Bacon and Shakespeare

“Sware by my sword never to speak of thisThat you have found while we do live;”

and again —

“Sweare never to publish that we conceal under the namesOf others our own till we are dead,Sweare never to reveal the secret cipher wordsThat guide your steps from part to part,Nor how it is gathered, joined or put together,Till we be dead, so help you God!”

The chief point to be noted about these cipher stories, biographies and plays is that they are built up of quotations from the works of all the authors whose writings Bacon claims to be his own. Dr. Owen asks us, in all seriousness, to believe that Bacon composed the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peel, and Greene, and the poems by Spenser, as they appear in the cipher translation, and that he subsequently “decomposed and composed them again” for circulation in his own day, under the names of the various authors who acted as his masques. “When deciphered and replaced in their original form,” Dr. Owen asserts, “they mean something which they do not in the plays.” Such a statement, as anyone can prove by turning to these curious deciphered books, is both fallacious and absurd.

Let us see what these passages which mean nothing in the plays mean in the cipher stories. The pledge which Hamlet imposes upon Horatio and Marcellus after the interview with the ghost is a serviceable case in point. Hamlet’s words are almost too familiar to need repeating:

“So help you mercy, that how strangeOr odd soe’er I bear myself —As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meetTo put an antic disposition on —That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,With arms encumber’d thus, or this head shake,Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,As ‘Well, well, we know;’ – or ‘We could, and if we would;’Or ‘If we list to speak;’ – or, ‘There be, an if they might:’ —Or such ambiguous giving out, to noteThat you know aught of me; – This not to do,So grace and mercy at your most need help you,Swear.”

No one can question the fitness and perfect appropriateness of the foregoing passage in Hamlet, but it is doubtful if anybody, other than Dr. Owen, will recognise their cogency when they are addressed by Bacon to his unknown decipherer.

Bacon declares that Bottom’s recital of his dream, which commences,

“The eye of man hath not heard,The ear of man hath not seen,”

is

“Simply and plainly, the ingenious means of writingWithout creating suspicion;”

and he goes on to explain that the decipherer can, by changing

“The words from one end to another, make it read aright.”

Bacon heartens his timorous decipherer with the words, “Be thou not, therefore, afraid of greatness” – the greatness that he will attain as the reward of his decipherations. “Some,” he assures the unknown, in the memorable words, “have greatness thrust upon them,” and he further reminds him that

“There is a tide in the affairs of man,Which taken at the flood,Leads on to glorious fortune.”

“Nature and fortune joined to make you great,” Bacon tells his decipherer, from the text of King John, and one can almost imagine Dr. Owen blushing with conscious pride, as he translated this borrowed gem. He implores the modest unknown to free his (Bacon’s) name from the disgraceful part he had in the death of the Earl of Essex, and cries —

“Oh, if I couldI would make a willow cabin at your gate,And call upon your soul within the house…You should not restBetween the elements of earth and air,But you should pity me – ”

Words full of passion and beautiful imagery when spoken by Viola, on behalf of Orsino, to the haughty and unresponsive Lady Olivia, but sheer drivel when taken as Bacon’s exhortation to the discover of his wrongs.

But one travels in this precious cipher from foolishness to foolishness – from destruction to damnation, in quick, long strides. In the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth receives and answers the ambassadors of the King of Spain in the words that Henry V. employs in parley with the messengers of the Dauphin. She proclaims her physical superiority to her sister in the braggart language of Faulconbridge before King John beginning

“An’ if my brother had my shape…If my legs were two such riding rods,”

and the next dozen pages are a literal transcription of the first act of Henry V. A hundred pages further on we are introduced to Bacon’s brother Anthony. The brothers meet during the progress of a storm – the storm that is described in Act I. Sc. III. of Julius Cæsar. The scene is placed in Dover, and Bacon who

“… never till to-night, never till now,Did I go through a tempest dropping fire,”

happened in the streets upon

“A common slave,” who“Held up his left hand, which did flame and burnLike twenty torches joined; and yet his hand,Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched.Against the Citadell I met a lion,Who glared upon me, and went surly byWithout annoying me.”

Bacon, in his normal moods, employs the royal style of “we” and “us” when referring to himself, but in moments of agitation, when, for instance, slaves and lions promenade the thoroughfares of Dover, he drops, instinctively, like a Scotchman into his native manner. “Whilst walking thus,” he continues:

“Submitting me unto the hideous night,And bared my bosom to the thunderstone,”

“I met foster-brother Anthony,” who said,

“O Francis, this disturbed city is not to walk in,Who ever knew the heavens menace so?..Let’s to an inn.”

It might be thought that the foregoing instances have been carefully sought out and employed to italicise the foolishness of Dr. Owen’s statement that the plays were first composed in this form, and that in this form alone is their true meaning and relevancy fully demonstrated. Such, however, is far from being the fact. If the reader will take the trouble to wade through the mass of incoherent commonplace, illuminated as it is by passages of Shakespeare’s brilliant wit and inspired poesy which make up these five volumes, he will find scores upon scores of such meaningless and inopportune mis-quotations.

Dr. Owen himself concedes that “some parts of the deciphered material” – viz., those parts which have not their origin in Shakespeare, Spenser, and the works of the other masques – “are not equal in literary power, poetic thought, nor artistic construction to the well-known efforts of Shakespeare,” but he accounts for this inequality on the ground that “the necessities for concealment were so great as to make the difficulties of the cipher serious, and artistic re-construction impossible.” If it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the quotations from the plays, which appear in these “interiour” works, were from the pen of Shakespeare, and that the original parts are the product of Bacon, then Spedding’s contention that there are not “five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles, and practised in such observations,” is proved up to the hilt. Indeed, and without any such concession being allowed, it is impossible to compare the original lines with the pirated passages in these cipher books, and accept the two as the work of the same hand. Dr. Owen, who is evidently neither “familiar with the several styles” of Shakespeare and Bacon, nor “practised in such observations,” invites his readers “to set aside the different names upon the title pages, and ask themselves whether two or more men could have written so exactly alike.” His conclusions are equally destitute of logic or critical acumen: “Either Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare were the same man, at least so far as the writings are concerned; or else, for once in the history of mankind, two men, absolutely dissimilar in birth, in education, and in bringing up, had the same thoughts, used the same words, piled up the same ideas, wrote upon the same subjects, and thought, wrote, talked, and dreamed absolutely alike.” It is true that Shakespeare, in cipher, bears an amazing likeness to Shakespeare in the plays, but if the Shakespeare in the cipher is to be compared with the Bacon either here or in his recognised works, Dr. Owen’s conclusions are palpably absurd.

Dr. Owen promises still further cipher revelations of the same startling nature, which will explain how Bacon succeeded in using his various masques during the lifetime of the alleged authors. “In the decipherings which will appear in their regular order,” he says, “I have found an epitome of the lives of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Green (he is probably referring to Greene), Burton, Peele and Spenser … the circumstances under which they were employed, and the sums of money paid to each for the use of his name. Anthony Bacon, the foster-brother of Francis, was the unknown owner of the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare, while uneducated, possessed a shrewd wit, and some talent as an actor. He received, as a bribe, a share in the proceeds of the theatre, and was the reputed manager. Bacon, with his Court education and aristocratic associations, could not be known as the author of plays or the associate of play actors, and put Shakespeare forward as the mask which covered his greatest work.”

The Tragical Historie of our Late Brother Robert, Earl of Essex

Even at the risk of wearying my readers, it is necessary for the purposes of this book, to make a critical inspection of one of the “interiour” plays which Dr. Owen has deciphered from many of the principal works of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era. As all these hidden plays are derived from the same source – the writings of Shakespeare, Spenser, Greene, Marlowe, Peele, and Burton – the choice of a subject for consideration would appear to be immaterial. The Tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots, a “remarkable production,” according to Dr. Owen, and one that “has been pronounced a masterpiece,” would seem to have the first claim upon our attention. The selection of “The Tragical Historie of our late brother Robert, Earl of Essex, by the author of Hamlet, Richard III., Othello, &c.,” has been decided upon, however; because, in the first place, it is a later production, and in the second, it is declared by Dr. Owen to bear “the impress of greater skill, more experience, and far more intense personal feeling.” In the Publisher’s Note, we are informed that it is “one of the marvels of literature,” and “a work of the most thrilling interest and historical value.” The prologue, which takes the form of a soliloquy, embodies “the deepest philosophy concerning things natural and spiritual, temporal and eternal.” It can, moreover, “only be measured from the point of view of its author, Francis Bacon.” This “wonderful prologue,” which comprises some 200 lines of blank verse, is really a wonder of misapplied misappropriation. It opens with the Seven Ages of Man, to which Bacon adds an eighth, “which rounds out and finishes the story, with the “exit” from human view of all that is mortal:

“Last scene of allThat ends this strange eventful history,The old man dies; and on the shoulders of his brethren,To the heavy knolled bells, is borneIn love and sacred pity, through the gatesOf the holy edifice of stone, where, all in white,The goodly vicar meets them and doth say: —‘I am the resurrection and the life;’And then doth mount the pulpit stairs and doth begin: —‘O Lord, have mercy on us wretched sinners!’The people answering cry as with one voice,‘O Lord, have mercy on us wretched sinners!’Then through the narrow winding churchway paths,With weary task foredone, under the shadeOf melancholy boughs gently set downTheir venerable burden, and from the presenceOf the sun they lower him into the tomb.”

The “eighth” age, it will be observed, is not an age at all, but a funeral. To this striking addition to one of Shakespeare’s best known passages, Bacon tacks on the whole of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” commencing with “To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;” helps himself to a pinch of Hamlet’s lines, “Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt,” acknowledges in the language of the King that “Our offence is rank, it smells to Heaven!” promises that

… “When our younger brothers’ play is done,We’ll play a comedy, my lord, whereinThe players that come forth, will to the life presentThe pliant men that we as masks employ;”

borrows from Hamlet’s advice to the players, and so —

“The curtain’s drawn. Begin.”

The entire mosaic is the most unintelligible, inept, and exasperating mixture of pathos, bathos, and sheer drivel that has ever been claimed as the work of a learned, sane man.

The first act opens outside the Queen’s hunting lodge. Elizabeth alludes to her hounds in the lines allotted by Shakespeare to Theseus (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and has an interview with the Earl of Essex, who comes to bring news of the Irish rising; and Bacon, who remains mute during the entire scene. In the second scene, Essex and Mr. Secretary Cecil come to open rupture in the presence of the Queen. Cecil cries, in Shylock’s words,

“Thou call’st me a dog before thou hast a cause,But since I am a dog, beware my fangs;”

and Essex retorts, in the prayer of Richard II.,

“Now put it, heaven, in his physician’s mindTo help him to his grave immediately!The lining of his coffers shall make coatsTo deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.”

In the mouth of King Richard II., these words had some meaning, for it was the King’s intention to seize the possessions of old John of Gaunt after his demise, and Gaunt was on his death-bed. But Cecil is in excellent good health, and if he were likely to die not a shilling of his personalty would have reverted to the crown. If this was the original form in which Bacon composed the plays of Shakespeare, he was undoubtedly mad.

The Queen then administers to Essex the historical box on the ear, which so enrages the choleric nobleman that he “essays to draw his sword,” and is summarily dismissed by the Queen, who, immediately repenting upon the reflection,

“How bravely did he brave me in my seat,Methought he bore him here as doth a lion,”

despatches Cecil to follow and bring him back. Essex boxes Cecil’s ear, refuses to listen to his wife’s reproof, and having sent for his brother, Francis Bacon (who greets him with

“Brother, to fall from heaven unto hell,To be cubbed up upon a sudden,Will kill you” – )

dismisses the smug, but “rightful Prince of Wales,” and soliloquises —

… “But I’ll use means to make my brother King;Yet as he, Francis, has neither claimed it,Or deserved it – he cannot have it!His highness ‘Francis First,’ shall repose himAt the tower; fair, or not fair, I willConsign my gracious brother thereunto.Yes, he must die; he is much too nobleTo conserve a life in base appliances.”…

Taken as poetry, or as logic, the effort is not a masterpiece; it is, presumably, one of those portions in which “the necessities for concealment” were so great as to make “artistic construction impossible.” But it certainly explains, in a way, the reason of the traitorous behaviour of Bacon towards Essex in the hour of the latter’s adversity. The poetry improves again in the next scene. By misquoting the words of Junius Brutus respecting Caius Marcus,

“All speak praise of him, and the bleared sightsAre spectacled to see him pass along,” &c.

(it is impossible to determine whether the inaccuracies in quotation should be blamed upon Bacon or Dr. Owen), and adding thereto the jealous Richard II.’s contemptuous reference to Bolingbroke:

“A brace of draymen did God-speed him well,And had the tribute of his supple knee,” &c.

Bacon discloses Elizabeth’s mental attitude towards the recalcitrant Earl. Directly Essex enters, however, the Queen promises him that he will soon be known as Duke of York, and she meets his objection,

“My princely brotherFrancis, your quondam son, tells me flatlyHe is the only rightful Prince of Wales,”

with

“The proud jack! ’tis true, if it comes to that,He is the Prince of Wales. But”…

Now Bacon must have known, as well as Elizabeth, that neither he, nor Essex, nor anybody else would be Prince of Wales unless so created by the reigning monarch. But Essex is so full of his Irish command that he overlooks such trifles, and in the next scene he sends a captain to the Queen for a thousand pounds, with the admonition,

“Be secret and away,‘To part the blessings of this happy day.’”

In the third act, the Queen does the sleep-walking scene from Macbeth. Essex returns to England, uttering the words used by Richard II. on his own safe arrival from Ireland, to be upbraided by the Queen in the Duke of York’s words to Bolingbroke:

“Why have those banished and forbidden legs? &c.”

A half-dozen lines of description (from Coriolanus) of Caius Marcus’ return to Rome, illustrate the reception that London tendered to the disobedient Earl. Essex revolts, and fortifies himself in his house in London. When ordered by the Chief Justice of England to surrender, Essex replies in the magnificent curse which Mark Antony utters against Rome over the corpse of the murdered Cæsar. The lack of enthusiasm which the citizens of London display in the Essex rebellion is related to the Earl in the report which Buckingham makes to the King, of London’s reticence in rebellion (Richard III.) commencing

“The citizens are mum, say not a word.”

And when the insurrection dies out for want of fuel, he finds solace for his grief in quoting Richard II.’s lines —

… “Of comfort, no man speak,Let’s talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs,” &c.

The unsuccessful Essex in parley with Lord Lincoln employs the passage between Northampton and the King in Richard II., and in the subsequent Star Chamber trial, the Chief Justice dismisses Essex to execution in the words that Henry V. applied to Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey:

“Get you, therefore, hencePoor miserable wretches, to your death,” &c.

But the marvel of inept plagiarism, of consummate wrongheadedness, and ignorance in the bestowal of stolen property, is seen in the last act of this marvellous play. Herein, Essex is discovered in a dungeon in the tower. He is a man 34 years of age, and it is somewhat of a surprise to find him declaring, in the (revised) language of little Prince Arthur (King John):

“So I were out of prison and kept sheep,I should be merry as the day is long;And so I should be here, but that I doubtThat Cecil practices more harm to me:He is afraid of me, and I of him.”

But it is more than a surprise to learn that this hardy man of war is to be compelled by Bacon (Shakespeare aiding) to play young Arthur to the bitter end. After being surfeited with Francis Bacon’s choicest philosophy, the Lord Keeper arrives with a commission to deliver Essex to the jailers: “I will not reason what is meant thereby!”

It is impossible, without quoting the whole of this culminating passage, to convey a correct impression of the ludicrousness of the finale to this “marvel of literature,” – this play of “most thrilling interest and historical value.”

[Exit Keeper.]First Jailer. Oh, he is bold, and blushes not at death.Essex. Avaunt thou hateful villain, get thee gone!First Jailer. There’s the great traitor.Second Jailer. Ingrateful fox, ’tis he.First Jailer. Bind fast his corky arms.Essex. Help, – help, – help, – help!Here’s a man would murder me. Help, – help, – help!I will not struggle, I will stand stone still.First Jailer. Bind him, I say.Second Jailer. Hard, hard! O filthy traitor!First Jailer. Give me the iron, I say, and bind him here:To this chair bind him.Essex. Let me not be bound:Alas, why need you be so boistrous rough?O I am undone, O I am undone!Do me no foul play, friend!First Jailer. Read here, traitor.Can you not read it? Is it not writ fair?Essex. How now, foolish rheume;Must you, with hot irons, burn out both mine eyes?O Heaven, that there were but a moth in yours,A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair,Any annoyance in that precious sense:Then feeling what small things are boisterous there,Your vile intents must needs seem horrible.O spare mine eyes, though to no use but still to look on you!Lo, by my troth, the instrument is cold,And would not harm me – O men, if you will,Cut out my tongue, so that I may still keepBoth mine eyes to see.First Jailer. To see some mischief!See shall thou never: (fellow, hold the chair:)Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot!Essex. He that will think to live till he be old,Give me some help! O save me, – save me! – help!(They tear out one of his eyes.)Oh cruel! Oh God, – O God, – O God! my eyes are out!Oh, I am slain!First Jailer. My Lord, you have one eye left!One side will mock another; th’ other too.Out, vile jelly! where is thy lustre now?(They tear out the other eye.)Essex. All dark and comfortless! —O God, enkindle all the sparks of natureTo quit this horrid act.First Jailer. Away with him; lead him to the block.[Exeunt Omnes.

In the epilogue, the two jailers blackmail Mr. Secretary Cecil as he walks in his garden with his decipherer, and the book ends with the following cryptic lines:

“This is the cruel man (Cecil) that was employedTo execute that execrable tragedy,And you can witness with me this is true.”(Omnes) “This is the strangest tale that e’er I heard.”

This amazing adaptation of a perfect piece of dramatic writing to the exigencies of biography is, it may be assumed, without parallel in the history of literature. Comment would be superfluous: imagine Mr. Daniel Leno sustaining the part of Essex in a performance of the drama, and the illusion is complete.

Bacon, the Poet

The whole of the new matter that we find in the play under notice is so dissimilar from that of Shakespeare in style, language, and expression, that it might be the work of any author, American or English, even – if we accept the statement of Spedding – of Bacon himself. It is difficult to form any correct estimate of Bacon’s talent as a poet, because, apart from his own description of himself as a “concealed poet,” and his versification of the Psalms, we have nothing to guide us. Spedding doubtless had these Psalms in his mind when he pronounced so emphatically upon the absence of similarity between the writings of Shakespeare and Bacon. There is little extant verse of the period which is so un-Shakespearean as this product of Bacon’s maturity, which was dedicated to the pious and learned George Herbert, whose verses on Bacon were printed in 1637. The publication is a proof that Bacon thought well of his work – it is not on record that anybody else has endorsed that opinion. Indeed, these seven Psalms give us all that we have, or want, of Bacon’s poetry. The following is an extract from the first psalm:

“He shall be like the fruitful tree,Planted along a running spring,Which, in due season, constantlyA goodly yield of fruit doth bring;Whose leaves continue always green,And are no prey to winter’s pow’r;So shall that man not once be seenSurprised with an evil hour.”

His rendering of the 90th psalm is not all as bald and discordant as the following:

“Begin Thy work, O Lord, in this our age,Shew it unto Thy servants that now live;But to our children raise it many a stage,That all the world to Thee may glory give.Our handy-work likewise, as fruitful tree,Let it, O Lord, blessed, not blasted be.”

The beautiful 14th and 15th verses of the 104th psalm are thus rendered by our “concealed poet”:

“Causing the earth put forth the grass for beasts,And garden herbs, served at the greatest feasts,And bread that is all viands firmament,And gives a firm and solid nourishment,And wine, man’s spirits for to recreate,And oil, his face for to exhilarate.”

There can be no two opinions as to the merits of these metrical efforts, which Bacon thought good enough to print and to dedicate to his friend George Herbert. Spedding says of them, “In compositions upon which a man would have thought it a culpable waste of time to bestow any serious labour, it would be idle to seek either for indications of his taste or for a measure of his powers.” And again, “of these verses of Bacon’s, it has been usual to speak not only as a failure, but as a ridiculous failure; a censure in which I cannot concur. An unpractised versifier (fancy styling the author of the Faerie Queene and Adonis, an ‘unpractised versifier!’) – who will not take time and trouble about the work, must, of course, leave many bad verses; for poetic feeling and imagination, though they will dislike a wrong word, will not of themselves suggest a right one that will suit metre and rhyme; and it would be easy to quote from the few pages, not only many bad lines, but many poor stanzas.” Spedding concludes with the comment: “Considering how little he cared to publish during the first sixty years of his life, and how many things of weightier character and more careful workmanship he had then by him in his cabinet, it was somewhat remarkable that he should have given these Psalms to the world.” Dr. Abbott, another friendly biographer and admirer of Bacon’s “magnificent prose,” says: – “Some allowance must be made (no doubt) for the fact that Bacon is translating, and not writing original verse. Nevertheless a true poet, even of a low order, could hardly betray so clearly the cramping influence of rhyme and metre. There is far less beauty of diction and phrase in these verse translations than in any of the prose works that are couched in an elevated style… But I cannot help coming to the conclusion that, although Bacon might have written better verse on some subject of his own choosing, the chances are that even his best would not have been very good.”