Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

Now, as we shall later show, Bacon’s rapid production of the plays, considering his other contemporary activities and varied but always absorbing interests, was as much a miracle as the sudden blossoming of Henry’s knowledge and accomplishments; for all Bacon’s known exertions and occupations, and his deepest and most absorbing interest, were remote from the art of tragedy and comedy. If we are to admit the marvel of genius in Bacon, of whose life and pursuits we know much, by parity of reasoning we may grant that the actor, of whom we know much less, may have had genius: had powers and could use opportunities in a way for which Baconians make no allowance.

We now turn to Mr. Greenwood’s chapter, “Shakespeare and ‘Genius.’” It opens with the accustomed list of poor Will’s disqualifications, “a boy born of illiterate parents,” but we need not rehearse the list. 63 He “comes to town” (date unknown) “a needy adventurer”; in 1593 appeared the poem Venus and Adonis, author’s name being printed as “W. Shakespeare.” Then comes Lucrece (1594). In 1598 Love’s Labour’s Lost, printed as “corrected and augmented” by “W. Shakespere.” And so on with all the rest. Criticism of the learning and splendour of the two poems follows. To Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the amusing things written about it by Baconians, I return; and to Shakespeare’s “impossible” knowledge of courtly society, his “polish and urbanity,” his familiar acquaintance with contemporary French politics, foreign proverbs, and “the gossip of the Court” of Elizabeth: these points are made by His Honour Judge Webb.

All this lore to Shakespeare is “impossible” – he could not read, say some Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none; on these points I have said my say. The omniscient Baconians know that all the early works ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a man of, say thirty – who was no more, and knew no more, than they know that the actor was and knew; and as for “Genius,” it cannot work miracles. Genius “bestows upon no one a knowledge of facts,” “Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned.”

Precisely, but genius as I understand it (and even cleverness) has a way of acquiring knowledge of facts where the ordinary “dull intelligent man” gains none. Keen interest, keen curiosity, swift observation, even the power of tearing out the things essential from a book, the gift of rapid reading; the faculty of being alive to the fingertips, – these, with a tenacious memory, may enable a small boy to know more facts of many sorts than his elders and betters and all the neighbours. They are puzzled, if they make the discovery of his knowledge. Scott was such a small boy; whether we think him a man of genius or not. Shakspere, even the actor, was, perhaps, a man of genius, and possessed this power of rapid acquisition and vivid retention of all manner of experience and information. To what I suppose to have been his opportunities in London, I shall return. Meanwhile, let the doubter take up any popular English books of Shakespeare’s day: he will find them replete with much knowledge wholly new to him – which he will also find in Shakespeare.

A good example is this: Judge Webb proclaimed that in points of scientific lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon were much on a level. Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the facts staggered him, as a “Stratfordian.” A friend told me that he too was equally moved. I replied that these pseudoscientific “facts” had long been commonplaces. Pliny was a rich source of them. Professor Dowden took the matter up, with full knowledge, 64 and reconverted Mr. Tyrrell, who wrote: “I am not versed in the literature of the Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians who put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the poet. Professor Dowden has proved that this is not so.” 65

Were I to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers’s papers on “The Mechanism of Genius” (in his Human Personality), and to consider the humble problem of “Calculating Boys,” which is touched on also by Cardinal Newman. How do they, at the age of innocence, arrive at their amazing results? How did the child Pascal, ignorant of Euclid, work out the Euclidean propositions of “bars and rounds,” as he called lines and circles? Science has no solution!

Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge of human nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in manners and matter of war) Jeanne d’Arc; – and science, I fancy, is much to seek for a reply.

Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert Burns. The parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much to Mr. Greenwood’s advantage as he supposes. The genius of Burns, of course, is far indeed below the level of that of the author of the Shakespearean plays. But that author and Burns have this in common with each other (and obviously with Homer), that their work arises from a basis of older materials, already manipulated by earlier artists. Burns almost always has a key-note already touched, as confessedly in the poems of his predecessor, Fergusson; of Hamilton of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or artistic, and so forth. He “alchemised” his materials, as Mr. Greenwood says of his author of the plays; turned dross into gold, brick into marble. Notoriously much Shakespearean work is of the same nature.

The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his parish school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek; in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and French; and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry’s Wallace; Locke’s Essay; The Spectator, novels of the day, and vernacular Scots poets of his century, with a world of old Scots songs. These things, and such as these, were Burns’s given literary materials. He used them in the only way open to him, in poems written for a rural audience, and published for an Edinburgh public. No classical, no theatrical materials were given; or, if he read the old drama, he could not, in his rural conditions, and in a Scotland where the theatre was in a very small way, venture on producing plays, for which there was no demand, while he had no knowledge of the Stage. Burns found and filled the only channels open to him, in a printed book, and in music books for which he transmuted old songs.

The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed with reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and theatrical; and, from his profession of actor, by far the best channel open to him was the theatre. Badly as it paid the outside author, there was nothing that paid better. Venus and Adonis brought “more praise than pudding,” if one may venture a guess. With the freedom of the theatre Will could soar to all heights and plumb all depths. No such opportunity had Burns, even if he could have used it, and, owing to a variety of causes, his spirit soon ceased to soar high or wing wide.

I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current Elizabethan light literature —Euphues, Lyly’s Court comedies, novels full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney – his Defence of Poesy, and Arcadia (1590) – with scores of tales translated from the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full of foreign society, and discourses of knights and ladies. He saw the plays of the day, perhaps as one of “the groundlings.” He often beheld Society, from without, when acting before the Queen and at great houses. He had thus, if I am right, sufficient examples of style and manner, and knowledge of how the great were supposed (in books) to comport and conduct themselves. The books were cheap, and could be borrowed, and turned over at the booksellers’ stalls. 66 The Elizabethan style was omnipresent. Suppose that Shakespeare was a clever man, a lover of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory, easily influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that my conjectures are not too audacious. Not only “the man in the street,” but “the reading public” (so loved by Coleridge), have not the beginning of a guess as to the way in which a quick man reads. Watch them poring for hours over a newspaper! Let me quote what Sir Walter Raleigh says: 67 “Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly readers who know what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is dressed in print, but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of all that brings them new information, or jumps with their thought, or tickles their fancy. Such a reader will have done with a volume in a few minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years. He is a live man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a learned man.”

I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was Dr. Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius. The accomplishment is only a marvel to – well, I need not be particular about the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!

Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will, quoted by Mr. Greenwood 68 from Mr. Morgan. 69

Genius, says Mr. Morgan, “did not guide Burns’s untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.” No! that was not Burns’s lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend. The public of 1780–90 did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full of the mediæval legends of Troy and Athens. But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the mediæval legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, not of Homer, Will made his market. Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch’s Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman’s new translation (1598). For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton’s Destruction of Troy, still reprinted as a popular book as late as 1713. Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, “reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten.. ” He bestowed the manners of mediæval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards. Look at his notion of “the very manners” of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning “the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings” the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith’s bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of “matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!”

Mon Dieu! do historians not treat of “matters of curious research” and of statutes and of treaties? As for “old romances,” they were current and popular. The “occult” sources of King Lear are a popular tale attached to legendary “history” and a story in Sidney’s Arcadia. Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as “a letterless peasant lad,” or the Author, whoever he was, is not “invested with all the love” (sic, v.1. “lore”), “which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten.”

“Our friend’s style has flowery components,” Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, “and yet Shakespeare who did all this,” et cætera. But Shakespeare did not do “all this”! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which “Delphos” is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North’s Plutarch, done out of the French; older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the State Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up “clasped books, buried and forgotten.” There is no original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day. Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence. And the common Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.

But Mr. Greenwood asks “what was the poetic output?” in Burns’s case. 70 It was what we know, and that was what suited his age and his circumstances. It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.

Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre. I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the classics, – with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current popular Morte d’Arthur and Destruction of Troy.

I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that “Genius is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is associated, and the opportunities that are open to it – in a word, on the circumstances of its environment.” 71

Of course by “moral qualities,” a character without spot or stain is not intended: we may take that for granted. Otherwise, I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and with “the circumstances of its environment.” Without the “environment,” no Jeanne d’Arc, – without the environment, no Shakespeare.

To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of “the light people,” the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers’ tales, the seamen’s company, the vision of the Court, the gallants, the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was. Not as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William does not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob. Like Alceste (in Le Misanthrope of Poquelin), he might say,

“L’Ami du genre humain n’est point du tout mon fait.”

In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob. This reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study-haunting, or law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms haunting Bacon make acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers, and carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all Shakespeare’s crowd of people hanging loose on the town?

It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and manners of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and conventional), than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge of what is called “low life.”

If you reply, as regards Bacon, “his genius divined the Costards and Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and Bardolphs, and carters, from a hint or two, a glance,” I answer that Will had much better sources for them in his own experience of life, and had conventional poetic sources for his courtiers – of whom, in the quick, he saw quite as much as Molière did of his Marquis.

But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting for Bacon’s pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by Lord Penzance, that aged Judge. The way is short. These pictures of rural life and character were interpolated into the plays of Bacon by his collaborator, William Shakspere, actor, “who prepared the plays for the stage.” This brilliant suggestion is borrowed from Mr. Appleton Morgan. 72

Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it is difficult to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects of character which he could scarcely draw “from the life.” I am willing to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited give the honour to the actor, “who prepared the plays for the stage.”

Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I believe in “Genius.” Shakespeare and Molière did not live in “Society,” though both rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over the invisible barrier between the actor and the great people in whose houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer. The rest they divined, by genius.

Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not at Court, not in the study, did he meet them. How then did he create his multitude of very low-lived persons? Rustics and rural constables he may have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company. So you have to admit “Genius,” – the miracle of “Genius” in your Bacon, – to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated with Bacon.

Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily get at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford says something about the humorist, and tradition, in similar circumstances, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy years.

Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney. Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so lightly as Burns did, – some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer, and was in troubles many. Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main chance. Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory. His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.

Something must be done! Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have seen and talked with them, and been attracted. He was a practical man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a small brigade of boys as his deputies. According to Ben Jonson he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent, that terrible bar! The actors find that out; he is admitted within the house as a “servitor” – a call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.

By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, “Shakescene” thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene’s three author friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.

Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say, five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with the stage. Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a good deal of very mixed society – writing men, bookish young blades, young blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the custom of the gallants.

What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among prize-fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact that he was a lord. Moreover there were no women on the stage to distract the attention of the gallants. The players, says Asinius Lupus, in Jonson’s Poetaster, “corrupt young gentry very much, I know it.” I take the quotation from Mr. Greenwood. 73 They could not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate with them. From Ben’s Poetaster, which bristles with envy of the players, Mr. Greenwood also quotes a railing address by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor, “There are some of you players honest, gentlemanlike scoundrels, and suspected to ha’ some wit, as well as your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests; and are companions for gallants. A man may skelder ye, now and then, of half a dozen shillings or so.” 74 We think of Nigel Olifaunt in The Fortunes of Nigel; but better gallants might choose to have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.

To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to show misunderstanding of human nature. The players were, when unprotected by men of rank, “vagabonds.” The citizens of London, mainly Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not Puritans. The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in palaces and great houses. The wealth and splendid attire of the actors, their acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the sweated playwrights. Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge “Parnassus” plays of c. 1600–2. In the mouth of Will Kempe, who acted Dogberry in Shakespeare’s company, and was in favour, says Heywood, with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag: “For Londoners, who of more report than Dick Burbage and Will Kempe? He is not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.” It is not my opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be, as much “in Society” as is possible for a mere literary man. I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour. He was a man’s man, a peer might be interested in him as easily as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, que sçais-je? Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more interested, interested in a better way.

In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with human nature, I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young, handsome, popular Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and interested himself in the poet. There followed the dedication to the Earl of Venus and Adonis; a poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).

Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate. The mere fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that of Lucrece, proves that the Earl did not share the surprise of Mr. Greenwood. He, conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew the real concealed author, and the secret of the pseudonym. But of the hypothesis of such a choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said. Whatever happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable to be dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we are to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have left any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the poet.