and then proceeds to inveigh against the “knowledge that is now in use: All the philosophie of nature now receaved is eyther the philosophie of the Gretians or of the Alchemist.” Aristotle’s admiration of the changelessness of the heavens is derided on the naïve assumption that there is a “like invariableness in the boweles of the earth, much spiritt in the upper part of the earth which cannot be brought into masse, and much massie body in the lower part of the heavens which cannot be refined into spiritt.”[61] Ancient astronomers are next taken to task for failing to see “how evident it is that what they call a contrarie mocion is but an abatement of mocion. The fixed starres overgoe Saturne and Saturne leaveth behind him Jupiter, and so in them and the rest all is one mocion, and the nearer the earth the slower.” As for modern astronomers, Copernicus for instance, and Galileo, he dismisses them with contumely as “new men who drive the earth about.” Then he chides himself for having forgotten that “knowledge itself is more beautiful than any apparel of wordes that can be put upon it”—a romantic sentiment reminiscent of Biron’s “angel knowledge” in Love’s Labour’s Lost; and a subsequent passage is reminiscent of Montaigne. The conclusion of the Speech is too fine to be abridged and must be given in full:
“But indeede facilitie to beleeve, impatience to doubte, temeritie to assever, glorie to knowe, end to gaine, sloth to search, resting in a part of nature, these and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the minde of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vaine nocions and blynde experiments. And what the posteritie of so honorable a match may be it is not hard to consider.[62] Therefore no doubte the sovereigntie of man lieth hid in knowledge, wherein many things are reserved which Kings with their treasures cannot buy, nor with their force command: their spies and intelligencies can give no news of them: their seamen and discoverers cannot saile where they grow. Now we governe nature in opinions but are thrall to her in necessities, but if we would be led by her in invention we should command her in action.”
These are not the views nor is this the accent of one who has been devoting himself to natural science. The utterance is that of a genius for letters whose preoccupation has been the apparelling of beautiful thoughts in beautiful words.
The above Speech, which is part of an entertainment called a Conference of Pleasure, expresses intuitions that come from the very soul of the poet-speaker. Ample confirmation of this is to be found in the Advancement of Learning—Learning here being the synonym of Knowledge in the Speech—published in 1605. That work aimed at promoting “natural science” with a view above all to scientific discovery and the increase of man’s power over nature. It teems with practical allusions to and quotations from the classical poets, particularly Ovid and Vergil. It was dedicated to James the First, a prince—to quote the words of its author—“invested with the learning and universality[63] of a philosopher.” In a passage dealing with the art of medicine the author deems it very much “to the purpose” to note that poets were wont “to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body and reduce it to harmony.” Another passage asserts that the wild fancies of quacks or empirics were anticipated and discredited by the poets in the fable of Ixion. What we call endowment of research, he, student of belles lettres that he is, regards as provision for the making of experiments appertaining to Vulcan and Dædalus. Students of Natural Science will search the book in vain for evidence of direct familiarity with any branch of the subject. In the opinion of its author, natural history—the natural history of 1605—left little to be desired so far as normal phenomena were concerned. He ruled that the “opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth” was repugnant to “natural philosophy.” The notion that air had or could have weight is dismissed as preposterous. Among his observations on history there is no suggestion of the circulation of the blood. He sums up Gilbert in terms of contempt, his own contribution to the subject of magnetism being: “There is formed in everything a double nature of good, the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a part or member of a greater or more general form. Therefore we see the iron in particular sympathy moveth to the loadstone, but yet if it exceed a certain quantity, it forsaketh the affection to the loadstone and like a good patriot moveth to the earth which is the region or country of massy bodies.”
One of the most telling arguments against the presumption that Bacon had interested himself in natural science to the exclusion of almost everything else, is the staggering value he put upon “poesy” as compared with “philosophy” or science at large. Fascinated by the wonderful discoveries of explorers in the material globe, he pictures knowledge, all knowledge, as an intellectual globe, which he then divides into three great parts or continents, History, Poesy, and Philosophy. Only a poet could have made such a distribution as that. For the continent allotted to Philosophy, as he understands it, embraced not only all the natural sciences, but also ethics, politics, mathematics, metaphysics, and many another subject besides. It would be easy, out of the Advancement alone, to multiply refutations of the theory that Bacon’s early and middle life were devoted to natural science. The only difficulty is to select.
Before changing the subject it may be well to give the substance of a foot-note to the present writer’s Shakespeare-Bacon, 1899 (Swan Sonnenschein): “When Bacon came to review his early estimate of the importance of poetry to science or knowledge, he was evidently dissatisfied. In the Advancement (1605) he had claimed that ‘for the expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are beholding to poets more than to philosophers.’ In the corresponding place of the revised edition (1623) he drops this claim. In the Advancement again Poesy is stated to be one of the three ‘goodly fields’[64] (history and experience being the other two), ‘where grow observations concerning the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions.’” In the corresponding place of the revised version this commendation is materially lowered, on the ground that poets are so apt to exceed the truth. The revised version, in short, goes so far towards cheapening Poesy and Imagination as to suggest that if the author had not been hampered by his earlier utterances, he would have deposed both from the high places they still were permitted to occupy in his system.
That Bacon’s relations with “Poesy” were extremely intimate and at the same time anxiously concealed from the public, his letters afford convincing evidence. Writing to the Earl of Essex in 1594-5, when his affairs were in evil plight, he assures that generous friend that “the waters of Parnassus” are the best of consolation. In a letter to Lord H. Howard he writes: “We both have tasted of the best waters to knit minds together”—the allusion being of course to the same Parnassian waters. In an open letter (1604) to the Earl of Devonshire, he confesses to having written a sonnet addressed to the Queen herself on a memorable occasion, and then, by way of proving his generosity when the welfare of Essex was at stake, directs special attention to the fact that this sonnet (affair) involved a publishing and declaring of himself—in other words a dropping of the mask that screened him as poet from the eyes of the public. That such was his meaning is explained by a confidential letter to a poetical friend in which he ranks himself among “concealed” poets. Moreover, this was evidently only one of several letters in which Bacon confessed himself a concealed poet, for John Aubrey tells us that Bacon “was a good poet, but concealed as appears by his letters.” Whether any of these other letters still exist is to be doubted, for the piety of Sir Tobie Mathew, Sir Thomas Meautys, and other devoted friends of the concealed poet, would naturally destroy all they could lay hands on.
The external evidence that Bacon was essentially a poet is a theme so large that only a portion of it can be given here. In 1626, the year of Bacon’s death, John Haviland printed for Sir William Rawley thirty-two monumenta insignia expressive of adoration and grief for the great man who had just passed away.[65] Rawley, the editor, would take care that no published offering to the Manes Verulamiani should impart his Master’s secret to persons who were not in it already; and this may help to explain why all the thirty-two offerings are in Latin, not in the vulgar tongue. In his preface to the collection, Rawley informs his readers that the monumenta were a selection merely from the numbers which had been entrusted to him—“very many, and those of the very best having been kept back by him” (plurimos, enim, eosque optimos versus apud me contineo). How tantalising! He does not even hint at his reason for such wholesale suppression of masterpieces. One of the thirty mourners declares that Bacon was a Muse more choice than any of the famous Nine. Another considers him “the hinge of the literary world.” Another bids the fountain of Hippocrene weep black mud, and warns the Muses that their bay-trees would go out of cultivation now that the laurel-crowned Verulam had left this planet. Others call upon Apollo and the Muses to weep for the loss of the great Bacon. Another laments the disaster that has befallen “us nurselings of the Muses,” and calls Bacon “the Apollo of our choir.” Another exclaims that “the morning-star of the Muses, the favourite of Apollo, has fallen,” and supposes that Melpomene in particular is inconsolable for the loss of him. Another declares that Bacon had placed all the Muses under obligations impossible to estimate. Another laments him as “the Tenth Muse ... ornament of the choir,” and imagines that Apollo can never have been so unhappy before. Another regards Bacon as the delicium of his country. Another calls him the choir leader of the Pierides. Another, No. 24, will have it that Ovid, had he lived, would have been better qualified than any other poet to lay an acceptable offering on the tomb of Bacon. Why Ovid should have been pitched upon is not obvious. Perhaps the opinion of Francis Meres, that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his Sugred Sonnets, among his private friends,” may have determined his choice. Here it should be mentioned that a previous contributor had hinted not obscurely at Bacon’s authorship of “some elegant love pieces or poems”—quicquid venerum politiorum.[66] Another contributor exclaims: “Couldst thou thyself, O Bacon, suffer death, thou who wert able to confer immortality on the Muses themselves?” The last of the thirty-two selected contributors is Thomas Randolph, a notable member of the group of wits known as the tribe of Ben. After having expatiated on the grief of himself and his fellow-poets for the irreparable loss they had just sustained, and borne his testimony to Bacon’s intimacy with the melodious goddesses (Camænæ), Randolph in the manner affected by contemporary poets and men of letters, proceeds to eulogise Bacon as the inventor of new scientific methods, of keys to Nature’s labyrinth, etc., and finishes: “But we poets can add nothing to thy fame. Thou thyself art a singer, and therefore singest thine own praises.” (At nostræ tibi nulla ferent encomia musæ, Ipse canis, laudes et canis inde tuas).
To sum up, the outstanding impression left on the mind by Randolph and his friends is that they regarded Bacon, not merely as a poet, but as the foremost poet of the age; and this impression is confirmed by the reflection that few if any of the contributors knew enough of science to be capable of appreciating the work of really scientific pioneers such as Harriot, Gilbert, Harvey, and others whose names are conspicuously absent from the roll of Bacon’s admirers.
(iii) The remaining difficulty—that of establishing a relation between Bacon and Shakespeare—has now to be dealt with. It may be well to begin by directing attention to the significant omission of the name of Jonson, head of the tribe of Ben, from the collection of eulogies we have just been considering. Adequate explanation of this conspicuous omission is almost impossible without the aid of the Bacon hypothesis. If any contribution of Jonson’s had appeared in the publication, the secret would have been out. Even as it was, his executors almost disclosed it when, in 1640-1, they sanctioned publication of those tell-tale notebooks in which Jonson records that Bacon “had performed that in our tongue which might be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” an appreciation almost identical with that contained in his famous Ode to Shakespeare. It is well to remember in this connection that Jonson on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday had apostrophised him as an enchanter or “mystery” worker.
Among other arguments which tend to identify the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, the following seem worthy of mention: (a) Poesy, as we know, constituted one of the three continents into which Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, mapped out the whole “globe” of the knowable. To ignore dramatic poetry altogether would have given rise to inconvenient curiosity. Compelled, therefore, to give it a name, Bacon rejects the natural word “dramatic” and adopts instead the out-of-the-way word “representative.” What he says, moreover, about dramatic poetry—in the proper place for saying it—is apparently intended to carry on the suggestion that he was almost a stranger to dramatic performances, a suggestion contradicted by passages in other sections of the same work. For instance, on handling what he calls the “Georgics of the mind,” he describes dramatic poetry in terms so appropriate to the best dramatic poetry of the period, that one is almost forced to say to oneself: Here surely, Bacon must have been thinking of Shakespeare! The passage will bear quoting at length. “In poetry,” it runs, “no less than in history, we may find painted forth with great life how affections are kindled and excited; how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they do fight and encounter one with another ... how to set affection against affection, and to master one by another, even as we use to hunt beast with beast.” His leave-taking, it may be added, of the whole theme or subject of poetry is effected by an ironical: “But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre,” which could only be fully appreciated I suppose, by his personal friends.
(b) Nowhere, I believe, in any extant writing of Bacon’s, whether letter, essay, or notebook, is there any mention of Shakespeare, and a like reticence is observed in the Rawley collection just cited. Assume for the moment that Shakespeare was the proper name of the man of Stratford, not the pseudonym of Bacon, or, to put it in another way, that Shakespeare and Bacon were two separate persons, and what is the result? We should have to concede that of two poets, both interested in things dramatic, both supreme judges and keen observers of human nature, its affections, passions, corruptions, and customs—that of two such poets, one, and that one Bacon, must have forbidden the very mention of the other, and this, too, for no discoverable reason.
(c) Bacon (in 1605) held that the chief function of poetry was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it.” He ranked poets among the very best of ethical teachers in virtue of their insight into human character as modifiable “by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity” and the like; and again ... “by sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising per saltum, per gradus and the like.” Here again many an open-minded reader must have felt moved to reflect that he was on the track, if not in the presence, of Shakespeare.
(d) It is clear that Bacon as he grew older, came to think less and less highly of imaginative work. The mere fact that Shakespeare ultimately abandoned his poetical offspring to chance, points, it surely would seem, to a similar change of view.
(e) Though many of the coincidences between Bacon and Shakespeare may be explained as manifestations of the Time Spirit, some of them strongly suggest direct contact even when taken singly. Take for example, the misquotation of Aristotle by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, and by Bacon in the Advancement of Learning.[67] Take, again, the curious resemblance between the Winter’s Tale and the Essay of Gardens. Spedding’s comment on this passage in the Essay runs: “The scene in Winter’s Tale where Perdita presents the guests with flowers ... has some expressions which, if the Essay had been printed somewhat earlier, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it.”[68]
(f) Again, certain views to which Bacon gave expression in the Essay of Deformity, seem implicit in Shakespeare’s Richard the Third. Richard has his “revenge of nature” for the ill turn she did him in making him deformed. He is also “extreme bold,” ever on the watch to “observe the weakness” of others. His deformity, moreover, must, it would seem, be supposed to have “quenched jealousy” in those personages who, if he had been comely, would have foreseen and thwarted his ambitious designs.
(g) In the course of some interesting observations on the writing of history considered as an art, Bacon confesses to a liking for ready-made outlines or plots, so that the artist might be free to concentrate his powers on the more congenial work of enrichment “with counsels, speeches, and notable particularities.” The faulty plots of many of Shakespeare’s plays imply that he also grudged the labour of construction and delighted in decoration and enrichment.
(h) Several editions of Bacon’s Essays seem to have been published without their author’s consent. Shakespeare also seems to have been preyed upon by piratical publishers. Wherever concealment of authorship is a desideratum, prosecution by law must needs be difficult if not impossible.
(i) Whenever Shakespeare, as we know him in quartos and folios, stands in need of an interpreter, no contemporary author is so often consulted by orthodox critics as Francis Bacon.
(k) Compare the Merchant of Venice, which the editor of the First Folio rather enigmatically calls comedy, with Bacon’s Essay of Usury. The primary intention of the play was to amuse or delight; that of the Essay being of course to instruct. But the play appears to me to have combined utile with dulce, instruction with pleasure; and the lesson as I understand it was this:—usury instead of being forbidden by the State, should be recognised and regulated, on the ground that unconditional forfeiture of pawns or pledges—the usual alternative to usury—is apt to bear more harshly on the borrower. The crisis of the play arrives near the end of Act IV, Sc. 1, where the Doge pronounces judgment. The instant and immediate effect upon Shylock is positively crushing; he would rather die than submit. But the accent of despair is quickly succeeded by the words: “I am content,” although one of the conditions just introduced by Antonio is that the wretched man Shylock should “presently become a Christian.” The change of mood is so amazing that we can hardly believe our senses. What can be the explanation? we ask ourselves. Between the judgment pronounced by the Doge and Shylock’s accent of despair, Antonio has thrown in these words: “So please my lord the Duke and all the Court to quit the fine for one half of his goods, I am content; so he [Shylock] will let me have the other half in use, to render it upon his death unto the gentleman that lately stole his daughter.” To us the words may seem insignificant. But Shylock was a sort of personification of usury, and to him they meant nothing less than victory—victory over his arch-enemy Antonio, the head and front of the anti-usury party in Venice.
Students of Bacon will remember that his Essay of Usury is a plea for State recognition and regulation of interest or “use,” on utilitarian grounds similar to those suggested in the comedy.
But may not this harmony between the Merchant of Venice and the Essay have been accidental, especially as there was an interval of some twenty-five years between the appearance of the Essay in its present form and our Merchant of Venice? My answer is that the Essay was based, as we know from one of Bacon’s own letters, on “some short papers of mine touching usury, how to grind the teeth of it,” etc., and these short papers may well have been written as early as 1598, when Bacon himself was in the clutches of the money-lender.[69]]
(l) The relation between the play of Hamlet and the Essay of Revenge is quite as close as that between the Essay of Usury and the Merchant of Venice. A reader who should consider the tragedy of Hamlet with a single eye to conduct, will hardly escape the reflection that its lesson or moral is summed up to perfection in one of Bacon’s Essays, viz., the one which treats of revenge: “They doe but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s sake; but thereby to purchase himselfe Profit, or Pleasure, or Honour, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a Man, for loving himselfe better than mee?... Vindicative persons live the Life of Witches: who, as they are Mischievous, so end they Infortunate.” Such in the end was the noble Hamlet’s fate. Once possessed by the devil of revenge, he becomes a sort of upas or plague-centre, and perishes in a sorry and most unlucky broil.
(m) The existence of striking harmonies between Shakespeare and Bacon was detected by foreign students fifty years ago and more. Professor Kuno Fischer, for example, wrote: “To the parallels between them [i.e. Bacon and Shakespeare] belong the similar relation of both to Antiquity, their affinity to the Roman mind, and their divergence from the Greek.... Bacon would have man studied in his individual capacity as a product of nature and history, in every respect determined by ... external and internal conditions. And exactly in the same spirit has Shakespeare understood man and his destiny.” Gervinus in his Commentaries observes: “In Bacon’s works we find a number of moral sayings and maxims of experience from which the most striking mottoes might be drawn for every Shakespearean play, aye, for all his principal characters, testifying to a remarkable harmony in their comprehension of human nature.” One more quotation, of like import and from an author with no partiality for Baconian views, may not be superfluous. Professor J. Nichol, after having ruled out the Baconian heresy by recording his opinion that Bacon did not write Shakespeare, proceeds: “But there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they [Bacon and Shakespeare] find voice for sentiments often as nearly identical when they anticipate as when they contravene the manners of thought and standards of action that prevail in our age.” (Francis Bacon, Vol. I, 1888).
(n) Only a lawyer by education would have hit upon the technicality which is the nucleus of the 87th Sonnet of Shakespeare. The technicality is not one which an amateur interested in common law proceedings would be likely to pick up, for it belongs to the art of conveyancing. Part of my time, fifty years ago, was spent in the chambers of a conveyancer. But for that early training I might still have been able to see intellectual beauty in the well-known bust of Shakespeare at Stratford; for my suspicion of the popular legend originated in the conviction that the Shakespeare who matters must have been bred up a lawyer.[70]]
(o) In the year 1867, Mr. John Bruce discovered in Northumberland House, which then stood in the Strand, a bundle of Elizabethan manuscripts, the outermost sheet of which contains a miscellaneous list of Elizabethan writings, the majority of which are unquestionably identified with work previously known to have been due to Bacon. The minority consists of five pieces, three of which may, for anything we know to the contrary, have been enriched if not entirely written by him. The two remaining pieces figure in the list as “Rychard the Second” and “Rychard the Third.” The significance of this association with work of which there can be no doubt that Bacon was the author, is greatly increased by the fact that the cover or sheet which bears the list of contents is bescribbled at random with the names “ffrancis Bacon” and “William Shakespeare.”[71]
Mr. Spedding evidently missed what seems to me the true significance of this double association—the combination of titles in the list of contents, and the mixture of the names Bacon with Shakespeare in the scribbles. But one or two of his observations on the subject of this singular find are interesting enough. He notes, for example, that the name “Shakespeare” in the scribbles is “spelt in every case as it was always printed in those days, and not as he himself in any known case wrote it.” Another of Spedding’s observations is that the contained manuscripts, list or lists of contents, and scribbles, all belong to a period “not later then the reign of Elizabeth.”
(p) Attentive readers of almost any biography of Francis Bacon will be surprised to learn that the record of his achievements begins so late. Singularly precocious, he has already reached the ripe age—so these biographies tell us—of 36, before anything worthy of mention can be placed to his credit except a small tract or booklet of confessedly unripe Essays, Religious Meditations, and Coulers of Good and Evil. That there must be something very wrong with the record is proved by the fact that already in 1597, the date of the booklet, everything that came, or was suspected of coming, from the pen of Bacon, was in such request that he was compelled, as he tells his brother, to publish these crudities lest they should be stolen or mutilated by piratical printers. His first really notable work, according to the conventional record, is the Advancement of Learning, which was not published until two-thirds of his life was behind him. By far the greater part of the remaining third was so absorbed by public affairs, and, after his fall, so harassed by ill-health and private worries, that no literary fruit could have been looked for. Yet its closing years were marked by an unparalleled outburst of literary activity—an outburst which, like the fear of piratical printers expressed in his letter of 1597, means, I take it, that his youth and early manhood had been devoted to the art and practice of literature. Shelley’s emphatic assertion that Bacon was a poet leaves the puzzle still unsolved. So, perhaps, does the discovery of harmony after harmony between Bacon and Shakespeare.
But the tension will begin to relax so soon as we shall have taken time to grasp the significance on these two facts: first, that the dramas attributed to Shakespeare (spelt as it was always printed in those days[72]) cannot be fitted into the life of the man Shakspere who ended his life, and was evidently content to end it, in what was then a small and rather squalid country town: and second, that the evidence—Ben Jonson’s—which is commonly supposed to establish the Stratford case, turns out to be in itself an enigma rather than a solution.
The riddle is almost read when we shall have satisfied ourselves that Bacon was not only a poet but a “concealed” poet, and that by his own confession. And by the time we have been shown Sir T. Mathew’s remark, in his letter to Viscount St. Alban: “The most prodigious ... wit I know ... is of your Lordship’s name though he be known by another,” the true and only solution stands revealed.
This letter was written, I imagine, just at the time when the First Folio (of Shakespeare) was the talk of literary London. It was excluded from Sir Tobie Mathew’s own Collection of Letters (published 1660), but seems to have lived on, in seclusion no doubt, till 1762, by which time all thought about the “concealed poet’s” potent art had long been buried with his bones. Basil Montagu gives a copy of it, but Spedding, if I mistake not, ignores it.
This is by no means all the evidence that a better advocate than I could bring to bear on the question in dispute. But no stronger guarantee for the truth of the Bacon hypothesis can be demanded than that it should harmonise a large number of otherwise inexplicable data; and this demand I hope I may have done something to meet.
For the rival hypothesis, of course, there is much to be said. Never was Golden Bough the child or offspring of an ilex oak. Yet Vergil’s beautiful tale for ever adorns the lovely Avernian lake. Stratford-on-Avon was even more to the Shakespeare legend, and thereby may likewise be immortalised. “Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”
“THE TEMPEST” AND ITS SYMBOLISM “THE TEMPEST” AND ITS SYMBOLISM[73]
The Tempest in the form in which it originally left the author’s hand belongs, it would seem, with A Winter’s Tale, to the period 1607-1610, nearer probably to the 7 than the 10. The ground-plot may well have been adapted, as Herr Dorer suggested, from a story which ultimately got into a Spanish collection of Tales, called Winter Nights. Of the actual plot it is not necessary to say much. Twelve years before the opening of the play, Prospero, poet and enchanter, the victim of a wicked cabal, found himself and his daughter, then a mere babe, stranded on a barren island. Fortunately part of his library, consisting of volumes which he prized above everything else in the world, except Miranda, had somehow been allowed to accompany him. In the beloved society of these books and Miranda he managed to pass the time until relief came in the shape of a commotion brought about by his own consummate art.
The true centre of the play, the Sun about which its system revolves, is Miranda. It is for her sake, hers alone, that Prospero displays, and then for ever renounces, an art which he dearly loves and is certain he will miss.
Now there is no evidence fit to be trusted that Shakspere, or, to give him the title he coveted, Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, gentleman, was ever a lover of books, none that he ever possessed, or would have cared to possess anything in the shape of a library. Among the various specific bequests of his essentially vulgar Will no such thing as a book is even suggested. About 1613 Shakspere exchanged the mentally stimulating atmosphere of London for the deadly dullness of a mean provincial town. His departure, unwept, unsung, and seemingly not even noticed by any member of the literary world he is supposed to have adorned, may have been demanded by keen personal interest in an enclosure scheme which was then agitating the petty community at Stratford. There is no evidence, no hint even, that it was due to ill-health, and it certainly cannot have been due (as the whole action of Prospero was) to preoccupation with the marriage of a daughter. Daughters he had, it is true, and the younger of them (Judith) married one Thomas Quiney a vintner or tavern-keeper, son of Richard Quiney (an old friend of the Shaksperes) who, or whose widow, also kept a tavern. But Judith’s marriage took place long after her father’s retirement from London must have been resolved on. Shakspere’s highest ambition—Mr. Sidney Lee tells us—was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father’s misfortunes had imperilled. This father it seems was a chandler or general dealer, not more illiterate probably than others of the family, who began life in a humble way and afterwards came to grief. If, as is likely, his debts were inconsiderable, his ambitious son should have found little difficulty in restoring the family repute, such as it was. The fat-witted lines—Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here, etc.—which this same son seems to have selected, or composed, or ordered, for his monument, though quite out of keeping with mountains of surmise, are entirely in keeping with all we can properly be said to know of the man. Yet this is the man who is said, on eminent authority, to have conceived and executed The Tempest, and what is more to my immediate purpose, to have drawn Prospero in his own image! Belief in this might have been possible, had we known next to nothing about Shakspere or his environment. But the finds of a Halliwell-Phillipps (to take him as a type) have had an effect which the industrious finder certainly did not foresee or intend.
More than thirty years ago the writer came to the double conclusion, (a) that whoever Shakespeare might have been, Shakspere was not the man; (b) that of all the known poets of that day, it was Bacon and Bacon alone who seemed to possess the necessary qualifications. Many of the reasons—none of them beholden to cypher, cryptogram or hocus-pocus of any kind—which made for that conclusion are set forth in a little book, Bacon-Shakespeare, An Essay (signed E. W. S., Rome, but published, 1900, in London). Most of the reasons there given have, however, no very definite relation to The Tempest and its symbolism.
Shelley saw and asserted that Bacon was a poet. But students of Bacon need no Shelley to inform them that Bacon was indeed a poet. His earlier work betrays him. Even the Advancement of Learning (1605), tinctured as it is by the pedantic style then coming into fashion, holds just the same truth in solution. To many such students, apology is due for labouring the point. My excuse is the existence of a strong prepossession to the contrary. By what seems to have been an oversight on the part of Bacon, his executors and intimate friends, a letter of his to Sir J. Davies, also a poet, has come down to us, unedited for the public. In this letter Bacon confesses himself a poet, ranks himself in effect amongst concealed poets. Aubrey too, thanks probably to a similar oversight, lets us into the same secret that Bacon was a concealed poet. Of Bacon’s affection for poetry the product (Bacon himself calls it the work or play) of the imagination, there is no room for doubt. If other evidence were wanting, the Sapientia Veterum (1609) would almost suffice to prove it. As Porphyry’s reverence for the elder gods is deducible from his attempt to extract philosophy out of the oracles of antiquity, so Bacon’s reverent affection for poetry manifests itself in that elaborate attempt of his to distil philosophy out of what is at bottom a medley of poetical fables. That Bacon, like Prospero, delighted in poesis (making) is equally clear. Poesy, he says in the De Augmentis—Poesy is a dream of knowledge (or culture), a thing sweet and varied and that would fain be held partly divine.... But now it is time for me to awake (ut evigilem) and cleave the liquid ether of philosophy, etc. This passage, written after 1605, obviously means more than affection for poetry the product. Only a poet who loved to dream, only a poet for whom the awaking was fraught with pain, however glorious the promise of the dawn, would have written that.
Bacon again, like Prospero, was a lover of books, and happy like him, in the possession of a well-filled library (at Gray’s Inn, or Gorhambury, or both). He was an omniverous reader, tasting some books (mathematical and astronomical, for example), swallowing others, chewing and digesting a few. His biographer says of him: He was a great reader, but no plodder upon books.
About 1607-9, Bacon (in one of his impetus philosophici) imagined that at last he really had hit upon an infallible Method of vastly enlarging man’s dominion over Nature. The problem was how to launch this Method to the best advantage. Knowing only too well that he would receive no encouragement from living experts in science—the scientists who had arrived as distinguished from those who had not yet started—he fixed his hopes on ingenuous, open-minded Youth. But this is a prosaic way of looking at the matter, and Bacon was a poet. To him the desideratum presented itself as a marriage, a marriage between his darling philosophy, as he was wont to call it, and an ideal husband. In the Redargutio Philosophiarum men are exhorted to devote themselves to the task of bringing about a chaste and legitimate wedlock between the mind and nature. In the Sapientia Veterum the same idea appears in a different form: facultates illas duas Dogmaticam et Empiricam adhuc non bene conjunctas et copulatas fuisse.[74] In the Delineatio (c. 1607) he writes: We trust we have constructed a bride-bed for the marriage of Man’s Mind with the Universe. The same idea (hardly as yet an obsession) makes one of its earliest appearances in a Speech in Praise of Knowledge, forming part of a dramatic jeu d’esprit entitled A Conference of Pleasure (1592). In this Speech several things are said to have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. And what the issue of so honourable a match may be it is not hard to consider. With the actual merits of the Method we are but distantly concerned here. What is of importance here is the certainty that Bacon would lose no opportunity of repudiating every suggestion that his beloved child owed anything to the imagination. It was an usual speech of his lordship’s, says his biographer, that his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as men have made it, for it hath nothing of the imagination.
By this time the inner meaning of The Tempest, and also the editorial reason for thrusting it into the leading place of the First Folio, may have become apparent. Miranda stands for Bacon’s Darling Philosophy, and the ingenuous young Ferdinand for the unsophisticated mind of man, the human intellect cleared and delivered from idols, particularly idols of the theatre. The issue of so auspicious a match is left, in The Tempest, as in the Conference of Pleasure, to the imagination. Prospero’s ceremonious rejection of his magic robes is an adumbration of Bacon’s anxiety to preserve his Philosophy from being calumniated as a poetical dream, a thing infected with the style of the poets, as he once (in a fragmentary Essay of Fame) confessed himself to be. Devotion to Miranda again is the motive for Prospero’s resolve to dismiss Ariel from his service, at a time when Ariel could ill be spared, one feels, by his ageing master. The words my dainty Ariel I shall miss thee are eloquent of pain, pain self-inflicted and unexplained, except by a promise wholly uncalled-for by anything that appears on the surface. Ariel on the other hand, tricksy Ariel, incapable of human affection, sick of expecting a long-promised freedom, feels no pain, no regret, nothing but joy at the prospect of slaving it no longer for a despotic master: Merrily, merrily shall I live now, Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
The last words of one of Prospero’s closing speeches, Every third thought shall be my grave, followed up as they are by the thinly veiled pathos of his appeal in the Epilogue, perplex and distress the reader. Prospero triumphans, without one word of warning or explanation, has changed into Misero supplicans. Why this sudden revulsion? To my untutored mind it intimates a working-over of the play after Bacon’s fall, for the purpose of adapting it, not too obviously, to the altered circumstances of the original author, that unfortunate Chancellor who, according to Ben Jonson, hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. The date of this (last) working-over would probably synchronise with the first public or semi-public appearances of the First Folio (of Shakespeare), of Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum, and of Ben Jonson’s Time Vindicated, these four events—with perhaps a Court performance of the adapted Tempest thrown in—being, I venture to think, intimately connected with what may be called an Apotheosis of Bacon.
“A remarkable story indeed”—an objector may say—“but do you seriously believe that Bacon can be proved to have been the Author, and Shakespeare the pen-name? Besides, does it really matter—except to Stratford and Verulam—whether Shakespeare hailed from this place or that? We have the poems and we have the plays, and that is enough. As for your reading of The Tempest, it may be ingenious, but it is not convincing. Patience, with a modicum of ingenuity, has probably never despaired of cajoling almost any given meaning out of any fable—fables, like dreams and Delphian utterances, being almost as plastic as wax. Moreover, the inner meaning you claim to have disclosed, involves the absurdity of supposing that a fable was invented for the express purpose of wrapping up the said meaning, so effectually as to ensure its being missed by all the world, a few esoteric contemporaries only excepted. The idea, to be quite candid, belongs rather to Bedlam than to Bacon.”
Strict proof, I reply, is hardly to be expected either now or hereafter. A high degree of probability, resting on evidence of various kinds and different degrees of cogency, is all that the writer has ever contended for. The history of literature abounds in instances of pseudonymity. Of these one of the most apposite that occurs to me is that of Aristophanes, who made use of the name Callistratus, a contemporary actor, to mask his (own) authorship of the Birds, Lysistrata, etc. There are differences, of course, between the two cases, one being that in that of Aristophanes there were no very obvious reasons for concealment, whereas in the case of Bacon there were several. Whether it really matters who the great poet was depends on the word “really.” It certainly does not matter in the sense in which the high price of coal, the low price of Consols, England’s relations with other Powers, etc., matter. It does matter for The Tempest, the symbolism of which probably extends beyond Miranda and Prospero, as far as Neapolis, and possibly further. It cannot fail to affect the interpretation of other plays of Shakespeare. It solves, or helps to solve, interesting problems in the life and acknowledged works of Bacon. It matters in short for all genuine admirers of English literature. As to plasticity—where the fable to be juggled is vague, undocumented, variously and incoherently documented, or frugal of features, the operation will be child’s play. With such a fable as The Tempest the trick can only be brought off by singling out one or two features and shutting the eye to all the rest. One objection only remains to be dealt with. The reference to Bedlam with which it concludes might have been omitted, but no discussion of this question seems quite in order without some innuendo that the unorthodox person is mad or a crank. The objection itself (though the phrasing might be challenged as favouring the objector) is pertinent enough, and may be answered as follows: Bacon was an inveterate treasure-seeker. The unsunned treasures he sought were not material things like gold and silver, but gems of thought hidden away in the dreamlands of poetry. The genesis of this habit was no doubt closely related to his theory that poesy enables the artist in words to retire and obscure ... secrets and mysteries by involving them in fables invented for the purpose, a practice by no means uncommon, he firmly believed, among the poets of antiquity when they wished to reserve information for selected auditors.
So far the discussion has been grave to the point of dullness. Would that I had been able to enliven it, if only because The Tempest is a comedy—heads the file of the comedies in the First Folio. Possibly the following quotation from the work of an eminent critic may help to remedy the fault: Miranda ... and her fellow Perdita are idealizations of the sweet country maidens whom Shakspere (sic) would see about him in his renewed family life at Stratford.[75]]
THE COMMON KNOWLEDGE OF SHAKESPEARE AND BACON
Many years ago, when, not having bestowed a thought upon the subject, I was, naturally, of the orthodox Stratfordian faith, and knew nothing of the Baconian “heresy” except the time-honoured joke that “Shakespeare” was not written by Shakespeare, but by another gentleman of the same name (which I thought “devilish funny”) I happened to be reading Bacon’s Essay on Gardens. This passage at once arrested my attention: “In April follow, the double violet; the wall-flower; the stock-gilliflower; the cowslip; flower-de-luces, and lillies of all natures.” Why, thought I, those last words are almost identical with some used by Perdita at the conclusion of her lovely catalogue of flowers! I turned to the Winter’s Tale (IV. 4) and there read:
lillies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one.
For at least half a minute I thought, in my innocence, that I had made a discovery! But reflection of course, told me that so startling a parallelism must have been observed by hundreds before me. “Lillies of all kinds,” says Shakespeare; “lillies of all natures,” says Bacon; and each specifies “the flower-de-luce” as one of them! Surely, I said to myself, this is no mere coincidence! Surely one of these writers must have, consciously or unconsciously, taken the words from the other! On closer inspection, too, I found a remarkable resemblance between the two lists of flowers, Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s; that they are in fact substantially the same. Did then Shakspere borrow from Bacon? Very possibly, I thought; but on investigation I found that the Essay on Gardens was first printed in 1625, nine years after player Shakspere’s death. Well, then, did Bacon borrow from Shakspere in this instance? Few, I think, would be inclined to adopt that hypothesis. The author of the Essay had made a life-long study of gardens, and, as Mr. James Spedding writes (though I did not discover this till years afterwards), “it is not probable that Bacon would have anything to learn of William Shakespeare [i.e., Shakspere of Stratford] concerning the science of gardening.” “Moreover,” says the same writer, “the scene in Winter’s Tale where Perdita presents the guests with flowers ... has some expressions which, if the Essay had been printed somewhat earlier, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it!”[76] Yes, indeed, and these “expressions,” almost identical in both, have made some persons “suspect” that the same pen wrote both the Essay and the Scene.
There are, as all those who have studied the two authors are aware, many other striking coincidences to be found in the writings of Shakespeare and Bacon. In this chapter I propose to consider some of them only, namely those which, nearly twenty years ago, formed the subject of a controversy between the late Judge Webb, and the late Professor Dowden.
In the year 1902 the late Judge Webb, then Regius Professor of Laws, and Public Orator in the University of Dublin, published a book which he called The Mystery of William Shakespeare.