explained as manifestations of the Time Spirit, some of them strongly
suggest direct contact even when taken singly. Take for example, the
_misquotation of Aristotle_ by Shakespeare in _Troilus and Cressida_,
and by Bacon in the _Advancement of Learning_.[67] Take, again, the
curious resemblance between the _Winter’s Tale_ and the _Essay of
Gardens_. Spedding’s comment on this passage in the Essay runs: “The
scene in _Winter’s Tale_ where Perdita presents the guests with flowers
... has some expressions which, if the Essay had been printed somewhat
earlier, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading
it.”[68]
(f) Again, certain views to which Bacon gave expression in the _Essay of
Deformity_, seem implicit in Shakespeare’s _Richard the Third_. Richard
has his “revenge of nature” for the ill turn she did him in making him
deformed. He is also “extreme bold,” ever on the watch to “observe the
weakness” of others. His deformity, moreover, must, it would seem, be
supposed to have “quenched jealousy” in those personages who, if he had
been comely, would have foreseen and thwarted his ambitious designs.
(g) In the course of some interesting observations on the writing of
history considered as an art, Bacon confesses to a liking for ready-made
outlines or plots, so that the artist might be free to concentrate his
powers on the more congenial work of enrichment “with counsels,
speeches, and notable particularities.” The faulty plots of many of
Shakespeare’s plays imply that he also grudged the labour of
construction and delighted in decoration and enrichment.
(h) Several editions of Bacon’s Essays seem to have been published
without their author’s consent. Shakespeare also seems to have been
preyed upon by piratical publishers. Wherever concealment of authorship
is a desideratum, prosecution by law must needs be difficult if not
impossible.
(i) Whenever Shakespeare, as we know him in quartos and folios, stands
in need of an interpreter, no contemporary author is so often consulted
by orthodox critics as Francis Bacon.
(k) Compare the _Merchant of Venice_, which the editor of the First
Folio rather enigmatically calls _comedy_, with Bacon’s _Essay of
Usury_. The primary intention of the play was to amuse or delight; that
of the Essay being of course to instruct. But the play appears to me to
have combined _utile_ with _dulce_, instruction with pleasure; and the
lesson as I understand it was this:--usury instead of being forbidden by
the State, should be recognised and regulated, on the ground that
unconditional forfeiture of pawns or pledges--the usual alternative to
usury--is apt to bear more harshly on the borrower. The crisis of the
play arrives near the end of Act IV, Sc. 1, where the Doge pronounces
judgment. The instant and immediate effect upon Shylock is positively
crushing; he would rather die than submit. But the accent of despair is
quickly succeeded by the words: “I am content,” although one of the
conditions just introduced by Antonio is that the wretched man Shylock
should “presently become a Christian.” The change of mood is so amazing
that we can hardly believe our senses. What can be the explanation? we
ask ourselves. Between the judgment pronounced by the Doge and Shylock’s
accent of despair, Antonio has thrown in these words: “So please my lord
the Duke and all the Court to quit the fine for one half of his goods, I
am content; so he [Shylock] will let me have the other half in use, to
render it upon his death unto the gentleman that lately stole his
daughter.” To us the words may seem insignificant. But Shylock was a
sort of personification of usury, and to him they meant nothing less
than victory--victory over his arch-enemy Antonio, the head and front of
the anti-usury party in Venice.
Students of Bacon will remember that his _Essay of Usury_ is a plea for
State recognition and regulation of interest or “use,” on utilitarian
grounds similar to those suggested in the comedy.
But may not this harmony between the _Merchant of Venice_ and the Essay
have been accidental, especially as there was an interval of some
twenty-five years between the appearance of the _Essay_ in its present
form and our _Merchant of Venice_? My answer is that the _Essay_ was
based, as we know from one of Bacon’s own letters, on “some short papers
of mine touching usury, how to grind the teeth of it,” etc., and these
short papers may well have been written as early as 1598, when Bacon
himself was in the clutches of the money-lender.[69]
(l) The relation between the play of _Hamlet_ and the _Essay of Revenge_
is quite as close as that between the _Essay of Usury_ and the _Merchant
of Venice_. A reader who should consider the tragedy of _Hamlet_ with a
single eye to conduct, will hardly escape the reflection that its lesson
or moral is summed up to perfection in one of Bacon’s Essays, viz., the
one which treats of revenge: “They doe but trifle with themselves that
labour in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s
sake; but thereby to purchase himselfe Profit, or Pleasure, or Honour,
or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a Man, for loving
himselfe better than mee?... Vindicative persons live the Life of
Witches: who, as they are Mischievous, so end they Infortunate.” Such in
the end was the noble Hamlet’s fate. Once possessed by the devil of
revenge, he becomes a sort of upas or plague-centre, and perishes in a
sorry and most unlucky broil.
(m) The existence of striking harmonies between Shakespeare and Bacon
was detected by foreign students fifty years ago and more. Professor
Kuno Fischer, for example, wrote: “To the parallels between them [i.e.
Bacon and Shakespeare] belong the similar relation of both to Antiquity,
their affinity to the Roman mind, and their divergence from the
Greek.... Bacon would have man studied in his individual capacity as a
product of nature and history, in every respect determined by ...
external and internal conditions. And exactly in the same spirit has
Shakespeare understood man and his destiny.” Gervinus in his
_Commentaries_ observes: “In Bacon’s works we find a number of moral
sayings and maxims of experience from which the most striking mottoes
might be drawn for every Shakespearean play, aye, for all his principal
characters, testifying to a remarkable harmony in their comprehension of
human nature.” One more quotation, of like import and from an author
with no partiality for Baconian views, may not be superfluous. Professor
J. Nichol, after having ruled out the Baconian heresy by recording his
opinion that Bacon did not write Shakespeare, proceeds: “But there is
something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they
[Bacon and Shakespeare] find voice for sentiments often as nearly
identical when they anticipate as when they contravene the manners of
thought and standards of action that prevail in our age.” (_Francis
Bacon_, Vol. I, 1888).
(n) Only a lawyer by education would have hit upon the technicality
which is the nucleus of the 87th Sonnet of Shakespeare. The technicality
is not one which an amateur interested in common law proceedings would
be likely to pick up, for it belongs to the art of conveyancing. Part of
my time, fifty years ago, was spent in the chambers of a conveyancer.
But for that early training I might still have been able to see
intellectual beauty in the well-known bust of Shakespeare at Stratford;
for my suspicion of the popular legend originated in the conviction that
the Shakespeare who matters must have been bred up a lawyer.[70]
(o) In the year 1867, Mr. John Bruce discovered in Northumberland House,
which then stood in the Strand, a bundle of Elizabethan manuscripts, the
outermost sheet of which contains a miscellaneous list of Elizabethan
writings, the majority of which are unquestionably identified with work
previously known to have been due to Bacon. The minority consists of
five pieces, three of which may, for anything we know to the contrary,
have been enriched if not entirely written by him. The two remaining
pieces figure in the list as “Rychard the Second” and “Rychard the
Third.” The significance of this association with work of which there
can be no doubt that Bacon was the author, is greatly increased by the
fact that the cover or sheet which bears the list of contents is
bescribbled at random with the names “ffrancis Bacon” and “William
Shakespeare.”[71]
Mr. Spedding evidently missed what seems to me the true significance of
this double association--the combination of titles in the list of
contents, and the mixture of the names Bacon with Shakespeare in the
scribbles. But one or two of his observations on the subject of this
singular find are interesting enough. He notes, for example, that the
name “Shakespeare” in the scribbles is “spelt in every case as it was
always printed in those days, and not as he himself in any known case
wrote it.” Another of Spedding’s observations is that the contained
manuscripts, list or lists of contents, and scribbles, all belong to a
period “not later then the reign of Elizabeth.”
(p) Attentive readers of almost any biography of Francis Bacon will be
surprised to learn that the record of his achievements begins so late.
Singularly precocious, he has already reached the ripe age--so these
biographies tell us--of 36, before anything worthy of mention can be
placed to his credit except a small tract or booklet of confessedly
unripe _Essays_, _Religious Meditations_, and _Coulers of Good and
Evil_. That there must be something very wrong with the record is proved
by the fact that already in 1597, the date of the booklet, everything
that came, or was suspected of coming, from the pen of Bacon, was in
such request that he was compelled, as he tells his brother, to publish
these crudities lest they should be stolen or mutilated by piratical
printers. His first really notable work, according to the conventional
record, is the _Advancement of Learning_, which was not published until
two-thirds of his life was behind him. By far the greater part of the
remaining third was so absorbed by public affairs, and, after his fall,
so harassed by ill-health and private worries, that no literary fruit
could have been looked for. Yet its closing years were marked by an
unparalleled outburst of literary activity--an outburst which, like the
fear of piratical printers expressed in his letter of 1597, means, I
take it, that his youth and early manhood had been devoted to the art
and practice of literature. Shelley’s emphatic assertion that Bacon was
a poet leaves the puzzle still unsolved. So, perhaps, does the discovery
of harmony after harmony between Bacon and Shakespeare.
But the tension will begin to relax so soon as we shall have taken time
to grasp the significance on these two facts: first, that the dramas
attributed to Shakespeare (spelt as it was always printed in those
days[72]) cannot be fitted into the life of the man Shakspere who ended
his life, and was evidently content to end it, in what was then a small
and rather squalid country town: and second, that the evidence--Ben
Jonson’s--which is commonly supposed to establish the Stratford case,
turns out to be in itself an enigma rather than a solution.
The riddle is almost read when we shall have satisfied ourselves that
Bacon was not only a poet but a “concealed” poet, and that by his own
confession. And by the time we have been shown Sir T. Mathew’s remark,
in his letter to Viscount St. Alban: “The most prodigious ... wit I know
... is of your Lordship’s name though he be known by another,” the true
and only solution stands revealed.
This letter was written, I imagine, just at the time when the First
Folio (of Shakespeare) was the talk of literary London. It was excluded
from Sir Tobie Mathew’s own _Collection of Letters_ (published 1660),
but seems to have lived on, in seclusion no doubt, till 1762, by which
time all thought about the “concealed poet’s” potent art had long been
buried with his bones. Basil Montagu gives a copy of it, but Spedding,
if I mistake not, ignores it.
This is by no means all the evidence that a better advocate than I could
bring to bear on the question in dispute. But no stronger guarantee for
the truth of the Bacon hypothesis can be demanded than that it should
harmonise a large number of otherwise inexplicable data; and this demand
I hope I may have done something to meet.
For the rival hypothesis, of course, there is much to be said. Never was
Golden Bough the child or offspring of an ilex oak. Yet Vergil’s
beautiful tale for ever adorns the lovely Avernian lake.
Stratford-on-Avon was even more to the Shakespeare legend, and thereby
may likewise be immortalised. “Doth any man doubt that if there were
taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false
valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave
the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy
and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”
“THE TEMPEST” AND ITS SYMBOLISM[73]
_The Tempest_ in the form in which it originally left the author’s hand
belongs, it would seem, with _A Winter’s Tale_, to the period 1607-1610,
nearer probably to the 7 than the 10. The ground-plot may well have been
adapted, as Herr Dorer suggested, from a story which ultimately got into
a Spanish collection of Tales, called _Winter Nights_. Of the actual
plot it is not necessary to say much. Twelve years before the opening of
the play, Prospero, poet and enchanter, the victim of a wicked cabal,
found himself and his daughter, then a mere babe, stranded on a barren
island. Fortunately part of his library, consisting of volumes which he
prized above everything else in the world, except Miranda, had somehow
been allowed to accompany him. In the beloved society of these books and
Miranda he managed to pass the time until relief came in the shape of a
commotion brought about by his own consummate art.
The true centre of the play, the Sun about which its system revolves, is
Miranda. It is for her sake, hers alone, that Prospero displays, and
then for ever renounces, an art which he dearly loves and is certain he
will miss.
Now there is no evidence fit to be trusted that Shakspere, or, to give
him the title he coveted, Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon,
gentleman, was ever a lover of books, none that he ever possessed, or
would have cared to possess anything in the shape of a library. Among
the various specific bequests of his essentially vulgar Will no such
thing as a book is even suggested. About 1613 Shakspere exchanged the
mentally stimulating atmosphere of London for the deadly dullness of a
mean provincial town. His departure, unwept, unsung, and seemingly not
even noticed by any member of the literary world he is supposed to have
adorned, may have been demanded by keen personal interest in an
enclosure scheme which was then agitating the petty community at
Stratford. There is no evidence, no hint even, that it was due to
ill-health, and it certainly cannot have been due (as the whole action
of Prospero was) to preoccupation with the marriage of a daughter.
Daughters he had, it is true, and the younger of them (Judith) married
one Thomas Quiney a vintner or tavern-keeper, son of Richard Quiney (an
old friend of the Shaksperes) who, or whose widow, also kept a tavern.
But Judith’s marriage took place long after her father’s retirement from
London must have been resolved on. Shakspere’s _highest ambition_--Mr.
Sidney Lee tells us--_was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the
family repute which his father’s misfortunes had imperilled_. This
father it seems was a chandler or general dealer, not more illiterate
probably than others of the family, who began life in a humble way and
afterwards came to grief. If, as is likely, his debts were
inconsiderable, his _ambitious_ son should have found little difficulty
in restoring the _family repute_, such as it was. The fat-witted
lines--_Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed
here_, etc.--which this same son seems to have selected, or composed, or
ordered, for his monument, though quite out of keeping with mountains of
surmise, are entirely in keeping with all we can properly be said to
know of the man. Yet this is the man who is said, on eminent authority,
to have conceived and executed _The Tempest_, and what is more to my
immediate purpose, to have drawn Prospero in his own image! Belief in
this might have been possible, had we known next to nothing about
Shakspere or his environment. But the finds of a Halliwell-Phillipps (to
take him as a type) have had an effect which the industrious finder
certainly did not foresee or intend.
More than thirty years ago the writer came to the double conclusion, (a)
that whoever _Shakespeare_ might have been, Shakspere was not the man;
(b) that of all the known poets of that day, it was Bacon and Bacon
alone who seemed to possess the necessary qualifications. Many of the
reasons--none of them beholden to cypher, cryptogram or hocus-pocus of
any kind--which made for that conclusion are set forth in a little book,
_Bacon-Shakespeare, An Essay_ (signed E. W. S., Rome, but published,
1900, in London). Most of the reasons there given have, however, no very
definite relation to _The Tempest_ and its symbolism.
Shelley saw and asserted that _Bacon was a poet_. But students of Bacon
need no Shelley to inform them that Bacon was indeed a poet. His
earlier work betrays him. Even the _Advancement of Learning_ (1605),
tinctured as it is by the pedantic style then coming into fashion, holds
just the same truth in solution. To many such students, apology is due
for labouring the point. My excuse is the existence of a strong
prepossession to the contrary. By what seems to have been an oversight
on the part of Bacon, his executors and intimate friends, a letter of
his to Sir J. Davies, also a poet, has come down to us, unedited for the
public. In this letter Bacon confesses himself a poet, ranks himself in
effect amongst _concealed poets_. Aubrey too, thanks probably to a
similar oversight, lets us into the same secret that Bacon was a
_concealed poet_. Of Bacon’s affection for poetry the product (Bacon
himself calls it the _work or play_) of the imagination, there is no
room for doubt. If other evidence were wanting, the _Sapientia Veterum_
(1609) would almost suffice to prove it. As Porphyry’s reverence for the
elder gods is deducible from his attempt to extract philosophy out of
the oracles of antiquity, so Bacon’s reverent affection for poetry
manifests itself in that elaborate attempt of his to distil philosophy
out of what is at bottom a medley of poetical fables. That Bacon, like
Prospero, delighted in _poesis_ (making) is equally clear. _Poesy_, he
says in the _De Augmentis_--_Poesy is a dream of knowledge_ (_or_
culture), _a thing sweet and varied and that would fain be held partly
divine_.... _But now it is time for me to awake_ (ut evigilem) _and
cleave the liquid ether of philosophy_, etc. This passage, written after
1605, obviously means more than affection for poetry the product. Only
a poet who loved to dream, only a poet for whom the awaking was fraught
with pain, however glorious the promise of the dawn, would have written
that.
Bacon again, like Prospero, was a lover of books, and happy like him, in
the possession of a well-filled library (at Gray’s Inn, or Gorhambury,
or both). He was an omniverous reader, _tasting_ some books
(mathematical and astronomical, for example), _swallowing_ others,
_chewing and digesting a few_. His biographer says of him: _He was a
great reader_, but _no plodder upon books_.
About 1607-9, Bacon (in one of his _impetus philosophici_) imagined that
at last he really had hit upon an infallible Method of vastly enlarging
man’s dominion over Nature. The problem was how to launch this Method to
the best advantage. Knowing only too well that he would receive no
encouragement from living experts in science--the scientists who had
arrived as distinguished from those who had not yet started--he fixed
his hopes on ingenuous, open-minded Youth. But this is a prosaic way of
looking at the matter, and Bacon was a poet. To him the desideratum
presented itself as a marriage, a marriage between his _darling
philosophy_, as he was wont to call it, and an ideal husband. In the
_Redargutio Philosophiarum_ men are exhorted to devote themselves to the
task of bringing about _a chaste and legitimate wedlock between the mind
and nature_. In the _Sapientia Veterum_ the same idea appears in a
different form: _facultates illas duas Dogmaticam et Empiricam adhuc non
bene conjunctas et copulatas fuisse_.[74] In the _Delineatio_ (c. 1607)
he writes: _We trust we have constructed a bride-bed for the marriage of
Man’s Mind with the Universe_. The same idea (hardly as yet an
obsession) makes one of its earliest appearances in a _Speech in Praise
of Knowledge_, forming part of a dramatic _jeu d’esprit_ entitled _A
Conference of Pleasure_ (1592). In this _Speech_ several things are said
to _have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the
nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions
and blind experiments. And what the issue of so honourable a match may
be it is not hard to consider._ With the actual merits of the Method we
are but distantly concerned here. What is of importance here is the
certainty that Bacon would lose no opportunity of repudiating every
suggestion that his beloved child owed anything to the imagination. _It
was an usual speech of his lordship’s_, says his biographer, _that his
Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as men have made
it, for it hath nothing of the imagination_.
By this time the inner meaning of _The Tempest_, and also the editorial
reason for thrusting it into the leading place of the _First Folio_, may
have become apparent. Miranda stands for Bacon’s _Darling Philosophy_,
and the ingenuous young Ferdinand for the unsophisticated mind of man,
the human intellect _cleared and delivered_ from _idols_, particularly
_idols of the theatre_. The issue of so auspicious a match is left, in
_The Tempest_, as in the _Conference of Pleasure_, to the imagination.
Prospero’s ceremonious rejection of his magic robes is an adumbration
of Bacon’s anxiety to preserve his Philosophy from being calumniated as
a poetical dream, a thing _infected with the style of the poets_, as he
once (in a fragmentary _Essay of Fame_) confessed himself to be.
Devotion to Miranda again is the motive for Prospero’s resolve to
dismiss Ariel from his service, at a time when Ariel could ill be
spared, one feels, by his ageing master. The words _my dainty Ariel I
shall miss thee_ are eloquent of pain, pain self-inflicted and
unexplained, except by a promise wholly uncalled-for by anything that
appears on the surface. Ariel on the other hand, tricksy Ariel,
incapable of human affection, sick of expecting a long-promised freedom,
feels no pain, no regret, nothing but joy at the prospect of slaving it
no longer for a despotic master: _Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough_.