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BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
BACON OR
SHAKESPEARE?
AN HISTORICAL ENQUIRY.
BY
E. MARRIOTT.
" My Shakespeare, rise." — Ben Jonson.
"iontjon :
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G.
1898,
UNlVEKSITY OF CALll'VXviMJLA
SANTA BARBARA
NOTICE.
The Writers referred to in the following pages are : —
Mr. R. M. Bucke, ' Shakespeare Dethroned/ Pearson's
Magazine, Christmas, 1897.
Mr. W. Theobald, M.R.A.S., M.N.E.L., 'A Lecture
delivered at Budleigh Salterton, April 3rd, 1894.'
Mrs. Henry Pott, Edition of Bacon's ' Promus,' 1883.
Mr. J. A. Truesdell, Article in the Washington Post,
April 1 2th, 1885, on Mr. Ignatius Donnelly's Theory of
a Cypher imbedded in Shakespeare's Plays.
ERRATA.
"':;■ (from bottom) dele " in England."
' ■■ dele "in America."
1 6
33
38
38
43
Foo,No,e-af.er.-Verona"ad<l"Ac.ii.,Sc.3.
„ancl,, for -CoHis" read ■•Abbou."
32 before ■•London" insert "C.ly of.
(or ■■Tliomas" read "George.
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
HO wrote Shakespeare's Plays ? This question
has of late years been so often asked and
answered that it might be deemed not merely
superfluous, but impertinent, to offer a further
word on the subject. I myself hoped and believed that
the new theory was dying out, at least on this side of the
Atlantic.
But my attention has been recently called to an article,
by Mr. R. M. Bucke, in the last Christmas number of
Pearsoyi^s Magazine, not only reviving the question, but,
as the writer believes, so triumphantly and finally closing
it in favour of Bacon that one more patient review
of the matter seems to be still called for — the more so
because Mr. Bucke has stated his case plausibly enough
to mislead cursory readers (that is to say some three-
fourths of all readers), who take it for granted that any
one who sets forth his arguments in a confident and
telling manner must have good reasons for his con-
clusions, and accept them accordingly, without taking
the trouble to sift them.
I have also seen and carefully read a lecture published
in pamphlet form about four years ago by Mr. W.
Theobald on the same side.
Neither of these writers, however, has done much more
than reproduce the old arguments first brought forward in
America some fifty years ago, without taking the slightest
notice of the answers again and again made to them.
But the Baconians appear to have started their theory
under the immediate patronage of the famous St. Gingul-
8 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
phus, better known in the vulgar tongue, thanks to the
legendary story of his martyrdom, as *' the living
Jingo," for, cut him to pieces as often as they would, he
always came to life again. If the process was repeated
as often in his case as it has been in the latter instance,
Gingulphus himself must have had a bad time of it.
But doubtless, in our advanced days, Baconians enjoy the
privilege of a free use of anaesthetics, for they do not
seem to mind it in the least.
To leave figure and come to fact. The theory was,
as we have said, first started in America about the
middle of the present century.* But within its ninth
decade two new lines of argument were brought strongly
forward both in America and England by Mrs. Henry
Pott, drawn from an analysis of Bacon's ' Promus ' (of
which we shall speak more particularly further on), and
on the authority of a concealed cypher, or rather of two
Cyphers, cryptograms as they were called, which Mrs.
F. C. A. Windle, of San Francisco, and Mr. Ignatius
Donnelly find imbedded — in the Plays, says Mr, Donnelly
— in all Bacon's prose writings, including his private
correspondence (!), as well as in the Plays, says Mrs.
Windle — whereby each believes that Bacon makes his
own claim to their authorship. Mrs. Windle, indeed,
disclaims any discovery on her own part, being con-
fidently persuaded that Iter cypher was a mysterious
communication from the spirit of Bacon himself " from
the unseen world "; while Mr. Donnelly learns from his
cypher that *' the intention of the [historical] Plays was
to familiarize the public mind with the fact that kings
were only men, and a very base kind of men, and that
when their folly or their sins became too great, the
people had power to dethrone them." With much more
to the same monstrous effect.
* In a small i2mo. volume, entitled ' Romance of Yachting,' by
J. C. Hart, United States Consul at Vera Cruz. (New York, 1848.)
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 9
Compare this with the whole tone of Bacon's acknow-
ledged writings. Can any one imagine him to have held
such ideas of the place of kings, either in the Providential
order of the world or in actual history ?
But the prij/id facie objection to all Baconian theories
is that they are grounded solely upon inferences. From
first to last there is no direct external evidence whatever
as to the authorship of the Plays.
Inferences and conjectures, right or wrong as others
may deem them, are still matters of opinion, upon
which every man has a right to his own. But such
questions as whether or no Ben Jonson has named
Shakespeare in a particular work, or whether or no the
Folio of 1623 be "the foundation upon which the verdict
of Shakespearian authorship is based," as Mr. Theobald
has stated in one of his papers, are matters of fact which
cannot with truth be answered negatively in the first
case, or affirmatively in the second, by any one who has
looked carefully through the pages of Ben Jonson's
' Discoveries,' or been made aware that, as one among
numerous collateral witnesses, Francis Meres, a man of
much literary note in his day, in the midst of an enthu-
siastic eulogy of Shakespeare's language and style, names
twelve of the Plays as \{\s,, five-and-twenty years before
the appearance of the Folio, viz. in 1 598.
It would take us too far afield to go fully into Mr.
Theobald's pamphlet ; I must restrict myself to answering
Mr. Bucke, and in so doing the main points in both will
be inclusively answered at the same time.
Mr. Bucke begins by a comparison between " known
facts " respecting the two men for whom the authorship
of the Plays is claimed.
A communication from the unseen world in the form
of the ghost of the old President of Magdalen, Dr.
Routh, repeating his famous dictum " verify your refer-
ences," might have been very useful to Mr. Bucke and
some other of our Baconian critics ; compliance with the
10 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
counsel might have saved them from some very awkward
misstatements.
All that " three hundred years' rigorous research " has
been able to discover concerning Shakespeare Mr. Bucke
enumerates in something less than two columns of a
magazine page, in the course of which only one
contemporary witness is quoted, in the following
sentence: "In 1592 his name was parodied in London
as ' Shakescene ' in Greene's ' Groat's Worth of
Wit.'"
Greene was a well-known contemporary dramatist of
some talent, but a coarse-minded man of very dissipated
life, and in his 'Groat's Worth of Wit' had spoken in
scurrilous (and oft quoted) words of Marlowe and Shake-
speare. The work was published posthumously by
Chettle, who at that time knew neither of them ; but
three months later, in the preface to a work of his own,
having meanwhile become personally acquainted with
Shakespeare, he wrote of him : —
" I am as sorry as though the originall fault had beene my fault,
because myself have scene his demeanour, no less civile than he
exelent, in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of worship,
have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty,
and his facetious grace in writing which approves his art."
But more than this, looking at Mr. Bucke's words,
could any reader imagine that one of Shakespeare's
advocates* has collected testimonies to his general cha-
racter, to his marvellous genius, as exhibited in the Plays
and Poems attributed to him, from more than thirty
well-known literary men of his own day — some of them
his personal friends — and more than another thirty
within the first half century after his death ? Of these
want of space only allows me to adduce two or
three : —
* Mrs. C. Stopes in her only too elaborate, but exhaustive treatise
* Bacon- Shakes pere Controversy,' now out of print.
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? II
" And first, as showing how early his dawning genius was recog-
nized, Aubrey (whose notice of his life is the first known to exist)
in a letter to Antony-a-Wood, the celebrated antiquary at Oxford,
speaks of him in these terms : ' This William, being inclined
naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, and was an actor
at one of the Playhouses, and did act exceeding well He began
early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was
very low, and his plays took well I have heard Sir William
Davenant and Mr. Thos. Shadwell (who is counted the best
comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious wit."
Francis Meres (above referred to) in his ' Palladium '
(a survey of the literature of his own day) writes : " As
the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pytha-
goras, so the sweet soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and
hony-tongued Shakespeare." And six of the tragedies
and six of the comedies are severally named to prove,
with another classical allusion, that the Muses "would
speak with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrases if they would
speak English."
Again Camden, in his * Remaines concerning Britaine'
(1605), after speaking of "our ancient poets," adds, "If
I would come to our time, what a world could I present
to you out of Sir Philip Sidney William Shakespeare,
and other pregnant wits of these our times, whom suc-
ceeding ages may justly admire."
But the most important of all contemporary witnesses
is Ben Jonson, on whose testimony Mr. Bucke lays, and
rightly lays, the greatest stress (however much we may
differ as to the conclusion he draws from it). The
eighth and ninth of the ten heads under which Mr.
Bucke arranges his arguments are respectively headed
' The Testimony of Ben Jonson ' and ' Bacon and his
Contemporaries.'
With these, therefore, as the crucial ones, on the right
understanding of which the value of all the others
depends, I will begin, and I think that we shall agree
that a more trustworthy witness than Jonson in reference
to Bacon and Shakespeare could not be brought forward
12 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
— scholar, poet, and intimate friend of both. First then
I take
THE TESTIMONY OF BEN JONSON.
Lest I should be suspected of minimizing this part of
the argument, I will give the paragraph so headed all
but in full.
After telling us that Jonson was private secretary to
Bacon, that he was a fine Latinist, and is supposed to
have had a part in the translation of Bacon's works
into Latin, Mr. Bucke goes on to say : —
"There cannot be a doubt that Jonson knew where the Plays
came from — at least he knew, beyond a peradventure, whether or
no Bacon wrote them. In the preface to the great Folio, Jonson
(in a most elaborate eulogy) pronounced the works of Shakespeare
superior to ' all that insolent Greece and haughty Rome sent forth.'
A few years afterwards in his 'Discoveries' he said of certain
works by Bacon that they were to be preferred to those of * insolent
Greece or haughty Rome.' In the same connexion he tells us that
Bacon had ' filled up all numbers,' that is, that he was a great poet."
The entire passage here referred to occurs in the
second of three consecutive paragraphs devoted to
Bacon in the ' Discoveries '* — written after his death,
for in the first of the series he is spoken of as " the
late Lord St. Albans." This second is entitled the
" Catalogus Scriptorum " (of the sixteenth century)
" who were great masters of wit and language." The
list gives sixteen names, ending with that of " Lord
Egerton the Chancellor, a great and grave Orator."
Then follow the words : —
" But his learned and able (though unfortunate) successor 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 time, were
all the wits bom that could honour a language, or help study.
Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows
backward ; so that he may be named, and stand as the mark and
axfiiq of our language."
* See Jonson's works, vol. ix. pp. 184-5.
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 1 3
" Jonson, therefore," continues Mr. Bucke, "used the same lan-
guage in praising Bacon that he had used in praising Shakespeare —
which last would seem to have been a pen-name for Bacon. Not
only so, but he tells us explicitly [!] that Bacon was a great poet.
'To fill up all numbers' is to be not only a poet, but a supreme
poet. If Bacon wrote the plays he was that ; if he did not write
the plays it was an absurd misnomer."
I pause to ask why. Not only do the words, read with
their context, plainly show that Jonson was referring to
Bacon's published and acknowledged works, but the
phrase " filled up all numbers " is surely applicable to
the man who hesitated not to say of himself, " I have
taken all knowledge for my province"* — "the daring
enterprise," to use Dean Church's words, " in which
Bacon and Aristotle — * the masters of those who know '
— stood alone."
The idea that Bacon's wide Intellectual sphere was the
thought Jonson had in his mind is strongly confirmed
by the remark made by a very good classical scholar to
whom I showed the passage in question. He said to
this effect : —
''To fill up all numbers is a distinctly different idea from
writing in numbers. Seventeenth- century English was impregnated
with Latin thought and expression. Ben Jonson's assertion that
Bacon ' filled up all numbers ' is probably an adaptation — conscious
or unconscious — of Cicero's * Mundus expletus omnibus suis
numeris et partibus,' the world complete in all its numbers and
parts — words in which there is no reference to metrical numbers at
all, and which as applied to Bacon might be paraphrased, ' His set
purpose was the perfecting of knowledge in all its numerous de-
partments,' the exact counterpart of ' I have taken all knowledge
for my province.' "
Mr. Bucke, however, is of a different opinion, for after
quoting another, and that the most tender and beautiful
of the three eulogistic paragraphs, in order "to show
how deeply Jonson reverenced Bacon's character," and
" how impossible it would have been to him to write
hastily or recklessly about him," he continues : —
* Letter to Lord Burghley (Dean Church's ' Bacon,' p. 16).
14 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
" But if, as I think, we are right in supposing that Jonson knew
who wrote the Plays, and if further we do right to give his words
in this connection their full meaning, then I claim we have a right
to say Jonson knew who wrote the Plays, and he says that their
author was Francis Bacon."
We must award Mr, Bucke the merit of having the
courage of his opinions, for a bolder assertion (save for
courtesy's sake I could use a stronger word) on a more
slender foundation can rarely have been uttered.
I, too, call Ben Jonson into court, as the strongest,
most incontrovertible witness on the other side. Let us
hear what he did " explicitly " say.
Bear in mind that the advocates of the Baconian author-
ship all agree that the fact of Shakespeare's having held
unchallenged fame as the author of the Plays during his
life, and for some 250 years after, can only be accounted for
by Bacon's extreme anxiety to conceal his own authorship.
Assuming then for the moment that Bacon was the
true author, but that rather than that he should be
known to have had any connection with the stage he
was willing to give away world-wide fame to an obscure
illiterate actor such as they represent Shakespeare to
have been — if, I say, all this were so, the appearance of
the great Folio published by Heminge and Condell in
1623 must have satisfied him that his secret was secured
not only in his own age, but through all generations to
come.* It was entitled
* The Plays of William Shakespeare.'
It shows Shakespeare's portrait on its first page
subscribed by a ten-line panegyric signed " Ben Jonson,"
which began and ended thus : —
This figure that thou seest cut
Was for the gentle Shakespeare put,
Reader, looke
Not on his picture but his booke.
* In treating the evidence of the Folio in this place I designedly
confine myself to Ben Jonson's share in it ; but I shall have
occasion to recur to the subject further on.
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 1 5
It is startling enough to be asked to regard all this as
a hoax intended to mislead the world as to the author-
ship of the Plays ! There was no call for an honest man
like Ben Jonson to have done so much, but to go further
was utterly superfluous.
But if we must indeed suppose that his extreme desire
to eulogize the true author of the Plays, although under
a false name, induced Jonson to add the " elaborate
eulogy" Mr. Bucke refers to, he would surely have
taken care that its wording should be as far as possible
applicable to the genius, character, and circumstances of
the man for whom (we are assuming) he intended them.
Is it conceivable that Jonson could go out of his way to
support such a wholesale imposture as to dedicate a
panegyric on a living author " to the memory " of a man
who had been dead seven years ? or to perpetuate so
grotesque a falsehood as the representing the stately
Francis Bacon treading the stage in buskins and the
actor's socks .? The eighty lines of the panegyric are
headed thus : —
To the memory of my beloved
Master William Shakespeare
And what he left us,
and they contain, inter alia, the following lines,
sufficient, one would have thought, to daunt the boldest
theorist from assigning the authorship of the Plays to
Bacon : —
I therefore will begin, Soul of the age !
The applause, delight, and wonder of our Stage...
My Shakespeare, rise !
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee I will not seek
For names, but call forth thund'ring yEschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles
To live again to hear thy buskins tread
And shake the Stage, or when thy socks are on
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come...
l6 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which since thy flight fro hence hath mourned the night
And despairs day but for thy volume's light.
This is a long extract, but less would scarcely have
done justice to the astounding assertion on the part of
Messrs. Theobald & Co. that the panegyric was intended
for Bacon. Considering the difficulty of discerning the
greatest scholar of the age in the disguise of a man apos-
trophized as having "small Latin and less Greek,"
it would be not more unreasonable to argue that
Bacon was really the disguised actor as well as the
concealed author of the Plays. Or if — to drop irony —
we are asked gravely to admit the Baconian hypothesis,
imagine the feelings of the already humbled ex-
Chancellor, with his alleged dread of any association
with the stage, on reading such lines as I have quoted,
from the pen of the man who (according to our critics)
knew him to be the author ! The idea is so preposterous
in its incongruity that one is almost ashamed to treat it
as worth serious refutation.
But I have a more serious charge to bring against the
advocates of the Baconian theory — such as Messrs.
Theobald and Bucke in England, and Mrs. Henry Pott
in America — than mere weak arguments or unwarrant-
able deductions : I mean the reckless carelessness with
which some of their most important statements are made.
All three quote Ben Jonson's eulogies of Bacon in the
' Discoveries ' — all three overlook his equally fervent
praise of Shakespeare a few pages back (175) in the
same volume. Mr. Bucke does not allude to Shake-
speare in this place at all, but the other two triumphantly
point out that Ben Jonson omits his name in the list of
eminent literary men of the age.
Now in the particular paragraph from which they
quote, naming some of the " great masters of wit and
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? I7
language of the sixteenth century," Shakespeare is not
named (and, strange to say, but proving the incomplete-
ness of the list, neither is Spenser) ; and if the paragraph
stood alone, the omission would be hard to account for.
But it does not stand alone,
A few pages back (175) Shakespeare is named — just
where we should expect to find him — among the poets,
and named in terms of the highest encomium.
For the sake of its bearing upon our whole subject, I
give the paragraph in full. It is headed thus : " De
Shakespeare Nostrat [sic] Augustus in Hat.": —
" I remember that the Players have often mentioned it as an
honour to Shakespeare that he never blotted a line. I have said.
Would he had blotted a thousand — which they thought a malevolent
speech. 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 justify mine own candour."
Now mark what follows : —
" For I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side
idolatry, as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open
and free nature ; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and
gentle expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility, that
sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped : sujfflatninandus
erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his o.vn power,
would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those
things could not escape laughter : as when he said in the person of
Caesar, one speaking to him, ' Ceesar, thou dost me wrong,' he
replied,* Csesar never did wrong but with just cause,' and such like,
which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues.
There was ever more of him to be praised than to be pardoned."*
At this point, then, I sum up the "testimony" of Ben
Jonson, and, adopting Mr. Bucke's method of argument,
venture to conclude that, reading the panegyric in the
Folio in connexion with the eulogy in the ' Discoveries,*
"we have a right to say Jonson knew who wrote the
Plays, and he says that their author was " — William
Shakespeare.
* Ben Jonson's works, vol. xi. pp. 175-6.
l8 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
We have now seen the sort of ingenious sophistry by
which Mr. Bucke draws what he regards as " expHcit "
evidence from Ben Jonson's " testimony." Let us now
see how he applies the same logical screw to draw con-
firmation of his theory out of Bacon's own words.
The ninth of Mr. Bucke's ten heads of argument
begins by asking, " What do Bacon's intimate friends,
what does Bacon himself, say upon the point ? " The
point, that is, of the authorship of the Plays.
We know what one intimate friend — Ben Jonson —
says about it, and we have glanced at what two or three
out of some twenty or thirty other contemporaries have
said about it also.
The instances brought forward by Mr. Bucke himself
are really not worth pausing upon, nor, to do him justice,
does he lay stress upon them. He feels, and rightly,
that what Bacon says of himself is the important point
at this moment, and on this head this partisaji quand
mime scruples not to say that " Bacon distinctly claims
that the Plays proceeded from him."
The " phrase " on which Mr. Bucke grounds this
audacious assertion is found in a prayer written by
Bacon just after his fall in 1621. The prayer, which
Dean Church gives in full, is an extremely affecting one,
too long to be reproduced here. In the small portion
which Mr. Bucke was able to quote, the broken-hearted
man prays God to " remember " how he had " walked
before" Him ; and among other instances of his fidelity
he adds, " The state and bread of the poor and the
oppressed have been ever precious in my eyes. I have
hated all cruelty and hardness of heart. I have, though
in a despised weed, procured the good of all men."
"This last clause," says Mr. Bucke, "has never been
explained, and I say boldly," he continues, " that it can-
not be explained, except on the supposition that it refers
to the Plays. It is something vast that he is speaking
of, something that is to benefit the race." Mr. Bucke
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? I9
goes on to admit that " Bacon's prose has done that ";
but he says, " it never appeared in a despised dress
or weed. It was nobly composed — put into the best
Latin," &c., " nobody ever dreamed of despising it."
But the Plays, he argues, " though they have done ten
times more for the race than the prose works," were — at
least in Bacon's own day — distinctly and unmistakably
in a " despised weed " ; and he concludes that " the
Plays, and the Plays alone, fulfil the conditions : they
were in a despised weed, and they are calculated to
procure the good of all men." Mr. Bucke sets the Plays
at a high level ; he could hardly say more for the Old
and New Testaments.
Statements more false to fact than are contained in
the above paragraph could hardly have been made.
In the first place, what were the kind of writings by
which Bacon hoped to procure the good of all men
he has himself more than once fully revealed. The
first instance occurs in a paper originally written " in
stately Latin." It never appeared in a separate
form. " It retains," says Mr. Spedding, " a peculiar
interest for us on account of the passage in which he
explains the plans and purposes of his life, and the
estimate he had formed of his own character and
abilities." And what does he say ? Mr. Spedding shall
tell us (the italics in all the ensuing passages are mine,
to point their connexion with the words of the prayer) :
" He began by conceiving that a wise method of studying
Nature would give man the key to all her secrets and therewith
the mastery of all her powers. If so, what boon so great could a
man bestow upon his felloiv-men f"
Again, in 162 1, immediately after his fall, he wrote to
his intimate friend Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Win-
chester.*' The letter is very interesting and characteristic,
both in its religious tone and its classical allusions.
* It was written as an "Epistle Dedicatory " for a treatise on
the relations between England and Spain, never completed.
B 2
20 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
Though, he thanks God, he has as a Christian higher
consolations, yet he finds comfort too in thinking how
others have borne themselves under the like calamities ;
and taking example from Demosthenes and Seneca, he
resolves to spend his time wholly in writing. And then
he gives an account of the works he intends to set himself
to do — such as the completion of the ' Advancement of
Learning ' and of the ' Instauration,' a digest of laws, &c. :
" Now having," he says, " in my work of my ' Instaura-
tion ' had in contemplation the general good of all men
in their very being, and the dowries of nature — and in
my work of laws the general good of men, likewise in
society, and dowries of government," &c.
Then he goes on to say that, being no longer able to do
his country service, it remained to him to do her honour,
as he hopes to do by his life of King Henry VII.
He adds that he purposes also to continue his ' Essays,'
" and some other particulars of that nature," as recrea-
tions from other studies.*
If further proof were needed that the purposes which
Bacon set before himself — the subjects with which his
thoughts were occupied — left absolutely no inch of
mental ground for the composition of such a bulk of
dramatic literature as the six-and-thirty " Shakespeare "
Plays — let alone all else which has been claimed as his
work — let the reader look at the remarkable record
called ' Commentarius Solutus,' discovered by Mr. Sped-
ding, and quoted and remarked upon by Dean Church,
p. ^2.
And I ask. Who, reading all the above, can for a
moment believe that the thought of writing Plays ever
entered his thoughts, or can have been referred to in his
prayer ?
* These recreations cannot have included the Plays as he goes
on to say, " I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would
with more pains (perhaps) yield more lustre and reputation to
my name than those other I have in hand."
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 21
If Mr. Bucke will refer to Dean Church's book, he
will find himself greatly mistaken in supposing that no
one ever despised the prose writings.
In a splendid passage which I can but briefly here
refer to, he says that the hopes and aspirations of the
age after a larger science " embodied themselves in
Bacon in the form of a great and absorbing idea which
took possession of the whole man," an idea, he adds,
which has "long become a commonplace to us, but
strange and perplexing to his own generation, which
probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its
champion for a place in the company of the ' Ship of
Fools,' and expressed its opinion of the ' Novum
Organum ' in the sentiment that ' a fool could not have
written it, and a wise man would not.' " *
And although no one probably, save Bacon himself in
the hour of his deep humiliation, would have used such
a phrase as " a despised weed " of any of his writings,
yet it is evident from words here and there dropped
from his pen that he was conscious that his highest
speculations were not appreciated by his own country-
men. In the letter to Bishop Andrewes above quoted,
while he acknowledges gratifying testimony from " many
beyond seas" to the value of his great work the 'Instaura-
tion,' he adds that he has "just cause to doubt that it flies
over men's heads "; and we have already seen that he
believed a lighter style of writing would have added
more to his reputation.
But if " despised weed " be an exaggerated term for
the estimation in which some may have held the prose
writings, it is nothing short of absolute untruth in regard
to the Plays.
So far from being despised, the Plays were performed
before Royalty at Court, before scholars at the Uni-
versities, year after year before admiring audiences in
* Church's ' Bacon,' pp. 200-202.
23 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
London. They won for their author (who that author
may have been does not affect this part of the question) —
they won, I say, for their author enthusiastic eulogiums
in prose and verse from literary men of the day. Two
or three specimens of such have been already given,
and they might have been multiplied tenfold.
But of all unexpected utterances of men in those
" next ages " to which Bacon in his will confided his
" name and memory,"* surely not one would have been
more surprising to himself than the interpretation put
upon his prayer, and to learn that when, humbly on his
knees imploring mercy, he had ventured to plead before
Almighty God that he had sought "the good of all men,"
he was praying Him to remember that he had — written
" Shakespeare's Plays " !
Another instance of the extreme untrustworthiness of
Mr. Bucke's statements and inferences is too significant
to be omitted. He is giving a conjectural explanation
of the dates at which the Plays appeared (assuming their
author to be Bacon), and he says : —
"From 1590 to 1605 Bacon, having ample leisure, wrote and
issued under a pen-name twenty-one Plays, and under his own
name two small prose works."
During this period of " ample leisure" Bacon was study-
ing law and conducting a considerable legal practice,
was a Member of Parliament, was Reader at Gray's Inn,
wrote numerous legal treatises not published in his life-
time, and wrote and published the two " small prose
works" — the ' Essays ' and the first part of the 'Advance-
ment of Learning.'
Mr. Bucke continues : —
"From 1606 to 1621, being in office and his time fully taken up,
he wrote and published almost nothing, either in his own or any
other name, till the publication of the ' Novum Organum ' in 1620."
* " For my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable
speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages."
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 23
Now, not to mention that this " almost nothing "
comprised the writing and the publishing in 1610 of his
famous (and in his own day his most popular) work
' The Wisdom of the Ancients,' besides some minor
matters, let the reader remember that the ' Novum
Organum,' thus slightly referred to, as though the writing
as well as the publishing belonged to the same year, is
the work upon which, says Dean Church, Bacon
" concentrated all his care," which was twelve years in
progress, twelve times revised by his own hand,* and
written in Latin, which answers to it in "conciseness,
breadth, and lordliness."
But whatever the " almost nothing " may, or may not,
have included, Bacon, according to Mr. Bucke, made up
for it within the next four years, for he goes on to tell
us: —
"After his fall in 1621, having nothing else to do he set to
work in good earnest to finish what he had in hand or had partly
thought out."
So far is quite true, and what the work actually was
that he set before his own mind we may learn from his
letter to Bishop Andrewes. t
" And so," Mr. Bucke tells us, " he passed through the press in
four years the enlargement of the ' Advancement of Learning ' and
some five other books with his own name on their title-pages."
All this — in four of those five years of ** misery " and
" expiation," as he himself wrote, which intervened
between his impeachment in March, 1621, and his death
in April, 1626 — was a vast intellectual achievement. But
Mr. Bucke adds an " and " as unhesitatingly as though
the MSS. were all existing in Bacon's own handwriting
* " My great work goeth forward," Bacon wrote to his friend
Matthew, 17 February, 1 610, "and after my manner I alter ever
when I add, so that nothing is finished till all is finished."
t See ante^ p. 20.
24 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
— " and — the Plays as above," i.e. " eight or ten new Plays
and twelve rewritten ones." *
And note that the Plays are the supposed additional
work of only two years, for the Folio was published in 1623.
And within these same two years the broken-hearted,
but still undaunted man brought out the ' History of the
Winds ' and the ' History of Life and Death,' in 1622,
and a greatly enlarged recasting of the ' Advancement,*
and the nine books of the ' De Augmentis,' in 1623.
Such a mass of work within so brief a time and under
such circumstances is sufficiently astonishing, but with
the alleged addition would have been alike such a physical
and intellectual impossibility, that if the words were not
standing in printer's ink before our eyes, it would have
been incredible that any one could have the assurance
to ask us to accept it.
As to the argument which at this point Mr. Bucke
draws from the fact that the folio edition of the Plays,
and the 'De Augmentis,' and an edition of Bacon's
works published at Frankfort much about the same
time, are all of the same size, type, and kind of paper,
it is really too ridiculous to adduce all this as evidence
that the works named were " projected and carried
through by the same mind."
The folio size, with suitable type and paper, was the
fashion of the time, when not more books were printed
in a year than are now in a week ! I have in my own
possession a copy of Bishop Andrewes's sermon of pre-
cisely the dimensions Mr. Bucke gives, viz., foolscap,
measuring eight and a quarter by thirteen inches, and
the bookshelves of every public library in the kingdom
could afford similar instances.
* To which Mr. Donnelly would fain have us add the enormous
labour of rearranging the entire text of the whole thirty-six
Dramas, with additions, omissions, alterations, "sometimes making
his characters talk nonsense " in order to " lug in some word
required for the Cypher " !
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 2$
There is one more strong presumption against the idea
that Bacon would at any time of his life have been willing
to bestow such a large portion of time and of intellectual
labour upon writing English Plays : I refer to his avowed
mean estimate of vernacular speech as a vehicle for any
permanent literature.
" It is a curious defect in Bacon," writes Dean Church,
" that he should not have been more alive to the powers
and future of his own language." Again he says : " It
is strange that he should not have seen that the new
ideas and widening thoughts of which he was the herald
would want a more elastic and more freely-working in-
strument than Latin could ever become ; but so great
a change was beyond even his daring thought. To him,
as to his age, the only safe language was the Latin."
" For these modern languages " — so he writes towards
the close of his life to Sir Toby Matthew — " these modern
languages will one time or another play the bankrowte
with books, and since I have lost much time with this age
I would be glad if God would give me leave to recover
it with posterity."
And this was written " towards the close of his life,"
the very time to which some attribute such an amount
of English composition.
This seems a fitting place to touch upon the
comparative literary style of the Plays * and
Bacon's prose works, between which Mr. Bucke
claims a close resemblance on the sole ground
that Bacon's prose can readily be arranged and
pronounced as blank verse, and has a tendency to fall
into threefold clauses.
* I cannot too strongly recommend my readers, if they seek
trustworthy evidence, direct and indirect, on the subject of
Shakespeare's character, literary and personal, to study the
extremely interesting articles by Prof. Spencer Baynes in the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' ed. 1886, and by Mr. Sidney Lee in
the ' Dictionary of National Biography.'
26 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
All rhetorical writing can readily supply blank
verse if we may take a line at a time, and the force and
rhythmical euphony of the triplet are universally recog-
nized and of frequent recurrence in our standard literature
— e.£:, in the Scriptures, and in Hooker's ' Ecclesiastical
Polity,' the book, we may stop to remark, beside which
Dean Church says ' The Advancement of Learning ' is
the first which can claim a place as " one of the land-
marks of what high thought and rich imagination have
made of the English language." But — />ace Mr. Bucke
— what resemblance is there between Bacon's stately
periods and sustained gravity of expression, and the
ever-varying sympathetic feeling, the sparkling wit, still
less the broad humour which brim over in Shakespeare ?
Imagine Francis Bacon at any period of his life
writing the Falstaff scenes in * Henry IV.,' or any scene
at all of ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' I
But more than all this. Where is there a trace in
Bacon's avowed writings, or in his biography, of that
delicate, discriminating knowledge and vivid though
never exaggerated portraiture of womanhood in its
tenderest, its noblest, its most passionate, or its most
commonplace aspects which form so leading a character-
istic of the Plays ?
He has spoken of the passion of love, but — notwith-
standing the purity of his life, and the elevation of his
mind and sentiment — he seems to have been incapable
of the very idea of love in those high developments
which make
The world's great bridals chaste and calm.
It is this defect which was so conclusive to the mind of
Lord Tennyson. In the second volume (p. 424) of the
delightful biography which his son has given us, it
appears that some one had written to ask if he thought
that Bacon wrote the Plays, and he says : —
" I felt inclined to write back, * Sir, don't be a fool. The way in
which Bacon speaks of love is enough to prove that he is not
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 2/
Shakespeare : " I know not how, but martial men are given to love.
I think it is but as they are given to wine, for perils like to be paid
with pleasure." How could a man with such an idea of love have
written " Romeo and Juliet " ? ' "
The passage Tennyson quotes occurs in the brief
No. X. of the ' Essays,' and throughout is at the Hterary
antipodes to Shakespeare's idea, and ideals, of love.
If Baconians could ever be induced to give heed to
the plain words of the friends and collaborators among
whom Shakespeare lived his life and wrought his work,
difficulties arising out of varying editions and uncertain
dates and missing manuscripts would shrink into their
proper insignificant proportions.
Listen to what Heminge and Condell, co-managers
with Shakespeare for years of all theatrical matters in
the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, who must therefore
have known what manner of man he was, and what
work he was capable of producing — listen, I repeat, to
what they have recorded in their prefatory words to the
famous First Folio : —
** It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished,
that the Author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen
his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and
he, by death, departed from that right, we pray you do not envy
his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and
published them ; and so to have published them, as where, before,
you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies,
maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious
impostors that exposed them — even those are now offered to your
view cured, and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest, absolute in
their numbers, as he conceived them, who, as he was a happy
imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it His mind
and hand went together ; and what he thought, he uttered with that
easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his
papers."
And here I might have stopped, so far as the main
question is concerned. For, after all, the two cardinal
points upon which the whole argument turns, and by
which the rival claims to the authorship of the Plays
28 BACON OR Shakespeare?
must stand or fall, are the testimony of Ben Jonson and
other contemporaries to Shakespeare, and the utterances
of Bacon himself concerning his own literary aims and
literary life's work.
But for the sake of the large class of readers who fail
to distinguish between ingenious conjecture and direct
evidence, I will endeavour specifically to answer the
most important of Mr. Bucke's remaining " arguments,"
touching here and there on Mr. Theobald's.
I begin with their assumption of Shakespeare's lack
of even the most elementary education, extending to a
doubt whether he ever learned to write.
On this subject Baconians are specially unfair. Every
social disadvantage attached to Shakespeare's circum-
stances is stated in exaggerated terms. His parents are
"illiterate," his mother of "the peasant class," and so
forth, to all which Mr. Theobald adds gossiping tales
raked out of the compilation which goes by the name of
* Gibber's Lives of the Poets,' published 1 20 years after
Shakespeare's death, and in an age so incapable of
appreciating the mind of Shakespeare that Rymer (pro-
nounced by Pope to be " one of the best critics England
ever had ") wrote that in tragedy Shakespeare appears
quite out of his element — "his brains are turned — he
raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark of
reason to set bounds to his phrensy," and that "the
shouting of his battle scenes is necessary to keep the
audience awake, otherwise no sermon would be so strong
an opiate."*
To the gossip of such an age Mr. Theobald yields
implicit credence, while to the reiterated testimony of eye
and ear witnesses he pays not even the attention of an
attempted refutation, but passes it all by as if non-existent.
It is true that Shakespeare's father was a tradesman
in a country town, but a town considerable enough to
* See Moulton's ' Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist,' p. S.
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE ? 29
have its own civic corporation, every grade of which, up
to its " chief Alderman " or " Bailiff," he at one time or
other filled in turn. A coat of arms was granted to him
in 1596, a thing of far more significance at the end of
the sixteenth than of our nineteenth century ; and in
the grant, which may be seen to this day in the Heralds'
Office, John Shakespeare is styled "gentleman," and
his great-grandfather referred to as having rendered
faithful and valiant service to Henry VHL*
Shakespeare's mother was the daughter and heiress of
Robert Arden, of Wilnecote or Wilmcote, more commonly
written Wincot, whose family had for some generations
been reckoned among the landed gentry of Warwickshire.
All this does not look like being utterly illiterate them-
selves, or allowing the eldest of their four sons to be so,
when they had the right to gratuitous education for
them in the Free Grammar School of Stratford — a
fifteenth-century foundation recently re-established by
Edward VI.
The books in use at such schools at that period
included Homer, Horace, Virgil, &c., for the elder boys,
and among those for the junior classes were the ' Puerilis
Sententiae ' and * Lily's Grammar.' In this last are found
the ipsissima verba Shakespeare puts into the mouth of
his two schoolmasters, Holofernes in ' Love's Labour
Lost,' and Sir Hugh Evans in ' The Merry Wives of
Windsor.'
On this subject the late Rev. Henry Dale, himself an
accomplished scholar, in an interesting lecture on the
authorship of the Plays which I have been kindly per-
mitted to make free use of,f aptly quotes from 'Titus
Andronicus,' Act IV. sc. ii., where Demetrius reads from
a scroll : —
* C. Stopes's * Bacon- Shakespere Controversy,' p. 142.
t The lecture remains in manuscript, the day fixed for its de-
livery at Budleigh Salterton having been mournfully anticipated by
the deaih of the writer after very brief illness.
30 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
Integer vkve, scelerisque purus
Non eget Mauri jaculis, nee arcu
(the only classical distinct quotation, so far as he could
remember, to be found in the Plays), and Chiron
answers : —
Oh ! 'tis a verse in Horace ; I know it well,
I read it in the grammar long ago.
Moreover, numerous translations as well as collections
of brief extracts from classic authors, such as Baudwin's
'Collections of the Sayings of all the Wise,' 1547, were
much in vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. Numerous instances of recurrence to such aids
to learning are to be found among Jeremy Taylor's
quaint illustrations and out-of-the-way bits of know-
ledge.
Such collections would easily account for the occur-
rence of similar passages in the Plays and in Bacon's
prose works and the ' Promus ' (of which last we shall
speak more particularly presently) — such, for instance,
as the much noted false quotation of " moral " instead of
" political " philosophy from Aristotle, of which mistake
another curious example is found (as the learned editor
of Bacon's philosophical works discovered) in a work of
Virgilio Maivezzi published in 1622,* which strongly
points to some common source from which all derived
it. But can we believe that Bacon would commit such
a solecism as to make Hector quote an author born
some eight hundred years after the siege of Troy >
There are several similar inaccuracies, such as intro-
ducing a " Frenchman " into the dramatis pcrsoncB of
• Cymbeline,' and making Imogen refer to the Christian
hours of prayer in a play chronologically placed in the
pagan times of Britain, and localizing a shipwreck on
♦ " Non h discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele il qual
dice, che io giovani non sono buoni ascultatori delle morale Dis-
corsi sopra Cornelio Tacito." Quoted in Lord Bacon's works,
vol. iii. p. 4 t'J-
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 3 1
the coast of Bohemia — all natural enough in a man who
had to pick up his information here and there as he
could, and whose poetic faculty would seize upon every
picturesque incident and turn it to dramatic use, regard-
less of chronological or topographical accuracy, but cer-
tainly not like the carefully accurate Bacon.
As to the reiterated assertion that Shakespeare can
hardly have learned to write, grounded upon the fact of
there being no existing manuscripts — only one letter
addressed to him — and no specimen of his handwriting
save five almost illegible signatures, in which his name is
spelt in various ways, the first statement is sufficiently
disproved by the assertion of the players that he never
blotted a line, and Ben Jonson's wish that he had
blotted a thousand. Mr. Theobald's suggestion that the
unblotted manuscripts were the work of Bacon's secre-
tary will not hold, as it is impossible but that Jonson
and the players during the intercourse of years knew
whether Shakespeare could write them or no.
Mr. Theobald also states as a positive fact that Shake-
speare's family never claimed the authorship on his
behalf. How does he know that they never did, except
on the negative evidence that their doing so is not on
record ? But as far as negative evidence goes neither
did they contradict it. One might as reasonably argue
that the wife and the two daughters were dumb, because
there is no record of a single word uttered by any of
them.
And for the illegible handwriting and the varied
orthography, in which he is more than rivalled by Sir
Walter Ralegh, the correspondents of Dean Stanley, to
mention no other, could bear witness that illegible hand-
writing is not absolute proof of illiterate vulgarity in the
writer.
The fact of there being no existing letters or manu-
scripts may to a great extent be accounted for by the
Globe Theatre and Ben Jonson's house having each been
32 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
burnt to the ground, the one being a very probable
depository for manuscripts of the Plays, and Jonson
more likely than any one else to have had private
letters.
But when all exaggeration has been set aside,
undoubtedly the fact remains that the circumstances
surrounding Shakespeare's early years were most
unfavourable to literary eminence.
But what does this but enhance our sense of the
mighty genius which, coupled with what Webster, a
fellow-dramatist, calls his " happy copious industry,"
enabled him to overcome all his social disadvantages,
and to supply during the years of his London residence
the defective teaching of his brief school days ?
And think of the rapidity with which a youth of such
extra-ordinary gifts (I mark the etymological force of the
word) would gather up knowledge on all hands.
What in truth he did make of himself, and of the
marvellous faculties with which God had endowed him,
the authentic unanimous verdict of one friend after
another bears witness.
And yet, in face of the reiterated praises and loving
admiration lavished upon him in his own day, there are
those to be found in our day who, shutting eyes and
closing ears to all this, persist in speaking of him as a
" vulgar," " illiterate," " very commonplace fellow," vying
with each other to find terms mean enough to express
their contempt of him.
But I must hasten on. Mr. Bucke's next point is that
" it is certain that the man who wrote the Plays had seen
many of the houses," &c., described in the dramas whose
scenes are laid in foreign countries.
(In Bacon's case it suffices for Mr. Bucke to assume that
his brother had seen them for him — admissible, perhaps,
had Antony Bacon ever been in Italy. But during his
twelve years' residence abroad, mainly in the South of
France, he never proceeded further than Geneva.)
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 33
But there neither is nor does there need to be any such
certainty whatever, since it is notorious that the plots of
many of the Plays — notably of ' Romeo and Juliet ' and
of ' The Merchant of Venice '— were drawn from foreign
sources. The latter had already been embodied in a
ballad preserved to us in the ' Percy Reliques,' beginning :
In Venice towne not long agoe
A cruel Jew did dwell,
Which lived all on usurie,
As Italian writers tell.
And to fear losing the tide before embarking at Verona*
does not look much like travelling in Lombardy.
Then we come to the mention of places which were
interesting to Bacon, contrasted with the absence of any
mention of Stratford, upon which both critics, but
especially Mr. Theobald, lay such unaccountable stress,
in contrast to the silence of the Plays in regard to places
of Shakespearian interest. Mr. Bucke begins with two
inaccuracies: he calls St. Albans Bacon's "home," and
says it is named twenty-three times instead of twelve,!
and such a phrase as " by St. Albans " and the like
occurs three times.
But Bacon never lived at St. Albans itself at all.
The country home so greatly loved by him was Gor-
hambury, a family property in Hertfordshire, near
St. Albans, inherited from his brother Antony in 1601,
and upon its spacious mansion and its woods and
gardens he lavished large sums of money. But Gor-
hambury is not named in the Plays. And considering
that ten out of the twelve times St. Albans is named
occur in ' Henry VI.' and one in ' Richard HI.' — that is
to say, during the thirty years of the Wars of the Roses,
in which St. Albans played such a conspicuous part —
the wonder would have been if it had not been frequently
mentioned in these particular Plays.
* ' Two Gentlemen of Verona.'
t See ' Shakespeare Concordance.'
34 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
And unless the supposed author deliberately chose
that period of history in anticipated hopes of being
made first a baron, then an earl, some nineteen or
twenty years later, and determined beforehand that
in such a case he would choose Verulam for the one
title and St. Albans for the other, one does not see how
any very strong argument as to authorship is deducible
from the mere recurrence of the name.
And as to York Place — " twice tenderly named," Mr.
Bucke tells us, in the play of 'Henry VIII.' — that, too,
was almost unavoidable in describing the splendid
coronation of Anne Boleyn, as the wedding feast being
held in its banqueting hall is an historical fact. Of the
tenderness characterizing its mention the reader may
judge for himself by referring to ' Henry VIII.,* Act IV.
sc. i.
And this is the amount of reference to localities which
in one paper of Mr. Theobald's is called " crushing
evidence " ; while Ben Jonson's, Chettle's, and other
testimonies, to which his attention, in the manuscript
he is answering, was especially called, are passed by
without a single syllable.
With regard to Stratford, Shakespeare's birthplace, or
any house or place associated with him, both critics
pointedly remark that no mention whatever is made of
them in the Plays. True Stratford itself is not named,
but Mr. Dale, " as a Warwickshire man," calls particular
attention "to the many local references and verbal
usages which afford internal evidence that the Plays
were written by a native of that county." Wincot,
Mary Arden's birthplace, is recalled by the mention of
" Wincot ale " in ' The Taming of the Shrew ' : —
" The Forest of Arden, which is the chief scene of ' As You Like
It,' he writes, not as a Frenchman or a travelled Englishman would,
* Ardennes,' but Arden, familiar to him as the name of the wood-
land district which in his time extended over a large part of the
county, and still survives in * Henley-in-Arden,' ' Hampton-in-
Arden.' "
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 35
Mr. Dale gives numerous other instances of Warwick-
shire words still in use, A peculiar and almost obsolete
word is " dowle," in the sense of a feather, which it means
in ' The Tempest/
One dowle that 's in my plume.
To " colly " is to blacken, as with a coal, and so in 'A
Midsummer Night's Dream ' we have
Brief as the lightning in the coUied night.
To " make the doors " still means to close them, as in
'As You Like It,' "Make the doors upon a woman's
wit, and it will out at the casement,"
Lastly, a " sheep " is by every Warwickshire farm
servant and by almost every farmer called a " ship," and
" I have no doubt," says Mr. Dale, "that Shakespeare, to
make room for his favourite play on words, intended it
to be so pronounced in ' The Comedy of Errors,' where
Dromio of Syracuse says to Antipholus of Ephesus : —
Why, thou peevish sheep.
What ship of Epidamnum stays for me ?
Many other such instances might be found, and I
venture to ask " (I am still quoting Mr, Dale) " whether
any one of them occurs in Bacon's * Promus ' or in any
other of his writings ? "
I will only mention one more which the writer
of the very interesting article in the * Encyclopaedia
Britannica' (fifth edition), while enlarging on the
evidence the Plays afford of the local influences under
which Shakespeare grew up, instances as found in a
restored line of ' Timon of Athens,'
It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,
rother being an old Anglo-Saxon word for any kind of
horned cattle, which remained in use longer in the
Midlands than in any other part of England. There
was a " Rother Market " at Stratford in Shakespeare's
time.
C 2
36 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
Now I am well aware that these and similar instances
were adduced ten years ago and were met by the asser-
tion that Bacon's universal knowledge made him master
of all provincial dialects and customs.
Be it so. But we are not arguing that the presence
of such Warwickshire provincialisms is proof that the
Plays must have been written by Shakespeare — only
that no argument can be drawn against his having done
so from any absence of such.
Before I leave this part of the subject there is one
passage in the article in the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica '
above quoted so interesting that I must ask my reader's
pardon for stepping aside from my main subject to
quote it : —
" Mr. J. Greene," says the writer of the article in question,
" referring to the moral effects arising from the mixture of races in
the Midland districts, adds, ' It is not without significance that the
highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in
their largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the
depth and energy of the Teutonic temper, was born on the old
border-land in the Forest of Arden ! ' And from the purely critical
side Mr. Matthew Arnold has clearly brought out the same points.
He traces some of the finest qualities of Shakespeare's poetry to
the Celtic spirit which touched his imagination as with the
enchanter's wand, and thus helped to brighten and enrich the
profounder elements of his creative genius."
In the next paragraph Mr, Bucke says that Shake-
speare left London in 1610, adding : " No one pretends
that he wrote any Plays after his retirement into the
country."
The Rev. J. Ward, Vicar of Stratford during the
middle half of the seventeenth century, who, though
not a contemporary, at all events must have had ample
opportunities for learning all the traditions of the place,
records in his diary that Shakespeare supplied the stage
with two Plays a year.
Next, for various assertions concerning the chronology
of some of the Plays Mr. Bucke is not answerable, as he
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 37
Speaks on the authority of the anonymous editors of 'The
Temple Shakespeare.' It is they who must reckon with
Collier, Knight, and others who bring " conclusive evi-
dence " that * Winter's Tale ' was acted at Shakespeare's
own theatre, the Globe, on May 15th, 161 1, in presence
of Dr. Symon Forman, whose curious * Book of Plays
and Notes thereof for common policy ' (whatever that
last phrase may mean) was a few years ago discovered
in the Bodleian Library. It was written in 16 10 and
161 1, and, says Mr. Knight, "distinctly gives the plots of
' Winter's Tale,' ' Macbeth,' and ' Cymbeline,' " proving
that * Cymbeline ' existed several years before 1623.*
Of 'Julius Caesar' it is also said that it was never
heard of before 1623, and though no record of it has as
yet been found, that Ben Jonson made no doubt of its
having been written by Shakespeare we have already
learned from his reference to it in his testimony to
Shakespeare in the * Discoveries.'
My remarks have already run to greater length than I
intended. But there are two portions of the subject in
hand to which I must give a prominent place. I mean
the ' Promus ' and the Sonnets. Some trivial points I
may be excused for passing by, but these two and the
Anagram (the last of the ten arguments) demand
distinct attention.
We will begin with the ' Promus.' This was a
common-place book (the word signifies a storehouse),
and is entitled thus, ' The Promus of Formularies and
Elegancies.' It was begun Christmas, 1 594, and continued
through several years, chiefly, but not entirely, in Bacon's
own handwriting, and containing, says Mr. Bucke, " some
1,700 passages in six different languages, from all sorts
of books, on all sorts of subjects" — proverbs, French and
English, quotations from Virgil, Erasmus, the English
* See introduction to ' Winter's Tale ' and * Cymbeline,' in
Knight's edition of Shakespeare.
38 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
Bible, &c. Sometimes the entries are so seemingly
trivial — now and then only single words — that both
Dean Church and Mr, Spedding conjecture, with great
probability, that they were jotted down as memoranda
to serve as a sort of 7nemoria technica* This curious
collection of heterogeneous material, such as Bacon was
in the habit of making, stands foremost in Mr. Bucke's
plea for the Baconian authorship ; and Mrs. Henry Pott
lays so much stress upon it as evidence, that she published
a costly volume, with illustrations from the Plays, to
prove — as she believed — that the collector of the
' Promus ' and the author of the Plays must be identical.
And not only so, but, as Mr. Bucke sums up the matter
by saying, " the literature of England preceding the
issue of the Plays has been almost exhaustivelyexamined,
and it appears that in almost every instance the ex-
pressions and thoughts found in the ' Promus ' and
transferred to the Plays are new in the language."
It is quite true that there are some very curious
coincidences between the entries in the ' Promus ' and
the Plays — so much so that Dr. Collis, Head Master of
the London School, in his Preface to Mrs. Henry Pott's
edition of the ' Promus,' says some instances lead to the
irresistible conclusion either that both Bacon and
Shakespeare drew from a common source, or that the
one borrowed from the other. Mrs. Henry Pott thinks
the Plays borrowed from the ' Promus ' ; Dr. Collis
that the ' Promus ' borrowed from the Plays.
* This idea of the ' Promus ' is so strikingly illustrated by the
known practice of one of the greater contemporary scholars of
Bacon's own day that the following passage from Mark Pattison's
' Casaubon ' (second edition, p. 428) cannot be omitted : — " He
read pen in hand, with a sheet of paper by his side, on which he
noted much, but wrote out nothing. What he jots down is not a
remark of his own on what he reads, nor is it even the words he
has read ; it is a mark, a key, a catchword, by which the point of
what he has read may be recordeil in memory. The notes are not
notes on the book, but memoranda ^it for his own use."
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 39
The idea that Bacon occasionally borrowed from the
Plays is very applicable to the phrase " Discourse of
Reason," upon which Mr. Bucke lays great stress in his
fifth argument, 'Identical or Similar Expressions.' Bacon
uses it in the * Advancement ' and Shakespeare uses it
in * Hamlet' Now the first specimen portion of the
'Advancement' was published in 1603; and the first
edition of * Hamlet,' also in 1603, was thus entitled :
" The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke
by William Shakespeare, as it hath beene diverse times
acted by His Highnesse servants in the cittie of London,
as also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford."
So that Bacon may have had ample opportunity for
learning the phrase, and transferring it to his own pages.
But a very large proportion of the alleged resemblances
are of the most trivial character, and Mr. Bucke's
assertion that the thoughts and expressions were "in
almost every instance new in the language " is disproved
by the very extracts themselves. " Proverbs " of
necessity embody popular thoughts or words, and the
fact of their being found in the English translations of
the Bible proves the same thing. The earlier ones,
especially, were studiously written " in the spoken
language of the people."
Out of scores of Mrs. Henry Pott's non-sequiturs I
can only quote two or three. I assure the reader they
are typical specimens. In Appendix D, p. 529, Mrs.
Pott says (I copy verbatim) : " The change of colour in
hair by age has only been noticed by Bacon (Nat.
Hist. Cen. IX. 851) and in the Plays of Shakespeare,"
and she gives seven references for " silver " as applied to
head or beard.
The patriarch Jacob seems to have observed the
phenomenon ; nor did it escape the keen observation
of King Solomon or the poetic eye of the prophet
Isaiah. Should the reader's memory fail for refer-
ences, Cruden's ' Concordance/ under ' Gray hairs ' and
40 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
* Hoary head,' will assist him. Nearer to Bacon's
own age, his friend Bishop Andrewes gives evidence of
being aware of it when in his ' Praeces Quotidianse ' he
prays " usque ad canos porta me," " even to hoar hairs
carry me " : but then, to be sure, being on such intimate
terms, Bacon himself may have called the bishop's
attention to it.
Again, in No. 703 of the entries in the ' Promus,
authority apparently of Erasmus : " Wyld thyme in the
grownd hath a sent like a cypresse chest," paralleled by
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows.
'Midsummer Night's Dream,' II. ii.
1603 gives a French proverb — " Joyeuse comme souris
en graine," illustrated — not very obviously to the general
reader — by
Sleep'st thou or wak'st thou, jolly shepherd,
Thy sheep be in the com ;
And for one blast of thy minikin mouth
Thy sheep shall take no harm.
* King Lear,' III. v.
No. 293, "You have," and No. 211, "Cocke," afford
but slight grounds on which to establish identity of
authorship. However, Mrs. Henry Pott thinks it worth
while to give us the following quotations : —
I cannot tell yihaXyou have done — I HAVE.
'Antony and Cleopatra,' II. ii.
And have you (done it) .•'
I have. 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' II. i.
There are four other equally forcible references for the
use of " you " and " have," but these may suffice.
For " cocke " we have quotations from eight Plays,
including ' Hamlet ' and ' Othello.' I select that from
Ariel's song in ' The Tempest,' Act I. sc. ii. : —
Hark, hark ! I hear
The strain of strutting Chanticlere
Cry Cock-a-dowdle-do.
Humbler walks of literature might furnish similar
parallels. There are many nursery rhymes handed down
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 4I
to US from an obscure antiquity which still remain
anonymous. Who shall say but what we may, after all,
be indebted to the great Lord Verulam for
Cock-a-doodle-do,
My dame has lost her shoe,
and for the pathetic story of the kittens who lost their
mittens and incurred their mother's penal sentence —
Then you can have no pie ?
I should like to be serious when such names as Bacon
and Shakespeare are " the theme of our discourse," but
it is really impossible to be serious in the face of such
use of the * Promus ' as the foregoing.
We come now to the Anagram, with some amusement
at the flourish of trumpets with which Mr. Bucke intro-
duces it as the clencher of his argument, and pledge
of literary immortality for Dr. Piatt, of New Jersey, who
discovered it.
This formidable thirteen-syllabled word
" Honorificabilitudinitatibus,"
put into the mouth of Costard the Clown in the Play
of ' Love's Labour Lost,' is the lengthened form of
" Honorificabilitudino," scribbled outside a collection of
papers found at Northumberland House, claimed as
Bacon's property on the sole ground that his masque
' The Conference of Pleasure' is one among other manu-
scripts copied in some clerk's hand. Outside the packet
is the following list, apparently of what were once its
contents, though some are no longer there : —
Richard II. Asmund and Cornelia.
Richard III. Isle of Dogs, by Nash.
Then, over the page,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Neville. Ne vile velis, &c,
and scrawled across it the word given above. But all
this neither proves that the collection was Bacon's
property nor identifies him with Shakespeare more than
42 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
with any of the other writers whose names appear on
the cover.
It is not necessary to enter fully into what Mr, Bucke
calls the history of the word. But we may just mention
that when referring to the scene in ' Love's Labour Lost,'
in which the full word occurs (Act V. sc. i.), he quotes
"Are you not lettered? Yes, yes, he teaches boys
the horn-book. What is a, b, spelt backward, with
the horn on his head?" The answer to that of course
is "Ba, with a horn added." "Now ba," continues
Mr, Bucke, "with a horn added, is Bacornu, which is
not, but suggests, and was probably meant to suggest,
Bacon."
And from another part of the word, also spelt back-
ward, is obtained Bacifironoh, "from which it is not
hard to pick Bacon,"
This precious specimen of ingenious argument leads
up to, and we must do Dr. Piatt the justice to acknow-
ledge is improved upon by the discovery he thinks
himself so fortunate to have made, that the exact
twenty-seven letters of the full word " honorificabilitudi-
nitatibus " would render up hi ludi tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono
nati, a specimen of Latin composition which it would
scarcely have flattered its supposed author to have
fathered upon him, and the English construing is upon
the same linguistic level : These Plays intrusted to them-
selves proceeded from Fr. Bacon. The results of several
well-known anagrams are not only ingenious, but really
very interesting; such, for instance, as the " Cras ero lux "
(" To-morrow I shall be light ") to which Charles L is
said to have given utterance when, on the night before
his execution, his eye fell upon the " Carolus Rex "
inscribed beneath his own portrait at Whitehall ! And
again, "Honor est a Nilo," from Horatio Nelson, and
from "La revolution Fran^aise" "otez le mot veto et
il nous reste Un Corse la finira''' But till it shall be
thought proof of a prophetical spirit in Lord Nelson's
BACON OR SHAKESPEARK ? 43
sponsors, when in answer to " Name this child " they
pronounced a name designedly indicating the battle
destined to win an earldom for the infant then presented
at the font ; or again, of a providentially ordained con-
nexion between the birthplace of the first Napoleon and
the anagram just quoted. Dr. Piatt and his admiring
friends must excuse us from accepting " Honorificabili-
tudinitatibus " for authentic evidence as to the author-
ship of the Plays.
THE SONNETS.
Lastly, having to his own satisfaction disposed of the
Plays, Mr. Bucke proceeds to confiscate some more of
Shakespeare's literary property for his hero's benefit.
But, indeed, there seem to be no bounds to the belief in
Bacon's powers, time, and opportunity for literary pro-
duction. Mr. Donnelly and Mrs. Windle claim for him
the authorship of Montaigne's ' Essays,' Mr. Theobald of
Marlowe's plays, while Mrs. Henry Pott and Mr. Bucke
quietly assume the Sonnets* also to be his, without an
attempt to show cause for so doing.
In curious contrast to the taste of a former age, when
Thomas Steevens omitted the Sonnets from his edition of
Shakespeare's works, on the ground that the strongest
Act of Parliament would fail to compel readers into
their service (!), Mr. Bucke falls into rhapsodies over
"those little lakes of purest, most setherial beauty,
those exquisite Psalms of the most profound spirituality."
Though far as may be from sharing Thomas Steevens's
sentiment in the matter, I own I stop short of this last
phrase. But to attribute them to Bacon !
The Sonnets ! the original edition of which bore
* Mr. Theobald assigns these — at least mainly — to Sir Philip
Sidney, who never put in any claim to them himself, nor was any
trace of them found among: his papers so carefully collected and
published by his sister, the famous " Sidney's sister, Pembroke's
mother," of Ben Jonson's epitaph. But these are trifling difficulties
to modern criticism.
44 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
Shakespeare's name on the title-page * which contain the
writer's own wail over his position and calling (cxi.J : —
Oh, for my sake do thou with Fortune chide,
The guihy Goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means — which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
And let no one fancy that the " brand " can refer to the
charges under which Bacon came to dishonour. In 1609,
the date of the first publication of the Sonnets, Bacon
was high in royal and popular favour, and not till twelve
years later did that shadow fall on his great name.
And the language of some other of the sonnets, as
XCIII. and XCIV., while intelligible enough as addressed
by a man in Shakespeare's position to a noble friend and
patron, even though his junior in years, is ludicrously
inappropriate from Sir Francis Bacon — high in office,
moving in the same Court circles with the Earl of
Southampton, or whosoever it were to whom they were
addressed : —
Oh ! if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse ;
But let your love even with my life decay ;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Or, again, could Bacon in lighter mood possibly have
played upon the name of " Will," emphasized by italics,
in three several Sonnets ? As thus : —
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will.
And will to boot and will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
* " Shakespeare's Sonnets — Never before imprinted. At London
by G. W. for T. T. and are to be sold by John Wright dwelling at
Christchurch Gate. 1609."
BACON OR SHAKESPEARE? 45
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine ?
Shall will in others seem right gracious.
And in my will no fair acceptance shine ?
*****
So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will
One will of mine, to make thy large will more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill ;
Think all but one and me in that one Will.
Sonnet cxxxv.
And again in one of them (cxxxvi.) three times, thus :
If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will.
# « * # *
Thus far for love my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love.
« * * * *
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lov'st me - for my name is Will.
In the two concluding paragraphs in which, in the
most inflated language, Mr. Bucke sums up his homage
to Francis Bacon, he can speak of him as the " almost
Godlike and inspired man reported to us by Jonson,"
and " set forth by Spedding after a lifetime's study."
But he does not tell us that this same Ben Jonson wrote
of William Shakespeare as the man he "loved and
honoured this side idolatry as much as any," and he
willingly forgets that Spedding's thirty years' study of
Francis Bacon resulted in his treating the idea of his
having written the Plays as an intellectual impossibility.
He says : —
" Nature is always individual. I doubt whether there are five lines
together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shake-
speare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for
Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles, and
practised in such observations."
And now one question in conclusion I cannot forbear
asking before I close my plea in character of counsel for
the defendant.
46 BACON OR SHAKESPEARE?
If William Shakespeare were indeed the "vulgar,
commonplace, illiterate fellow " some would have us
believe, how came Bacon to fix upon him, of all men in
the world, to stand sponsor for works of the highest
dramatic merit ? How was Shakespeare able, through-
out his whole life, to pass himself off among his contem-
poraries as the author, not of the Plays only, but of the
' Venus and Adonis ' and the ' Lucrece' (published in his
lifetime with his name in their title-pages) and of the
Sonnets ? How came he to be in favour with Queen
Elizabeth and King James ? How was it that, neither
among the friends of Bacon on the one side, nor his own
theatrical partners and boon companions on the other,
no suspicion ever arose — no hint ever transpired — that
all his attributed literary fame was an absurd fiction,
utterly out of keeping with all that was known of him ?
How came his fellow townsmen, after his death, to show
their pride in him by erecting a monument to his memory,
whereon his title to literary fame is symbolized by the
pen in his right hand and the scroll in his left ?
These questions I leave others to answer, while for a
final judicial verdict on the two men whose names have
been put forth as rival claimants for the poet's crown,
I gladly avail myself of better and more trustworthy
words than my own, by adopting those in which Dean
Church, when eulogizmg Bacon, practically passes judg-
ment on Shakespeare also. After relating the time and
manner of Bacon's death, he says : —
" So he died, the brightest, richest, largest mind but
one, in the age which had seen Shakespeare and his
fellows ; so bright and rich and large that there have
been found those who identify him with the writer of
' Hamlet' and 'Othello,' That is idle. Bacon could no
more have written the Plays than Shakespeare could
have prophesied the triumphs of natural Philosophy."
FINIS.
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