A consideration of the theory that Lord Bacon wrote the plays which
are attributed to Shakspeare comes in here more conveniently, because
it will appear that Bacon's knowledge of women and his experience
of the passion of Love, as expressed in his works, are so meagre
and so colorless when contrasted with the plays that the fact might
stand alone, with scarce a comment, to refute the theory which is so
elaborately defended. In its proper place this will appear. In the mean
time, some notice may be taken of a few points of the theory which seem
to have gained a recognition so far as to produce scepticism in many
intelligent minds.
Books enough are published in various languages filled with
preternaturally far-fetched conjectures concerning Shakspeare. Many of
them are devoted to proving that he must have been brought up to this
or that profession. Lord Campbell has shown the extent of the poet's
knowledge of legal terms, and his aptness in placing them. A surgeon
claims him on the ground of his knowledge of the technical terms used
in medical art. Bucknill and others, on the same ground of technical
knowledge, prove that he must have been trained as a mad-doctor. A
musician refers to his love of music, botanists to his accuracy in
grouping flowers according to their seasons, and Hastings is convinced
that he was bred a bird-fancier. Each investigator discovers his own
specialty in the teeming pages, and insists upon apprenticing the poet.
The doctor points to the line in "Hamlet,"--
"And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,"--
and asks, with an air of conviction, how any one at that period,
who had not been bred to the profession, could have understood the
ginglymoid structure of the knee! The Worshipful Master of the
Bard-of-Avon Lodge claims masonic fraternity with him, thinking that
allusions to masonic terms and customs are scattered through the plays,
but chiefly on the strength of Hubert's words in "King John,"--
"They shake their heads,
And whisper one another in the ear,
And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist;"
for that action is the symbol of the sublime degree! Dr. Farmer
anchored his theory that Shakspeare was in his youth, and during the
unaccounted-for years after he left Stratford, a sharpener and dealer
in skewers, upon these lines from "Hamlet:"--
"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."
These skewers were of the kind then used to fasten bales of wool. But
Hugh Miller, who began life as a stone-cutter, finds in those lines a
clear indication that the poet was bred to be a stone-mason! And at
last a practical printer by the name of Blades proves that he worked
at the printer's trade; for he speaks about "printing kisses" and the
print of hoofs. In "Love's Labor Lost" is the clause, "I will do it,
sir, in print;" and in the "Winter's Tale," "I love a ballad in print."
Blades even apprentices him to the printer Vantrollier, who at the
time enjoyed the monopoly of printing a certain class of books. Up to
the present date, the number of professions and employments to which
Shakspeare was trained amounts to twenty-four. No doubt some one is
preparing to show that he must have been a fishmonger, and the lines
which invite his attempt are quite as apposite as any of the above: "A
fish: he smells like a fish;" "The luce is a fresh fish, the salt-fish
is an old coat;" "They are both as whole as a fish;" and, more decisive
than all, "The fish lives in the sea." By all means, let us have the
sixty-eight allusions to fish and fishing in Shakspeare elaborated into
one final theory, that he spent four years on a herring-smack; for how
otherwise could the Clown in "Twelfth Night" have told Viola that a
pilchard was a big herring?
There is another kind of criticism to which the plays have been
subjected that imputes to them all the after-thoughts of later times.
Ulrici derives from them an evangelical scheme of Christian ethics;
a Roman Catholic claims the poet as an ardent adherent of the Pope;
another commentator attributes to Shakspeare a deliberate purpose to
write up the Protestant Reformation and write down the Pope, and finds
a trace of Shakspeare's contempt for Romanism in "I Henry IV.," iv. I,
where the troops of the Prince of Wales are described as--
"Glittering in golden coats, like images."
Sievers[11] thinks that the main thread of all Shakspeare's poetry was
the "reproduction out of the nature of man of the Protestant scheme of
Christianity"! It is shown particularly in the "Merchant of Venice"
and "Hamlet." Tschischwitz's[12] book is as deterrent as his name. It
is an attempt to develop Shakspeare's views upon the relation between
ruler and people,--to show that he considered the state and kingdom
to rest upon reciprocity of duties and upon the principle of piety.
This is only another specimen of the terrific after-thoughts which the
Germans force back upon Shakspeare. Gervinus calls him the perfect
representative of modern Protestantism; Vischer concluded that he was
a Pantheist; Bernays will not allow to him any religion at all; while
Dr. Reichensperger, of the German Parliament, gives reasons in his
book[13] for believing that he was an Ultramontanist! And Thomas Tyler,
of the University of London, considers that Hamlet was a forerunner of
Schopenhauer, and thoroughly pessimistic, because the calamity in the
play does not respect personal character, and the future retributions
and compensations are not clearly made out![14]
It would be a dreary business to construct a catalogue of all these
modern slights to the memory of Shakspeare. They turn his plays
into a system of theology. Some critics declare that his object was
to make celibacy ridiculous and marriage honorable; some labor to
prove that the plays are treatises upon the Christian doctrines of
justification by faith and the salvation of man; some point to his
Baconian method of induction; and others reject the whole over-done
business of interpretation, because they simply claim for Bacon
himself, the authorship of all the plays: as if Shakspeare were turned
inside out, wrung dry, macerated and dispersed, by two centuries of
vigorous comment, and it became necessary to begin operations upon a
fresh person. These operations have enriched literature with its most
grandiose specimens of futility.
With respect to this last effort of modern criticism, it might suffice
with many to repeat an observation made by Lowell, who said that, if
any person was disposed to believe that Bacon wrote the plays, he could
set himself right by reading Bacon's paraphrase of the Psalms. One
dose of that would settle the supremacy of Shakspeare back upon the
seat of reason.
The following verse is a specimen of the average workmanship expended
on this paraphrase:--
"So shall he not lift up his head
In the assembly of the just.
For why? The Lord hath special eye
To be the godly's stay at call;
And hath given over righteously
The wicked man to take his fall."
Half a score of lines may be found of a better quality than those above
exhibit; but the bad ones have been purposely selected as yielding the
only sensible and conclusive test. The writer of the plays could not
have been guilty of them. Some things we know to be impossible,--that
Sidney should display the white feather; that a gentleman should ever
once practise a scurvy trick; that a woman all compact of grace,
animate with the instinct of fitness, should ever make a vulgar
gesture; that the genius which interfused the plays should ever
have gone to rot on the Lethean wharf of those prosaic lines. Nay,
the question whether Bacon composed the plays grows pale before a
greater one,--If he did compose them, what debility suggested to him
this undertaking of the Psalms? There they already stood, in their
tender, majestic English, simple as Hamlet's soliloquy and Macbeth's
regrets,--a mother-tongue that resents the adulterate touch. We have a
right to call upon those who espouse the Baconian theory of the plays
to account for the existence of the paraphrase.
Lord Bacon wrote some lines commending the natural defence of an
upright conscience. So did Shakspeare. Let us compare them:--
"The man of life upright, whose guileless heart is free
From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity;
The man whose silent days in harmless joys are spent,
Whom hopes cannot delude nor fortune discontent,--
That man needs neither towers nor armor for defence,
Nor secret vaults to fly from thunder's violence."
In the second part of "Henry VI." are found the lines which are
memorable to all English-speaking people:--
"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just;
And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted."
We have plainly another case of paraphrase to be accounted for; and
we can understand why Bacon, who used to send sonnets to Elizabeth
to soften her heart towards Essex, should lament, "But I could never
prevail with her."
The badness of Bacon's efforts at poetry has suggested to me the
possibility that some of the didactic passages in the plays which
Shakspeare altered and amended for the theatre, were left as they came
from his pen; just as other passages from the playwrights of that day
may be found streaking the rich Shakspearean lode, recognized by their
inferiority or difference of style, but no longer imputable to the
culprits by name. Pages of this un-Shakspearean matter may have drifted
from Bacon's pen into the original crudeness of some of the plays,
particularly into those which set forth periods of history.
One is tempted to make this surmise serve to explain a famous argument
which the Baconians derive from a letter written by a friend to Bacon
in acknowledgment of the present of a volume which he had lately
published. This friend was Tobie Matthew, a devoted adherent of
Bacon, who had done him important service from time to time, and who
consequently was frequently saluted with the little pots of incense
which Tobie swung adoringly before his patron. Now Bacon wrote him
a letter dated the 9th of April, the year not given; but it must
have been after January, 1621, because Matthew's reply addresses the
Viscount St. Albans, and Bacon did not receive that title previously
to the above date. Bacon's letter accompanied a copy of a volume.
Matthew's reply acknowledges this "great and noble token" of his
"lordship's favor." And the Baconians claim that this token was the
Folio of the Plays, published in 1623; and they point triumphantly
to the postscript to Matthew's letter, which runs thus: "The most
prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the
sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another;" that
is to say, a few intimate friends, like Matthew, knew perfectly well
that Bacon wrote the plays, but suffered them, for prudential reasons,
to appear under the name of Shakspeare, who doubtless had some hand
in them. The temptation is, I say, to account for that postscript by
supposing that Matthew was acquainted with those inferior passages
which may have strayed into the plays from the pen of Bacon, that he
appraised them with the judgment of a toady, and exaggerated their
quantity as well as quality. This method for breaking the force of
Matthew's postscript I reject, for the simple reason that it is not
only strained, but superfluous; for Bacon published his "History of
Henry VII." in March, 1622, the "De Augmentis" in October, 1623, and
the "Apothegms" in December, 1624. One of these books, probably the
first of them, and the first which Matthew had received from Bacon
since he was made Viscount St. Albans, was sent; and Matthew took the
first opportunity to flatter Bacon with his title in connection with
his genius, saying in the postscript, "A most prodigious wit is my
friend Bacon, though he now passes by the other designation as Viscount
St. Albans."
It is alleged that Bacon did not wish to be reputed a poet, lest his
preferment and prospects at the Court should be impaired. It seems to
me that he needed not to dread the imputation of having written poems.
Veins of a lively fancy run through the prose of his great treatises,
and he was largely endowed with the scientific imagination; but his
verses are dry as a remainder biscuit. The divine art was not in those
days imputed to any man on such pretences.
One advocate of the Baconian theory thinks that the poems of "Lucrece"
and "Adonis" were dedicated to Southampton, under the name of
Shakspeare, as an arranged and designed cover, for the real author.
But why, supposing this, was Shakspeare selected as the cover? A man
selected for such a purpose must have been deemed by contemporaries
competent to have written the poems, else there could have been no
cover in using his name.
Did Ben Jonson, who was intimate with Bacon, know the secret of the
authorship of the plays, and thus know that the manuscripts in use
among the players must have been copies, and yet say, in praise of
Shakspeare, "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an
honor to Shakspeare, that in writing (whatever he penned) he never
blotted out a line"? Jonson could never have written so in the secret
conviction that Shakspeare did not compose the lines, some of which
Jonson _wished he had_ blotted.
With respect to the saying which was common among the players, the
following points deserve consideration: First, it may have been a
generalization carelessly made by admiring friends and comrades;
second, what did they really know about it? They only saw the acting
copies made for the theatre whose property they were. They knew nothing
about Shakspeare's preliminary sketches and studies, the first drafts,
the tentative outlines and passages. Third, the total absence of
suspicion among them that he did not write the plays, but only copied
them from some unknown author's manuscript, is unaccountable. Every
probability would be against it. Among the players who knew Shakspeare,
saw his daily life, computed how and where he spent his time, gauged
him as a companion and a wit, such a secret would soonest leak out and
spread all over London, or his reputed authorship would be soonest
exploded and treated as a joke. For they and Jonson best knew the
man. And this probability was not rebutted by Lord Palmerston; when,
alluding to Jonson's remarks, he jauntily said, "Oh, these fellows
will always stand up for each other!" for what reasons existed for
protecting Shakspeare by reticence or by elaborate lying?
In the discussion, which has lately been renewed, upon the authorship
of the plays, the points which are chiefly relied on by the Baconians
are these: 1. The plays are _too great_, and out of all proportion
to the obscurity which rests upon Shakspeare's life, and to the
insignificance of his contemporary fame. 2. They are filled with all
kinds of classical allusion, professional information, legal, medical,
horticultural, scientific, to an extent which an obscure play actor
could not possibly comprise within the limits of his ragged and scanty
education. 3. The plays contain remarkable parallelisms with passages
in Bacon's works, and coincidences of thought and expression.
These are the points of chief consequence which claim the plays for
Bacon. To the critics who make this claim it is wonderful that one
man from Stratford, so little known and prized, of whom no account of
education and career survives, should have sent down to posterity,
side by side with the great works of Bacon, compositions which are
parallel in greatness and abreast of them in fame. They are too great
for any one man of that epoch, unless that man be the greatest and
wisest of his day. But how much more wonderful is the problem which, by
implication, these critics set before us,--namely, to account for the
fact that Bacon should have produced not only Shakspeare, a miracle
for one mind, but himself besides! It taxes the resource of miracle
less sharply to refer the plays back again to Shakspeare.
For which shall we prefer? To accredit Bacon with the authorship
because he knew all the law and science which the plays include; or to
accredit Shakspeare with it because he possessed all the poetic flow,
imagery, and plastic art, all the passion and humor, which the plays
include? Of the two sets of endowments, which could have resulted in
the plays? Not the first without the second. But the second, then,
being absolutely essential, must make the first to be also an essential
accessory, whether we can or cannot account for the possessorship of it
by Shakspeare. Because we can, from the published writings of Bacon,
derive the fact that, however poetic his prose may sometimes be, and
fertile in apposite wit and fancy, it does not supply the peculiar
imagination, and, least of all, the genial sense of humor, which reigns
through all the plays. If the more important qualities be impossible
to Bacon, a sufficient accessory acquaintance with terms of law, facts
of science, and scraps of classic learning may not be impossible to
Shakspeare.
Let us ask, too, would Bacon have taken the risk of writing for the
theatre? His relations with the Queen, his desires for office and
persistent struggles to attain it, his exigency to keep a clean record
with the Cecils and his other jealous rivals, are supposed to have
been the motives for concealing his authorship. The opinion of public
circles would have tainted him with the "vulgar scandal" of being a
playwright. No doubt it would, and have effectually barred advancement.
For he was known, watched, dreaded, appraised, opposed by too many
people. His secret would not have waited two centuries for another
Bacon to discover. How much worse for the aspiring statesman would
have been an exposed concealment. The more exacting the motive for
concealment appears, the more exacting appears the motive for doing
nothing that required concealment.
All which Bacon did for the Court, from a politic disposition, in
getting up masques and entertainments, was openly done. The labored
and jejune speeches, and other matters, which he prepared for masques,
have come down to us. He could be tolerated in this, and not in writing
for the theatre, because a writer of plays could not wrest from public
opinion the grave and stately responsibilities which he was eager to
assume. Other lawyers of the day wrote for the stage; but they were not
born in the line of England's chancellors.
And in those days the emoluments of a playwright were too trifling to
attract a man like Bacon, who managed to keep himself so deeply in debt
that once, at least, he breathed the air of a spunging-house. Nothing
but place, retainers, royal donations of rented estates, and official
fees, could save him from the moneylenders.
As it is supposed that Shakspeare was not well acquainted with
the Latin writers, we are asked to account for the appearance of
classical quotations in the plays from writers who had not yet been
translated. In the "Taming of the Shrew," iii. 7, there is one from
Ovid's Epistles. If Bacon wrote the play, we may suppose that he quoted
directly from Ovid. Then why, in Act i. 1 of the same play, did he
not quote a Latin line directly from Terence, instead of taking it
from Lily's Grammar where the quotation is not correct? And suppose
Shakspeare never did nor could read Ovid: it was easy enough for him
to pick up those two lines for the fun in iii. 1, even if we reject
the opinion that attributes large portions of an earlier form of the
play to Marlowe. If Shakspeare only knew Latin through Lily's Grammar,
he might have taken Terence from it; but Bacon's scholarship was above
that.
A large part of the plot of the "Comedy of Errors" was drawn from
the _Menæchmi_ of Plautus, a play which Bacon frequently quotes. On
the supposition that Shakspeare was unacquainted with it, we easily
account for his knowledge of the plot. A previous play, called the
"Historie of Error," acted in 1577, was derived from the same comedy
of Plautus; and William Warner's translation of it was freely handed
about in manuscript for some time before the appearance of the "Comedy
of Errors," though it was not entered at Stationers Hall till June,
1594.[15]
There is a curious parallelism between the fourth scene of Act iv.
of the "Winter's Tale," where Perdita shows her tender knowledge of
flowers, and Bacon's Essay on Gardens which was not printed till
1625. So it appears that both men were acquainted with the same facts
concerning the succession of flowers through the months of the year.
And there is nothing strange in that; for the flowers took their same
times to bloom for Shakspeare in Stratford as they did for Bacon near
London, or in the retreats of Gorhambury. But it is only enough to
contrast the exquisite lines of Perdita with Bacon's cataloguing prose,
in which not one epithet save "pale" and "yellow" appears, to feel
quite sure that the flowers breathed no charm into Bacon's fancy.
"O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's wagon! daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength."
If precious articles at public vendue--Gobelins, rare Palissys,
Majolicas, and Sèvres ware--happen to tally with an auctioneer's
list of the sale, does it seem quite credible that they were all the
production of the auctioneer? "Merciful, wonder-making Heaven!" What a
myriad-minded auctioneer!
Indeed, does any one dare to say that Shakspeare and Bacon did not
compare notes upon many subjects? Many of the reputed parallelisms are
indirect traces of such an intercourse; and it is not a sufficient
objection that Shakspeare is nowhere mentioned by Bacon. Neither are
Spenser and Marlowe; and we know that he was acquainted with Ben
Jonson. Did Ben Jonson and Shakspeare never go to Gray's Inn together?
Shakspeare helped Johnson to write his tragedy of "Sejanus;" and the
latter was frequently with Bacon during the period of composition? I
love to think, as it cannot be disproved, that Shakspeare met high
themes of speculation, Nature's curious secrets, and choice allusions
of learning, amid the books and apparatus of the philosopher, where
problems dear to both these men were discussed. Such an intercourse as
this, which varied his close companionship with Essex and Southampton,
would be quite sufficient to account for the coincidences which support
the Baconian theory: there is, for instance, the passage in "Troilus
and Cressida" that puts into Hector's mouth a queer bit of didactic
anachronism. Reproving Paris and Troilus, he says,--
"You have both said well;
And on the cause and question now in hand
Have gloz'd,--but superficially; not much
Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought
Unfit to hear moral philosophy."
Aristotle really alluded to "political philosophy;" and when we find
that Bacon made the same mistake in his "Advancement of Learning,"
printed before the play, we think we can see that book in Shakspeare's
hand, or overhear with him the error lapsing in the flow of
conversation. But perhaps the passage which includes it was one of the
parts of "Troilus and Cressida" which did not proceed from Shakspeare's
pen. Certainly there was not poetic license enough in Bacon's mind
to plant a seaport in Bohemia, and make Aristotle a contemporary of
the Trojans. Neither would he have affronted his historical sense and
hurt his reputation as a scholar by importing into "Henry VI.," and
attributing to Jack Cade and his followers, the socialistic doctrine
and mad behavior which Holingshed shows to have belonged to Wat Tyler
in the reign of Richard II. It is also strange that the scholar, Bacon,
should have put into the mouth of a person in "Coriolanus," i. 4, line
57, that allusion to Cato,--
"Thou wast a soldier
Even to Cato's wish."
M. Porcius Cato was born B.C. 234: the play belongs to B.C. 490. And
if anybody knew when Galen was born, A.D. 130, it was Bacon; yet
Menenius, in the same play, ii. 1, line 128, says, "The most sovereign
prescription in Galen is but empiricutic." But Shakspeare's main object
was to write a play, and co-ordinate his groups. So he paired off his
characteristics with each other to gratify the poetic exigency of the
play, and not always to render strict tribute to the Muse of History.
Can anybody positively deny that Shakspeare stole away from the Mermaid
more often then his fellow-actors and poets relished, to spend the
evening with Essex at Gray's Inn, perhaps while Bacon was busy upon
his "Characters of Julius and Augustus Cæsar" in 1607-8,--for not long
after that the famous tragedy appeared; perhaps to urge him with the
happy suggestions of friendship to write his Defence of Shakspeare's
own dear Essex? There was, indeed, that "semblable coherence" between
the spirits of the philosopher and the poet which qualified them to
be mutual instructors; and the mobile and apprehensive intellect of
the poet could absorb without books the thoughts that filled the air
round Bacon's head. The structure of Shakspeare, open at every pore to
every influence, was pervaded with the conversations of his age: the
interchange made a thoroughfare of him; and, as it passed, he detained
all the nutriment that his imagination craved, and let the rest
escape. He lived amid this impromptu wit and knowledge of illustrious
friends, saturated with their atmosphere, passing it through the
deep-breathing lungs to redden, and transmitting it by magnificent
pulses to the hearts of his spectators, purged of superfluity,
sweetened by gentleness, drenched in grace. By every sense, with
the nerves of every touch, he appropriated character, love, theory,
and life. London was library and university; and poetic intuition
was the tutor of his soul. So--whether jesting at the Mermaid, and
growing forgetive upon the sack; visiting the haunts of travellers
and mariners to pick up strange tales; listening to the multifarious
comment of a Bacon, and turning over his rarities of books; or lounging
by the river-side with Southampton, the centre of a group of the most
advanced, curious, brilliant men of the Elizabethan age--he became, in
person, the coincidence which pervades the dramas; and all inquisitions
upon the amount of literary culture which he achieved, or surmises
about his earlier employments, become impertinent, if they are not made
ridiculous, as his great, receptive, broad-domed soul covered over
London's world and drew up its variety.
There is a kindred gift in Robert Browning, which makes its confession
thus:--
"If we have souls, know how to see and use,
One place performs, like any other place,
The proper service every place on earth
Was framed to furnish man with; serves alike
To give him note that, through the place he sees,
A place is signified he never saw,
But, if he lack not soul, may learn to know."
The soul of the true artist being cosmopolitan, any place can become
the centre of his circumference; for he is already outside of the world
which his neighborhood is too little to embrace. Perhaps his neighbors
are penurious step-dames who make scanty provision for emotion, and
detest passionate experiences of every kind. But his imagination cannot
starve. It implies all "the pomp and circumstance of glorious" life,
just as the genius of creation involved and anticipated ourselves, who
dress for it a perpetual banquet though no man sees it feeding, and
none offer it their alms. The artist's soul transmutes the refuse of
factories, the sweepings of coal, bone-parings, and street-scraps into
the brilliant colors which, like clarions, precede Beauty's procession
and summon the spectators.
If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have conceived the female
characters which invest them with such dignity and graciousness. To
have done that required a comprehension of the varieties of the female
disposition, such as could be derived only from personal contact and
experience. To have seized some broad features of the plays, Bacon must
have been acquainted with many degrees of social state beneath his
own. We can trust Shakspeare in the tavern and its purlieus as frankly
as we would the Persian poets, Saadi and Omer Khayam, who saw in the
full cup a symbol of the divine afflatus. But we cannot imagine that
Bacon was a frequenter of those London haunts where Dick the Butcher
took his ale before Jack Cade decreed that the three-hooped pot should
have ten hoops, and made it felony to drink small-beer; where Falstaff
leered and tossed his ballast over in a sea of sack; where Parolles
vapored, and Bardolph blushed, and Pistol's English grew tipsy; where
Sir Andrew and Sir Toby roared catches, and Feste and the other clowns
made excellent fooling into the small hours; where Bottom mildly
exhaled at the head of the table at which Flute, Snout, and Starveling
took their pots after the shop-shutters were up; where Dame Quickly
maundered, and Mistress Overdone and Doll Tear-street made largess
of their brassy smiles. A poet may convert the tavern-bench into a
wool-sack: "This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre,
and this cushion my crown." But a Queen's Solicitor and future Lord
Chancellor could not risk pawning the wool-sack for a tavern-bench.
Even the gift of poetry would not have so badly endangered his
prospects.
Bacon knew the wives and daughters of his friends and associates. He
was at home in the families of the Pakingtons and Barnhams and Hattons.
He doubtless noted the peculiarities of Lady Rich, Mistress Vernon,
Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the other women of that crowd upon the
steps of the throne. So many of these were cast in the same mould,
that he would have been meagrely provided with female types, leaving
us unable to account for the great range of character which fills the
scene, from awkward Audrey to queenly Hermione, from Mistress Overdone
to Imogen, from the Pander's wife to Marina, from Phebe to Perdita.
Moreover, search Bacon's writings upon this matter of knowledge of
woman to find, if you can, hints and passages which are parallel with
the plays in temper or language. Look for traces of that fervor which
devotes the plays to the great central passion, and consecrates them
with so many moods and styles of womanhood. Ransack his letters in
vain for any deep consciousness of sex like that which makes every
play personal and vital with something that cannot be put aside. Read
his Essay on Love, and contrast its dry, pragmatic tone with the
pages which palpitate with Juliet, or those over which Viola tenderly
broods and Helena frankly shines. Can we imagine that essay to have
been a treasured favorite of Desdemona, or to have beguiled Ophelia
during the absence of her prince, or to have served Cleopatra except
to hang on Antony's hook for a sinker, as for jest she hung the salted
cod? Isabella might have safely furnished a copy of it to every nun
in her convent; but Imogen, for all her "pudency so rosy," would not
have taken it to bed with her, to read three hours and fold down
the leaf where she left off. The warmest expression which Bacon was
ever overheard to make is preserved in a speech in praise of love,
written probably for a masque. The speaker says: "In the melting of a
horse-shoe, can a mighty dead fire do as much as a small fire blown?
In shaping metals, can a mighty huge weight do as much as a blow? It
is motion, therefore, that animateth all things: it is vain to think
that any strength of Nature can countervail a violent motion. Now,
affections are the motions of the soul. Let no man fear the yoke of
fortune that's in the yoke of love."
But the details which defend the Baconian theory are too numerous to be
met and properly treated unless one had a volume's space at disposal.
Each one is trivial; and the total effect of the theory depends upon a
nice and patient construction of a cumulative argument, such as lawyers
know how to use. Probably the majority of adherents to the theory will
come from the legal profession, or from the class of minds that is
trained to appreciate the importance of all the little points of some
routine. But so long as the court before which this case is argued must
have for judge a quick perception of the exigencies of the imagination,
which include the delicacy that tests differences of intellectual
structure and the broadness that adopts all vices, passions, whims, and
humors, the details need not be separately pursued: their refutation,
if still possible, is anticipated and made useless by the comprehensive
verdict of an imagination that is kindred to the plays.
It is not entirely just to say that the contributions of men who favor
the theory are specimens of literary futility. They are frequently
valuable to the scholar of Shakspeare by throwing unexpected
side-lights upon the plays: they also furnish suggestions to the
interpreter. They have amassed a quantity of collateral information
of Shakspeare's epoch which the critic will thankfully acknowledge
as he uses it. The minute and laborious research which Judge Holmes
has expended upon his volume, the literary, historical, and social
parallelisms which he discloses, the philosophy and style of thinking
of Elizabeth's age, put the lover of Shakspeare under obligation.