The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies

The hypothesis of Mr. Child could only be DEMONSTRATED incorrect by proving that there was no Russian scandal at all, or by producing a printed or manuscript copy of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ older than 1719. We can do neither of these things; we can only give the reader his choice of two improbabilities – (a) that an historical event, in 1718-19, chanced to coincide with the topic of an old ballad; (b) that, contrary to all we know of the evolution of ballads and the state of taste, a new popular poem on a fresh theme was composed in a style long disused,* was offered most successfully to the public of 1719, and in not much more than half a century was more subjected to alterations and interpolations than ballads which for two or three hundred years had run the gauntlet of oral tradition.

*A learned Scots antiquary writes to me: ‘The real ballad manner hardly came down to 1600. It was killed by the Francis Roos version of the Psalms, after which the Scottish folk of the Lowlands cast everything into that mould.’ I think, however, that ‘Bothwell Brig’ is a true survival of the ancient style, and there are other examples, as in the case of the ballad on Lady Warriston’s husband murder.

As for our own explanation of the resemblance between the affair of Miss Hamilton, in 1719, and the ballad story of Mary Hamilton (alias Mild, Myle, Moil, Campbell, Miles, or Stuart, or anonymous, or Lady Maisry), we simply, with Scott, regard it as ‘a very curious coincidence.’ On the other theory, on Mr. Child’s, it is also a curious coincidence that a waiting-woman of Mary Stuart WAS hanged (not beheaded) for child-murder, and that there WERE written, simultaneously, ballads on the Queen’s Maries. Much odder coincidences than either have often, and indisputably, occurred, and it is not for want of instances, but for lack of space, that we do not give examples.

Turning, now, to a genuine historic scandal of Queen Mary’s reign, we find that it might have given rise to the many varying forms of the ballad of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ There is, practically, no such ballad; that is, among the many variants, we cannot say which comes nearest to the ‘original’ lay of the frail maid and her doom. All the variants are full of historical impossibilities, due to the lapses of memory and the wandering fancy of reciters, altering and interpolating, through more than two centuries, an original of which nothing can now be known. The fancy, if not of the first ballad poet who dealt with a real tragic event, at least of his successors in many corners of Scotland, raised the actors and sufferers in a sad story, elevating a French waiting-maid to the rank of a Queen’s Marie, and her lover, a French apothecary, to the place of a queen’s consort, or, at lowest, of a Scottish laird.

At the time of the General Assembly which met on Christmas Day 1563, a French waiting-maid of Mary Stuart, ‘ane Frenche woman that servit in the Queenis chalmer,’ fell into sin ‘with the Queenis awin hipoticary.’ The father and mother slew the child, and were ‘dampned to be hangit upoun the publict streit of Edinburgh.’ No official report exists: ‘the records of the Court of Justiciary at this time are defective,’ says Maidment, and he conjectures that the accused may have been hanged without trial, ‘redhand.’ Now the Queen’s apothecary must have left traces in the royal account-books. No writer on the subject has mentioned them. I myself have had the Records of Privy Council and the MS. Treasurer’s Accounts examined, with their statement of the expenses of the royal household. The Rev. John Anderson was kind enough to undertake this task, though with less leisure than he could have desired. There is, unluckily, a gap of some months in 1563. In June 1560, Mr. Anderson finds mention of a ‘medicinar,’ ‘apoticarre,’ ‘apotigar,’ but no name is given, and the Queen was then in France. One Nicholas Wardlaw of the royal household was engaged, in 1562, to a Miss Seton of Parbroath, but it needed a special royal messenger to bring the swain to the altar. ‘Ane appotigar’ of 1562 is mentioned, but not named, and we hear of Robert Henderson, chirurgeon, who supplied powders and odours to embalm Huntley. There is no trace of the hanging of any ‘appotigar,’ or of any one of the Queen’s women, ‘the maidans,’ spoken of collectively. So far, the search for the apothecary has been a failure. More can be learned from Randolph’s letter to Cecil (December 31, 1563), here copied from the MS. in the Public Record Office. The austerity of Mary’s Court, under Mr. Knox, is amusingly revealed: – ‘For newes yt maye please your honour to knowe that the Lord Treasurer of Scotlande for gettinge of a woman with chylde muste vpon Sondaye nexte do open penance before the whole congregation and mr knox mayke the sermonde. Thys my Lord of murraye wylled me to wryte vnto you for a note of our greate severitie in punyshynge of offenders. THE FRENCHE POTTICARIE AND THE WOMAN HE GOTTE WITH CHYLDE WERE BOTHE HANGED THYS PRESENT FRIDAYE. Thys hathe made myche sorrowe in our Courte. Maynie evle fortunes we have had by our Frenche fowlkes, and yet I feare we love them over well.’

After recording the condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about ‘shame hastening the marriage’ of Mary Livingstone. Dr. Robertson, in his ‘Inventories of Queen Mary,’ refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox’s own continence. Knox adds: ‘What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit.’ Unlucky omission, unfortunate ‘modestei’! From Randolph’s Letters it is known that Knox, at this date, was thundering against ‘danseris.’ Here, then, is a tale of the Queen’s French waiting-woman hanged for murder, and here is proof that there actually were ballads about the Queen’s Maries. These ladies, as we know from Keith, were, from the first, in the Queen’s childhood, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seatoun, Mary Beatoun, and Mary Fleming.

We have, then, a child-murder, by a woman of the Queen, we have ballads about her Maries, and, as Scott says, ‘the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition, the French waiting-woman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the Queen’s apothecary into Henry Darnley,’ who, as Mr. Child shows, was not even in Scotland in 1563. But gross perversion of contemporary facts does not prove a ballad to be late or apocryphal. Mr. Child even says that accuracy in a ballad would be very ‘suspicious.’ Thus, for example, we know, from contemporary evidence, that the murder of the Bonny Earl Murray, in 1592, by Huntley, was at once made the topic of ballads. Of these, Aytoun and Mr. Child print two widely different in details: in the first, Huntley has married Murray’s sister; in the second, Murray is the lover of the Queen of James VI. Both statements are picturesque; but the former is certainly, and the latter is probably, untrue. Again, ‘King James and Brown,’ in the Percy MS., is accepted as a genuine contemporary ballad of the youth of gentle King Jamie. James is herein made to say to his nobles, —

         ‘My grandfather you have slaine,          And my own mother you hanged on a tree.’

Even if we read ‘father’ (against the manuscript) this is absurd. James V. was not ‘slaine,’ neither Darnley nor Mary was ‘hanged on a tree.’ Ballads are always inaccurate; they do not report events, so much as throw into verse the popular impression of events, the magnified, distorted, dramatic rumours. That a ballad-writer should promote a Queen’s tirewoman into a Queen’s Marie, and substitute Darnley (where HE is the lover, which is not always) for the Queen’s apothecary, is a license quite in keeping with precedent. Mr. Child, obviously, would admit this. In producing a Marie who never existed, the ‘maker’ shows the same delicacy as Voltaire, when he brings into ‘Candide’ a Pope who never was born.

Finally, a fragment of a variant of the ballad among the Abbotsford MSS.* does mention an apothecary as the lover of the heroine, and, so far, is true to historical fact, whether the author was well informed, or merely, in the multitude of variations, deviated by chance into truth.

There can, on the whole, be no reasonable doubt that the ballad is on an event in Scotland of 1563, not of 1719, in Russia, and Mr. Child came to hold that this opinion was, at least, the more probable.**

*Child, vol. iv. p. 509.

**Ibid., vol. v. pp. 298, 299.

XII. THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON IMBROGLIO*

The hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon has now been before the world for more than forty years. It has been supported in hundreds of books and pamphlets, but, as a rule, it has been totally neglected by scholars. Perhaps their indifference may seem wise, for such an opinion may appear to need no confutation. ‘There are foolisher fellows than the Baconians,’ says a sage – ‘those who argue against them.’ On the other hand, ignorance has often cherished beliefs which science has been obliged reluctantly to admit. The existence of meteorites, and the phenomena of hypnotism, were familiar to the ancient world, and to modern peasants, while philosophy disdained to investigate them. In fact, it is never really prudent to overlook a widely spread opinion. If we gain nothing else by examining its grounds, at least we learn something about the psychology of its advocates. In this case we can estimate the learning, the logic, and the general intellect of people who form themselves into Baconian Societies, to prove that the poems and plays of Shakespeare were written by Bacon. Thus a light is thrown on the nature and origin of popular delusions.

*(1) ‘Bacon and Shakespeare,’ by William Henry Smith (1857);

(2) ‘The Authorship of Shakespeare,’ by Nathaniel Holmes (1875); (3) ‘The Great Cryptogram,’ by Ignatius Donnelly (1888); (4) ‘The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies of Francis Bacon,’ by Mrs. Henry Pott (1883);

(5) ‘William Shakespeare,’ by Georg Brandes (1898); (6) ‘Shakespeare,’ by Sidney Lee (in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1897); (7) ‘Shakespeare Dethroned’ (in Pearson’s Magazine, December 1897); (8) ‘The Hidden Lives of Shakespeare and Bacon,’ by W. G. Thorpe, F.S.A. (1897).

(9) ‘The Mystery of William Shakespeare,’ by Judge Webb (1902).

The Baconian creed, of course, is scouted equally by special students of Bacon, special students of Shakespeare, and by almost all persons who devote themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the ‘Variorum Shakespeare;’ by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare’s latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian hypothesis is that its devotees are nobly careless of authority. We do not dream of converting them, but it may be amusing to examine the kind of logic and the sort of erudition which go to support an hypothesis not freely welcomed even in Germany.

The mother of the Baconian theory (though others had touched a guess at it) was undeniably Miss Delia Bacon, born at Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1811. Miss Bacon used to lecture on Roman history, illustrating her theme by recitations from Macaulay’s ‘Lays.’ ‘Her very heart was lacerated,’ says Mr. Donnelly, ‘and her womanly pride wounded, by a creature in the shape of a man – a Reverend (!) Alexander MacWhorter.’ This Celtic divine was twenty-five, Miss Bacon was thirty-five; there arose a misunderstanding; but Miss Bacon had developed her Baconian theory before she knew Mr. MacWhorter. ‘She became a monomaniac on the subject,’ writes Mr. Wyman, and ‘after the publication and non-success of her book she lost her reason WHOLLY AND ENTIRELY.’ But great wits jump, and, just as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace simultaneously evolved the idea of Natural Selection, so, unconscious of Miss Delia, Mr. William Henry Smith developed the Baconian verity.

From the days of Mr. William Henry Smith, in 1856, the great Baconian argument has been that Shakespeare could not conceivably have had the vast learning, classical, scientific, legal, medical, and so forth, of the author of the plays. Bacon, on the other hand, and nobody else, had this learning, and had, though he concealed them, the poetic powers of the unknown author. Therefore, prima facie, Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Mr. Smith, as we said, had been partly anticipated, here, by the unlucky Miss Delia Bacon, to whose vast and wandering book Mr. Hawthorne wrote a preface. Mr. Hawthorne accused Mr. Smith of plagiarism from Miss Delia Bacon; Mr. Smith replied that, when he wrote his first essay (1856), he had never even heard the lady’s name. Mr. Hawthorne expressed his regret, and withdrew his imputation. Mr. Smith is the second founder of Baconomania.

Like his followers, down to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke, and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in ‘The Spiritualist,’ and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested, first, on Shakespeare’s lack of education, and on the wide learning of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore, to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek. Here Mr. John Churton Collins suggests that Ben meant no more than that Shakespeare was not, in the strict sense, a scholar. Yet he might read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, with ease and pleasure, and might pick out the sense of Greek books by the aid of Latin translations. To this view we return later.

Meanwhile we shall compare the assertions of the laborious Mr. Holmes, the American author of ‘The Authorship of Shakespeare’ (third edition, 1875), and of the ingenious Mr. Donnelly, the American author of ‘The Great Cryptogram.’ Both, alas! derive in part from the ignorance of Pope. Pope had said: ‘Shakespeare follows the Greek authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius.’ Mr. Smith cites this nonsense; so do Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Holmes. Now the so-called Dares Phrygius is not a Greek author. No Greek version of his early mediaeval romance, ‘De Bello Trojano,’ exists. The matter of the book found its way into Chaucer, Boccaccio, Lydgate, Guido de Colonna, and other authors accessible to one who had no Greek at all, while no Greek version of Dares was accessible to anybody.* Some recent authors, English and American, have gone on, with the credulity of ‘the less than half educated,’ taking a Greek Dares for granted, on the authority of Pope, whose Greek was ‘small.’ They have clearly never looked at a copy of Dares, never known that the story attributed to Dares was familiar, in English and French, to everybody. Mr. Holmes quotes Pope, Mr. Donnelly quotes Mr. Holmes, for this Greek Dares Phrygius. Probably Shakespeare had Latin enough to read the pseudo-Dares, but probably he did not take the trouble.

*See Brandes, William Shakespeare, ii. 198-202.

This example alone proves that men who are not scholars venture to pronounce on Shakespeare’s scholarship, and that men who take absurd statements at second hand dare to constitute themselves judges of a question of evidence and of erudition.

The worthy Mr. Donnelly then quotes Mr. Holmes for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Greek drama. Turning to Mr. Holmes (who takes his motto, if you please, from Parmenides), we find that the author of ‘Richard II.’ borrowed from a Greek play by Euripides, called ‘Hellene,’ as did the author of the sonnets. There is, we need not say, no Greek play of the name of ‘Hellene.’ As Mr. Holmes may conceivably mean the ‘Helena’ of Euripides, we compare Sonnet cxxi. with ‘Helena,’ line 270. The parallel, the imitation of Euripides, appears to be —

          By their dark thoughts my deeds must not be shown,

with —

          Prooton men ouk ons adikoz eimi duskleez,

which means, ‘I have lost my reputation though I have done no harm.’ Shakespeare, then, could not complain of calumny without borrowing from ‘Hellene,’ a name which only exists in the fancy of Mr. Nathaniel Holmes. This critic assigns ‘Richard II.,’ act ii., scene 1, to ‘Hellene’ 512-514. We can find no resemblance whatever between the three Greek lines cited, from the ‘Helena,’ and the scene in Shakespeare. Mr. Holmes appears to have reposed on Malone, and Malone may have remarked on fugitive resemblances, such as inevitably occur by coincidence of thought. Thus the similarity of the situations of Hamlet and of Orestes in the ‘Eumenides’ is given by similarity of legend, Danish and Greek. Authors of genius, Greek or English, must come across analogous ideas in treating analogous topics. It does not follow that the poet of ‘Hamlet’ was able to read AEschylus, least of all that he could read him in Greek.

Anglicised version of the author’s original Greek text.

The ‘Comedy of Errors’ is based on the ‘Menaechmi’ of Plautus. It does not follow that the author of the ‘Comedy of Errors’ could read the ‘Menaechmi’ or the ‘Amphitryon,’ though Shakespeare had probably Latin enough for the purpose. The ‘Comedy of Errors’ was acted in December 1594. A translation of the Latin play bears date 1595, but this may be an example of the common practice of post-dating a book by a month or two, and Shakespeare may have seen the English translation in the work itself, in proof, or in manuscript. In those days MSS. often circulated long before they were published, like Shakespeare’s own ‘sugared sonnets.’ However, it is highly probable that Shakespeare was equal to reading the Latin of Plautus.

In ‘Twelfth Night’ occurs —

Like the Egyptian thief, at point of death, kill what I love.

Mr. Donnelly writes: ‘This is an allusion to a story from Heliodorus’s “AEthiopica.” I do not know of any English translation of it in the time of Shakespeare.’ The allusion is, we conceive, to Herodotus, ii. 121, the story of Rhampsinitus, translated by ‘B. R.’ and published in 1584. In ‘Macbeth’ we find —

          All our yesterdays have LIGHTED fools          The way to dusty death.  Out, out, BRIEF CANDLE.

This is ‘traced,’ says Mr. Donnelly, ‘to Catullus.’ He quotes: —

          Soles occidere et redire possunt;          Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,          Nox est perpetuo una dormienda.

Where is the parallel? It is got by translating Catullus thus: —

          The LIGHTS of heaven go out and return;          When once our BRIEF CANDLE goes out,          One night is to be perpetually slept.

But soles are not ‘lights,’ and brevis lux is not ‘brief candle.’ If they were, the passages have no resemblance. ‘To be, or not to be,’ is ‘taken almost verbatim from Plato.’ Mr. Donnelly says that Mr. Follett says that the Messrs. Langhorne say so. But, where is the passage in Plato?

Such are the proofs by which men ignorant of the classics prove that the author of the poems attributed to Shakespeare was a classical scholar. In fact, he probably had a ‘practicable’ knowledge of Latin, such as a person of his ability might pick up at school, and increase by casual study: points to which we return. For the rest, classical lore had filtered into contemporary literature and translations, such as North’s Plutarch.

As to modern languages, Mr. Donnelly decides that Shakespeare knew Danish, because he must have read Saxo Grammaticus ‘in the original tongue’ – which, of course, is NOT Danish! Saxo was done out of the Latin into French. Thus Shakespeare is not exactly proved to have been a Danish scholar. There is no difficulty in supposing that ‘a clayver man,’ living among wits, could pick up French and Italian sufficient for his uses. But extremely stupid people are naturally amazed by even such commonplace acquirements. When the step is made from cleverness to genius, then the dull disbelieve, or cry out of a miracle. Now, as ‘miracles do not happen,’ a man of Shakespeare’s education could not have written the plays attributed to him by his critics, companions, friends, and acquaintances. Shakespeare, ex hypothesi, was a rude unlettered fellow. Such a man, the Baconians assume, would naturally be chosen by Bacon as his mask, and put forward as the author of Bacon’s pieces. Bacon would select a notorious ignoramus as a plausible author of pieces which, by the theory, are rich in knowledge of the classics, and nobody would be surprised. Nobody would say: ‘Shakespeare is as ignorant as a butcher’s boy, and cannot possibly be the person who translated Hamlet’s soliloquy out of Plato, “Hamlet” at large out of the Danish; who imitated the “Hellene” of Euripides, and borrowed “Troilus and Cressida” from the Greek of Dares Phrygius’ – which happens not to exist. Ignorance can go no further than in these arguments. Such are the logic and learning of American amateurs, who sometimes do not even know the names of the books they talk about, or the languages in which they are written. Such learning and such logic are passed off by ‘the less than half educated’ on the absolutely untaught, who decline to listen to scholars.

We cannot of course furnish a complete summary of all that the Baconians have said in their myriad pages. All those pages, almost, really flow from the little volume of Mr. Smith. We are obliged to take the points which the Baconians regard as their strong cards. We have dealt with the point of classical scholarship, and shown that the American partisans of Bacon are not scholars, and have no locus standi. We shall take next in order the contention that Bacon was a poet; that his works contain parallel passages to Shakespeare, which can only be the result of common authorship; that Bacon’s notes, called ‘Promus,’ are notes for Shakespeare’s plays; that, in style, Bacon and Shakespeare are identical. Then we shall glance at Bacon’s motives for writing plays by stealth, and blushing to find it fame. We shall expose the frank folly of averring that he chose as his mask a man who (some assert) could not even write; and we shall conclude by citing, once more, the irrefragable personal testimony to the genius and character of Shakespeare.

To render the Baconian theory plausible it is necessary to show that Bacon had not only the learning needed for ‘the authorship of Shakespeare,’ but that he gives some proof of Shakespeare’s poetic qualities; that he had reasons for writing plays, and reasons for concealing his pen, and for omitting to make any claim to his own literary triumphs after Shakespeare was dead. Now, as to scholarship, the knowledge shown in the plays is not that of a scholar, does not exceed that of a man of genius equipped with what, to Ben Jonson, seemed ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ and with abundance of translations, and books like ‘Euphues,’ packed with classical lore, to help him. With the futile attempts to prove scholarship we have dealt. The legal and medical lore is in no way beyond the ‘general information’ which genius inevitably amasses from reading, conversation, reflection, and experience.

A writer of to-day, Mr. Kipling, is fond of showing how easily a man of his rare ability picks up the terminology of many recondite trades and professions. Again, evidence taken on oath proves that Jeanne d’Arc, a girl of seventeen, developed great military skill, especially in artillery and tactics, that she displayed political clairvoyance, and that she held her own, and more, among the subtlest and most hostile theologians. On the ordinary hypothesis, that Shakespeare was a man of genius, there is, then, nothing impossible in his knowledge, while his wildly daring anachronisms could have presented no temptation to a well-regulated scientific intellect like that of Bacon. The Baconian hypothesis rests on the incredulity with which dulness regards genius. We see the phenomenon every day when stupid people talk about people of ordinary cleverness, and ‘wonder with a foolish face of praise.’ As Dr. Brandes remarks, when the Archbishop of Canterbury praises Henry V. and his universal accomplishments, he says:

          Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it,          Since his addiction was to courses vain,          His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,          His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sportsAND NEVER NOTED IN HIM ANY STUDY,          Any retirement, any sequestration,          From open haunts and popularity.

Yet, as the Archbishop remarks (with doubtful orthodoxy), ‘miracles are ceased.’

Shakespeare in these lines describes, as only he could describe it, the world’s wonder which he himself was. Or, if Bacon wrote the lines, then Bacon, unlike his advocates, was prepared to recognise the possible existence of such a thing as genius. Incredulity on this head could only arise in an age and in peoples where mediocrity is almost universal. It is a democratic form of disbelief.