Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read ‘King John’
in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary
to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has--
The greater navies look like walking woods.
They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered
Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself.
One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon’s Psalms or
compare navies to ‘walking woods’! Mr. Holmes adds: ‘Many of the sonnets
[of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were
addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.’ That is,
Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pass from
hand to hand, among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends,’ as Shakespeare’s
(1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers
had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets
was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave
offspring--rather late in life. Shakespeare’s apparent allusions to his
profession--
I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
and
The public means which public manners breeds,
refer, no doubt, to Bacon’s versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has
hitherto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare’s
friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is
intended. Is it not obvious?
I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.
Bacon clearly had an assignation with Her Majesty--so here is ‘scandal
about Queen Elizabeth.’ Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is
‘within sight of Her Majesty’s Palace of White Hall.’ She gave Bacon the
reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White
Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen;
he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used
under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some
named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested
himself in a masque at Gray’s Inn, while he and his friends ‘partly
devised dumb shows and additional speeches,’ in 1588.
Nothing follows as to Bacon’s power of composing Shakespeare’s plays. A
fragmentary masque, which may or may not be by Bacon, is put forward as
the germ of what Bacon wrote about Elizabeth in the ‘Midsummer Night’s
Dream.’ An Indian WANDERER from the West Indies, near the fountain of
the AMAZON, is brought to Elizabeth to be cured of blindness. Now
the fairy, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ says, capitalised by Mr.
Holmes: