Bacon and Shakespeare

“For my burial I desire it may be in St. Michael’s Church, near St. Albans; there was my Mother buried, and it is the only Christian Church within the walls of Old Verulam.

“For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.”

This apology put forth by Henry Chettle is an invaluable attestation to the character and literary standing of Shakespeare – “his uprightness in dealing” is a matter of public report, and “his facetious grace in writing” is frankly acknowledged. At a period when professional rivalries ran strong, and no man’s reputation was above attack, a publisher and fellow author is seen regarding Shakespeare not only as a man to whom an apology was due, but to whom it appeared expedient to make one. In treating of the personal history of Shakespeare, it must be borne in mind that although the duly-attested facts regarding him are regrettably few, the poet was widely known to the leading literary and theatrical men of his day. Ben Jonson, his brother actor and dramatist, and Michael Drayton were his intimate friends. Condell and Heming remained in close relationship with Shakespeare until his death, and Richard Burbage was his partner in the business of the Globe Theatre. In Pericles and Timon, Shakespeare worked in collaboration with George Wilkins, a dramatic writer of some repute, and William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays. There were besides, the members of the Globe Company, men who lived their lives beside him, rehearsed under him, learned from him, interpreted him. Yet none of these men appear to have entertained the slightest doubt upon the genuineness of his claims to authorship, while every contemporaneous reference to him is couched in terms of affection and admiration. The only possible explanation of this remarkable fact is that Shakespeare and Bacon were one and the same person – a theory that the most hardened Baconian has not yet thought it advisable to advance.

Wm. Shakespeare, Money Lender and Poet

Mr. Theobald is unfortunate in his selection of the points he raises in Shakespeare’s career in order to belittle the character of the poet. He writes: “His known occupations, apart from theatre business, were money-lending, malt-dealing, transactions in house and land property.” There is not the slightest evidence to show that Shakespeare traded as a money-lender; his only interest in malt-dealing was confined to one transaction, and his transactions in houses and lands were those of any man who invests his savings in real estate. The phrase is, as the most superficial Shakespeare student will recognise, misleading in substance, and incorrect as a statement of fact. In another part of his determinedly one-sided book, Mr. Theobald dismisses, in a paragraph, the contention that Shakespeare’s poems are illuminated and illustrated by Shakespeare’s life. The obvious rejoinder is that there is nothing in the life of Shakespeare that makes it difficult for us to accept him as the author of the Plays, whereas the whole life and character of Bacon makes his pretensions more than difficult, even impossible, of acceptance.

In 1593, Venus and Adonis was published by Shakespeare’s friend and fellow townsman, Richard Field, and in the following year Lucrece was issued at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Both poems were dedicated to Shakespeare’s first and only patron, the Earl of Southampton, with whom Bacon is not known to have sought any intimacy until 1603, when he addressed to him a characteristic letter of conciliation. (In 1621, when Bacon was accused of corruption, the Earl of Southampton pointed out the insufficiency of the Lord Chancellor’s original confession, and it was largely the result of his firm and unfriendly attitude that Bacon’s abject submission and acknowledgment of the justice of the charges, was placed before the Lords). These poems constituted Shakespeare’s appeal to the reading public. The response was instantaneous and enthusiastic. “Critics vied with each other,” writes Mr. Sidney Lee, “in the exuberance of the eulogies, in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author had gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus.” Lucrece, Michael Drayton declared, in his Legend of Matilda (1594), was “revived to live another age.” In 1595, William Clerke, in his Polimanteia, gave “all praise” to “Sweet Shakespeare” for his Lucrecia. John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to “honey-tongued” Shakespeare in his Epigrams (1595), eulogised the two poems as an unmatchable achievement, although he mentions the plays Romeo, and Richard, and “more whose names I know not.” Richard Carew, at the same time, classed him with Marlowe, as deserving the praises of an English Catullus. Printers and publishers of the poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers. No fewer than seven editions of Venus appeared between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617. Lucrece achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare’s death. The Queen quickly showed him special favour, and until her death in 1603, Shakespeare’s plays were repeatedly acted in her presence.

When the sonneteering vogue reached England from Italy and France, Shakespeare applied himself to the composition of sonnets, with all the force of his poetic genius. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive, the greater number were probably composed in 1593 and 1594. Many are so burdened with conceits and artificial quibbles that their literary value is scarcely discernible; but the majority, on the other hand, attain to supreme heights of poetic expression, sweetness, and imagery. They are of peculiar interest, as disclosing the relationship that existed between Southampton and Shakespeare. No less than twenty of the sonnets are undisguisedly addressed to the patron of the poet’s verse: three of them are poetical transcriptions of the devotion which he expressed to Southampton in his dedicatory preface to Lucrece. The references are direct and unmistakable. In 1603, when the accession of James I. opened the gates of Southampton’s prison, Bacon was meekly writing to him: “I would have been very glad to have presented my humble service to your Lordship by my attendance if I could have foreseen that it should not have been unpleasing to you,” and hypocritically assuring him, “How credible soever it may seem to you at first, yet it is as true as a thing God knoweth, that this great change (i. e., the release of Southampton, and his favour with the new monarch, whose good-will Bacon ardently desired), hath wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely be now that which I was truly before.” The Earl of Southampton considered these protestations of friendship so incredible, as coming from the man who had consigned Essex, Bacon’s own friend and patron, to the headsman, and sent Southampton himself to the Tower, that he appears to have made no response to this letter, and twenty years afterwards he materially contributed to the Lord Chancellor’s discomfiture. One has only to compare this letter with the sonnet with which Shakespeare saluted his patron on his release from the Tower, to recognise the impossibility of regarding the two compositions as the work of the same man.

The “True Shakespeare.”

If Bacon was the “true Shakespeare,” as Mr. Theobald calls him, the question naturally arises as to his motive in concealing the authorship of the plays and the poems. Baconians explain this extraordinary act of reticence on the ground that dramatic authorship was held in low esteem, and that the fact, if known, would have proved an obstacle to his advancement at Court. This contention, though fully borne out by Bacon’s cipher writings, is ridiculous in the extreme. In the first place, it was not the profession of dramatic authorship, but the calling of the actor that was held in low esteem. Furthermore, poetry was not under the ban that attached to the stage, and it cannot be denied that the acknowledged authorship of Venus and Adonis, of Lucrece, or of the Sonnets, would have won for Bacon more favour at Elizabeth’s Court than he ever secured by his philosophy. Poetry was held in high esteem; sonneteering was the vogue. Buckingham, in the next reign, wrote a play, The Rehearsal, and Essex had composed a masque. The publication of The Faerie Queene, in 1589, secured for Edmund Spenser an introduction to the Queen, who made him her poet laureate in the same year. Why should Bacon have persisted in devoting himself to a branch of literature which appears to have advanced his interests so little? Elizabeth was never impressed by his genius; she acknowledged his great wit and learning, but accounted him “not deep.” James criticised his philosophy with lofty captiousness, and compared his Novum Organum to “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” It would be neither discreditable to his pride as a poet, nor contrary to the nature of the man, to believe that if he could safely have claimed the authorship of Lucrece and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he would not have hesitated for an hour in so doing. Venus and Adonis won for Shakespeare the favour of Elizabeth, while, under the sovereignty of her successor, Shakespeare’s company gave between forty and fifty performances at Court during the first five years of his reign. Is it not rather absurd to believe that Bacon should have remained quiescent while his unavowed work was being acclaimed as “immortal,” and the works published under his own name were either neglected, or treated to a contemptuous mot by the very person whose admiration he was feverishly striving to attract?

Yet the Baconians find no difficulty in accepting this explanation of secrecy – Mr. A. P. Sinnett regards the motive as perfectly intelligible. Bacon, he contends, was not writing his plays for fame, but for the money it brought him. Mr. Theobald contends that the plays could not have been written by Shakespeare because he was too busily employed in “carving his own fortune” … “filling his pockets” … “working for the present, not for the future,” to devote the necessary leisure to literary pursuits. Bacon himself, according to the bi-literal cipher discoveries of Mrs. Gallup, declares that so far from receiving remuneration for his plays, he paid “a sufficient reward in gold” to Shakespeare for the use of his name. “He was left quite without resources,” Mr. Sinnett explains, “and he took up dramatic writing for the sake of the money it earned him.” Before we are won over by this fallacious explanation, we would inquire how it was that Bacon, who was left without resources in 1577, did not produce his first play until 1591, and then paid for the luxury of concealing his indiscretion. Mr. Sinnett’s next sentence is instructive as a specimen of Baconian reasoning. “After Bacon obtained an office of profit at forty-six, no more Shakespeare plays appeared, though the reputed author lived for ten more years in dignified leisure at Stratford.” It may, of course, be regarded as a “shallow objection” to raise, but Bacon was fifty-one years of age when Shakespeare retired to Stratford. Moreover, Bacon obtained no office of profit in 1611. He was made Solicitor-General, and became a rich man, in 1607, but until his appointment to the Attorney-Generalship in 1613 he was continually suing for promotion and applying for a better paid office. It is, indeed, significant that Bacon was silent as a playwright from the time of Shakespeare’s retirement. When he was Chancellor, and enjoyed a yearly income equal to between £60,000 and £70,000 of our money, he continued to compose his scientific works, and he was still actively engaged in the task between 1621 and 1626 when he was again reduced to comparative penury, and the more remunerative employment of play-writing would have relieved his financial position without detriment to his political prospects. The source from whence he could have augmented his inadequate income was neglected while he employed himself in writing a Digest of the Laws of England, The History of Henry VII., Sylva Sylvarum, Augmentis Scientiarum, The Dialogue of the Holy War, some additional Essays, and the translation of “certain Psalms into English verse.” Bacon, according to Baconians, produced his plays during the busiest period of his political career, and in the days of his leisure and impecuniosity – “when Shakespeare was not present to shield him from the disgrace of possessing poetic and dramatic genius” – he produced his versification of the Psalms.

Mr. Sinnett, in common with Mr. Theobald and, indeed, all other upholders of the Baconian theory, has a distinctly original way of dealing with matters of fact. Mr. Theobald invents his facts to suit his argument; Mr. Sinnett ignores all facts that prove intractable. Thus Mr. Sinnett in The National Review: “All through the plays there is no allusion to Stratford.” And again: “While Bacon seems to have gone North to curry favour with James on his accession, Macbeth was written just after that event. Certainly there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare ever went to Scotland.” What nonsense is all this! Although personalities are rare in the Plays, there are a number of literal references to Stratford, and Shakespeare’s native county, in The Taming of the Shrew; and local allusions are also to be found in the second part of Henry IV. and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In his Life of William Shakespeare, Mr. Lee enumerates several instances in point. “Barton Heath,” we read is, “Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of Shakespeare’s aunt, Edmund Lambert’s wife, and of her sons. The tinker, in The Taming of the Shrew, confesses that he has run up a score with Marian Hacket, the fat ale wife of Wincot. The references to Wincot and the Hackets are singularly precise. The name of the maid of the inn is given as Cicely Hacket, and the ale-house is described in the stage direction as ‘on a heath.’” Again, in Henry IV., the local reference to William Visor, of Woncot, and the allusions to the region of the Cotswold Hills, and the peculiar Cotswold custom of sowing “red lammas” wheat at an unusually early season of the agricultural year, are unmistakable. Mr. Sinnett’s assumptions that Bacon went to Scotland and that Shakespeare did not, are entirely arbitrary. In point of fact we may be quite sure that Bacon did not go to Scotland, and we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare was ever in Venice, or Sardis, or “a wood near Athens.” The author of the Letters from Hell was not under suspicion because he could not claim to have been ferried across the Styx to get his local colour.

If we are to accept the Baconian opinion of Shakespeare it is difficult to understand how Bacon came to allow him to make a successful application on behalf of his father, John Shakespeare, to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms in 1597. Bacon was an aristocrat and a firm believer in his order. If he knew Shakespeare to be a notoriously ill-educated actor, a man little better than a vagabond, an impostor, a villain with “some humour,” whom Bacon employed as the original model for Sir John Falstaffe and Sir Toe-be – as Mr. Harold Bayley states – why did he not prevent his intimate friend, the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Southampton, and William Camden, the great scholar and antiquary, from being hoaxed by this impudent rogue, and prevent the Shakespeares from obtaining the desired grant? These three friends of Shakespeare certainly facilitated the proceedings.

Mr. Theobald’s Parallels and Mr. Bayley’s Conclusions

When Mr. Theobald gets away from his biographical pabulum and plunges into the literary arguments for Bacon’s authorship of the plays, he has little that is original to reveal, but much that is new in the way of parallels and coincidences. In the first place, he takes it for granted that Shakespeare could not, by any possibility, have written the plays. He does not prove it, but —cela va sans dire. Then he proceeds, to the extent of some four hundred pages of matter, to demonstrate, by reference to the significant Baconian characteristics in the plays, and the still more significant parallels between the poetry of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Bacon, that Bacon must be the author of both. Bacon, for instance, appears to have had a “very curious habit” of striking himself on the breast when he wished to emphasise an argument. Brutus, Ophelia, Clarence’s little boy, and Claudio, are all represented as using a similar gesture. Some such lamentations as Bacon may be supposed to have uttered after his fall, are to be found in King Lear, and Lucrece’s self-condemnation of herself to death for an offence of which she is entirely innocent is, of course, inspired by Bacon’s behaviour in making a full and humble submission to the Lords in respect of offences which he never committed. The mere fact that Lucrece was published in 1594, and that Bacon’s downfall did not take place until 1621, is a point of no moment – we can readily agree with Mr. Theobald that “there is a very curious reflection of Bacon’s character and temperament in the poem of Lucrece.” Lucrece absolves herself in the reflection,

“The poison’d fountain clears itself again,And why not I from this compelled stain?”

Everybody knows that Bacon, “for some time after his condemnation, expected to resume his ordinary functions as counsellor to Parliament, and adviser to the King” —ergo Lucrece was Bacon’s prototype – in petticoats. Moreover, in the Essays, Bacon affixes to a meditative reflection in one of his philosophical propositions the phrase, “I cannot tell.” The same phrase, scarcely remarkable in itself, occurs several times in the Plays. Mr. Theobald devotes a whole chapter of his book to emphasising this remarkable coincidence. He advances pages of historical parallels, and he remarks, almost enthusiastically, that both Shakespeare and Bacon have dilated with pitiless logic on “the uselessness of hope.”

But Mr. Theobald is most amusing when he compares Bacon’s Essay of Love with the treatment of Love in Shakespeare. We know Bacon’s opinion of love, as expressed in the Essay, and we find it difficult to reconcile it with the rhapsodies that we find in the Plays; we remember Romeo and Juliet, and the exquisite comment, “Imagine Juliet as the party, loved” – or, rather, we should do so, if Mr. Theobald was not at our elbow to explain the apparent contradiction in thought and term. Love, it would appear, has two sides. There is the “bosom” side, and the business side. Here we have a full and convincing explanation of the difference between the views of love as expressed in the Essay, and the Shakespearean application of the sentiment as displayed in his dramas. In the Plays, Bacon regarded love from the “bosom” point of view, while in the Essay, the “very brief, very aphoristic, very concentrated, never discoursive or rhetorical, but severely reflective and practical essay,” he was dealing with Juliet as a “business” detail – a contracting party, in short – “the party loved.” Nothing could be more convincing! It would almost lead us to entertain a greater admiration for Bacon than Spedding could hope for. He has not only voiced two such entirely contradictory views of love as we find in the Essay of Bacon and the plays of Shakespeare, but he has, with the aid of Mr. Theobald, showed that, “curiously enough,” the two conflicting expressions are “significantly identical.” There is surely no need to proceed further. Mr. Theobald has proved his contention, and we must perforce accept his conclusions that Shakespeare, the arch-impostor, the champion literary fraud of all time, was “either entirely uneducated, or very imperfectly educated; that his Latin was small, his Greek less, and his pure English least of all; that such handwriting as his could never have figured on a University examination paper – this is the opinion, it will be observed, of an M.A., and a former editor of The Bacon Journal– that his whole life was too full of business, too much devoted to money to leave any extensive opportunities for study, or for large, broad, world-covering experience.”

But if we make it a sine quâ non that the writer of the Plays was a man of leisure not devoted to mammon, “with ample opportunity for study, and of a broad-world covering experience” (whatever that may precisely mean), it is proof positive that he was not the man whom we know as Francis Bacon. Bacon’s whole life was devoted to business, and to the getting of money; he had no leisure, as he is for ever telling us, for his life’s work, and his experience of the world of men was so superficial and misleading that it sent Essex to the block, brought the King to loggerheads with his Parliament, and encompassed the utter downfall and disgrace of the cunning Chancellor. We need not be flustered by Mr. Theobald’s hysterical opinion that Shakespeare’s writing was “so execrably bad, so unmistakably rustic and plebean, that one may reasonably doubt whether his penmanship extended beyond the capacity of signing his name to a business document,” because we have Spedding’s statement that Shakespeare’s signature is simply characteristic of the caligraphy of the time, and we know by comparison that it is in advance, both in style and legibility, of that of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the father of the great Pretender.

Mr. Harold Bayley, the author of The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon, is, in the same degree, disdainful of facts. He declares that he will quote verbatim from Mr. Sidney Lee’s well-known Life of Shakespeare which would be most commendable in him if he did it – but he doesn’t. Rather he quotes the opinion of Richard Grant White, who says that “Shakespeare was the son of a Warwickshire peasant,” who “signed his name with a mark,” and that the Poet was “apprenticed to a butcher.” It is but waste of space to repeat that such assertions are palpably false. It may be true, as Mr. Bayley states, that Stratford, in 1595, was in an unsanitary condition, and that the Metropolitan theatres were the resort of undesirable persons – even that Shakespeare entered the play-house as a servitor, but all this proves nothing. It is also true that, up to the time that Shakespeare’s plays began to be produced, “there had been nothing in his career that would cause us to suppose he was a sublime genius,” but until Homer, or Michael Angelo, or Rudyard Kipling began to produce their masterpieces, we knew of nothing in them to make us accept them as heaven-born geniuses. Mr. Bayley assumes that Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon in 1585 with “Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and, perhaps, Hamlet, in his pocket.” The reason for his assumption is not vouchsafed to us. True, our dramatist left Stratford in 1585, but Venus was not published until 1593, and it was not until 1602 that Hamlet was produced. The mere fact that “in the sixteenth century the provincial dialects were so marked that the county gentry … had difficulty in making themselves understood, except to their provincial neighbours,” proves that both these works were composed after Shakespeare had been for some time a resident in London, and indeed it is ridiculous to suppose that it took him eight years to find a publisher for Venus and Adonis. Donnelly deciphered the Bishop of Worcester’s opinion that Shakespeare was “a butcher’s rude and vulgar apprentice,” who “in our opinion was not likely to have writ them (the Plays).” “In our opinion” is scarcely evidence. Mr. Bayley’s contemptuous reference to Shakespeare’s handwriting as “five strange scrawls,” is combated by Spedding’s authoritative dictum, and his immediately succeeding conclusion that the classical allusions and references in the Plays prove the author to have been “a cultured aristocrat,” robs his entire argument of sapiency or merit.

Mr. Harold Bayley’s The Tragedy of Francis Bacon, is, in my opinion, an inconsequential contribution to the controversy. In the chapter on Papermarks, his contention that every fresh device necessitates a new mould (p. 38) is correct, but his deductions are senseless; the fact being that the paper is contributed from very many – mostly foreign – mills. Take one of Caxton’s books – say, The Golden Legend– and you will find 50 different water-marks in one volume; if all the copies could be examined, probably double or treble the number would be revealed. One hasn’t the patience to follow Mr. Bayley’s “reasoning”: he believes one of the paper-marks (No. 55) to be Rosicrucian – it is the Divine monogram, and traceable to the first century. No. 14, the “fool’s-cap,” gives the name to a size of paper still extant – so of the vase, or “pott.” The symbols are allusive, heraldic, or “canting,” mostly emblematic, or in rebus form. That is all. What more natural for the paper-maker Lile than to take the Fleur-de-lys for his trade symbol? With respect to printers’ headlines, tail-pieces, etc., they were (and are) simply fancy types used for decorative purposes. The oak, and its fruit the acorn – the rose, Tudor or otherwise, the lily, typifying our conquest of France, only erased from the Royal Arms temp. George III., would all, from a national standpoint, become the commonest form of ornament, and each, in its turn, lend itself to the fancy of the designer, who, Mr. Bayley would have us think, were all under the direction of Francis Bacon, who wove a wonderful story by this puerile means. As for the printers’ “hieroglyphics,” as Mr. Bayley calls them, they have been used almost from the invention of the art to the present time. Amongst publishers, too, they are common. The printer of The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon employs one: a lion supporting the trade symbol of Aldus. I have not consulted Mr. Whittingham, but (if he knows anything at all about it) he would probably say the device signifies that he is the English successor of the Venetian printer!