two points of interest to be mentioned. Shakespeare shows a fondness for
the use of phrases and illustrations taken from the law; and on such
grounds our Delia-Baconians argue that the plays must have been written
by an eminent lawyer, such as the Lord Chancellor Bacon undoubtedly was.
They feel that this is a great point on their side. One instance, cited
by Nathaniel Holmes and other Baconizers, is the celebrated case of Sir
James Hales, who committed suicide by drowning, and was accordingly
buried at the junction of crossroads, with a stake through his body,
while all his property was forfeited to the Crown. Presently his widow
brought suit for an estate by survivorship in joint-tenancy. Her case
turned upon the question whether the forfeiture occurred during her late
husband's lifetime: if it did, he left no estate which she could take;
if it did not, she took the estate by survivorship. The lady's counsel
argued that so long as Sir James was alive he had not been guilty of
suicide, and the instant he died the estate vested in his widow as
joint-tenant. But the opposing counsel argued that the instant Sir James
voluntarily made the fatal plunge, and therefore before the breath had
left his body, the guilt of suicide was incurred and the forfeiture took
place. The court decided in favour of this view, and the widow got
nothing.
There can be little doubt that this decision is travestied in the
conversation of the two clowns in "Hamlet" with regard to Ophelia's
right to Christian burial. The first clown makes precisely the point
upon which the ingenious counsel for the defendant had rested his
argument: "If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act
hath three branches; it is to act, to do, and to perform." In making
this distinction the counsel had maintained that the second branch, or
the doing, was the only thing for the law to consider. The talk of the
clowns brings out the humour of the case with Shakespeare's inimitable
lightness of touch.
The report of the Hales case was published in the volume of "Plowden's
Reports" which was issued in 1578; and Mr. Holmes informs us that "there
is not the slightest ground for a belief, on the facts which we know,
that Shakespeare ever looked into 'Plowden's Reports.'" This is one of
the cases where your stern Baconizer will not hear of anything short of
absolute demonstration. Mere considerations of human probability might
disturb the cogency of a neat little pair of syllogisms:--
(1.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. Shakespeare never
read Plowden. Therefore Shakespeare was not the author of "Hamlet."
(2.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. The lawyer, Bacon,
must have read Plowden. Therefore Bacon wrote "Hamlet."
With regard to the major premise here, one might freely deny it. The
author of "Hamlet" might easily have got all the knowledge involved from
an evening chat with some legal friend at an alehouse. Then as to the
minor premise, what earthly improbability is there in Shakespeare's
having dipped into Plowden? Can anybody but lawyers or law students
enjoy reading reports of law cases? I remember that, when I was about
ten years old, a favourite book with me was one entitled "Criminal
Trials of All Countries, by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar." I read it
and read it, until forbidden to read such a gruesome book, and then I
read it all the more. One of the most elaborate reports in it was that
of the famous case of Captain Donellan, tried in 1780 on a charge of
poisoning his wife's brother, Sir Theodosius Boughton, a dissipated and
diseased young man, who died very suddenly one day. A post-mortem
inspection showed spots in the intestine, which three ordinary country
doctors ascribed to poisoning by laurel water, while Sir John Hunter,
one of the greatest authorities in Europe, testified that they might
equally well have ensued upon death from apoplexy. The judge, Sir
Francis Buller, saw fit, in his charge, to reckon this as the testimony
of three experts against one; and thus the jury were driven to a verdict
of murder, though it was not proved that any murder had been committed.
Captain Donellan, who lived in his brother-in-law's house, was a man of
blameless life, an amateur chemist, much given to fooling with odorous
liquids and hissing retorts. It was proved that he had been distilling
laurel water, and one or two other suspicious circumstances were
alleged. The whole trial was begun and ended on the same day, the jury
were about twenty minutes in finding the captain guilty, and three days
afterward he was hung. It was a case where reason was submerged and
drowned under a wave of angry prejudice shrieking for a victim.
Now, if I did not forthwith write a play, and take the occasion to
ridicule the judge's charge to the jury, it was because I could not
write a play, not because I did not fully appreciate the insult to law
and common sense which that unfortunate case involved. In view of this
and other experiences, when I now read a play or a novel that contains
an intelligent allusion to some law case, I am far from feeling driven
to the conclusion that it must have been written by a lord chancellor.
If Shakespeare's dramas are proved by such internal evidence to have
been written by a lawyer, that lawyer, by parity of reasoning, could
hardly have been Francis Bacon. For he was preëminently a chancery
lawyer, and chancery phrases are in Shakespeare conspicuously absent.
The word "injunctions" occurs five times in the plays, once perhaps with
a reference to its legal use ("Merchant of Venice," II. ix.); but
nowhere do we find any exhibition of a knowledge of chancery law. His
allusions to the common law are often very amusing, as when, in "Love's
Labour's Lost," at the end of a brisk punning-match between Boyet and
Maria, he offers to kiss her, laughingly asking for a grant of pasture
on her lips, and she replies, "Not so; my lips are no common, though
several they be." Again, in "The Comedy of Errors," "Dromio asserts that
there is no time for a bald man to recover his hair. This having been
written, the law phrase suggested itself, and he was asked whether he
might not do it by fine and recovery, and this suggested the efficiency
of that proceeding to bar heirs; and this started the conceit that thus
the lost hair of another man would be recovered."[39] In such quaint
allusions to the common law and its proceedings Shakespeare abounds, and
we cannot help remembering that Nash, in his prefatory epistle to
Greene's "Menaphon," printed about 1589, makes sneering mention of
Shakespeare as a man who had left the "trade of Noverint," whereunto he
was born, in order to try his hand at tragedy. The "trade of Noverint"
was a slang expression for the business of attorney; and this passage
has suggested that Shakespeare may have spent some time in a law office,
as student or as clerk, either before leaving Stratford, or perhaps
soon after his arrival in London. This seems to me not improbable. On
the other hand, "The Merchant of Venice" contains such crazy law that it
is hard to imagine it coming even from a lawyer's clerk. At all events,
we may safely say that the legal knowledge exhibited in the plays is no
more than might readily have been acquired by a man of assimilative
genius associating with lawyers. It simply shows the range and accuracy
of Shakespeare's powers of observation.
Let us come now to the second part of the Delia Bacon theory. Having
satisfied herself that William Shakespeare could not have written the
poems and plays published under his name, she jumped to the conclusion
that Francis Bacon was the author. Surely, a singular choice! Of all
men, why Francis Bacon?[40] Why not, as I said before, George Chapman or
Ben Jonson, men who were at once learned scholars and great poets?
Chapman, like Marlowe, could write the "mighty line." Jonson had rare
lyric power; his verses sing, as witness the wonderful "Do but look on
her eyes," which Francis Bacon could no more have written than he could
have jumped over the moon. To pitch upon Bacon as the writer of
"Twelfth Night" or "Romeo and Juliet" is about as sensible as to assert
that "David Copperfield" must have been written by Charles Darwin. After
a familiar acquaintance of more than forty years with Shakespeare's
works, of nearly forty years with Bacon's, the two men impress me as
simply antipodal one to the other. A similar feeling was entertained by
the late Mr. Spedding, the biographer and editor of Bacon; and no one
has more happily hit off the vagaries of the Baconizers than the
foremost Bacon scholar now living, Dr. Kuno Fischer, in his recent
address before the Shakespeare Society at Weimar.[41] I used to wonder
whether the Bacon-Shakespeare people really knew anything about Bacon,
and, now that chance has led me to read their books, I am quite sure
they do not. To their minds, his works are simply a storehouse of texts
which serve them for controversial missiles, very much as scattered
texts from the Bible used to serve our uncritical grandfathers.
Francis Bacon was one of the most interesting persons of his time, and,
as is often the case with such many-sided characters, posterity has held
various opinions about him. On the one hand, his fame has grown brighter
with the years; on the other hand, it has come to be more or less
circumscribed and limited. Pope's famous verse, "The wisest, brightest,
meanest of mankind," may be disputed in all its three specifications.
Bacon's treatment of Essex, which formerly called forth such bitter
condemnation, has been, I think, completely justified; and as for the
taking of bribes, which led to his disgrace, there were circumstances
which ought largely to mitigate the severity of our judgment. But if
Bacon was far from being a mean example of human nature, it is surely an
exaggeration to call him the wisest and brightest of mankind. He was a
scholar and critic of vast accomplishments, a writer of noble English
prose, and a philosopher who represented rather than inaugurated a most
beneficial revolution in the aims and methods of scientific inquiry. He
is one of the real glories of English literature, but he is also one of
the most overrated men of modern times. When we find Macaulay saying
that Bacon had "the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever
been bestowed on any of the children of men," we need not be surprised
to find that his elaborate essay on Bacon is as false in its fundamental
conception as it is inaccurate in details. For a long time it was one of
the accepted commonplaces that Bacon inaugurated the method by which
modern discoveries in physical science have been made. Early in the
present century, such writers on the history of science as Whewell began
to show the incorrectness of this notion, and it was completely exploded
by Stanley Jevons in his "Principles of Science," the most profound
treatise on method that has appeared in the last fifty years. Jevons
writes: "It is wholly a mistake to say that modern science is the result
of the Baconian philosophy; it is the Newtonian philosophy and the
Newtonian method which have led to all the great triumphs of physical
science, and ... the 'Principia' forms the true Novum Organon." This
statement of Jevons is thoroughly sound. The great Harvey, who knew how
scientific discoveries are made, said with gentle sarcasm that Bacon
"wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor;" yet Harvey would not have
denied that the chancellor was doing noble service as the eloquent
expounder of many sides of the scientific movement that was then
gathering strength. Bacons mind was eminently sagacious and fertile in
suggestions, but the supreme creative faculty, the power to lead men
into new paths, was precisely the thing which he did not possess. His
place is a very high one among intellects of the second order; but to
rank him with such godlike spirits as Newton, Spinoza, and Leibnitz
simply shows that one has no real knowledge of the work which such men
have done.
So much for Bacon himself. With regard to him as possible author of the
Shakespeare poems and plays, it is difficult to imagine so learned a
scholar making the kind of mistakes that abound in those writings. Bacon
would hardly have introduced clocks into the Rome of Julius Cæsar; nor
would he have made Hector quote Aristotle, nor Hamlet study at the
University of Wittenberg, founded five hundred years after Hamlet's
time; nor would he have put pistols into the age of Henry IV., nor
cannon into the age of King John; and we may be pretty sure that he
would not have made one of the characters in "King Lear" talk about
Turks and Bedlam. In this severely realistic age of ours, writers are
more on their guard against such anachronisms than they were in
Shakespeare's time; in his works we cannot call them serious blemishes,
for they do not affect the artistic character of the plays, but they are
certainly such mistakes as a scholar like Bacon would not have
committed.
Deeper down lies the contrast involved in the fact that Bacon was in a
high degree a subjective writer, from whom you are perpetually getting
revelations of his idiosyncrasies and moods, whereas of all writers in
the world Shakespeare is the most completely objective, the most
absorbed in the work of creation. In the one writer you are always
reminded of the man Bacon; in the other the personality is never thrust
into sight. Bacon is highly self-conscious; from Shakespeare
self-consciousness is absent.
The contrast is equally great in respect of humour. I would not deny
that Bacon relished a joke, or could perpetrate a pun; but the bubbling,
seething, frolicsome, irrepressible drollery of Shakespeare is something
quite foreign to him. Read his essays, and you get charming English,
wide knowledge, deep thought, keen observation, worldly wisdom, good
humour, sweet serenity; but exuberant fun is not there. In writing these
essays Bacon was following an example set by Montaigne, but, as
contrasted with the delicate effervescent humour of the Frenchman, his
style seems sober and almost insipid. Only fancy such a man trying to
write "The Merry Wives of Windsor"!
Both Shakespeare and Bacon were sturdy and rapacious purloiners. They
seized upon other men's bright thoughts and made them their own without
compunction and without acknowledgment; and this may account for sundry
similarities which may be culled from the plays and from Bacon's works,
upon which Baconizing text-mongers are wont to lay great stress as proof
of common authorship. Some such resemblances may be due to borrowing
from common sources; others are doubtless purely fanciful; others
indicate either that Shakespeare cribbed from Bacon or _vice versa_.
Here are a few miscellaneous instances:--
Where Bacon says, "Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others"
("Essay of Wisdom"), Shakespeare says:--
"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
(Hamlet, I. iii.)
This looks as if one writer might have copied from the other. If so, it
is Bacon who is the thief, for the lines occur in the quarto "Hamlet"
published in 1603, whereas the "Essay of Wisdom" was first published in
1612.
Again, where Bacon, in the "Essay of Gardens," says, "The breath of
flowers comes and goes like the warbling of music," it reminds one
strongly of the exquisite passage in "Twelfth Night" where the Duke
exclaims:--
"That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."
I have little doubt that Bacon had this passage in mind when he wrote
the "Essay of Gardens," which was first published in 1625, two years
later than the complete folio of Shakespeare. This effectually disposes
of the attempt to cite these correspondences in evidence that Bacon
wrote the plays.
Another instance is from "Richard III.:"--
"By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust
Ensuing danger; as, by proof, we see
The waters swell before a boisterous storm."
Bacon, in the "Essay of Sedition," writes, "As there are ... secret
swellings of seas before a tempest, so there are in states." But this
essay was not published till 1625, so again we find him copying
Shakespeare. Many such "parallelisms," cited to prove that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare's works, do really prove that he read them with great care
and remembered them well, or else took notes from them.
An interesting illustration of the helpless ignorance shown by
Baconizers is furnished by a remark of Sir Toby Belch in "Twelfth
Night." In his instructions to that dear old simpleton, Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, about the challenge, Sir Toby observes, "If thou thou'st him
some thrice, it shall not be amiss." In Elizabethan English, to address
a man as "thou" was to treat him as socially inferior; such familiarity
was allowable only between members of the same family or in speaking to
servants, just as you address your wife, and likewise the cook and
housemaid, by their Christian names, while with the ladies of your
acquaintance such familiarity would be rudeness. The same rule for the
pronoun survives to-day in French and German, but has been forgotten in
English. In the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1604, Justice Coke
insulted the prisoner by calling out, "Thou viper! for I _thou_ thee,
thou traitor!" Now, one of our Baconizers thinks that his idol, in
writing "Twelfth Night," introduced Sir Toby's suggestion in order to
recall to the audience Coke's abusive remark. Once more, a little
attention to dates would have prevented the making of a bad blunder. We
know from Manningham's Diary that "Twelfth Night" had been on the stage
nearly two years before Raleigh's trial. On the other hand, to say that
the play might have suggested to Coke his coarse speech would be
admissible, but idle, inasmuch as the expression "to _thou_ a man" was
an every-day phrase in that age.
Here it naturally occurs to me to mention the "Promus," about which as
much fuss has been made as if it really furnished evidence in support
of the Baconian folly. There is in the British Museum a manuscript, in
Bacon's handwriting, entitled "Promus of Formularies and Elegancies."
"Promus" means "storehouse" or "treasury." A date at the top of the
first page shows that it was begun in December, 1594; there is nothing,
I believe, to show over how many years it extended. It is a scrap-book
in which Bacon jotted down such sentences, words, and phrases as struck
his fancy, such as might be utilized in his writings. These neatly
turned phrases, these "formularies and elegancies," are gathered from
all quarters,--from the Bible, from Virgil and Horace, from Ovid and
Seneca, from Erasmus, from collections of proverbs in various languages,
etc. As there is apparently nothing original in this scrap-bag, Mr.
Spedding did not think it worth while to include it in his edition of
Bacon's works, but in the fourteenth volume he gives a sufficient
description of it, with illustrative extracts. In 1883 Mrs. Henry Pott
published the whole of this "Promus" manuscript, and swelled it by
comments and dissertations into a volume of 600 octavo pages. She had
found in it several hundred expressions which reminded her of passages
in Shakespeare, and so it confirmed her in the opinion which she already
entertained that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works. Thus,
when the "Promus" has a verse from Ovid, which means, "And the forced
tongue begins to lisp the sound commanded," it reminds Mrs. Pott of
divers lines in which Shakespeare uses the word "lisp," as for example,
in "As You Like It," "you lisp and wear strange suits;" and she jumps to
the conclusion that when Bacon jotted down the verse from Ovid, it was
as a preparatory study toward "As You Like It," and any other play that
contains the word "lisp:" therefore Bacon wrote all those plays, _Q. E.
D._! On the next page we find Virgil's remark, "Thus was I wont to
compare great things with small," made the father of Falstaff's "base
comparisons," and Fluellen's "Macedon and Monmouth," as well as honest
Dogberry's "comparisons are odorous." When one reads such things,
evidently printed in all seriousness, one feels like asking Mrs. Pott,
in the apt words of Shakespeare's friend Fletcher, "What mare's nest
hast thou found?" ("Bonduca," V. ii.)
There are many phrases, however, in the "Promus" which undoubtedly agree
with phrases in the plays. They show that Bacon heard or read the plays
with great interest, and culled from them his "elegancies" with no
stinted hand. As for Mrs. Pott's bulky volume, it brings us so near to
the final _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Bacon theory that we hardly
need spend many words upon the gross improbabilities which that theory
involves. The plays of Shakespeare were universally ascribed to him by
his contemporaries; many of them were published during his lifetime with
his name upon the title-page as the author; all were collected and
published together by Hemminge and Condell, two of his fellow actors,
seven years after his death; and for more than two centuries nobody ever
dreamed of looking for a different authorship, or of associating the
plays with Bacon. But this Chimborazo of _prima facie_ evidence becomes
a mere mole-hill in the hands of your valiant Baconizer. It is all clear
to him. Bacon did not acknowledge the authorship of these works because
such literature was deemed frivolous, and current prejudices against
theatres and playwrights might injure his hopes of advancement at the
bar and in political life. Therefore, by some sort of private
understanding with the ignorant and sordid wretch Shakespeare,[42] at
whose theatre they were brought out, their authorship was ascribed to
him, the real author died without revealing the secret, and the whole
world was deceived until the days of Delia Bacon.
But there are questions which even this ingenious hypothesis fails to
answer. Why should Bacon have taken the time to write those thirty-seven
plays, two poems, and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, if they were
never to be known as his works? Not for money, surely, for that grasping
Shakespeare seems to have got the money as well as the fame; Bacon died
a poor man. His principal aim in life was to construct a new system of
philosophy; on this noble undertaking he spent such time as he could
save from the exactions of his public career as member of Parliament,
chancery lawyer, solicitor-general, attorney-general, lord chancellor;
and he died with this work far from finished. The volumes which he left
behind him were only fragments of the mighty structure which he had
planned. We may well ask, Where did this overburdened writer find the
time for doing work of another kind voluminous enough to fill a
lifetime, and what motive had he for doing it without recompense in
either fame or money? Baconizers find it strange that Shakespeare's will
contains no reference to his plays as literary property. The omission is
certainly interesting, since it seems to indicate that he had parted
with his pecuniary interest in them,--had perhaps sold it out to the
Globe Theatre. If this omission can be held to show that Shakespeare
was lacking in fondness for the productions of his own genius, what
shall be said of the notion that Bacon spent half his life in writing
works the paternity of which he must forever disown?
This question is answered by Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, a writer who
speculates with equal infelicity on all subjects, but never suffers for
lack of boldness. He published in 1887 a book even bigger than that of
Mrs. Pott, for it has nearly 1000 pages. Its title is, "The Great
Cryptogram," and its thesis is, that Bacon really did claim the
authorship of the Shakespeare plays. Only the claim was made in a
cipher, and if you simply make some numbers mean some words, and other
words mean other numbers, and perform a good many sums in what the Mock
Turtle called "ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision," you
will be able to read this claim between the lines, along with much other
wonderful information. Thus does the arithmetical Donnelly carry us
quite a long stride nearer to the _reductio ad absurdum_, or suicide
point, than we were left by Mrs. Pott, with her lisping and limping
comparisons.