Bacon and Shakespeare

In what degree Bacon was responsible for the drawing up of a Declaration of the Treasons of Essex, which Lord Clarendon described as a “pestilent libel,” is impossible to decide. He tells us that his task was little more than that of an amanuensis to the Council and the Queen, but this excuse fails him in the case of his Apology, put forth as a vindication of the author in the estimation of the nobles, from the charge of having been false to the Earl of Essex. The paper is admittedly full of inaccuracies, conveying to us the picture, “not of his actual conduct, but of what he felt his conduct ought to have been.” Dr. Abbott dismisses this literary and historical effort as interesting only as a “psychological history of the manifold and labyrinthine self-deception to which great men have been subjected.”

On the accession of James I., Bacon again threw himself into the political arena, determined to neglect no chance of ingratiating himself with the new Sovereign. He poured forth letters to any and everybody who had the power to forward his cause. He dwelt in these epistles upon the services of his brother Anthony, who had carried on secret and intimate negotiations with Scotland. Sir Thomas Challoner, the confirmed friend of Essex, received a letter from him; he appealed to the Earl of Northumberland; and became the “humble and much devoted” servant of Lord Southampton, on the eve of that nobleman’s release from the Tower (where Bacon had helped to place him as an accomplice of Essex). To each he turned with the same request that they would bury the axe, and “further his Majesty’s good conceit and inclination towards me.”

At this time, Bacon, desperately apprehensive of rebuff, was anxious to conciliate all parties, and to secure friends at Court. He was willing, nay, eager, to be Greek, Roman, or Hebrew, in order to attain his object – even he would avow a gift of poesy to make his calling and election sure. Writing to Sir John Davies, the poet, Bacon, the politician and philosopher, who did not publish two lines of rhyme until twenty-one years later, desired him to “be good to concealed poets.” Reading this statement in connection with the other epistles he indicted at the same crisis, we realise how little dependence can be placed upon the implied confession that he had written anonymous poetry. His letters to Southampton, to Michael Hickes (Cecil’s confidential man), to David Foules and Sir Thomas Challoner, and to the King himself, all betray the same feverish desire to be all things to all men. He assured Hickes that Lord Cecil is “the person in the State” whom he “loves most,” and at the same moment he placed his whole services at the disposal of Cecil’s rival, the Earl of Northumberland! When the star of Northumberland began to pale, Bacon importuned Cecil to procure him a knighthood to gratify the ambition of an “Alderman’s daughter, a handsome maiden,” whom he had found “to my liking.” But for a while Bacon found the struggle for recognition unavailing. The King found him an acquired taste – or rather a taste that his Majesty had yet to acquire – and after grovelling to all and sundry, he desisted at the moment from the attempt to gain the King’s grace, “because he had completely failed, and for no other reason.”

But although Bacon went into retirement, he divided his leisure between his literary labours and his quest for political advancement. In all his political pamphlets, his one ambition was to divine and reflect the Royal views. In 1590 he had nothing but condemnation for the Nonconformist party; in 1604 he had strenuously pleaded the cause of Nonconformity; in 1616 he as strenuously opposed the slightest concession being made to the Nonconformers. In 1604 he was returned to Parliament; three years later, his zeal in anticipating the King’s wishes, and supporting his proposals, was rewarded by his appointment to the Solicitor-Generalship. In the following year he was made clerk of the Star Chamber, and immediately set himself to secure the displacement of Hobart, the Attorney-General.

Bacon’s conduct towards the Earl of Essex has already been considered. Had this been the only instance of the kind in his career, his apologists would have achieved something more than public opinion can grant them in their endeavours to explain it away. But his behaviour towards Cecil is another lurid illustration of his duplicity and ingratitude. During the last fourteen years of his life Cecil had been the friend and patron of Bacon, whose letters to him are couched in almost passionate terms of loyalty and “entire devotion.” In one epistle he declares himself “empty of matter,” but “out of the fulness of my love,” he writes to express “my continual and incessant love for you, thirsting for your return.” Cecil was his refuge and deliverer in 1598, and again in 1603, when he was arrested for debt, and Bacon was not empty of reason when he asserted in another letter, “I write to myself in regard to my love to you, you being as near to me in heart’s blood as in blood of descent.” In 1611, a short while before Cecil’s death, he wrote this last profession of his affection: —

“I do protest before God, without compliment, that if I knew in what course of life to do you best service, I would take it, and make my thoughts, which now fly to many pieces, be reduced to that centre.”

In May of 1612 Cecil died. Within a week Bacon had proffered his services to the King in the place of his cousin, of whom he wrote: —

“He (Cecil) was a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better; for he loved to keep the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon himself.”

To another, he wrote that Cecil “had a good method, if his means had been upright,” and again to the King, on the same subject: —

“To have your wants, and necessities in particular, as it were hanged up in two tablets before the eyes of your Lords and Commons, to be talked of for four months together; to stir a number of projects and then blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing but the scandal of them; to pretend even carriage between your Majesty’s rights and the ease of the people, and to satisfy neither – these courses, and others the like, I hope, are gone with the deviser of them.”

Less than a year before, Bacon had protested before God, “without compliment,” his desire to serve Cecil, and now he protests to God in this letter to the King, that when he noted “your zeal to deliver the Majesty of God from the vain and indign comprehension of heresy and degenerate philosophy … perculsit ilico animum that God would shortly set upon you some visible favour; and let me not live if I thought not of the taking away of that man” – the man as “near to me in heart’s blood as in the blood of descent.”

The King, who had grown weary of Cecil, may have accepted his death as a visible favour of God, but the favour did not evidently embrace the substitution of Bacon in his cousin’s stead. His application for the vacant post of Lord Treasurer was passed over by the King, but Bacon became Attorney-General in the following year.

Bacon as the Creature of Buckingham

Let us regard another trait in the character of this many-sided statesman. To relieve the King’s pressing necessities it was proposed that voluntary contributions should be made by the well-affected. The contributions, commonly known as Benevolences, were rarely voluntary; the “moral pressure” that was employed in their collection made them in reality extortions, and, as such, they were the cause of national dissatisfaction. During the search of the house of a clergyman named Peacham, consequent on some ecclesiastical charge, a sermon was found predicting an uprising of the people against this oppressive tax, and foretelling that the King might die like Ananias or Nabal. The sermon had neither been issued nor uttered, but the unfortunate rector, a very old man, was indicted for conspiracy and, in contravention of the law, put to the torture. Peacham had not been convicted of treason, though Bacon “hopes that the end will be good;” or, in other words, that he will be able to wring from the condemned man a confession to make good the charge.

The wretched old clergyman, after being examined in Bacon’s presence, “before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture,” could not be made to convict himself, and Bacon’s comment to the King is that the man’s “raging devil seemeth to be turned into a dumb devil.” It will be noted that this infamous act of illegality and Bacon’s commentary are the deed and words of the man who is supposed by some to have declared,

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d;It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath; it is twice bless’d;It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes;’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomesThe throned monarch better than his crown.”

We have seen Bacon as the ingrate, and Bacon as the brute; let us observe him “the meanest of mankind,” as Pope described him – who, as Abbott admits, although he refuses Pope’s description, “on sufficient occasion could creep like a very serpent.” The sufficient occasion was the sudden advance into fame of George Villiers, afterwards Duke of Buckingham. The disgrace and imprisonment of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, whose conviction Bacon laboured so strenuously to accomplish, doubtless inspired the Attorney-General with the hope of becoming the chief adviser of the Sovereign. Great must have been his mortification when he discovered the impregnability of Villiers in the favour of the King. But although cast down, Bacon was not abashed. He had, on a previous occasion of disappointment, declared that “service must creep where it cannot go” (i. e., walk upright), and he at once determined to creep into the King’s confidence through the medium of the rising Favourite. Instantly, Bacon was on his knees to the new star. “I am yours,” he wrote, with more servile want of restraint than he had disclosed in his letters to Essex or Cecil, “surer to you than to my own life.” In speech and behaviour he lived up to his protest. He beslavered Villiers with flattery to his face, and he carolled his praises to those whom he felt assured would repeat his words to the spoiled Favourite. His reward was not long in the coming. In 1617 he was made Lord Keeper. He took his seat in Chancery with the most extravagant pomp, his retinue exceeding all his predecessors, says a correspondent of Carleton, “in the bravery and multitude of his servants.” The following day he wrote of the ceremony to Villiers, “There was much ado, and a great deal of the world. But this matter of pomp, which is heaven to some men, is hell to me, or purgatory at least.” This expression, if not an affectation entirely, is, at least, strangely inconsistent with the account of the vulgar pomp and display of a Feast of the Family, which is described by Bacon with so much detail in The New Atlantis.

In this year Bacon dared to interpose, for a fitful instant, between Villiers and his desires; the next moment he is reduced to a state of pathetic contrition. But the evanescent display of a spirit of independence nearly cost the Lord Keeper his position at Court. For purely personal reasons Bacon regarded, with aversion, the projected marriage between Sir John Villiers, a brother of Buckingham, and the daughter of his old rival and enemy, Sir Edward Coke. In a letter to the Earl of Buckingham he so far forgot himself and his repeated promises to hold himself as a mere instrument in the hands of the King, as to protest against the proposed marriage. Realising immediately the folly of this want of tact, he wrote to the King, and to Buckingham, justifying, or rather excusing his temerity. The King replied with a sharp rebuke, the Favourite in a short, angry note. Further letters elicited additional curt corrections from the angered Monarch, and from Buckingham. Bacon then, for the first time, realised the enormity of his presumption. His position was in danger. Excuse and justification were unavailing to conciliate his angry masters; absolute submission was the only way out of his predicament. Bacon submitted; he even offered to put his submission into writing to the Favourite. Buckingham, in a pencilled note, couched in tones in which arrogance is mixed with acrimonious reflection on “his confused and childish” presumption, notified his forgiveness. In reply, Bacon protested his gratitude to “my ever best Lord, now better than yourself,” and concluded, “it is the line of my life, and not the lines of my letter, that must express my thankfulness; wherein, if I fail, then God fail me, and make me as miserable, as I think myself at this time happy, by this reviver through his Majesty’s clemency and your incomparable love and favour.”

His submission nullified his early resolve not to tolerate any attempts to interfere with the course of law, and delivered him bodily into the hands of Buckingham. The Favourite took the Lord Keeper at his word, and although he put his loyalty to constant and severe tests, by making frequent application to him in favour of chancery suitors, Bacon never again forgot that “the lines of his life” must progress in undeviating conformity with the Favourite’s will. It is not profitable here to attempt to determine whether or not he gave verdicts against his own judgment, but we have the letters to show that he listened, replied, and complied with Buckingham’s requests, and in 1618 he was made Lord Chancellor, doubtless by the influence, and on the advice, of the Favourite.

During the period of Bacon’s temporary disgrace, “when the King and Buckingham had set their faces against him, and all the courtiers were yelping at his heels,” the only friend who remained staunch and constant to him was Sir Henry Yelverton, the Attorney-General. Yelverton, whose admiration for, and loyalty towards the Lord Chancellor were unswerving, would truckle neither to the Favourite nor to the King; although the former had assured him that those who opposed him “should discern what favour he had by the power he would use.” Within a year of Bacon’s restoration to favour Yelverton came into collision with Buckingham, and the Attorney’s accidental misconstruction of the King’s verbal instructions, served as an excuse for an information to be laid against him in the Star Chamber. We have seen how Bacon could repay friendship with ingratitude, and kindness with baseness in the case of Essex and of Cecil, but, in the instance of Yelverton, even his admirers are forced to admit that his behaviour was “peculiarly cold-blooded and ungrateful.” But the “lines of his life” had made him the serf of the Favourite, and “whatever other resolutions Bacon may have broken, none can accuse him of breaking this.” When the case came on, and when “the bill was opened by the King’s Sergeant briefly, with tears in his eyes, and Mr. Attorney, standing at the Bar, amid the ordinary Counsellors, with dejected looks, weeping tears, and a brief, eloquent, and humble oration, made a submission, acknowledging his error, but denying the corruption” – the Lord Chancellor did his utmost to resist the merciful proposal of the majority to submit the Attorney’s submission to the King. The King declined to interfere, and the termination of the case was announced to Buckingham by Bacon, in the following self-satisfied and congratulatory note: – “Yesterday we made an end of Sir Henry Yelverton’s causes. I have almost killed myself with sitting almost eight hours. But I was resolved to sit it through.” He then gives the terms of the sentence, and adds: “How I stirred the Court I leave it to others to speak; but things passed to his Majesty’s great honour.” In other words, a blunt, straightforward, and honourable man, who had refused to purchase his office by bribes, or by flattery, had been condemned, on a charge of corruption (of which his judges knew him to be guiltless), to a fine of £4,000 and imprisonment during the King’s pleasure, for the offence of refusing to cringe to Buckingham. These were the things that, in Bacon’s judgment, “passed to his Majesty’s great honour.”

In 1618 Bacon became Baron Verulam of Verulam; three years later he was created Viscount St. Alban, “with all the ceremonies of robes and coronet.” But his disgrace and discomfiture were soon to come. “In a few weeks,” writes Lord Macaulay, “was signally brought to the test the value of those objects for which Bacon had sullied his integrity, had resigned his independence, had violated the most sacred obligations of friendship and gratitude, had flattered the worthless, had persecuted the innocent, had tampered with judges, had tortured prisoners, had plundered suitors, had wasted on paltry intrigue all the powers of the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men.” On March the 14th, 1621, Bacon was charged by a disappointed suitor with taking money for the dispatch of his suit. On April the 30th, in the House of Lords, was read “the confession and humble submission of me, the Lord Chancellor.” On May the 3rd, the Lords came to a general conclusion that “the Lord Chancellor is guilty of the matters wherewith he is charged,” and it was resolved that he should be fined £40,000, imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure, declared incapable of any office, place, or employment in the State or Commonwealth, and that he should never sit in Parliament, nor come within the verge of the Court. Five years later, on April the 9th, 1626, he died at Highgate of a chill and sudden sickness, contracted by exposure when stuffing a fowl with snow to test the effect of snow in preserving flesh from putrefaction. He wrote, on his death bed, to Lord Arundel, to whose house he had been carried: “As for the experiment it succeeded exceeding well.”

Bacon and Shakespeare Contrasted

The argument of the Baconians – the term is uniformly employed here to mean the supporters of the Baconian theory of the authorship of Shakespeare – is based on the honest belief that the varied qualifications necessary for the production of the Plays were possessed by only one man of the period in which they were written. And having resolutely determined that the man could be no other than Francis Bacon, they set themselves to work with the same resoluteness, to bend, twist, and contort all facts and evidence to suit their theory. It is clearly impossible to credit any of Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatists with the authorship, because their acknowledged work is so immeasurably inferior to his, that any such suggestion must appear ridiculous. It is safe to assume that no writer who had produced poems or plays inferior to those of Shakespeare could be attributed with the authorship of these plays – Shakespeare can only be compared with himself. And the only author who cannot be compared, in this way, to his instant discomfiture, is Bacon, whose published work is, in form and style and essence utterly dissimilar from that of Shakespeare. If a brilliant intellect, wide knowledge, and classical attainments were the only requisite qualifications for the production of the greatest poetry of the world, then Bacon’s claim would stand on a sure foundation. He was intimately acquainted, no man better, with the philosophy of the law; he was an eminent classical scholar, a writer of beautiful English, compact in expression, and rich in fancy. He had an extensive acquaintance with literature and history, he was a brilliant orator; but unto all these great gifts was not added the gentle nature, the broad sympathy and knowledge of humanity, the wealth of humour, the depth of passion, the creative power of poetry, which is so strikingly manifested in the plays of William Shakespeare.

Our knowledge of the gentleness of Shakespeare’s nature, his 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.”