uprightness, his honesty, his modesty, is disclosed in his poems, and
corroborated by the evidence of his contemporaries. His poetry breathes
the gentleness and the lovable nature with which his personal friends
credited him. What is there in any analysis of Bacon, beyond his
marvellous mental attainments, which single him out as the probable,
even possible, creator of King Lear, Brutus, Juliet, Rosalind, and
Shylock? Coldness of heart, and meanness of spirit, are faults of
temperament which cannot, by the greatest stretch of imagination be
associated with the author of Lear’s desolating pathos and Arthur’s
deeply pathetic appeal to Hubert. The points in Bacon’s career,
which have been dealt with in the foregoing pages, were selected of
_malice prepense_; not to detract from the greatness of the Lord
Chancellor, as a literary genius and philosopher, but as demonstrating
the impossibility of associating such a nature with the authorship
of the poetry attributed to him. By his deeds we know him to have
been a man whose nature was largely made up of ingratitude, untruth,
flattery, meanness, cruelty, and servility. His treatment of Essex,
of Cecil, and of Yelverton, can only be stigmatised as “peculiarly
cold-blooded and ungrateful;” his persecution of Peacham convicts him
of cruelty, bordering on savageness; his meanness is illustrated by
the selfish unreasonableness displayed by his attitude towards Trott,
his long-suffering creditor. His servile submission to Buckingham has
scarcely a parallel in English history.
Deep as was his mind, and profound his knowledge, Bacon possessed no
high standard of virtue or morality; he had no intuitive knowledge of
mankind, and even as regards his dealings with the people amongst whom
his life was passed, he evidenced a singular defectiveness as a reader
of character. The sweeping generalities of his observations would be a
poor stock-in-trade for a writer of melodrama. In his books he exhibits
the cunning, the casuistry and unscrupulousness of an Elizabethan
politician and time server. His advice and his opinions betray a mean
view of life and its obligations. He had no sense of duty towards his
fellow men where duty clashed with his personal interests. His methods
are instinct with craft, artifice, and finesse--his advice to Essex,
and to the King, was, for this very reason, misleading and abortive.
It is incontrovertible that Bacon’s writings and Shakespeare’s plays
are crammed with all kinds of erudition, and Coleridge has claimed for
the latter that they form “an inexhaustible mine of virgin wealth.” But
not a single argument can be advanced to show that Shakespeare could
not easily have acquired such erudition and scholarship as the writing
of the plays entailed, while we have all the books of Bacon to prove
that the poetic genius, the colossal personality, the deep, intense
appreciation of nature, and the unrivalled knowledge of man, which are
the sovereign mark of the Plays, were not possessed by Bacon.
In editing the existing biographies of Lord Bacon to bolster up their
theory, the Baconians have only conformed to the laws of absolute
necessity. The cold, unvarnished facts that have been set forth
in the foregoing pages are so contrary to the popular impression
of what constitutes a “concealed poet,” that a more than ordinary
amount of colorisation was required to make them acceptable in the
author of _The Tempest_. But although there is reasonable excuse,
and even some justification for this rose-colorisation process as
applied to Bacon--for great men have almost invariably been given,
by their biographers, the greatest benefit that be derived from all
doubts--the champions of Bacon have far exceeded their prerogative
in their attempts to defame and belittle Shakespeare. So much
incorrect deduction, so much groundless suspicion, and so much
palpable inaccuracy have been put forward by the Baconians, that it is
imperative the few known facts in the poet’s life should be clearly
stated. The following sketch is frankly intended, not so much to
support the claim of Shakespeare as the author of the Plays, as to
refute the many misconceptions and untruths by which his enemies have
endeavoured to traduce him.
_Baconian Fallacies Respecting Shakespeare._
It is only necessary to read the facts concerning Shakespeare’s
ancestry and parentage to dissipate some of the absurd suggestions as
to the obscurity and illiteracy of the family. The poet came of good
yeoman stock, and his forebears to the fourth and fifth generation
were fairly substantial landowners. John Shakespeare, his father, was
at one period of his life a prosperous trader in Stratford-on-Avon. He
played a prominent part in municipal affairs, and became successively
Town Councillor, Alderman, one of the chamberlains of the borough, and
auditor of the municipal accounts. The assertion that he could not
write is a distinct perversion of fact, as “there is evidence in the
Stratford archives that he could write with facility.”
On the subject of the education of William Shakespeare it is inevitable
that there should be conflicting opinions. Those who would deck out the
memory of Bacon with the literary robe, “the garment which,” according
to Mr. R. M. Theobald, is “too big and costly” for the “small and
insignificant personality” of Shakespeare, will not concede that he
was better educated than his father, who--the error does not lose for
want of repetition--“signed his name by a mark.” Supporters of the
traditional theory, however, reply, “we do not require evidence to show
that he was an educated man--we have his works, and the evidence of
Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell to prove it.” Mr. Theobald
argues that because there is no positive proof that he had any school
education, it is logical to conclude that he had none. Mr. A. P.
Sinnett, with the same reckless disregard for facts, says, “We know
that he (William Shakespeare) was the son of a tradesman at Stratford,
who could not read or write.” And in another place, “there is no rag
of evidence that he (William Shakespeare) ever went to school.” Mr.
W. H. Mallock describes him, still without “a rag of evidence” to
support his assertion, as “a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems
to have found some difficulty in signing his own name.” All evidence
we have to guide us on this point of Shakespeare’s schooling is that
he was entitled to free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford,
which was re-constituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. As
the son of a prominent and prosperous townsman, he would, for a moral
certainty, have been sent by his father to school (Mr. Sidney Lee
favours the probability that he entered the school in 1571), where
he would receive the ordinary instruction of the time in the Latin
language and literature. The fact that the French passages in _Henry
V._ are grammatically correct, but are not idiomatic, makes it certain
that they were written by a school-taught linguist, and not by a man
like Bacon, who, from his lengthy residence on the Continent, must
have been a master of colloquial, idiomatic French. Ben Jonson, in his
profound, and somewhat self-conscious command of classical knowledge,
spoke slightingly of Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek,” which
is all that his plays would lead us to credit him with. His liberal
use of translations, and his indebtedness to North’s translations of
_Plutarch’s Lives_, also substantiates this theory.
We cannot regard, as a great scholar, an author who “gives Bohemia a
coast line, makes Cleopatra play billiards, mixes his Latin, and mulls
his Greek.” Mr. Reginald Haines, who has made a study of Shakespeare
for the express purpose of testing his classical attainments, denies
emphatically that he shows any acquaintance with Greek at all. His
conclusions are worthy of consideration: “Of course there are common
allusions to Greek history and mythology such as every poet would have
at command, but no reference at first hand to any Greek writer....
As far as I know there are but four real Greek words to be found in
Shakespeare’s works--_threne_, _cacodemon_, _practic_, and _theoric_.
It is impossible to suppose that Bacon could have veiled his classical
knowledge so successfully in so extensive a field for its display, or
that he could, for instance, have perpetrated such a travesty of Homer
as appears in _Troilus and Cressida_. With Latin, the case is somewhat
different. Shakespeare certainly knew a little grammar-school Latin.
He was familiar with Ovid, and even quotes him in the original; and he
certainly knew Virgil, and Seneca, Cæsar, and something of Terence and
Horace, and, as I myself believe, of Juvenal. But he very rarely quotes
Latin, unless it be a proverb or some stock quotation from Mantuanus or
a tag from a Latin grammar. When he uses conversational Latin, as in
_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, the idiom is shaky. The quotations from Horace,
&c., in _Titus Andronicus_ are certainly not by Shakespeare. Nor are
the Latinisms like “palliament” in that play. Still he has a very large
vocabulary of Latin words such as _renege_, to _gust_ (taste), and we
may fairly say that Shakespeare knew Latin as well as many sixth form
boys, but not as a scholar.” Two years ago a writer in the _Quarterly
Review_, who had gone through all the alleged examples of erudition
and evidences of wide and accurate classical scholarship in the
Shakespearean plays, showed them to be entirely imaginary.
In 1582, before he was nineteen years of age, Shakespeare married Anne
Hathaway, and three years afterwards he left Stratford for London. It
was during this period, says Mr. Theobald, that “the true Shakespeare
was studying diligently, and filling his mind with those vast stores
of learning--classic, historic, legal, scientific--which bare such
splendid fruit in his after life.” As Mr. Theobald’s contention is
that Bacon was the “true Shakespeare,” let us consider for a moment
how young Francis was employing his abilities at this particular time.
In 1579 he returned to England after a two years’ residence in France.
He had revealed an early disposition to extend his studies beyond the
ordinary limits of literature, and to read the smallest print of the
book of nature. He was already importuning his uncle, Lord Burghley,
for some advancement which might enable him to dispense with the
monotonous routine of legal studies. Failing in this endeavour, he was
admitted as a barrister of Gray’s Inn, was elected to Parliament for
Melcombe Regis, composed his first philosophical work, which he named
“with great confidence, and a magnificent title,” _The Greatest Birth
of Time_, and another treatise entitled, _Advice to Queen Elizabeth_.
In the case of the poet we have no record; in that of the future Lord
Chancellor we get the key of the nature which rendered the man as
“incapable of writing _Hamlet_ as of making this planet.”
[Illustration: ANNA LADY BACON, MOTHER OF FRANCIS BACON.
(From an original picture in the collection of Lord Verulam at
Gorhambury).]
William Beeston, a 17th century actor, has left it on record that,
after leaving Stratford, Shakespeare was for a time a country
schoolmaster. In 1586 he arrived in London. His only friend in the
Metropolis was Richard Field, a fellow townsman, whom he sought
out, and with whom, as publisher, he was shortly to be associated. It
is uncertain when Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s company
of actors, but documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it
in 1594, and that in 1603, after the accession of James I., when they
were called the King’s Players, he was one of its leaders. This company
included among its chief members Shakespeare’s life-long friends,
Richard Burbage, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips,
and it was under their auspices that his plays first saw the light.
Before they opened at the Rose on the Bankside, Southwark, in 1592, the
Lord Chamberlain’s company had played at The Theatre in Shoreditch,
and in 1599 they opened at the Globe, which was afterwards the only
theatre with which Shakespeare was professionally associated. In this
year he acquired an important share in the profits of the company,
and his name appears first on the list of those who took part in the
original performance of Ben Jonson’s _Every Man in His Humour_. Mr.
Theobald states that Shakespeare had become a fairly prosperous theatre
manager in 1592, but as he did not secure his interest in the business
until seven years later, what probably is meant is that Shakespeare was
combining the duties of stage manager, acting manager, and treasurer
of the theatre. It would appear that, recognising the fact that the
period in Shakespeare’s life between 1588 and 1592 is a blank “which no
research can fill up,” Mr. Theobald considers that he is justified in
making good the deficiency out of his own inner consciousness.
As occasion will require that Mr. Theobald’s contribution to the
controversy shall presently be dealt with, it may not be out of place
here to explain the object, so far as it is intelligible, of his
_Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light_ (Sampson Low, 1901). It would
have been a fair thing to assume that the design of the author of
this volume of over 500 pages, was to prove the Baconian authorship
of Shakespeare, but as Mr. Theobald has since written to the Press
to protest against this interpretation of his motives, we must take
his words as he gives his parallels “for what they are worth.” In the
opening lines of his preface, Mr. Theobald declares that while the
greatest name in the world’s literature is Shakespeare, there is in
the world’s literature no greater name than Bacon. Really, it would
seem that if his object is not to prove that the two names stand for
one and the same individual, this statement is sheer nonsense. Before
the end of the preface is reached, he frankly avows his belief that
“when the time comes for a general recognition of Bacon as the true
Shakespeare, the poetry will still be called “Shakespeare,” and that
no one will find anything compromising in such language, any more than
we do when we refer to George Eliot or George Sand, meaning Miss Evans
or Madame Dudevant.” But if Mr. Theobald was as versed in his study of
the subject as Mrs. Gallup, Dr. Owen, Mr. A. P. Sinnett, or even Bacon
himself, he would know that when this general recognition comes to pass
the author of the Plays will not be called Shakespeare, or Bacon, but
Francis “Tidder, or Tudor”--otherwise Francis I. of England--provided,
of course, that the bi-literallists can substantiate their cipher. But
as Mr. Theobald does not design to prove the Baconian theory, he does
not, of course, require the evidence of the great Chancellor, or he
may, as a disparager of cipher speculations, accept such evidence “for
what it is worth.”
_Mr. Theobald, a Baconian by Intuition._
Mr. Theobald’s “preliminaries” are chiefly remarkable for three diverse
reasons. We learn therefrom that he is a Baconian by intuition--“the
persuasion took hold of his mind” as soon as Holme’s _Authorship
of Shakespeare_ was placed in his hand--that he does not admit the
existence of genius, and that he is intolerant of “clamours and
asperities, denunciations and vituperations,” and the personal abuse
employed by anti-Baconians, whom he alludes to as Hooligans, and
compares with geese. So long as he keeps to the trodden path of
Baconian argument, he is only about as perverse and incorrect as
the rest of--to use his own expression as applied to Shakespearean
students--“the clan.” But he becomes amusing when he ventures to
present new arguments in support of Bacon’s claim, variously abusive
in his references to Shakespeare, and desperately dogmatic in his
pronouncement of the faith that is in him.
“Among the many shallow objections brought against the Baconian
theory,” writes Mr. Theobald in his chapter on Bacon’s literary
output, “one is founded on the assumption that Bacon was a voluminous
writer, and that if we add to his avowed literary productions, the
Shakespearean dramas, he is loaded with such a stupendous literary
progeny as no author could possibly generate. Moreover, he was so busy
in state business as a lawyer, judge, counsellor, member of Parliament,
confidential adviser to the King, and the responsible rulers in State
and Church, that he had very little spare time for authorship.”
[Illustration: SIR NATHANIEL BACON.
From the original, in the collection of The Right Honble the Earl of
Verulam.]
In order to demonstrate that this shallow objection, as Mr. Theobald
calls it, is a well-founded and irrefutable statement of fact, we
have only to refer to Lord Bacon’s life and to his letters. From
1579, when he returned from France, until the end of his life he
was distracted between politics and science; he put forward as his
reason for seeking office that he might thereby be able to help on his
philosophic projects which with him were paramount, and the poignant
regret of his last years was that he had allowed himself to be diverted
from philosophy into politics. He found “no work so meritorious,”
so serviceable to mankind, “as the discovery and development of the
arts and inventions that tend to civilise the life of men.” In his
letter to Lord Burghley in 1592, he expressed the hope that in the
service of the State he could “bring in industrious observations,
grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries--the
best state of that province”--the province embracing all nature which
he had made his own. But office was denied him, and he returned to
“business” and to his constant bewailings of the fact that he had no
time for literature. In 1607 he settled the plan of the _Instauratio
Magna_; which had been foreshadowed in his _Advancement of Learning_,
published two years previously. In 1609 he wrote to Toby Mathew, “My
_Instauratio_ sleeps not,” and again, in the same year, “My great work
goeth forward; and after my manner I alter ever when I add; so that
nothing is finished till all is finished.” From 1609 to 1620 Bacon
spent such leisure as he could snatch from his other work in revising
the _Novum Organum_ (the second part of his _Magna Instauratio_), of
which his chaplain, Rawley, says that he had seen “at least twelve
copies revised year by year, one after another, and amended in the
frame thereof.” In 1620, when the _Novum Organum_ was published,
the author sent it into the world uncompleted, because he had begun
to number his days, and “would have it saved.” This was the book he
alluded to as “my great work”--the work of his life, and he issued
it as a fragment because he had not been able to find time to finish
it. The belief that he had “very little spare time for authorship” is
no shallow objection brought against the Baconian theory--it is an
irrefutable fact, proved not only out of the mouth, but in the life, of
Lord Bacon.
In spite, however, of all positive evidence to the contrary, Mr.
Theobald proceeds to bolster up his contention that Bacon had time, and
to spare, for literary pursuits, by the following most amazing piece of
logic. He contends, in the first place, that “an estimate of the entire
literary output of Bacon, as a scientific and philosophical writer,
proves the amount to be really somewhat small.” He takes the fourteen
volumes of Spedding’s _Life and Works_, subtracts the prefaces, notes,
editorial comments, and the biographical narrative, puts aside as of
“no literary significance whatever,” all business letters, speeches,
State papers, etc., and thus reduces the total amount of literature
to Bacon’s credit in the seven volumes devoted to the _Life_ to some
375 pages. “If we calculate the whole amount contained in the fourteen
volumes, we shall find it may be reckoned at about six such volumes,
each containing 520 pages. On this method of calculation and selection,
all that Mr. Theobald can find, “for his whole life, amounts to about
70 pages per annum, less than six pages a month.” Turning from Bacon
to Shakespeare, Mr. Theobald finds that here again is a man whose
literary output has been greatly exaggerated, for “if the Shakespeare
poetry was the only work of William Shakespeare, certainly he was not
a voluminous writer. _Thirty-one years may be taken as a moderate
estimate of the duration of his literary life, i.e., from 1585 till his
death in 1616._ And the result is 37 plays and the minor poems--not
two plays for each year.” Mr. Theobald, it will be seen, possesses the
same weakness for statistics that Mr. Dick evinced for King Charles’
head; he drops in his little estimate in season and out of season, and
his appraisements are as manifold as they are fallacious. The period
of Shakespeare’s dramatic output was confined to twenty years, from
1591 to 1611--if he had continued writing plays till his death in 1616,
Bacon’s alleged playwriting would not have ceased with such significant
suddenness in 1611. But what conclusion does Mr. Theobald arrive at
as the result of his estimates? No less than this, that if the whole
of Shakespeare, and the whole of Bacon’s acknowledged works belong to
the same author, “the writer was not a voluminous author--_not by any
means so voluminous as Miss Braddon_ or Sir Walter Scott.” That Mr.
Theobald should not hesitate to class Miss Braddon’s novels with the
plays of Shakespeare, which belong to the supreme rank of literature,
or even with Bacon’s “royal mastery of language never surpassed, never
perhaps equalled,” is the most astounding link in this astounding
chain of so-called evidence. But Mr. Theobald advances it with the
utmost confidence. “Therefore,” he sums up, “let this objection stand
aside; it vanishes into invisibility as soon as it is accurately
tested”--_i.e._, weighed up, like groceries, by the pound.
Mr. Theobald is scarcely complimentary to Shakespeare’s champions
in this controversy, but his language is positively libellous when
he refers to Shakespeare himself. His personality is “small and
insignificant;”--he is a “shrunken, sordid soul, fattening on beer, and
coin, and finding sweetness and content in the _stercorarium_ of his
Stratford homestead”--a “feeble, and funny, and most ridiculous mouse.”
Mr. Theobald almost argues himself not a Baconian by his assertion that
“no Baconian, so far as I know, seeks to help his cause by personal
abuse, or intolerant and wrathful speech.”
_Was Shakespeare the “Upstart Crow?”_
All that we can allege with any certainty about Shakespeare, between
1586 and 1602, is that he must have obtained employment at one or other
of the only two theatres existing in London at that time (The Theatre,
and The Curtain)--perhaps, as Malone has recorded, in the capacity of
call-boy--that he became an actor, was employed in polishing up the
stock-plays presented by the Company, and that _Love’s Labour’s Lost_
was produced in the Spring of 1591. Assuming that Shakespeare was
the author of this play--assuming, that is to say, that Ben Jonson,
John Heming, and Henry Condell were neither arrant fools, nor wilful
perjurers--it is evident that the “insignificant,” “shrunken, sordid
soul,” “this ridiculous mouse” had education, application, a natural
taste for the stage; and what is more--and more than Mr. Theobald can
comprehend--he had genius. Mr. Theobald does not arrive at any such
conclusion. Apart altogether from Mrs. Gallup’s cipher revelations,
he is convinced by another “flash of intuition” that Ben Jonson was
a fellow conspirator with Bacon in the ridiculous plot of foisting
Bacon’s plays upon the world as the work of Shakespeare, and that
Heming and Condell were but the tools of the disgraced Lord Chancellor.