UC-NRLF 
 
 B 3 SbH fiSS 
 
Shakespeare 
 
 OR 
 
 Bacon \ 
 
 ? 
 
 SIR THEODORE MARTIN, K.C.B, 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
A 
 
 
SHAKESPEAKE OE BACON? 
 
SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 SIR THEODOEE MAETIN, K.C.B. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM ' BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE ' 
 WITH ADDITIONS 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD A:ND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCLXXXVIII 
 
f32f 
 
 SHAKESPEAEE OE BACON? 
 
 " How one starts at the conjunction of the names of 
 Bacon and Shakespeare ! And how strange it seems 
 that no other than a casual conjunction of their names 
 should seem to exist, or should yet have been dis- 
 covered ! " So wrote Sir Henry Taylor (27th August 
 1870) to Mr James Spedding, adding an expression of 
 his surprise that two of the world's greatest men should 
 have lived at the same time and in the same city 
 without to all appearance having known each other, 
 or " leaving some mark and token of the knowledge." 
 In his reply, four days afterwards, Mr Spedding says : 
 " I see nothing surprising in the fact — for I take it to 
 be a fact — that Bacon knew nothing about Shakespeare, 
 and that he knew nothing of Bacon except his political 
 writings and his popular reputation as a rising lawyer, 
 of which there is no reason to suppose that he was 
 
 A 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 ignorant. Why should Bacon have known more of 
 Shakespeare than you do of Mark Lemon, or Planche, 
 or Morton ? , . . I have no reason to think that 
 Bacon had ever seen or read anything of Shakespeare's 
 composition. * Venus and Adonis ' and the ' Eape of 
 Lucrece ' are the most likely ; but one can easily 
 imagine his reading them, and not caring to read any- 
 thing else by the same hand." ^ 
 
 The study of a lifetime, devoted with enthusiasm to 
 a scrutiny of the writings and character of Bacon, and 
 guided by the light of a fine critical faculty and a 
 profound acquaintance with not only Shakespeare but 
 with every great English writer of the era of Elizabeth 
 and James, gives to these words of Mr Spedding a 
 weight beyond that of any writer of mark who has 
 dealt with this question before or since. No one can 
 say of him, that he did not know the literary character- 
 istics of both Bacon and Shakespeare with all conceiv- 
 able thoroughness. Neither can it be questioned, that 
 he of all men is entitled to speak with authority not 
 only of what Bacon could do or could not do as an 
 author, but also of what was possible for him to have 
 done, consistently with the occupations and necessities 
 of his life. This being so, when he states his convic- 
 
 ^ Sir Henry Taylor's Correspondence, pp. 306, 307. London : 1888. 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 3 
 
 tioii that in all probability Bacon never read, nor even 
 cared to read, the poems and dramas ascribed to Shake- 
 speare, the mass of intelligent and cultivated students 
 of our great poet will be disposed to adopt his opinion 
 as conclusive. Who so likely as he to know what were 
 Bacon's gifts, what his literary tastes, or to find in his 
 austere and unemotional temperament no affinity to, 
 or even sympathy with, the genius to which we owe the 
 poems and the dramas which, as time has proved, were 
 the noblest outcome of the literary activity of his age ? 
 Nevertheless a creed directly at variance with that 
 of Mr Spedding has sprung up in these last years. Its 
 adherents, if not numerous, are at all events energetic, 
 and so adventurous in assertion that they have created 
 uneasiness in the minds of many who, loving Shake- 
 speare, have yet never made themselves familiar with 
 the ascertained facts of his life. To brmg these facts 
 and the general argument as to his right to the author- 
 ship — acknowledged in his lifetime, and ever since — 
 shortly before readers of this class, seemed not unde- 
 sirable, enabling them, as it will do, to justify the faith 
 that is in them as to the Shakespearian authorship of 
 the poems, the sonnets, and the plays. For very many, 
 such an essay is of course superfluous ; and the 
 Baconian heresy, they may think, might well be 
 
SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 allowed to wear itself out, like other heresies, from 
 inherent weakness. But there is a large class who, 
 having no foundation for their belief but inherited tra- 
 dition, will not be sorry to learn on how sure a basis 
 that belief may be rested. For them the following 
 pages are written. 
 
 Bacon, in his second and last will, dated 19th De- 
 cember 1625, made an appeal to the charitable judg- 
 ment of after times in these words — " For my name 
 and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches, 
 and to foreign notions, and the next ages." He might 
 well do so. The doubtful incidents of a shifty and in 
 some particulars by no means exemplary life he might 
 fairly suppose would be but little known to foreign 
 nations and to men of future centuries. Time, to use 
 his own words in a letter to Sir Humphrey May in 
 1625, would "have turned envy to pity;" and what 
 was blameworthy in his life would, in any case, be 
 judged lightly by posterity, in their gratitude for the 
 treasures of profound observation and thought with 
 which his name would be identified. " It is reason," as 
 he writes in his essay " Of Nobility," that " the memory 
 of men's virtues remain to their posterity, and their 
 
SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 faults die with themselves." Bacon died a few months 
 after making his will, on the 9th of April 1626. 
 
 'No author probably ever set greater store upon the 
 produce of his brain, or was at more pains to see that 
 it was neither mangled nor misrepresented by careless 
 printing or editing. Neither is there the slightest 
 reason to believe that he did not take good care, — nay, 
 on the contrary, that he was not at especial pains to 
 ensure, — that the world sliould be informed of every- 
 thing he had written, which he deemed worthy to be 
 preserved. Observe what care he took of his writings 
 in the sentences of his will next to those above quoted. 
 " As to that durable part of my memory, which consisteth 
 in my luorhs and writings, I desire my executors, and 
 especially Sir John Constable and my very good friend 
 Mr Bosville, to take care that of all my writings, both 
 of English and of Latin, there may be books fair bound, 
 and placed in the King's library, and in the library of the 
 University of Cambridge, and in the library of Trinity 
 College, where myself was bred, and in the library 
 of the University of Oxonford, and in the library of 
 my Lord of Canterbury, and in the library of Eaton." ^ 
 
 Two years before Bacon made his final will, the first 
 or 1623 folio of Shakespeare's plays was published, 
 
 ^ Spedding's Life and Lettei's of Bacon, vol. vii. p. 539. 
 
6 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 with the followmg title-page : " Mr William Shake- 
 speare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies; Published 
 according to the True Originall Copies. London : Printed 
 hy Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount. 1623." It was a 
 portly volume of nearly a thousand pages, and must 
 have taken many months, probably the best part of a 
 year, to set up in types and get printed off. The 
 printing of similar folios in those days was marked by 
 anything but exemplary accuracy. But this volume 
 abounds to such excess in typographical flaws of every 
 kind, that the only conclusion in regard to it which 
 can be drawn is, that the printing was not superin- 
 tended by any one competent to discharge the duty of 
 the printing-house "reader" of the present day, but 
 was suffered to appear with " all the imperfections on 
 its head," which distinguish "proof-sheets" as tliey 
 issue from the hands of careless or illiterate composi- 
 tors. Most clearly the proof-sheets of this volume had 
 never been read by any man of literary skill, still less 
 by any man capable of rectifying a blundered text. 
 In this respect the book offers a marked contrast to the 
 text of Bacon's Works, printed in his own time, which 
 were revised and re-revised till they were brouglit up 
 to a finished perfection.^ 
 
 ^ lu partial proof of this, it is only necessary to refer to the Notes 
 appended by Mr Aldis Wright to his admirable edition of the Essays, 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 Down to the year 1856 the world was content to 
 accept as truth the statement of the folio of 1623, that 
 it contained the plays of Mr William Shakespeare " ac- 
 cording to the true original copies." To the two pre- 
 ceding centuries and a half the marvel of Shakespeare's 
 genius had been more or less vividly apparent. His 
 contemporaries had acknowledged it ; and as the years 
 went on, and under reverent study that marvel became 
 more deeply felt, men were content to find the solution 
 of it in the fact, that the birth of these masterpieces of 
 dramatic writing was due — only in a higher degree — to 
 the same heaven-sent inspiration to which great sculp- 
 tors, painters, warriors, and statesmen owe their pre- 
 eminence. How often has it been seen that men of 
 genius, without the long and painful culture of school 
 teaching, have, amid the bustle of active life, by pro- 
 miscuous reading, by intercourse with their fellow-men, 
 by quick and almost unconscious intuition, acquired 
 with marvellous ease great stores of knowledge, which 
 they have brought to bear upon and to illustrate the 
 conceptions of their imagination and fancy ! Knowing 
 this, men would not set a limit to " the gifts that God 
 gives," or see anything more strange in the prodigality 
 
 published by Macmillan & Co. in 1862. So sensitive about accuracy and 
 finish was Bacon, that he transcribed, altering as he wrote, his ' Novum 
 Organum ' twelve, and his ' Advancement of Leai-ning ' seven times. 
 
SHAKESPEABE OE BACOX ? 
 
 of power in obserradoii; in feeling, in hnmoor, in 
 thoogbt, and in e3:pressi<m, as shown by the son of 
 the Scratford-on-Avon wool-stapler, than in the kin- 
 dred manifestations of genius in men as lowlr bom, 
 and as little faYoored in point of education as he, of 
 which Inographical records famish conntless instances.^ 
 But in 1856, or thereabouts, a new light dawned 
 upon certain people, to whom the wars of genius were 
 a stumbling-block. The plavs, ther conceived, could 
 not have been written br a man of lowly origin, of 
 scanty education, a struggling actor, who had the 
 presaic riitue of looking carefully after his pounds, 
 shillings, and pence, and who, moreover, was content 
 to retire, in the fulness of his fame, with a moderate 
 competence, to the small country town where he was 
 bora, and to leave his plays to shift for themselves 
 with posterity, in seemingly perfect indifference whether 
 they were printed or not printed, remembered or buried 
 
 I Fc«- example, — Giotto, a shqihezd bov; Lecoanio da Yioci, the 
 illegitimate sod of a oommon notary ; Ihriowe, the son of a shoonaker; 
 Boi JouBon, poethnmoos son of a dogyman, bat broaght ap br a 
 bricUayer stqifatiter ; Haasmgw, tiie sod of a nobleoian's serrant ; 
 Burns, the sod of a small fanna- ; Keats, an apothecary's a^^mntke, 
 and the SOD of a liTery-staUe-keepor ; Turno-, a barbo-'s sod. Tbe 
 list may be extmded indefinitely of moi vbcs with all external odds 
 agamst them, hare triumphed far beyond those who bad all these odds 
 in their favour. 
 
SHAKESPEARE OE BACON ? 
 
 in oblivion. This virtue of modesty and carelessness 
 of fame is so unlike the characteristic of " the mob 
 of gentlemen who write with ease," at all times, and 
 especially in these our days — it is so hard to be under- 
 stood by people possessed by small literary ambitions, 
 that it was natural it shoxdd be regarded by them as 
 utterly incomprehensible. So they set themselves to 
 look elsewhere for the true author. Shakespeare lived 
 amid a crowd of great dramatic writers — Peele, Mar- 
 lowe, Greene, Jonson, Dekker, Lyly, Marston, Chapman, 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, and others. But we 
 know their works ; and to ascribe " Othello," " Macbeth," 
 " Eomeo and Juliet," " Julius C£esar," " King Lear," or 
 the other great plays, to any of them, would have been 
 ridiculous. Outside this circle, therefore, the search 
 had to be made; but outside it there was no choice. 
 Only Francis Bacon towered pre-eminently above his 
 literary contemporaries. He, and he only, therefore, 
 could have written the immortal dramas ! And so the 
 world was called upon to forego its old belief in the 
 marvel that one man had written Shakespeare's plays, 
 and to adopt a creed which implied a marvel far greater 
 still, adding these plays as it did to the other massive 
 and voluminous acknowledged works of Francis, Lord 
 Verulam — in themselves enough, and more than enough. 
 
10 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 to have absorbed the leisure and exhausted the energies 
 of the most vigorous intellect. The great jurist, states- 
 man, philosopher, and natural historian of his age was, 
 according to this new doctrine, also the greatest di'ama- 
 tist of any age ! 
 
 Who has the merit of being first in the field with 
 this astounding discovery is not very clear. America 
 claims to have been first in the person of Mr J. C. 
 Hart, who, in his book ' The Romance of Yachting,' 
 published at New York in 1848, is said to have 
 thrown a doubt on Shakespeare's authorship. Eng- 
 land, however, was not far behind; for in Septem- 
 ber 1856, a Mr William Henry Smith propounded 
 similar doubts in a letter to Lord Ellesmere, sometime 
 President of the then Shakespeare Society, which, as 
 the copy before us bears, was modestly printed for 
 private circulation. Mr Smith had really little else to 
 say for his theory beyond his own personal impression 
 that Shakespeare, by birth, education, and pursuits, was 
 not the kind of man to write the plays ; while Bacon 
 had " all the necessary qualifications — a mind well 
 stored by study and enlarged by travel, with a com- 
 prehensive knowledge of nature, men, and books." 
 But if Bacon wrote the plays, why did he not say so ? 
 Mr Smith's answer to this very obvious question was 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 11 
 
 the wholly gratuitous assumption, that to have been 
 known to write plays, or to have business relations 
 with actors, would have been ruinous to Bacon's pros- 
 pects at the Bar and in Parliament; and that, being 
 driven into the avocation of dramatist by the necessity 
 of eking out his income, he got Shakespeare to lend his 
 name as a blind to the real authorship ! To be a great 
 dramatic w^riter, and yet to go through life without 
 being suspected of the gifts that go to make one, would 
 to ordinary minds seem to be as impossible as to be 
 born witli the genius of a Phidias or a Titian, and not 
 to show it. But such a thing as the irrepressible im- 
 pulse of dramatic genius to find expression in its only 
 possible medium is not even suggested by Mr Smith as 
 among Bacon's motives. He claims for him, indeed, 
 " great dramatic talent," on the strength of the very 
 flimsy masques and pageants in which Bacon is known 
 to have had a share, and of some vague record, 
 that " he could assume the most different characters, 
 and speak the language proper to each with a facility 
 which was perfectly natural" — a gift which might 
 have produced a Charles Matthews, senior, and is in 
 itself by no means uncommon, but wdiich would go 
 but a very little way towards the invention of a single 
 scene of even the weakest of the Shakespearian plays. 
 
1 2 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ? 
 
 Strangely enough, Mr Smith, unable apparently to 
 foresee to what his argument led, appealed to the first 
 folio in proof of his assumption. " Bacon," he writes, 
 " was disgraced in 1621, and immediately set himself 
 to collect and revise his literary works." " Imme- 
 diately " is rather a strong assertion, but he no doubt 
 very soon busied himself in literary and scientific work. 
 He finished his ' Life of Henry VII.,' and set to work 
 upon the completion and translation into Latin of his 
 ' Advancement of Learning,' which appeared in October 
 1623 as ' De Augmentis Scieutiarum.' ^ In the same 
 year he published his ' History of the Winds ' and his 
 ' Treatise on Death and Life.' At this time, as his 
 correspondence proves, he was busy with anything but 
 poetry or play-books.^ In March 1622 he offered to 
 draw up a digest of the law, a project which he had 
 long cherished, and showed the greatest anxiety to get 
 
 ^ " Modern language will, at one time or another," he wrote to Mr 
 Tobie Matthews in June 1623, " play the bankrupt with book.s ; and 
 since I have lost much time with this age, I shall be glad, as God will 
 give me leave, to recover it with posterity." Surely this is about the 
 very last thought that would be uppermost in a mind that had con- 
 ceived such plays as Shakespeare's, and was then passing, or had just 
 passed, the first folio through the press. 
 
 - As to how Bacon was occupied in 1 622, see his letter to the Bishop 
 of Winchester, Speddiug's ' Life and Works of Bac<jn,' vol. vii. p. 371 
 et seq., and his letter to Father Redeniptor IJaranzano (ibid., p. 375 ct 
 seq.) 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 13 
 
 back into active political life. He was, moreover, in 
 wretched health, but at the same time intent on 
 making progress with his 'Instauratio Magna,' with 
 all the eagerness of a man who feared that his life 
 would be cut short before he could accomplish the 
 chief object of his ambition. All his occupations 
 during 1622-23, during which the first Shakespeare 
 folio was at press, are thus fully accounted for. 
 
 " But," continues Mr Smith, " in 1623 a foho of thirty- 
 six plays (including some, and excluding others, which 
 had always been reputed Shakespeare's) was published." 
 And then he asks, in the triumphant emphasis of italics, 
 " Who but the author himself could have exercised this 
 power of discrimination ? " As if the researches of 
 Shakespearian students had not demonstrated to a cer- 
 tainty, that one of the chief defects of the folio was 
 the absence of this very " power of discrimination," 
 which, if duly exercised, would, besides giving us a 
 sound text, have shown which of these plays were all 
 Shakespeare's, and which had only been worked up 
 into their present form, upon the slight or clumsy 
 fabric of some inferior hand. 
 
 It is characteristic of tlie inexact and illogical kind 
 of mind which had persuaded itself of the soundness 
 of a theory based on such trivial data, that Mr Smith 
 
14 SHAKESPEARE OK BACON? 
 
 accepted without verification the " remarkable words," 
 as he calls them, to be found in Bacon's will. " My 
 name and memory I leave to foreign nations ; and to 
 my own countrymen, after some time he passed over," 
 — language which, it may be presumed, in the light of 
 the use which has since been made of it, was held by 
 Mr Smith to point to some revelation of great work 
 done by Bacon, which should be divulged to the world, 
 " after some time had passed over." Unluckily for 
 this theory, the words in italics do not exist in the 
 will.^ Nevertheless, followers in Mr Smith's wake 
 have found them so convenient for their theory, that 
 they repeat the misquotation, and ignore the actual 
 words of Bacon's last will, to which reference has 
 already been made. 
 
 Mr Smith seems never to have perceived that, if 
 Bacon were indeed the author of the plays, and re- 
 vised the first folio, or, as we should say, saw it through 
 the press, he was guilty of inconceivable carelessness in 
 letting it go forth with thousands of mortal blunders in 
 the text, " the least a death " to prosody, poetry, and 
 
 ^ Bacou made two wills, one in 1621 after his impeachment, and one 
 in 1625 ; but in neither do the words quoted in italics appear. The 
 words of the will of 1621 are, " I bequeath my name to the next ages 
 and to foreign nations." 
 
SHAKESPEAKE OE BACON? 15 
 
 sound printing.^ The man, in short, who rewrote and 
 retouched over and over even so relatively small a book 
 as his Essays, was content to leave innumerable blun- 
 ders in passages of the finest poetry and the choicest 
 humour in all literature ! What wonder if Shake- 
 spearian scholars, indeed the world generally, met the 
 preposterous assumption with the words of Horace — 
 
 " Quodcunque ostendis milii sic, incredulus odi " ! 
 
 Neither were they disposed to alter their opinion, 
 when America in the same year, 1856, sent forth an 
 apostle to preach the same new doctrine in the person of 
 a Miss Delia Bacon, to whom years of study of Shake- 
 speare's works had revealed in them " a continuous 
 inner current of the philosophy of Sir Walter Ealeigh, 
 and the imperishable thoughts of Lord Bacon." This 
 was Miss Bacon's first opinion. It seems to have been 
 modified when she came to grapple more closely with 
 the subject in a portentous volume of 582 pages 
 octavo — ' The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare 
 Unfolded, 1857 ' — in which, dropping Sir Walter Ealeigh 
 out of the discussion, she ascribed the whole honour and 
 glory of the thirty-seven plays to her namesake. Poor 
 
 1 The typographical errors alone have been computed to amount to 
 nearly 20,000. 
 
16 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 Miss Bacon died a victim to her owu belief. She had 
 pondered over it until her brain gave way, and she 
 went to her grave possessed by her monomania. Of 
 course she had followers. What crazy enthusiast has 
 not ? for there is a charm to a certain order of minds 
 in running counter to the established creeds of ordinary 
 mortals. Her mantle was not suffered to fall neglected. 
 She was quickly succeeded by a more vigorous, but 
 even more long-winded preacher of the same doctrine, 
 in Judge Nathaniel Holmes of Kentucky, who spent 
 696 octavo pages in demonstrating that Shakespeare 
 was utterly incapable of writing either poetry or plays, 
 being nothing but an illiterate stroller, who could 
 scarcly write his own name, who had no ambition but 
 to make money, and was not very scrupulous as to how 
 he made it; while Bacon was endowed with every 
 quality, natural and acquired, which was requisite for 
 the composition of the famous plays. Like Mr Smith, 
 Judge Holmes deals largely in assumptions — such, for 
 example, as that "it is historically known that Lord 
 Bacon wrote plays and poems." How " historically 
 known " he does not say, as neither by his contempo- 
 raries nor by the collectors of Elizabethan and Jaco- 
 bean poetry is he credited with that faculty. He left 
 behind him, it is true, a frost-bitten metrical version of 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 17 
 
 seven of the Psalms, written within a year or two of his 
 death, which scarcely rises to the Sternhold and Hopkins 
 level, published, when he was quite broken in health, in 
 1624 ; and one small poem, " The Eetired Courtier," not 
 witliout beauty, and a paraphrased translation from the 
 Greek, have also been assigned to him on doubtful 
 authority.^ 
 
 Very different from the doctrine of Mr Holmes was 
 the view taken by Mr James Speddiug, who, by his fine 
 literary taste and deep study of Shakespeare, as well as 
 by the intimate knowledge of Bacon's mind and modes 
 of thought and expression gained in editing his works, 
 was entitled, as already said, to speak upon the subject 
 with authority. Judge Holmes had courted his judg- 
 ment, and this was his answer : — 
 
 " To ask me to believe that Bacon was the author of these 
 plays, is like asking me to believe that Lord Brougham was 
 the author, not only of Dickens's works, but of Thackeray's 
 and Tennyson's besides. That the author of 'Pickwick' 
 was Charles Dickens I know upon no better authority than 
 that upon which I know that the author of ' Hamlet ' was a 
 man called William Shakespeare. And in what respect is 
 the one more difficult to believe than the other ? ... If 
 
 1 In the Appendix (p. 63) will be found specimens of these Psalms, 
 and also the only poems which have heen assumed, but never proved, 
 to have been written by Bacon. 
 
 B 
 
18 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 you had fixed upon anybody else rather than Bacon as the 
 true author — anybody of whom I know nothing — I should 
 have been scarcely less incredulous, liut if there were any 
 reason for supposing that the real author was somebody else, 
 I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it 
 was not Francis Bacon. The difficulties which such a sup- 
 position would involve would be innumerable and altogether 
 insurmountable." ^ 
 
 Such a judgment from such a man is death to all 
 the arguments drawn by Mr Holmes and others from 
 fanciful parallelisms or analogies between passages in 
 Bacon's writings and passages in the Shakespeare 
 dramas. No man in England or elsewhere was more 
 thoroughly conversant than Mr Spedding with the 
 works of both Bacon and Shakespeare, or more capable 
 of bringing a sound critical judgment to bear upon the 
 distinctive literary qualities of each. But even if this 
 were not so, it is notorious that arguments of this sort, 
 frequently resorted to as they are to support charges of 
 plagiarism, are utterly deceptive. Great ideas are the 
 common property of great minds, especially if, being 
 contemporaries, the men who clothe them in words are 
 living in the same general atmosphere of thought and 
 daily u^ing the same vocabulary. How, indeed, should 
 
 ^ 'Authorship of Shakespeare,' by N. Hchne.s, ed. 1886, vol. ii., 
 Ai)p., pp. G13, 617. 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 19 
 
 it be otherwise ? The same incidents, the same pheno- 
 mena, the same conditions of social development, the 
 same human characteristics, are daily and hourly fur- 
 nishing to them the same stimulus to their imagina- 
 tion, the same materials for thought. Literary history 
 does undoubtedly present some remarkable instances of 
 authors expressing the same feeling or the same thought 
 in closely analogous language. But we venture to say 
 that every competent judge who will so " slander his 
 leisure " as to wade through the so-called parallelisms 
 cited by Miss Bacon, Mr Holmes, Mr Smith, Mrs Pott, 
 and other victims of the Baconian delusion, will come 
 to the conclusion that they are mostly far-fetched and 
 not unfrequently overstrained to the point of absurdity. 
 It would be quite as reasonable to maintain on such 
 evidence that Bacon borrowed from Shakespeare, as 
 that Shakespeare and Bacon were one. 
 
 It is obviously essential for the Baconians to set out 
 with the assumption that Shakespeare was an illiterate 
 boor. They say as much as that he was so from the 
 first and remained so to the last, and say it in language 
 extravagant and coarse in proportion to the utter reck- 
 lessness of assumption from which it springs. He was 
 a butcher's boy, they tell us ; he could only have been 
 some two years at school; he was a sordid money- 
 
20 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 lender ; and so completely had his nature become, 
 " like the dyer's hand, subdued to what it [had once] 
 worked in," that when he returned, at near fifty, to 
 Stratford, he resumed with delight the trade of butcher, 
 wool - stapler, and usurer. The ascertained facts of 
 Shakespeare's life are few. Still some facts there are 
 which cannot be disputed, and which give the lie to 
 this scandalous assumption. 
 
 Shakespeare came of a good stock on both father 
 and mother's side. They held a good position in Strat- 
 ford, and if at a later period they became poor, they 
 were undoubtedly in easy circumstances during the 
 boyhood of Shakespeare. There was in Stratford an 
 excellent grammar-school, to which they were certain 
 to have sent their son, when he reached the age, about 
 six, at which boys were usually entered there. "What 
 the course of study pursued at this and similar schools 
 was is well known, and was pointed out in an admirable 
 series of papers by the late Professor Spencer Baynes 
 on " What Shakespeare learnt at School " in ' Fraser's 
 Magazine' in 1879-80.^ It was very much the same 
 as that of the Edinburgh High School in the days of 
 our youth, and brought a boy up, by the time he 
 
 ' The subject was again treated by Mr Baynes in his masterly paper 
 on Shakespeare in the last edition of the * EncyclopEedia Britannica,' 
 
SHAKESPEARE OE BACON? 21 
 
 reached the age of twelve, to the reading of such 
 writers as Ovid, Cicero, and Virgil in Latin, and the 
 New Testament and some of the orators and tragedians 
 in Greek. To send their children to the school was 
 within the means of all but the poorest, which John 
 Shakespeare and Mary Arden unquestionably were 
 not ; and all that is known of them justifies the 
 conclusion that it is inconceivable they should have 
 allowed their son to want any advantage common to 
 boys of his class. Every presumption is in favour of 
 the view that they would not be behind their neigh- 
 bours in a matter of this sort. John Shakespeare, a 
 leading burgess, who had held high office in the local 
 government of Stratford, would never have exposed 
 himself to the reproach of his fellow-townsmen for 
 neglecting the education of his children. Desperate, 
 indeed, are the straits to which the Baconian theorists 
 are driven, when, without a particle of evidence, they 
 deny to Shakespeare the advantages within the reach 
 of the sons of the humblest householder in Stratford. 
 
 The next clearly ascertained fact which bears upon 
 this part of the question is the publication of the 
 "Venus and Adonis," when Shakespeare was in his 
 twenty-ninth year. Only in the previous year does 
 he come clearly into notice as a rising dramatist 
 
22 SHAKESPEARE OR BACOX ? 
 
 and poet, there being, as admitted by his best bio- 
 grapher, Mr Halliwell-Phillips,^ nothing known of his 
 liistory between liis twenty -third and twenty -eighth 
 year, — an interval that Mr Halliwell-Phillips very 
 reasonably considers " must have been the chief period 
 of Shakespeare's literary education," which, when he 
 left Stratford, could not, he thinks, have been other- 
 wise than imperfect. 
 
 Imperfect truly it might be, as indeed, in a certain 
 sense, of what education can it be said that it is not 
 imperfect ? But who can doubt that between the 
 age of fourteen, when Shakespeare's schooling pro- 
 bably came to an end, and the time he went to London, 
 he was imbibing stores of observation and knowledge 
 at every pore, not from books only, but from the men 
 and women round him, from the sights and sounds of a 
 
 ^ Let us here acknowledge the debt that all students of Shakesjieare 
 owe to Mr J. 0. Halliwell-Phillips for the invaluable information which 
 he has brought together in the two volumes of his ' Outlines of the 
 Life of Shakespeare,' of which the sixth edition, published by Alessrs 
 Longmans in 1886, contains every ascertained fact concerning Shake- 
 speare, his familj', fortune, and pursuits. The book is a model of 
 painstaking inquiry, and contains no conclusions that are not based 
 upon judicial proof. We are not aware whether Mr Halliwell-Pliillips 
 has published his views upon the Shakesi)eare-Bacou controversy ; but 
 that he regards the proposition that Bacon wrote the plays, and the 
 arguments on which it is founded, as " lunacy," we have direct means 
 of knowing. 
 
SHAKESPEARE OK BACON? 23 
 
 country life, and from the impulses that come to a 
 thouglitful and poetic mind in the solitude of its quiet 
 hours. Then it was, no doubt, that he grew familiar 
 with the woods, the brooks, the streams, the flowers, 
 the legends, the quaint local phrases, the songs, the 
 oddities of character, the sense of maidenly and 
 matronly charm, the visions of higher and better 
 things, that enrich the dreams of young imagination, 
 and which were afterwards to fill his pages with a 
 boundless wealth of suggestion and of illustration. 
 Then, too, he would be learning to apply this know- 
 ledge to what he had gathered from his favourite 
 books. This would be the time, in short, when he 
 was "making himself," as it was said of Sir Walter 
 Scott that he did, in the days before the Wizard of 
 the North revealed his magic to the world in the 
 poems and the novels which after middle age he 
 poured out in marvellous profusion. 
 
 Such, we know, was the view taken by Professor 
 Baynes, whose experience had satisfied him how true 
 it is, that it is not at school but by his own self-im- 
 posed studies afterwards that a man is educated, and 
 who so far differs from Mr Halliwell- Phillips as to 
 maintain, that before Shakespeare left Stratford he had 
 probably written the " Venus and Adonis," quoting in 
 
24 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 support of his view the language of the dedication to 
 the Earl of Southampton, in which Shakespeare speaks 
 of it as " the first heir of his invention." It might 
 be so, for Shakespeare was twenty-one when he was 
 forced to leave Stratford ; and, weighted although the 
 " Venus and Adonis " is with thought as well as pas- 
 sion, the genius which produced the dramas might 
 even at that early age have conceived and written it. 
 But however this may be, the poem shows a know- 
 ledge of what Ovid had written upon the same theme, 
 in a poem of which there existed at that time no Eng- 
 lish translation, which could not have been accidental, 
 any more than the language in which that knowledge 
 was expressed could have been within the command of 
 an uneducated man. Moreover, that Shakespeare knew 
 Latin, when or however acquired matters little, is 
 conclusively proved by his placing as motto upon the 
 title-page the following lines from 0\ad's Elegies, the 
 very selection of which showed that, at this early date, 
 he set the calling of a poet above all ordinary objects 
 of ambition : — 
 
 " Vilia mu'etur vulgus ; mibi flaviis Apollo 
 Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua." 
 
 May it not also be fairly argued, from the very selec- 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 25 
 
 tion of the subject, as well as from the manner in which 
 it is treated, that the youthful poet's mind had already 
 caught the classical tone, which he could only have 
 done through a considerable familiarity with some at 
 least of the Latin writers ? When we remember what 
 Keats was able to do in his " Ode to a Grecian Urn " 
 and his " Hyperion," despite his " small Latin and less 
 Greek," it is no wonder if Shakespeare turned his limited 
 knowledge of these languages to the excellent account 
 he did, and satisfied the scholarly men of his time that 
 he was well entitled to choose for " the first heir of his 
 invention " the motto, which it would have been imper- 
 tinence in a writer to select who had not a fair know- 
 ledge of the language in which it was written. 
 
 That they were satisfied of this, is tolerably evident, 
 for the success of the poem was immediate. Edition 
 followed edition, and by 1602 five had been printed. 
 In 1594 the "Lucrece," also dedicated to Lord South- 
 ampton, appeared, and ran into several editions. This 
 poem, like the " Venus and Adonis," bears internal 
 proofs of familiarity with what had been written by 
 Ovid on the same theme. Unless, therefore, it can be 
 shown that Shakespeare, who claimed the authorship 
 on the title-pages, did not write either poem, the charge 
 of want of education must fall to the ground. But 
 
26 SHAKESPEAEE OK BACON ? 
 
 how can this be shown in the face of the fact that his 
 was by this time a familiar name among literary men 
 in London, some of whom would have been glad 
 enough to expose so glaring an imposture, while by 
 several of them his merits were recognised in such 
 epithets as " honey-tongued Shakespeare " (John Wee- 
 ver, 1595), "mellifluous and honey-tongued Shake- 
 speare" (Francis Meres, 1598); and while "his sugared 
 sonnets," then unpublished, but which had probably 
 for many years been " circulating among his private 
 friends," were acknowledged by Meres as adding fresh 
 lustre to a^name that had already been coupled with 
 many popular plays — "Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 " The Merchant of Venice," " King John," and " Eomeo 
 and Juliet " among the number ? ^ 
 
 Now it is to be borne in mind that Meres, from 
 
 ^ " As the soul of Eupliorbus was thought to live m Pythagoras, so 
 the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued 
 Shakesi^eare. Witness his ' Venus and Adonis ' ; his ' Lucrece ' ; his 
 sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c. As Plautus and Seneca 
 are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so 
 Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for 
 tlic stage. ... As Epius Stolo said that the Pluses would speak 
 with Plautus's tongue if they would speak Latin, so I say that the 
 Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would 
 si)cak English." — (Mcres's 'Palladis Tanna.') 
 
 Meres's " fine filed phrase " reminds us of Ikni Jonson, when he 
 speaks of Shakespeare's " well turned and true tiled lines." 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 27 
 
 whose " Palladis Tamia " we quote, was familiar not 
 only with what was being done in contemporary liter- 
 ature, but also with many of the authors of the day. 
 Xot otherwise could he have gained his intimate know- 
 ledge of several works, which had not been published 
 when he wrote, as well as of some which were never 
 published at all. Many of the living poets of repute, 
 it is obvious, were personally known to him, and about 
 those who were not so known he was just the man to 
 seek out every piece of information within his reach. 
 Again and again he recurs to the name of Shakespeare 
 in a strain which proves how deep was the interest 
 he took both in the poet and his works. Possibly 
 he was a personal friend, but at least he had no 
 doubt, from what he knew and heard, that William 
 Shakespeare the actor was the author of the plays 
 as well as of the poems with which his name was 
 connected. 
 
 That Shakespeare's success as a furbisher-up of plays, 
 which wanted the magic of his hand to turn their dross 
 to gold, had, even before 1593, excited the jealousy of 
 at least one rival dramatist, is shown by the language 
 of Eobert Greene in his " Groat's Worth of Wit, bought 
 with a Million of Eepentance." Greene died in 1592, 
 leaving this tract behind liim in manuscript. In it the 
 
28 SHAKESPEARE OE BACON? 
 
 brilliant and at one time popular dramatist, sinking in 
 abject poverty into the grave, had poured out the 
 bitterness of his heart at seeing the players making a 
 rich harvest by acting pieces, while the authors of them, 
 like himself, were in poverty. His grudge against 
 Shakespeare was apparently intensified by the fact, 
 that the young man from Stratford not only acted 
 in plays, but wrote them, or, at least, had worked them 
 up for the stage. 
 
 " There is an upstart Crow," he writes, " beautified with 
 our feathers " (alluding apparently to plays originally written 
 by Greene and Marlowe, of which Shakespeare had somehow 
 or other made use), " that with his Tyger's heart wrajjt in a 
 player's hide " (a parody of " Oh, Tyger's heart Avrapt in a 
 woman's hide " — Shakespeare's ' Henry VI.,' part iii., act 1 
 sc. 4) " supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank 
 verse as the best of you ; and, being an absolute Johannes 
 Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shakescene in a 
 countrie." 
 
 A few months after Greene's death, in the same 
 year, 1592, the tract was published by his friend Henry 
 Chettle. It had given great offence to the "play- 
 makers" attacked in it; and as Greene could not be 
 attacked in return, Chettle, as sponsor for his tract, 
 found himself in the awkward position of having to 
 
SHAKESPEARE OE BACON ? 29 
 
 bear the responsibility for Greene's invective. Mar- 
 lowe, to all appearance, and Shakespeare certainly, 
 considered themselves especially wronged ; and to the 
 latter Chettle felt bound to make an apology, in an 
 " Address to the Gentlemen Eeaders," published in De- 
 cember 1592, along with his " Kind-Hart's Dreame." 
 
 " "With neither of them that take offence," he writes, " was 
 I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never 
 he " (a very natural resolution, considering what a Bohemian 
 Marlowe was). " The other, whome at that time I did not 
 so much spare as since I wish I had, for that as I have 
 moderated the heate of living writers, and might have used 
 my owne discretion (especially in such a case), the Author 
 being dead, that I did not I am as sorry as if the originall 
 fault had been my fault, because myselfe have scene his 
 demeanour no lesse civiU than he excellent in the quality 
 he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his 
 uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, atul his 
 facetious grace i7i writing, that approves his art." 
 
 It is therefore clear beyond all question, that so early 
 as 1592 Shakespeare had made a name for himself both 
 as actor and as author, " excellent in the quality he 
 professed," viz., acting, and noted for " facetious grace," 
 or as we should now write, " graceful facility," in writ- 
 ing. The latter gift must have made him a most valu- 
 
30 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 able member of the theatrical company to which he 
 belonged, and its possession was what, it is only reason- 
 able to suppose, procured for him his rapid advancement 
 in the theatre. To polish up indifferent dialogue, to 
 write in effective speeches for his brother actors, to 
 recast inartistic plots, was work that must have been 
 constantly wanted in the theatre ; and it is obviously 
 work which was frequently done by Shakespeare in 
 those early days. It was, moreover, a kind of work 
 that must often have been wanted in a hurry. It would 
 never have been intrusted to him unless his qualifica- 
 tions for it had been obvious. Would any man have 
 dared to undertake such work who had to trust to an- 
 other man to do it for him ? And if he did undertake 
 it, must not his brother actors have quickly found out 
 whether the work was his own or not ? For much of 
 it must have had to be done under their own eye, 
 possibly within the theatre itself, conceived upon the 
 impulse of that quickness of invention, and executed 
 with that fluent facility, which a host of concurrent 
 testmiony shows that his brother poets and actors 
 ascribed to Shakespeare as a distinguishing charac- 
 teristic. Who can justly doubt that Webster, in tlie 
 preface to his " Victoria Corombona" (1G12), was only 
 speaking of what was as apparent to all these as it was 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 31 
 
 to Webster himself, when he alhided to " the right happy 
 and copious industry of Mr Shakespeare " ? 
 
 And yet the Baconians ask us to believe that not any 
 of the plays of which he was the recognised author 
 could have been written by him ! Has it ever occurred 
 to them to reflect how inevitably a man reveals the 
 character and tendencies of his mind in his easy talk 
 with the friends who know him well, and whom he 
 trusts ? Sir Walter Scott, anxious though he was to 
 keep secret even from his intimates the fact that he 
 wrote the Waverley Novels, could not, as we know, 
 help betraying it to such of them as were capable of 
 drawing a conclusion from the copious anecdotes and 
 distinctive humour with which his familiar conversa- 
 tion overflowed. Can it be supposed, then, if Shake- 
 speare were the uncultured boor the Baconians assume 
 him to have been, that he would not have been found 
 out by his talk ? Even in Goldsmith's case, Garrick's 
 well-known line — 
 
 " He wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll," — 
 
 had in it more of playful sarcasm than of truth ; for 
 are there not upon record many sayings of his which 
 were quite up to the level of the current talk of the 
 Literary Club ? But whatever his talk, Goldsmith at 
 
32 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ? 
 
 any rate was known by his friends to " write like an 
 angel " ; and if Shakespeare could not write what he pro- 
 fessed that he wrote, it is as certain as any deduction 
 from probabilities can be, that he could not have made 
 his way as he did among the poets and dramatists of the 
 day. Have the Baconians ever tried to picture to them- 
 selves what was the position of Shakespeare the actor 
 and accepted dramatic writer in a theatre of those days ? 
 By necessity he was in daily communion with some of 
 the sharpest and finest intellects of the time. In the 
 theatre itself were men like Burbage, Armin, Taylor, 
 Lowine, Kempe, all well qualified to take the measure 
 of his capacity ; while his profession as an actor, as well 
 as his pretensions as a writer of poetry and drama, must 
 have brought him into close contact, both at the theatre 
 and in their convivial gatherings, with men like Marlowe, 
 Dekker, Chapman, Middleton, Heywood, Drayton, and 
 Ben Jonson. We might as soon believe that a man 
 who pretended that he had written ' Vanity Fair ' or 
 ' Esmond,' but had not written them, could have escaped 
 detection in the society of Thackeray's friends, Charles 
 BuUer, Tennyson, Venables, or James Spedding, as that 
 Shakespeare, without having written them, could have 
 passed himself off as the author of even " The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona " or " Love's Labour's Lost " — we 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 33 
 
 purposely name two of his earliest and weakest plays, 
 — or that any of the brilliant circle of Elizabethan 
 poets would have given credit for ten minutes to such a 
 man as the Baconians picture Shakespeare to have been 
 for the capacity to construct one scene, or to compose 
 ten consecutive lines of the blank verse — the exquisite 
 blank verse — which is to be found in those plays. 
 
 Then, as the years flowed on, and the young poet of 
 the " Venus and Adonis " and the " Lucrece," who had 
 begun dramatic authorship by patching up old and in- 
 artistic plays well known to the public, put in his claim 
 to the nobler dramas which made him, in Ben Jonson's 
 words, " the wonder of our stage," is it to be supposed 
 that such rival writers as we have named could have 
 failed to see that it was the actor Shakespeare, their 
 chum and intimate companion, with all his marvellously 
 comprehensive grasp of character, his play of ebullient 
 humour, his unbounded exuberance of fancy and fer- 
 tility of exquisite expression, and none but he, whose 
 genius, and whose genius alone, breathed throughout 
 the series of dramas which, after 1592, were given to 
 the stage with a prodigality almost startling ? 
 
 By 1598, as we learn from Meres's 'Tamia,' already 
 cited, Shakespeare had established his claim to predomi- 
 nating excellence in both tragedy and comedy. " For 
 
 c 
 
34 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 comedy, witness," says Meres, " his ' Gentlemen of 
 Verona/ his (Comedy of) ' Errors,' his ' Love's Labour 
 Lost,' his 'Love's Labour Wonne' (Much Ado), his 
 'Midsummer's Night Dream,' and his 'Merchant of 
 Venice ' ; for tragedy, his ' Eichard II.,' ' Eichard III.,' 
 ' Henry IV.,' ' King John,' ' Titus Andronicus,' and his 
 'Eomeo and Juliet.'" "Within the ensuing twelve 
 years he had added to that noble list the other great 
 plays which will at once leap to every reader's memory. 
 If he had lived for fame, he might well thmk that by 
 this time he had lived enough for it. But what Florio 
 said of him was probably true, " that he loved better to 
 be a poet than to be called one." Most probably, too, 
 he had warnings within himself that the great fountain 
 of thought, imagination, and feeling, which had hitherto 
 flowed so copiously, was no longer to be relied on. The 
 wine of his poetic life had been drunk, and he was not 
 the man to wrong the public or his own reputation by 
 drawing upon the lees. Tempus dbire tihi est was the 
 warning that was like enough to have come to a man 
 so wise, as it does evermore come to all thoughtful men. 
 He had made for himself what a man in whom the 
 elements were so temperately mingled was sure to 
 regard as a sufficient fortune; and to go back to his 
 boyhood's home and breathe again the free air of the 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ? 35 
 
 old familiar haunts, and share in the simple duties of 
 a well-to-do citizen among the ageing friends of his 
 early youth, was to such a nature a welcome release 
 from the anxieties and the conflicts of the crowded and 
 struggling and feverish life which had been his since 
 he started to seek his fortune in London. He had had 
 enough of the toil and turmoil there, and, like his own 
 Prospero, was glad 
 
 " Thence to retire him to his Milan, where 
 Every third thought should be his grave." 
 
 To London he obviously went after this upon 
 occasion, — partly on business, as we know ; partly, it 
 may be presumed, to enjoy the stimulating society of 
 his old actor and literary friends. There he would 
 renew the wit-combats with Ben Jonson, of which 
 Thomas Fuller must have heard from living witnesses 
 of them, — for he could not have been present at them 
 in person, — when he wrote : — 
 
 " Which two I behold like a great Spanish Galleon and 
 an English Man-of-"War ; Master Jonson (like the former) 
 was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow in his per- 
 formances. Shakespeare, with the English Man-of-War, 
 lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all 
 tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the 
 quickness of his wit and invention." 
 
36 SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 Milton, also, though too young to have known Shake- 
 speare, could scarcely fail to have spoken with many who 
 had seen and talked with him. Not else would he have 
 written of him as "my Shakespeare," or as "sweetest 
 Shakespeare, fancy's child." And now this well authen- 
 ticated repute of our poet in the circle where he was 
 best known is to be set aside, and we are asked to believe, 
 with Miss Delia Bacon and her followers, that Ben 
 Jonson, despite the frequent collision of their wits, was 
 unable to discover, what is so palpable to them, that 
 Shakespeare was a liar who throws Mendez Pinto into 
 the shade, and a literary impostor such as the world 
 has never dreamt of ! 
 
 So far was Jonson from having a doubt as to the 
 works ascribed to Shakespeare being truly his, that in 
 his 'Timber; or. Discoveries upon Men and Matters,' 
 written long after Shakespeare was in his grave, he 
 described him in terms that confirm Fuller's estimate 
 in a remarkable degree : — 
 
 " He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature ; 
 had an excellent phautsie ; brave notions and gentle expres- 
 sions ; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes 
 it was necessary he should be stop'd : Sujflaminandus erat, 
 as Augustus said of Haterius, His wit was in his power — 
 would the rule of it had been so too. . . . But he redeem'd 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 37 
 
 his [literary] vices with his virtues. There was ever more 
 in him to be praysed than to be pardoned." 
 
 Who does not see, from this, the Shakespeare, not of 
 the dramas merely but of social intercourse — with his 
 flashes, not of merriment only, but also of pathos and 
 of subtle thought, his flow of anecdote and whim play- 
 ing like summer lightning amid the general talk of 
 the room, and sometimes provoking the ponderous and 
 irritable Jonson by throwing his sententious and learned 
 talk into the shade ? Brilliant talk would seem to 
 have come to Shakespeare as easily as brilliant writ- 
 ing, and he would thus eclipse Jonson in society as 
 he eclipsed him even when dealing with classical 
 themes upon the stage. But the genial player and 
 poet, to whom all concurred in giving the epithet of 
 "gentle," was too good a fellow to deal in the wit 
 that wounds, to presume on his personal popularity, 
 or to view the efforts of a rival author with jealousy. 
 Jonson had good cause to think well of him, for he 
 had not in his early days hesitated to attack Shake- 
 speare in very abusive terms ; ^ and yet it was to Shake- 
 speare's active intervention that he owed the production 
 on the stage, by the Lord Chamberlain's company, of 
 which Shakespeare was a member, of the fine play of 
 ^ See Appendix, p. 68. 
 
38 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 "Every Man in his Humour," which Jonson, then in 
 needy circumstances, had failed to get them to accept. 
 This, and many other acts of good-fellowship, as well 
 as the numberless hours which the talk and fine spirits 
 of his friend had made memorable, were doubtless in 
 Jonson's mind, when, in a previous passage of the 
 'Memorandum' just quoted, he said of him, remem- 
 bering how kind, how generous, how free from self- 
 assertion he had been, — "I loved the man, and doe 
 honour his memory on this side idolatrie as much as 
 any." And this is the man we are now to be told 
 was the poor coarse-grained creature to which the 
 Baconians would reduce him ! 
 
 In support of their theory they rest upon the cir- 
 cumstance that, after Shakespeare settled about 1612 
 in Stratford, no more plays appeared with liis name. 
 If there had been anything extraordinary in tliat cir- 
 cumstance, surely Ben Jonson and his other author 
 friends would have been struck by it. We know that 
 down to the last he was in intimate contact with Jonson 
 and Michael Drayton, who, according to a fairly authen- 
 ticated tradition, visited him at Stratford about a month 
 before his death. But neither Jonson nor Drayton, nor, 
 what is more material, liis player partners and inti- 
 mates, hint anywhere the slightest surprise that he 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 39 
 
 ceased, while still in the vigour of his years, to furnish 
 the stage with fresh sources of attraction. Why he 
 so ceased no one can tell, any more than we can tell 
 with certainty why he did not himself see his works 
 through the press. He may very well have intended 
 to do this, so soon as they could be printed without in- 
 jury to the interests of the theatres to which he had 
 sold them, and to which it was important that they 
 should not be made available to rival theatres, as by 
 publication they w^ould have been. 
 
 It must always be remembered, too, that Shakespeare 
 died of a sudden and brief illness, which probably cut 
 short many other projects besides that of having his 
 dramas printed in an authentic form. This view is 
 countenanced by the language of Heminges and Condell 
 in their dedication of the first folio to the Earls of Pem- 
 broke and Montgomery, in which they speak of Shake- 
 speare with regret as " not having the fate common 
 with some, to be executor to his owne writings." To 
 them it seems clear enough that he would have brought 
 them out himself, had he lived. " We," they say, " have 
 but collected them, and done an office to the dead to 
 procure his orphanes guardians, without amhition either 
 of selfe-projlt or fame, onely to keep the Jiiemory of so 
 worthy a fiend and fellovj alive as ^vas our Shakespeare, 
 
40 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 by humble offer of bis playes to your most noble pa- 
 tronage." The words of their preface to the volume 
 are even more significant: — 
 
 " It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthy to have bene 
 wished, that the author himselfe had lived to have set forth 
 and overseen his own writings ; but since it hath bm or- 
 dain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, 
 Ave pray you do not envie his friends the office of their care 
 and pains to have collected and publish 'd them ; and so to 
 have publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with 
 diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, niaim'd and deform'd 
 by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that ex- 
 pos'd them ; even those are now ofFer'd to your view cur'd 
 and perfect of their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their 
 numbers as he conceiv'd them ; ivlio, as he tvas a happie 
 imitator of Nature, teas a most gentle expresser of it. His 
 mind and hand went together ; and what he thought he uttered 
 with that easinesse, that we have scarce received from him a 
 blot in his p)0'pers!' 
 
 Now who are the men who bear this testimony to the 
 fact that Shakespeare's "mind and hand went to- 
 gether," and that composition was to him so easy, that 
 his manuscripts — like Sir Walter Scott's, George Eliot's, 
 or Thackeray's, all great masters of style — were almost 
 without a blot? They were men who had been asso- 
 ciated with him for years as brother actors, — men who 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ? 41 
 
 must have often heard discussed in his presence what 
 plots were to be selected for new plays, and how they 
 were to be treated, — men who must have again and again 
 marked, with delighted surprise, how he had transformed 
 into something of which his fellows had never dreamed 
 the tales on which such plays as "The Merchant of 
 Venice," "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," and "As You 
 Like It " were founded, — men who had known him from 
 time to time write in scenes and speeches, sometimes 
 of his own accord, but sometimes as likely at the sug- 
 gestion of his brother actors, or at a rehearsal in their 
 very presence cut and carve upon a passage to give it 
 more point and finish. They at least knew his auto- 
 graph, and had seen his " papers." If he could not even 
 write his own name respectably, as the Baconians con- 
 tend, they must have known the fact, and would not 
 have ventured to speak of his " papers," when so many 
 people were alive, who, if the Baconians are right, could 
 have shown up the imposture. Eemember, too, that this 
 very volume was dedicated to two noblemen of high 
 culture, the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Mont- 
 gomery, who knew Shakespeare personally, and, in the 
 language of the Dedication, had treated both his plays 
 " and their author living " with much favour. "Were such 
 men likely to have been the victims of a delusion ? 
 
42 SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 It in no way militates against the weight of this 
 argument, that much of the first folio was a reprint 
 merely of some of the plays which had already been 
 printed in quarto. Heminges and Condell might not 
 have intended by what they wrote to suggest that the 
 book was entirely printed from his "papers." Their 
 language may fairly be read merely as a record of the 
 fact that the MSS. of his plays, as originally delivered 
 by him to his " fellows " at the theatre, were not dis- 
 figured by the erasures and interlineations with which 
 they were familiar in the MSS. of other dramatic 
 writers. 
 
 Ben Jonson, it is true, thought this absence of blots 
 no virtue in his friend. The players, he says, often 
 mentioned it in Shakespeare's honour. "My answer 
 hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. . . . 
 Many times he fell into those things could not escape 
 laughter ; as when he said in the person of Cffisar, one 
 speaking to him, — Ccesar, thou dost me wrong ; he reply'd, 
 — Ccesar did never ivrong hut with Just cause ; and such 
 like, which were ridiculous." There is a good deal to 
 be said for the sentences excepted to by Jonson (which, 
 by the way, are not in the first folio, nor indeed printed 
 anywhere, though they may very possibly have been in 
 Shakespeare's original MS.) ; but what Jonson writes is 
 
SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON ? 43 
 
 of importance as showing that the cleanness and free- 
 dom from correction of Shakespeare's MSS. were noto- 
 rious in the theatres to which he had belonged. 
 
 Jonson's deliberate thought as to how Shakespeare 
 worked, and that art as well as natural gifts went to 
 the composition of his works, is very clearly stated in 
 the splendid eulogy by him prefixed to the first folio : — 
 
 " The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, 
 Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please, 
 But antiquated and deserted lye, 
 As they were not of Nature's family. 
 Yet must I not give Nature all ; thy art. 
 My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part; 
 For though the poet's matter Nature be. 
 His art doth give the fashion ! and that he, 
 Who casts to write a living line must sweat, 
 Such as thine are, and strike the second heat 
 Upon the Muses anvile ; turne the same 
 And himselfe with it, that he thinkes to frame, 
 Or for the laurell he may gaine a scorne, 
 For a good poet's made as well as borne. 
 And such wert thou!" 
 
 Jonson was not the man to write thus without having 
 a basis of fact to go upon. What more natural than 
 that Shakespeare and he should have often talked over 
 passages in their plays, which one or the other thought 
 might be improved ? It may be, that among these pas- 
 
44 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 sages were those very sentences in " Julius Caesar " to 
 which we have seen that Jonson took exception ; for in 
 the first folio (" Julius Coesar," Act iii. sc. 1) what we 
 read is — 
 
 " Know, Caesar dotli not wrong ; nor without cause 
 Will he be satisfied ; " 
 
 — ^just such a correction as the Shakespeare described 
 by Heminges and Condell would be likely to make upon 
 the spur of the moment, if his attention had been called 
 to the seemmg paradox of the words which Jonson 
 says he wrote, 
 
 Jonson had probably in his mind's eye many inci- 
 dents of a similar nature, which satisfied him that all 
 the seeming artlessness of his friend — the " art without 
 art, unparalleled as yet," as the scholarly Leonard Digges 
 called it — was nothing more nor less than that highest 
 triumph of art, that perfection of simplicity and finish, 
 by which art is never suggested. No unprejudiced 
 mind can read what Jonson has written of Shakespeare 
 without having the conviction forced upon him, that 
 Jonson had seen in the man himself living and unmis- 
 takeable proofs, that in him was the genius from which 
 sprang both the poetry and the plays which were iden- 
 tified with his name. It is not of the plays alone, but 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 45 
 
 of the man also as he knew him, that Jonson was thmk- 
 ing, when he wrote the lines opposite the Droeshout 
 portrait in the first folio: — 
 
 " Oh, could lie [Droeshout] but have drawne his wit 
 As well in brasse, as he hath hit 
 His face, the print would then surpasse 
 All that was ever writ in brasse." 
 
 And also in the lines — " To the memory of my beloved 
 the author, Mr William Shakespeare, and wliat lie, hath 
 left us" apostrophising him as — 
 
 " Soul of the age ! 
 " The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!" 
 
 And again — 
 
 " If I thought my judgement were of yeeres," 
 
 — that is, that my opinion was to be prized by pos- 
 terity — 
 
 " I should commit thee surely with thy peers. 
 And tell how far thou didst our Lily outshine, 
 Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. 
 And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greeke," 
 
 (How does this comport with the Baconians' theory of 
 the illiterate butcher's boy ?) 
 
 " From thence to honour thee I would not seeke 
 • For names, but call forth thund'ring ^Eschilus, 
 Euripedes, and Sophocles to us, 
 
46 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 Pacciivius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, 
 
 To life again, to hear thy bustin tread 
 
 And shake a stage ; or, when thy sockes were on, 
 
 Leave thee alone, for the comparison 
 
 Of all that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome 
 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
 
 Triumph, my Britaine ! thou hast one to showe, 
 
 To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. 
 
 He was not of an age, but for all time ! " 
 
 There spoke out the heart of brave old Ben, remem- 
 bering how meekly the man with whose friendship he 
 had been blest had borne his honours, and had never 
 made him feel that all Jonson's "slow endeavouring 
 art," working even upon classic ground, could not bring 
 him abreast in popularity with the heaven-gifted man 
 who had " small Latin and less Greek." For so it was 
 in Ben Jonson's own time, as we learn from the lines 
 of Leonard Digges, who died in 1635 at the University 
 of Oxford, where he led a scholar's life, when he says, — 
 
 " So have I seene, when Caesar would appeare. 
 And on the stage at half-sworde parley were 
 Brutus and Cassius, oh, how the audience 
 Were ravish'd ! With what wonder they went thence, 
 When some new day they would not brook a line 
 Of tedious (though well-labour'd) Catiline ; 
 Sejanus, too, was irksome ; they prized more 
 Honest lago or the jealous Moore ; 
 
SHAKESPEARE OE BACON? 47 
 
 And though the Fox and subtell Alchimist, 
 
 Long intermitted, could not quite be missed ; 
 
 Though these have shamed all th' ancients, and might raise 
 
 Their author's merit with a crowne of bays ; 
 
 Yet these sometimes, even at a friend's desire, 
 
 Acted, have scarce defray'd the seacoale fire 
 
 And doore-keepers ; when, let but Falstaft'e come, 
 
 Hal, Poins, the rest, — you scarce shall have a roome. 
 
 All is so pester'd ; let but Beatrice 
 
 And Benedick be seene, loe, in a trice 
 
 The cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full." 
 
 Few men like the man who eclipses them in a race, 
 where they think they are especially strong, — authors 
 least of all. But "gentle" Shakespeare subdued the 
 envy even of the rough and somewhat jealous Ben, who 
 in the days when Shakespeare was a stranger to him, 
 had attacked him with a rancour which only one so 
 "gentle" as Shakespeare would have forgotten. But 
 had Ben for a moment seen reason to surmise that the 
 man who had so thoroughly distanced him and all his 
 compeers in the arena of both tragedy and comedy was 
 sailing under false colours, that he was "an upstart 
 crow " wearing feathers not his own, it would not have 
 been left for the Smiths, Bacons, Holmes, and Don- 
 nellys of the nineteenth century to throw discredit 
 upon the great name which from 1616 has been held 
 in reverence by all cultivated men. 
 
48 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 We have purposely refrained from entering upon any 
 of the arguments from the internal evidence of the 
 works of Shakespeare and Bacon, that Bacon did not 
 and could not have written the marvellous series of 
 plays of which until 1856 the authorship was undis- 
 puted. This would open a field far too wide for dis- 
 cussion. Life is short, and a conflict of aesthetic judg- 
 ments in such matters is, by its very nature, inter- 
 minable. Without, however, approaching the question 
 from the side of the plays, it may be worth while to 
 glance briefly at the evidence to be found in the Son- 
 nets, that they at least were not from the same hand 
 as penned the famous Essays. That the best of what 
 are usually printed as Shakespeare's sonnets were ac- 
 knowledged by people who knew him to be his genuine 
 work, admits of no doubt. It was a time when sonnets 
 were in high favour with lovers of poetry, and the 
 writers of them were numerous. We learn from other 
 examples that sonnets, whose authors were well known, 
 used to circulate freely in society, and that, as in Shake- 
 speare's case, having got a reputation, they were put 
 into print by adventurous publishers without the priv- 
 ity of their authors.^ Shakespeare's efforts in this 
 
 1 Thus W. Percy, in the " Address to the Reader " publislied in 1594 
 with his ' Sonnets to the Fairest Coclia,' \vrites_ " Whereas I was fully 
 
SHAKESPEAKE OR BACON? 49 
 
 department of poetry were, as we learn from Meres, 
 well known to be his by his " friends," among whom 
 they liad been circulating for years before they were 
 printed by G. Eld for T[homas] TQiorpe] in 1609; and 
 none of the Baconians, so far as we are aware, have ever 
 ventured seriously to dispute the fact. To these son- 
 nets, therefore, we may look with confidence as indi- 
 cating the character of Shakespeare's mind and the dis- 
 tinctive qualities of his literary style, — the very same 
 qualities, be it said in passing, as are conspicuous in 
 the plays. If this be so, then they may be fairly con- 
 trasted with what we see of the same qualities in Bacon's 
 more familiar compositions, and so help towards a judg- 
 ment whether or not they sprang from the same mind. 
 Look, then, at Bacon's conception of womanhood as 
 we find it in his essays. Is there in it a trace of 
 romance, of the chivalrous reverence, of the passionate 
 aspiration which inevitably find their way into the 
 writings of every poetically-minded man where woman 
 "is the theme, and of which the Shakespeare sonnets 
 are full ? On the contrary. Bacon's view of woman is 
 essentially commonplace. To hun she is, when at her 
 
 determined to have concealed my sonnets as things privy to myself, 
 yet, of courtesy, having lent them to some, they were secretly com- 
 mitted to the press, and almost finished, before it came to my know- 
 ledge." 
 
 D 
 
50 SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 best, merely the good loyal housewife, the dutiful 
 minister to the desires, the comforts, and the wants of 
 the other sex. For beauty, no doubt, he had some 
 feeling, and spoke well of its "best part" as that 
 " which a picture cannot express " ; and in the same 
 essay (that " Of Beauty "), he shows himself not in- 
 sensible to the charm of grace in motion and de- 
 meanour. But the beauty which was mainly present 
 to his mind was that Beaut6 du Didble which fascinates 
 the senses but leaves the heart and the imagination 
 untouched, — the beauty that, to use his own words, 
 " is as summer fruits, and cannot last." No hint shall 
 we anywhere discover of the feeling which finds voice 
 iu Shakespeare's 104tli Sonnet, — 
 
 " To me, fair friend, you never can be old, 
 For as you were, when first your eye I eyed, 
 Such seems thy beauty still ! " 
 
 And yet Bacon was not thirty-five years old when his 
 essay " Of Beauty " was published, — a time of life when 
 the enthusiasm of love is perhaps strongest in a man 
 capable of the passion. Keeping this fact in view, 
 surely, if he were the poet we are now asked to believe 
 him to have been, one might expect to find in his essay 
 " Of Love," published at the same time, some of that 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 51 
 
 glow, some of that fine madness, which has always 
 been found to " possess the poet's brain " under the in- 
 fluence of this theme. But what is it that we do find ? 
 " The stage," he says, " is more beholden to Love than 
 the Life of Man." But if this be true of the stage, why 
 is it true ? Assuredly, because it is the passion that, 
 for good or evil, more than any other pervades life. 
 
 " It is the very centre of the earth, 
 Drawing all things to it ; " i — 
 
 and therefore naturally holds a prominent place upon 
 the stage, whose duty it is " to hold the mirror up to 
 nature." As the essay proceeds, it becomes plain that 
 Bacon had no liigher conception of love than as an 
 evanescent material passion. It is, he says, " a weak 
 passion," out of which "great spirits keep," — a thing 
 that is to be shunned, for it finds its way into " a heart 
 well fortified, if watch be not kept." The devout and 
 grateful humility of a noble love is to him no more 
 than "kneeling before a little idol," — a making of one's 
 self " subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are) 
 yet of the eye, which was given for higher purposes," 
 — a something which men should " sever wholly from 
 their serious affairs and actions of life." 
 
 ^ " Troilus and Cressida," Act iv. sc. 2. 
 
52 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ? 
 
 Now contrast this with the strain of sentiment which 
 inspires countless passages of the Sonnets, in which 
 hearts without number have found, and even in these 
 unromantic days evermore find delight, as expressing 
 the deepest, the purest, and most cherislied feelings of 
 their lives. Then ask if the man who wrote of love as 
 Bacon wrote could have addressed to his mistress such 
 lines as — 
 
 " My spirit is thine, the better part of me ! " ^ 
 " So you are to my thoughts as food to life ; " ^ 
 or the Sonnet (the 29th) beginning — 
 
 " When hi disgrace with fortune and men's eyes ; " 
 or that (the 71st) beginning — 
 
 " No longer mourn for me when I am dead ; " 
 with its lines of infinite pathos and beauty — 
 
 " For I love you so, 
 That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 
 If thinking of me then should make you woe." 
 
 Above all, could Bacon have penned that priceless creed 
 of all true lovers (the 116th Sonnet), beginnmg — 
 
 " Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
 Admit impediments," 
 
 and ending — 
 
 1 Souuet 74. - Sonnet 75. 
 
SHAKESPEAEE OE BACON? 53 
 
 " Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
 Within his bending sickle's compass come ; 
 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
 But hears it out even to the edge of doom," &c. 
 
 From all we know either of Bacon's Kfe or writings, 
 this and the multitude of similar passages which might 
 be quoted would have come within his censure, as but 
 "the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole, comely in 
 nothing but in love." But, indeed, how was it possible 
 that a man should write worthily of woman, or of that 
 love which is a love for evermore, who in his essay 
 " Of Marriage and Single Life " could find nothing 
 higher to say of wives than that they "are young 
 men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old 
 men's nurses " ? Idle to say, we are not to judge of a 
 man's prose by his poetry. Had Bacon been indeed a 
 poet, the feeling of exquisite tenderness, of profound 
 reverence for what is best in woman, wliich pervades 
 the Sonnets, must perforce have found its way into his 
 writings somewhere. Yet they will be ransacked in 
 vain for any indication of it.^ 
 
 But it were idle to pursue the topic further; still 
 more idle to bring these and other writings of Bacon 
 to the test of a comparison with the plays, and to 
 
 1 See note, " A Baconian on Shakespeare's Women," Appendix, p. 69. 
 
54 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 contrast his grave, square -cut, antithetical, ponder- 
 ous, unemotional style, and the absence in them of 
 everything like dramatic imagination and humour, 
 with the exuberance of poetical imagery and illus- 
 tration, the variety of rhythmical cadence, the ex- 
 quisitely modulated flow of aptly balanced diction, 
 not to speak of the creative dramatic power, and 
 the buoyant play of irrepressible humour and wit, 
 which brighten even the slightest of the Shake- 
 spearian plays. This would demand an essay of itself, 
 which no one competent to write it will deem other- 
 wise than superfluous, until better reason is shown 
 than has yet been shown for setting up Bacon's claim 
 to the imagination which "bodies forth the forms of 
 things unseen," and which would alone have enabled 
 him to conceive and place living before us such beings 
 as Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Jack Falstaff, Imogen, 
 Hermione, Rosalind, and all the other glorious figures 
 of that marvellous gallery. 
 
 Our task is of a much humbler kind. We have pur- 
 posely confined ourselves to a naked statement of facts 
 as to the man Shakespeare, based upon contemporary 
 testimony, and argued from upon the principles which 
 guide the judgment of practical men in all matters, 
 where they have only contemporary evidence from 
 
SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 55 
 
 which to draw their conclusions. On what better 
 evidence than we have cited in regard to Shakespeare, 
 do we believe that ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides 
 wrote the plays coupled with their names, that Horace 
 wrote his Odes, or Tacitus his Germania ? From the 
 belief of three centuries the world is not to be shaken 
 by the fine-spun theories of men who, judging by all 
 they write, know nothing of the mysterious ways in 
 which genius works, and who conceive that fine poetry, 
 and a sweep of thought, of invention, and of knowledge 
 of the human heart, vast beyond their limited concep- 
 tions, can only issue from the brain of a man trained in 
 the learning of the schools and moving in high society. 
 Something more than conjecture, something more than 
 unwarrantable assumption, must be produced to entitle 
 them even to a hearing, however slight, at this time 
 of day. 
 
 But now we are told that the true authorship of the 
 pseudo-Shakespearian works has been established by a 
 great American discoverer, Mr Ignatius Donnelly, a 
 lawyer, ex -member of Congress, and ex -senator of 
 Minnesota, who conceives that he has solved the 
 problem in a work bearing the name of ' The Great 
 Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the so-called 
 Shakespeare Plays.' As if the man who had written 
 
56 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 tlie thirty- six plays of the first folio would have left 
 to the chance of a cryptogram being deciphered three 
 centuries after his death the discovery of the fact that 
 he had written them ! 
 
 We gather from his book that Mr Donnelly, lawyer 
 though he be, and by his profession bound to have 
 some regard to the laws of evidence, started upon his 
 investigations with the fixed idea that Shakespeare's 
 name was simply a mask for Bacon. He does not 
 commend himself to much consideration when we 
 find that he adopts as gospel, and with a vehemence 
 that wholly discredits his judgment, all the prepos- 
 terous nonsense of previous Baconians about Shake- 
 speare having had no education, of his having been a 
 tavern-haunter and habitual poacher, a mere money- 
 grubbing usurer, who could not spell his own name, 
 and who was glad to get back to Stratford to his 
 old occupation of butcher and wool - stapler, having 
 had his purse previously well lined by Bacon for 
 having lent the use of his name to a scandalous 
 fraud for some twenty odd years. Neither does he 
 prepossess us in his favour, — although of his sincerity 
 we entertain no doubt, — when he tells us tliat he was 
 put upon the trail of his vaunted discovery by coming 
 across an elaborate cipher of Bacon's, quoted in ' Every 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 57 
 
 Boy's Book.' " Then," he says, " followed Hke a flash 
 this thought, could Bacon have put a cipher in his 
 plays ? " On further inquiry, he found, what is very 
 well known, that Bacon had a fancy for cryptographic 
 1 systems which "elude and exclude the decipherers." 
 
 I Upon this hint Mr Donnelly set to work to find out a 
 
 cipher in the first folio edition of the plays that was to 
 
 j confirm his preconceived theory, and, of course, he 
 
 found it to his own satisfaction. If, however, any 
 judgment may be formed as to the results of his hunt 
 from the specimens he has published, a more thorough 
 illustration can scarcely be conceived of the process 
 known as elucidating the dbscurum by the ohscurms. 
 There will no doubt be found persons, blessed or 
 
 I cursed, as it may be, with such superabundance of time 
 
 upon their hands, and with a passion for such a literary 
 wild-goose chase as Mr Donnelly invites them to, that 
 they will follow him through arbitrary mazes of figures 
 and calculations which would drive any ordinary brain 
 mad, and which leads up to conclusions no less fantastic. 
 On such a chase, however, we do not conceive that 
 Mr Donnelly has a right to ask any one to enter until 
 he can first establish from credible evidence the follow- 
 ing propositions : (1) That Bacon did in some clear and 
 unmistakable way set up in his life a claim to the 
 
58 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 work which has hitherto been assigned to Shakespeare ; 
 (2) That he was privy to the publication of the first 
 folio ; (3) That he had Heminges and Condell under his 
 thumb, and got them to write what they did write in 
 the Dedication and Preface, with the deliberate purpose 
 of throwing the world off the scent as to the real 
 authorship ; (4) That he suborned Ben Jonson to be- 
 come a party to the fraud ; (5) That there exists some- 
 where, and in some definite form under Bacon's hand, 
 a suggestion, no matter how slight, to lead posterity to 
 believe that in due tune the composition of the plays 
 would be demonstrated to have been falsely assigned to 
 Shakespeare, and to be due entirely to himself. 
 
 Wlien a satisfactory answer is given on these points, 
 then, but not till then, Mr Donnelly may have some 
 excuse for intruding his so-called discovery upon the 
 public. But upon them his two portentous volumes 
 are absolutely silent. It is idle to tell us, as he and 
 his predecessors do, that Bacon had reason during his 
 life to conceal his connection with the stage. It is an 
 assumption without warrant either in fact or proba- 
 bility. If Bacon gave his name to masques, why 
 should he have hesitated to give it to " Macbeth " 
 or " Julius Ca3sar " ? Moreover, no man who wrote 
 the plays assigned to Shakespeare could have kept 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 59 
 
 up such an imposture for such a lengthened period, 
 and under the very peculiar circumstances in which 
 these were produced — one of them, "The Merry- 
 Wives of Windsor," written at Queen Elizabeth's 
 request and produced within a fortnight. But grant 
 that there might be reason for concealment while 
 Bacon was alive, there could be none after his death. 
 He might say of himself then, in the words of his 
 own (?) Macbeth — 
 
 " After life's fitful fever I sleep well, 
 Nothing can touch me further." 
 
 By that time he would be beyond reach of the anger of 
 either " Eliza or our James," who, in common with their 
 subjects, sliared the general belief in the genius of 
 Shakespeare. How simple a matter, then, would it 
 have been to place upon record, along with the requisite 
 proofs — for clear proof ivould in any case have been 
 wanted — that he, and not Shakespeare, wrote the 
 plays ! Write them if he did, is it conceivable that 
 he would not have been so proud of their authorship 
 that he would have taken care to place the fact be- 
 yond a doubt, and to enjoin his executors to have jus- 
 tice done to his claim ? 
 
 This he unquestionably did not do, and yet we are 
 
60 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 asked to give a hearing to an American lawyer, who, 
 nearly three centuries after Bacon's death, chooses first 
 to imagine that Bacon wrote the immortal plays, and 
 then to assure us that, instead of placing the fact upon 
 record, as any man of common-sense would he sure to 
 place it, he wrapt up his secret in a cryptogram, of 
 ivliich he did not even leave the key — a cryptogram dis- 
 tributed in a most mystical and bewildering way 
 through the bad printing of the first folio, and which 
 it was left for Mr Donnelly's laborious and perverted 
 ingenuity to discover ! 
 
 Mr Donnelly and liis proselytes would have us forget 
 that Bacon knew what was evidence, and what was not, 
 far too well to trust to a cryptogram for the establish- 
 ment of so important a fact as that he was entitled to 
 the fame which he knew the plays in question had won 
 for the Stratford poet. However clear a cryptogram 
 might be, it could not, as he very well knew, possibly 
 amount to more than a mere assertion by an interested 
 witness. On the assumption of fraud on Shakespeare's 
 part, it was a fraud of which Bacon hmiself was the 
 instigator. He had helped, ex hypothesi, to set up 
 Shakespeare's claim, and he of all men must have 
 known that, his own testimony boing radically tainted, 
 this claim could only be displaced either by conclus- 
 
SHAKESPEARE OR BACON ? Gl 
 
 ive extraneous evidence, or by the confession of Shake- 
 speare himself. 
 
 Again we say, no man has a right, without a sure 
 ground of fact to go upon, to strain our credulity as Mr 
 Donnelly does, or to ask reasonable men to investigate 
 the cumbrous processes by which he works out his 
 " Great Cryptogram " theory. Let Mr Donnelly get 
 over the initial difficulties which we have suggested, 
 and then Shakespearian students will give him a hear- 
 ing. Till then, they, and all men who recognise that 
 one of life's chief responsibilities is the responsibility 
 for a right use of our time, will be content to abide in 
 the faith of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and of well- 
 nigh three centuries of rational men, that the kindly 
 and modest man, whose mortal remains rest in front of 
 the altar in Stratford Church, was no impostor, but the 
 veritable author of the works for which, as one of its 
 wholly priceless possessions, the civilised world owes to 
 him endless gratitude. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Note to p. 17. 
 
 SPECIMENS OF EACON'S POETEY. 
 
 The only verses which beyond aU doubt are known to have 
 been written by Bacon are liis versions of seven of the 
 Psalms of David. They were written about two years be- 
 fore his death, and must therefore be taken as showing 
 whatever mastery he had attained by previous practice over 
 our language for poetical purposes. Admit the postidatc of 
 Miss Bacon and her followers, that he wrote aU for which 
 an ignorant world has given Shakespeare credit, and then 
 judge if such a verse as the following was likely to have flowed 
 from the pen of the author of the " Yenus and Adonis," of 
 the best of the Sonnets, or of " Cymbeline " or " Hamlet ": — 
 
 " Who sows in tears shall reap in joy, 
 The Lord doth so ordain ; 
 So that his seed be pure and good, 
 His harvest shall he gain." 
 
 — Psalm cxxvi 5. 
 
64 SHAKESPEARE OR BACON? 
 
 Or this as the rendering from the 90th Psalm of the words, 
 " Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee : our secret sins 
 in the light of Thy countenance " : — 
 
 " Thou buriest not within Oblivion's tomb 
 Our trespasses, but enterest them aright ; 
 Even those that are conceived in darkness' womb 
 To Thee appear as done at broad daylight." 
 
 Now see how the dominant thought in each of these 
 stanzas has been treated by Shakespeare, — the first in 
 " Richard III.," iv. 4, and the second in " Hamlet," iii. 3 : — 
 
 " The liquid drops of tears that you have shed 
 Shall come again, transformed to orient pearls, 
 Advantaging their loan with interest, 
 Oftentimes double gain of happiness." 
 
 " 'Tis not so above : 
 There is no shuffling, there the action lies 
 In his true nature : and we ourselves compelled, 
 Even in the teeth and forehead of your faith, 
 To give in evidence." ^ 
 
 Could the same man have written these passages and the 
 hidebound stanzas of Bacon's " Psalms " 1 Here and there 
 a good line occurs in some of these translations, just as 
 Hobbes in his version of the ' Iliad ' now and then struck 
 out a line of genuine poetry. But they are such as no man 
 
 1 The contrast between Bacon and Shakespeare in these two pas- 
 sages was first pointed out in the first of two admirable lectures on the 
 " Bacon -Shakespeare Controversy," by Charles H. Higgins, M.D., pub- 
 lished in Liverpool in 1886, 
 
APPENDIX. 65 
 
 would have written who possessed a genuine poetical gift, 
 or the command of poetical and musical language, which 
 the practice of rhythmical composition must have produced. 
 They will be found in Mr Spedding's edition of Bacon's 
 works, vol. vii. pp. 273-286. 
 
 To Bacon has been attributed, on no sufficient evidence, 
 the following poem, which it is said he wrote for Lord 
 Burleigh : — 
 
 THE RETIRED COURTIER. 
 
 His golden locks hath Time to silver turned ; 
 
 Time too swift ! O swiftness never ceasing ! 
 His youth 'gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned, 
 
 But spurned in vain : youth waneth by increasing ; 
 Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seeme ; 
 Duty, faith, love, are roots and ever greene. 
 
 His helmet now shall make a hive for bees, 
 And lover's sonnets turn to holy psalmes ; 
 
 A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees. 
 And feed on praiers which are Age's Almes ; 
 
 But though from Court to College he depart, 
 
 His saint is sure of his unspotted heart. 
 
 And when he saddest sits in homely cell, 
 He'U teach his swaines this carol for a song : 
 
 Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well ! 
 Curst be the soul that thinks her any wrong ! 
 
 Goddess, aUow this aged man his right 
 
 To be your headsman now, that was your knight. 
 E 
 
66 SHAKESPEAEE OR BACOX ? 
 
 Tliis poem, which appeared without the author's name in 
 Dowland's 'First Book of Songs/ published in 1600, will 
 not go far to establish a reputation as a poet for whoever 
 wrote it. It is more likely to be held in memory from 
 being quoted by Thackeray and applied to Colonel Xew- 
 come in one of the last chapters of ' The Xewcomes,' than 
 from any intrinsic merit. 
 
 Mr Donnelly and others claim the following poem for 
 Bacon. Mr Spedding admits that it may possibly be his. 
 It is a laboured expansion rather than a paraphrase of a 
 Greek epigram, variously attributed to Poseidippus, to Plato 
 the comic poet, and to Crates the Cynic. It matters little 
 to whom the original Greek is due. Most certainly no one 
 will claim it for Shakespeare, false as it is in philosophy, 
 false in sentiment, — the protest of a sour and commonplace 
 mind against the Creator's dealings with His creatures. It 
 may be called 
 
 LIFE A CUESE. 
 
 The world's a bubble, and the life of man 
 
 Less than a span ; 
 In his conception wretched, from the womb 
 
 So to the tomb ; 
 Cursed from his cradle and brought up to years 
 
 With cares and fears : 
 Who, then, to frail mortality shall trust 
 But limns the water, or but writes in dust. 
 
APPENDIX. 67 
 
 Yetj whilst with sorrow here we live opprest, 
 
 What life is best ? 
 Courts are hut only superficial schools, 
 
 To dandle fools ; 
 The rural parts are tamed into a den 
 
 Of savage men ; 
 And Where's the city from foul vice so firee, 
 But may be termed, the worst of all the three I 
 
 Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed. 
 
 Or pains his head. 
 Those that live single take it for a curse, 
 
 Or do things worse. 
 Some would have children : those that hare them moan. 
 
 Or wish them gone. 
 What is it, then, to have or hare no wife. 
 But single thraldom or a double strife ? 
 
 Our own affections still at home to please 
 
 Is a disease : 
 To cross the seas to any foreign soil. 
 
 Perils and toiL 
 Wars with their noise affright us ; when they cease, 
 
 We're worse in peace. 
 What then remains, but that we stiU should cry, 
 Not to be bom, or, being bom, to die ? 
 
68 SHAKESPEARE OE BACON? 
 
 Note to p. 37. 
 
 BEN JONSON'S SCUEEILOUS SONNET ON 
 SHAKESPEAEE. 
 
 ON POET APE. 
 
 Poor poet Ape, that would be thought our chief, 
 
 Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit, 
 From brokage has become so bold a thief, 
 
 That we, the robbed, have rage and pity it. 
 At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean, 
 
 Buy the reversion of old plays ; now grown 
 To a little wealth and credit in the scene, 
 
 He takes up all — makes each man's wit his own, 
 And told of this he slights it. — Tut ! Such crimes 
 
 The sluggish gaping auditor devours ; 
 He marks not whose 'twas first, and after-times 
 
 May judge it to be his as well as ours. 
 Fool ! As if half eyes will not know a fleece 
 From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece ! 
 
 This is quite in the vein of Eicliard Greene's attack on 
 Shakespeare. But it has an incidental value as showing 
 that Jonson, when he wrote it, shared the universal belief 
 of Shakespeare's intimates and acquaintances, that he, and 
 nobody else, dressed up and put new life into old and 
 faulty plays, and made them popular in their altered 
 form. 
 
APPENDIX. 69 
 
 ISTOTE TO p. 53. 
 A BAC0:N'IAN 0^ SHAKESPEAEE'S WOIilEK 
 
 The Baconians obviously feel the pinch of the line of 
 argument in the text, for they are driven to meet it by 
 alleging that Shakespeare's plays show that the writer of 
 them had as low an estimate of women as Bacon. Thus 
 Mrs Potts, in a note (p. 479) to her edition of Bacon's 
 " Promus " (London, 1883), says: — 
 
 "Erom the entries which refer to women we see that 
 Bacon formed very imfavourable views regarding them, — 
 views which unhappy passages in his own life probably 
 tended to confirm. The Shakespeare plays seem to exhibit 
 the same unfavourable sentiments of their author. There are 
 130 female personages in the plays, and the characters of 
 these seem to be easily divisible into six classes : — 
 
 " 1. Euries or viragos, such as Tamora, Queen Margaret, 
 Goneril, Began, and even Lady Macbeth ia the dark side of 
 her character. 
 
 " 2. Shrews and sharp-tongued women, as Katharine, 
 Constance, and many others, when they are represented as 
 angry. 
 
 " 3. Gossiping and untrustworthy women, as most of the 
 maids, hostesses, &c., and as Percy insinuates that he con- 
 siders his wife to be. 
 
 " 4. Fickle, faithless, and artful — a disposition which 
 seems assumed throughout the plays to be the normal con- 
 dition of womanhood (!). 
 
70 SHAKESPEAEE OR BACON? 
 
 " 5. Thoroughly immoral, as Cleopatra, Phrynia, Timan- 
 dra, Bianca. 
 
 " 6. Gentle, simple, and colourless, as Hero, Olivia, 
 Ophelia, Cordelia, &c. 
 
 " Noteworthy exceptions, which exhibit more exalted and 
 finer pictures of good and noble women, are the characters 
 of Isabella, Yolumnia, and of Katharine of Aragon; but 
 these are not sufficient to do away with the impression that, 
 on the loliole, the author of the plays had hut a poor opinion 
 of women ; that love he regarded as youthfid passion, mar- 
 riage as a doubtful happiness^ 
 
 Every man or woman who has made a study of Shake- 
 speare can estimate for him or herself what weight is to be 
 attached to the judgment which could arrive at such con- 
 clusions. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 
 
 C-- 
 
i)t the youth of both sexes, and divest them of 
 a of inuocent igncrauce oi what is vile, and of 
 g belief in what is good. For it should never 
 tten that, as Fielding, the novelist, has said, 
 
 oo i;oV,l-> i~ I.- i-J l-TT 1 — '— 
 
 •naisa.TT'B s.iainf> mm naTnliTT ara^^ 
 
 MxiRTIN AT LLANGOLLEN. J I 
 
 EODOKE Martin presided at a Primrose b ; 
 monstratiou at Llangollen last evening, and j» I 
 led with great cheermg. He said the year [ 
 tassed since they last met had been an eventful [ 
 for Europe and our own Kingdom. No . 
 ow could have fallen upon Europe than the , 
 the three-mouths German Emperor — a " 
 whom all who knew him looked for- 
 contidence and hope as a guarantee for J 
 e of Europe, and for the liberties 
 advancement of his people (cheers). What- 
 i may have said of him who liked not his 
 liberal views, and to whom his well-known 
 for the toiling masses of his subjects was dis- 
 is people knew that in him they had a friend ; 
 showed that they did so by the endearing 
 • gave him, " Our own Fritz." It was a 
 1 went home to the hearts of us on this side 
 innel, for it told of the same feeling among 
 uic friends as that which stirred within our |t 
 hen we thought of our own Queeu, and all ^ 
 ess proofs she had given that, while the safety 
 ir of her dominions had never suffered and 
 Id suffer iu her hands, the daily well-being and 
 t those of her subjects whose lot in life was 
 rere ever present to her heart (applause), 
 immediate future of Europe was to be would 
 eatly upon the young Emperor William ; i 
 uld not believe that the policy and career of ^ 
 ad been so rarely blest in the training and i 
 f such a father, and not less of such a mother, 
 otherwise than worthy of the race whose 
 jlish as well as German, flowed in his veins 
 No braver or better soldier than his father 
 1 army to victory, or looked death iu the face 
 battle field. But, like all the greatest 
 he held war in horror, for, to borrow the 
 m Shakespeare, he was 
 As full of kindness as of valour — 
 |Princely in both." 
 
 aid his sword have been drawn in a war of 
 
 . Never would he have lent his aid to those 
 
 Id seek, to rob a nation of its iude- 
 
 3r to impose upon it a Govern- 
 
 tnst which its instincts rebelled. It was 
 
 ti a cause alone that war in Europe 
 
 ; but if the young Emperor William would 
 
 the principles of his parents, what Power 
 
 iture to force such a warr* The German 
 
 yould find Austria and Italy ranged by his 
 
 sistance to any disturber of the peace of 
 
 and if a crisis should arise, the voice of 
 
 rould of a surety be raised in the same strain. 
 
 all that had been said and done, England 
 
 a potential voice wherever and whenever 
 
 sts of Europe and of civilisation were at 
 
 !ers). That it has been potential in the 
 
 due to the fact that her arm was 
 
 many a victory by sea and land through 
 
 had proved. Nor was she of a mind 
 
^i 
 
a>e&icate& bu permission to 1ber /IDost C5racious flftajestt tbc Queen. 
 
 ON SOME OF 
 SHAKESPEARE'S FEMALE CHARACTERS. 
 
 IN A SERIES OF LETTERS. 
 Bv HELENA FAUCIT, LADY MARTIN. 
 
 A Third and Cheaper Edition. 
 8vo, ys. 6d. 
 
 "This is one of the books we dare hardly criticise We have seldom 
 
 met with a book which has given us more refined enjoyment as we read, 
 and more original matter for meditation afterwards." — Times. 
 
 " The book is delightful, full of information and helpful commentary on 
 Shakespeare, while at the same time it reveals to us, in the most effective 
 way, a very lofty and beautiful individuality."— 5r//«/i QuarUrly /Review. 
 
 " Interspersed with the accounts of the plays in which she has appeared, 
 there are fragments of dramatic autobiography of miich interest and value." 
 — Saturday Review. 
 
 WILLIAM BL.ACKWOOD & SONS. Edinburgh \nu London. 
 
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