Bacon and Shakespeare

On the subject of the education of William Shakespeare it is inevitable that there should be conflicting opinions. Those who would deck out the memory of Bacon with the literary robe, “the garment which,” according to Mr. R. M. Theobald, is “too big and costly” for the “small and insignificant personality” of Shakespeare, will not concede that he was better educated than his father, who – the error does not lose for want of repetition – “signed his name by a mark.” Supporters of the traditional theory, however, reply, “we do not require evidence to show that he was an educated man – we have his works, and the evidence of Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell to prove it.” Mr. Theobald argues that because there is no positive proof that he had any school education, it is logical to conclude that he had none. Mr. A. P. Sinnett, with the same reckless disregard for facts, says, “We know that he (William Shakespeare) was the son of a tradesman at Stratford, who could not read or write.” And in another place, “there is no rag of evidence that he (William Shakespeare) ever went to school.” Mr. W. H. Mallock describes him, still without “a rag of evidence” to support his assertion, as “a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems to have found some difficulty in signing his own name.” All evidence we have to guide us on this point of Shakespeare’s schooling is that he was entitled to free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford, which was re-constituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. As the son of a prominent and prosperous townsman, he would, for a moral certainty, have been sent by his father to school (Mr. Sidney Lee favours the probability that he entered the school in 1571), where he would receive the ordinary instruction of the time in the Latin language and literature. The fact that the French passages in Henry V. are grammatically correct, but are not idiomatic, makes it certain that they were written by a school-taught linguist, and not by a man like Bacon, who, from his lengthy residence on the Continent, must have been a master of colloquial, idiomatic French. Ben Jonson, in his profound, and somewhat self-conscious command of classical knowledge, spoke slightingly of Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek,” which is all that his plays would lead us to credit him with. His liberal use of translations, and his indebtedness to North’s translations of Plutarch’s Lives, also substantiates this theory.

We cannot regard, as a great scholar, an author who “gives Bohemia a coast line, makes Cleopatra play billiards, mixes his Latin, and mulls his Greek.” Mr. Reginald Haines, who has made a study of Shakespeare for the express purpose of testing his classical attainments, denies emphatically that he shows any acquaintance with Greek at all. His conclusions are worthy of consideration: “Of course there are common allusions to Greek history and mythology such as every poet would have at command, but no reference at first hand to any Greek writer… As far as I know there are but four real Greek words to be found in Shakespeare’s works —threne, cacodemon, practic, and theoric. It is impossible to suppose that Bacon could have veiled his classical knowledge so successfully in so extensive a field for its display, or that he could, for instance, have perpetrated such a travesty of Homer as appears in Troilus and Cressida. With Latin, the case is somewhat different. Shakespeare certainly knew a little grammar-school Latin. He was familiar with Ovid, and even quotes him in the original; and he certainly knew Virgil, and Seneca, Cæsar, and something of Terence and Horace, and, as I myself believe, of Juvenal. But he very rarely quotes Latin, unless it be a proverb or some stock quotation from Mantuanus or a tag from a Latin grammar. When he uses conversational Latin, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the idiom is shaky. The quotations from Horace, &c., in Titus Andronicus are certainly not by Shakespeare. Nor are the Latinisms like “palliament” in that play. Still he has a very large vocabulary of Latin words such as renege, to gust (taste), and we may fairly say that Shakespeare knew Latin as well as many sixth form boys, but not as a scholar.” Two years ago a writer in the Quarterly Review, who had gone through all the alleged examples of erudition and evidences of wide and accurate classical scholarship in the Shakespearean plays, showed them to be entirely imaginary.

In 1582, before he was nineteen years of age, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, and three years afterwards he left Stratford for London. It was during this period, says Mr. Theobald, that “the true Shakespeare was studying diligently, and filling his mind with those vast stores of learning – classic, historic, legal, scientific – which bare such splendid fruit in his after life.” As Mr. Theobald’s contention is that Bacon was the “true Shakespeare,” let us consider for a moment how young Francis was employing his abilities at this particular time. In 1579 he returned to England after a two years’ residence in France. He had revealed an early disposition to extend his studies beyond the ordinary limits of literature, and to read the smallest print of the book of nature. He was already importuning his uncle, Lord Burghley, for some advancement which might enable him to dispense with the monotonous routine of legal studies. Failing in this endeavour, he was admitted as a barrister of Gray’s Inn, was elected to Parliament for Melcombe Regis, composed his first philosophical work, which he named “with great confidence, and a magnificent title,” The Greatest Birth of Time, and another treatise entitled, Advice to Queen Elizabeth. In the case of the poet we have no record; in that of the future Lord Chancellor we get the key of the nature which rendered the man as “incapable of writing Hamlet as of making this planet.”

William Beeston, a 17th century actor, has left it on record that, after leaving Stratford, Shakespeare was for a time a country schoolmaster. In 1586 he arrived in London. His only friend in the Metropolis was Richard Field, a fellow townsman, whom he sought out, and with whom, as publisher, he was shortly to be associated. It is uncertain when Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s company of actors, but documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it in 1594, and that in 1603, after the accession of James I., when they were called the King’s Players, he was one of its leaders. This company included among its chief members Shakespeare’s life-long friends, Richard Burbage, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips, and it was under their auspices that his plays first saw the light.

Before they opened at the Rose on the Bankside, Southwark, in 1592, the Lord Chamberlain’s company had played at The Theatre in Shoreditch, and in 1599 they opened at the Globe, which was afterwards the only theatre with which Shakespeare was professionally associated. In this year he acquired an important share in the profits of the company, and his name appears first on the list of those who took part in the original performance of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. Mr. Theobald states that Shakespeare had become a fairly prosperous theatre manager in 1592, but as he did not secure his interest in the business until seven years later, what probably is meant is that Shakespeare was combining the duties of stage manager, acting manager, and treasurer of the theatre. It would appear that, recognising the fact that the period in Shakespeare’s life between 1588 and 1592 is a blank “which no research can fill up,” Mr. Theobald considers that he is justified in making good the deficiency out of his own inner consciousness.

As occasion will require that Mr. Theobald’s contribution to the controversy shall presently be dealt with, it may not be out of place here to explain the object, so far as it is intelligible, of his Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light (Sampson Low, 1901). It would have been a fair thing to assume that the design of the author of this volume of over 500 pages, was to prove the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare, but as Mr. Theobald has since written to the Press to protest against this interpretation of his motives, we must take his words as he gives his parallels “for what they are worth.” In the opening lines of his preface, Mr. Theobald declares that while the greatest name in the world’s literature is Shakespeare, there is in the world’s literature no greater name than Bacon. Really, it would seem that if his object is not to prove that the two names stand for one and the same individual, this statement is sheer nonsense. Before the end of the preface is reached, he frankly avows his belief that “when the time comes for a general recognition of Bacon as the true Shakespeare, the poetry will still be called “Shakespeare,” and that no one will find anything compromising in such language, any more than we do when we refer to George Eliot or George Sand, meaning Miss Evans or Madame Dudevant.” But if Mr. Theobald was as versed in his study of the subject as Mrs. Gallup, Dr. Owen, Mr. A. P. Sinnett, or even Bacon himself, he would know that when this general recognition comes to pass the author of the Plays will not be called Shakespeare, or Bacon, but Francis “Tidder, or Tudor” – otherwise Francis I. of England – provided, of course, that the bi-literallists can substantiate their cipher. But as Mr. Theobald does not design to prove the Baconian theory, he does not, of course, require the evidence of the great Chancellor, or he may, as a disparager of cipher speculations, accept such evidence “for what it is worth.”

Mr. Theobald, a Baconian by Intuition

Mr. Theobald’s “preliminaries” are chiefly remarkable for three diverse reasons. We learn therefrom that he is a Baconian by intuition – “the persuasion took hold of his mind” as soon as Holme’s Authorship of Shakespeare was placed in his hand – that he does not admit the existence of genius, and that he is intolerant of “clamours and asperities, denunciations and vituperations,” and the personal abuse employed by anti-Baconians, whom he alludes to as Hooligans, and compares with geese. So long as he keeps to the trodden path of Baconian argument, he is only about as perverse and incorrect as the rest of – to use his own expression as applied to Shakespearean students – “the clan.” But he becomes amusing when he ventures to present new arguments in support of Bacon’s claim, variously abusive in his references to Shakespeare, and desperately dogmatic in his pronouncement of the faith that is in him.

“Among the many shallow objections brought against the Baconian theory,” writes Mr. Theobald in his chapter on Bacon’s literary output, “one is founded on the assumption that Bacon was a voluminous writer, and that if we add to his avowed literary productions, the Shakespearean dramas, he is loaded with such a stupendous literary progeny as no author could possibly generate. Moreover, he was so busy in state business as a lawyer, judge, counsellor, member of Parliament, confidential adviser to the King, and the responsible rulers in State and Church, that he had very little spare time for authorship.”

In order to demonstrate that this shallow objection, as Mr. Theobald calls it, is a well-founded and irrefutable statement of fact, we have only to refer to Lord Bacon’s life and to his letters. From 1579, when he returned from France, until the end of his life he was distracted between politics and science; he put forward as his reason for seeking office that he might thereby be able to help on his philosophic projects which with him were paramount, and the poignant regret of his last years was that he had allowed himself to be diverted from philosophy into politics. He found “no work so meritorious,” so serviceable to mankind, “as the discovery and development of the arts and inventions that tend to civilise the life of men.” In his letter to Lord Burghley in 1592, he expressed the hope that in the service of the State he could “bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries – the best state of that province” – the province embracing all nature which he had made his own. But office was denied him, and he returned to “business” and to his constant bewailings of the fact that he had no time for literature. In 1607 he settled the plan of the Instauratio Magna; which had been foreshadowed in his Advancement of Learning, published two years previously. In 1609 he wrote to Toby Mathew, “My Instauratio sleeps not,” and again, in the same year, “My great work goeth forward; and after my manner I alter ever when I add; so that nothing is finished till all is finished.” From 1609 to 1620 Bacon spent such leisure as he could snatch from his other work in revising the Novum Organum (the second part of his Magna Instauratio), of which his chaplain, Rawley, says that he had seen “at least twelve copies revised year by year, one after another, and amended in the frame thereof.” In 1620, when the Novum Organum was published, the author sent it into the world uncompleted, because he had begun to number his days, and “would have it saved.” This was the book he alluded to as “my great work” – the work of his life, and he issued it as a fragment because he had not been able to find time to finish it. The belief that he had “very little spare time for authorship” is no shallow objection brought against the Baconian theory – it is an irrefutable fact, proved not only out of the mouth, but in the life, of Lord Bacon.

In spite, however, of all positive evidence to the contrary, Mr. Theobald proceeds to bolster up his contention that Bacon had time, and to spare, for literary pursuits, by the following most amazing piece of logic. He contends, in the first place, that “an estimate of the entire literary output of Bacon, as a scientific and philosophical writer, proves the amount to be really somewhat small.” He takes the fourteen volumes of Spedding’s Life and Works, subtracts the prefaces, notes, editorial comments, and the biographical narrative, puts aside as of “no literary significance whatever,” all business letters, speeches, State papers, etc., and thus reduces the total amount of literature to Bacon’s credit in the seven volumes devoted to the Life to some 375 pages. “If we calculate the whole amount contained in the fourteen volumes, we shall find it may be reckoned at about six such volumes, each containing 520 pages. On this method of calculation and selection, all that Mr. Theobald can find, “for his whole life, amounts to about 70 pages per annum, less than six pages a month.” Turning from Bacon to Shakespeare, Mr. Theobald finds that here again is a man whose literary output has been greatly exaggerated, for “if the Shakespeare poetry was the only work of William Shakespeare, certainly he was not a voluminous writer. Thirty-one years may be taken as a moderate estimate of the duration of his literary life, i.e., from 1585 till his death in 1616. And the result is 37 plays and the minor poems – not two plays for each year.” Mr. Theobald, it will be seen, possesses the same weakness for statistics that Mr. Dick evinced for King Charles’ head; he drops in his little estimate in season and out of season, and his appraisements are as manifold as they are fallacious. The period of Shakespeare’s dramatic output was confined to twenty years, from 1591 to 1611 – if he had continued writing plays till his death in 1616, Bacon’s alleged playwriting would not have ceased with such significant suddenness in 1611. But what conclusion does Mr. Theobald arrive at as the result of his estimates? No less than this, that if the whole of Shakespeare, and the whole of Bacon’s acknowledged works belong to the same author, “the writer was not a voluminous author —not by any means so voluminous as Miss Braddon or Sir Walter Scott.” That Mr. Theobald should not hesitate to class Miss Braddon’s novels with the plays of Shakespeare, which belong to the supreme rank of literature, or even with Bacon’s “royal mastery of language never surpassed, never perhaps equalled,” is the most astounding link in this astounding chain of so-called evidence. But Mr. Theobald advances it with the utmost confidence. “Therefore,” he sums up, “let this objection stand aside; it vanishes into invisibility as soon as it is accurately tested” —i. e., weighed up, like groceries, by the pound.

Mr. Theobald is scarcely complimentary to Shakespeare’s champions in this controversy, but his language is positively libellous when he refers to Shakespeare himself. His personality is “small and insignificant;” – he is a “shrunken, sordid soul, fattening on beer, and coin, and finding sweetness and content in the stercorarium of his Stratford homestead” – a “feeble, and funny, and most ridiculous mouse.” Mr. Theobald almost argues himself not a Baconian by his assertion that “no Baconian, so far as I know, seeks to help his cause by personal abuse, or intolerant and wrathful speech.”

Was Shakespeare the “Upstart Crow?”

All that we can allege with any certainty about Shakespeare, between 1586 and 1602, is that he must have obtained employment at one or other of the only two theatres existing in London at that time (The Theatre, and The Curtain) – perhaps, as Malone has recorded, in the capacity of call-boy – that he became an actor, was employed in polishing up the stock-plays presented by the Company, and that Love’s Labour’s Lost was produced in the Spring of 1591. Assuming that Shakespeare was the author of this play – assuming, that is to say, that Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell were neither arrant fools, nor wilful perjurers – it is evident that the “insignificant,” “shrunken, sordid soul,” “this ridiculous mouse” had education, application, a natural taste for the stage; and what is more – and more than Mr. Theobald can comprehend – he had genius. Mr. Theobald does not arrive at any such conclusion. Apart altogether from Mrs. Gallup’s cipher revelations, he is convinced by another “flash of intuition” that Ben Jonson was a fellow conspirator with Bacon in the ridiculous plot of foisting Bacon’s plays upon the world as the work of Shakespeare, and that Heming and Condell were but the tools of the disgraced Lord Chancellor.

But if Shakespeare was not advancing towards prosperity by the feasible methods I have conjectured, how can Mr. Theobald account for his ultimately emerging from the “depths of poverty” into a position of comparative affluence? The explanation is simplicity itself: “If a needy, and probably deserving vagabond” (page 11). – Why deserving? He was a “shrunken, sordid soul” on page 7! – “dives into the abyss of London life, lies perdu for a few years, and then emerges as a tolerably wealthy theatrical manager; you know that he must have gained some mastery of theatrical business.” So far the inference is legitimate and convincing; but how? Must he not have disclosed exceptional ability as an actor or playwright, or – ? listen to Mr. Theobald! – “he must have made himself a useful man in the green room, a skilful organiser of players and stage effects – he must have found out how to govern a troop of actors, reconciling their rival egotisms, and utilising their special gifts; how to cater for a capricious public, and provide attractive entertainments. Anyhow, he would have little time for other pursuits – if a student at all, his studies would be very practical relating to matters of present or passing interest. During this dark period he has been carving his own fortune, filling his pockets, not his mind; working for the present, not for the future. But it was exactly then that the plays began to appear.”

Mr. Theobald’s argument can only be described as a reckless, illogical, and absurd distortion of possibilities, and it is the more inconsequential since it proceeds to defeat its primary object. In the first place it is supremely ridiculous to assume that the paltry services of Shakespeare in the green room and the carpenter’s shop, secured for him his pecuniary interest in the Globe Theatre, or the respect and friendship of the leading dramatists of his day, or even the enmity of jealous rivals in the craft. Yet Mr. Theobald attempts to substantiate his conclusions by distorting the obvious meaning of Robt. Greene’s reference to Shakespeare in A Groat’s Worth of Wit. Greene was not an actor, but a dramatist; he was a man of dissolute habits, a poet of rare charm, but a playwright of only moderate ability and repute. He was a gentleman by birth, and a scholar by training. He had the lowest opinion of actors – he envied them their success, and despised their avocation. In The Return from Parnassus he betrays his prejudice in the following lines, which are put into the mouth of a poor and envious student: —

“England affords these glorious vagabonds,That carried erst their fardels on their backs,Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,And pages to attend their masterships;With mouthing words that better wits had framed,They purchase lands, and now esquires are made.”

To the jaundiced mind of Robert Greene, the accumulation of means by an actor was a crime in itself, but that a mere mummer should dare to compete with the scholar and the poet in the composition of plays – more, that he should write plays that exceeded in popularity those of the superior person, the student – was a personal affront. On his death-bed, in 1592, Greene found an outlet for his resentment in writing an ill-natured farewell to life, in which he girded bitterly at the new dramatist, whose early plays had already brought him into public notice. He warns his three brother playwrights – Marlowe, Nash, and Peele – against the “upstart crow, the only Shake-scene in the country” who “supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” How it is possible to interpret these words to mean that the “upstart crow” was not an author, “but only an actor who pretended to be an author also,” the oldest inhabitant of Colney Hatch and Mr. Theobald must decide between them. These anything but “cryptic” words, as Mr. Theobald describes them, can have but one interpretation, and that is the one their author intended. They do not imply that Shakespeare, the “upstart crow,” is not the author of the plays imputed to him, but that he considers his plays as good as those of the older dramatists. His profession of authorship is not questioned, but the quality of his work is savagely challenged. Any other construction put upon the passage is sheer nonsense. Mr. Theobald appeals to the “most gentle and gentlemanly critics” to be patient and tolerant with the Baconians – “men as sound in judgment and as well equipped in learning as yourselves” – but it is high time that this kind of wilful misrepresentation and perversion of common sense should be condemned in plain language. If Greene had believed that Shakespeare was wearing feathers that did not rightfully belong to him, if he were pretending to be what he really was not; if, in Mr. Theobald’s confident explanation, he had no right to profess himself an author at all, we may be quite certain that Greene would have said so outright – he would not have adopted a “cryptic” style, and left it for Mr. Theobald to decipher his meaning.

Mr. Theobald’s alternative theory that the word “Shake-scene” does not refer to Shakespeare at all, is even more preposterous. “In 1592 ‘Shakespeare’ did not exist at all, and only two or three of the plays which subsequently appeared under this name could have been written.” But those two or three plays included, as far as we can tell, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Comedy of Errors– plays of sufficient promise to secure any author recognition as a poet and dramatist. If Mr. Theobald entertains any serious doubts as to the identification of Shakespeare in the “Shake-scene” of Greene, he may be advised to read the apology for this attack which Henry Chettle, the publisher, prefixed to a tract of Greene’s in the same year. “I am as sorry,” Chettle wrote, “as if the originall fault had been my fault, because myselfe have seene his (i. e., Shakespeare’s) demeanour no lesse civill than he (is) exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art.”