A=S A— o — s ^ ^i^^^ m ==^5 '-' ■ z 1 ^^3) — — o 4^si 3^? *♦• i 2939 M3 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"adace 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. ^ / LONDON : PRINTED BY JOHN EDWARD FRANCIS, ATHEN^UM PRESS, BREAM's BUILDINGS, E.G. 3 1205 00562 7920 A W 2 1 1 THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. j i ■ 1 nitnnu « 1 } 1 1 I 1 1 1 • ■ f-