The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies

For the hypothesis, as we said, it is necessary to show that Bacon possessed poetic genius. The proof cannot possibly be found in his prose works. In the prose of Mr. Ruskin there are abundant examples of what many respectable minds regard as poetic qualities. But, if the question arose, ‘Was Mr. Ruskin the author of Tennyson’s poems?’ the answer could be settled, for once, by internal evidence. We have only to look at Mr. Ruskin’s published verses. These prove that a great writer of ‘poetical prose’ may be at the opposite pole from a poet. In the same way, we ask, what are Bacon’s acknowledged compositions in verse? Mr. Holmes is their admirer. In 1599 Bacon wrote in a letter, ‘Though I profess not to be a poet, I prepared a sonnet,’ to Queen Elizabeth. He PREPARED a sonnet! ‘Prepared’ is good. He also translated some of the Psalms into verse, a field in which success is not to be won. Mr. Holmes notes, in Psalm xc., a Shakespearean parallel. ‘We spend our years as a tale that is told.’ Bacon renders:

          As a tale told, which sometimes men attend,          And sometimes not, our life steals to an end.

In ‘King John,’ iii. 4, we read: —

          Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale          Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read ‘King John’ in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has —

          The greater navies look like walking woods.

They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself. One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon’s Psalms or compare navies to ‘walking woods’! Mr. Holmes adds: ‘Many of the sonnets [of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.’ That is, Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pass from hand to hand, among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends,’ as Shakespeare’s (1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave offspring – rather late in life. Shakespeare’s apparent allusions to his profession —

                    I have gone here and there,          And made myself a motley to the view,

and

          The public means which public manners breeds,

refer, no doubt, to Bacon’s versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has hitherto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare’s friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is intended. Is it not obvious?

          I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.

Bacon clearly had an assignation with Her Majesty – so here is ‘scandal about Queen Elizabeth.’ Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is ‘within sight of Her Majesty’s Palace of White Hall.’ She gave Bacon the reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen; he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested himself in a masque at Gray’s Inn, while he and his friends ‘partly devised dumb shows and additional speeches,’ in 1588.

Nothing follows as to Bacon’s power of composing Shakespeare’s plays. A fragmentary masque, which may or may not be by Bacon, is put forward as the germ of what Bacon wrote about Elizabeth in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ An Indian WANDERER from the West Indies, near the fountain of the AMAZON, is brought to Elizabeth to be cured of blindness. Now the fairy, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ says, capitalised by Mr. Holmes:

I DO WANDER EVERYWHERE.

Here then are two wanderers – and there is a river in Monmouth and a river in Macedon. Puck, also, is ‘that merry WANDERER of the night.’ Then ‘A BOUNCING AMAZON’ is mentioned in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘the fountain of the great river of the Amazons’ is alluded to in the fragment of the masque. Cupid too occurs in the play, and in the masque the wanderer is BLIND; now Cupid is blind, sometimes, but hardly when ‘a certain aim he took.’ The Indian, in the masque, presents Elizabeth with ‘his gift AND PROPERTY TO BE EVER YOUNG,’ and the herb, in the play, has a ‘VIRTUOUS PROPERTY.’

For such exquisite reasons as these the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ are by one hand, and the masque is by Bacon. For some unknown cause the play is full of poetry, which is entirely absent from the masque. Mr. Holmes was a Judge; sat on the bench of American Themis – and these are his notions of proof and evidence. The parallel passages which he selects are on a level with the other parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare. One thing is certain: the writer of the masque shows no signs of being a poet, and a poet Bacon explicitly ‘did not profess to be.’ One piece of verse attributed to Bacon, a loose paraphrase of a Greek epigram, has won its way into ‘The Golden Treasury.’ Apart from that solitary composition, the verses which Bacon ‘prepared’ were within the powers of almost any educated Elizabethan. They are on a level with the rhymes of Mr. Ruskin. It was only when he wrote as Shakespeare that Bacon wrote as a poet.

We have spoken somewhat harshly of Mr. Holmes as a classical scholar, and as a judge of what, in literary matters, makes evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon’s as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote ‘Richard II.,’ ‘which, though it grew from me, went after about in others’ names.’ Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes’s opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But ‘nothing less than a miracle’ could shake Mr. Holmes’s belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon’s) and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the visitation of God in the shape of idiocy, could bring the conviction that the person who wrote the masque could have written the play. The reader may compare the whole passage in Mr. Holmes’s work (pp. 228-238). We have already set forth some of those bases of his belief which only a miracle could shake. The weak wind that scarcely bids the aspen shiver might blow them all away.

Vast space is allotted by Baconians to ‘parallel passages’ in Bacon and Shakespeare. We have given a few in the case of the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The others are of equal weight. They are on a level with ‘Punch’s’ proofs that Alexander Smith was a plagiarist. Thus Smith:

          No CHARACTER that servant WOMAN asked;

Pope writes:

          Most WOMEN have no CHARACTER at all.

It is tedious to copy out the puerilities of such parallelisms. Thus Bacon:

          If we simply looked to the fabric of the world;

Shakespeare:

          And, like the baseless fabric of a vision.

Bacon:

The intellectual light in the top and consummation of thy workmanship;

Shakespeare:

Like eyasses that cry out on the top of the question.

Myriads of pages of such matter would carry no proof. Probably the hugest collection of such ‘parallels’ is that preserved by Mrs. Pott in Bacon’s ‘Promus,’ a book of 628 pages. Mrs. Pott’s ‘sole object’ in publishing ‘was to confirm the growing belief in Bacon’s authorship of the plays.’ Having acquired the opinion, she laboured to strengthen herself and others in the faith. The so-called ‘Promus’ is a manuscript set of notes, quotations, formulae, and proverbs. As Mr. Spedding says, there are ‘forms of compliment, application, excuse, repartee, etc.’ ‘The collection is from books which were then in every scholar’s hands.’ ‘The proverbs may all, or nearly all, be found in the common collections.’ Mrs. Pott remarks that in ‘Promus’ are ‘several hundreds of notes of which no trace has been discovered in the acknowledged writings of Bacon, or of any other contemporary writer but Shakespeare.’ She adds that the theory of ‘close intercourse’ between the two men is ‘contrary to all evidence.’ She then infers that ‘Bacon alone wrote all the plays and sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare.’ So Bacon entrusted his plays, and the dread secret of his authorship, to a boorish cabotin with whom he had no ‘close intercourse’! This is lady’s logic, a contradiction in terms. The theory that Bacon wrote the plays and sonnets inevitably implies the closest intercourse between him and Shakespeare. They must have been in constant connection. But, as Mrs. Pott truly says, this is ‘contrary to all evidence.’

Perhaps the best way to deal with Mrs. Pott is to cite the author of her preface, Dr. Abbott. He is not convinced, but he is much struck by a very exquisite argument of the lady’s. Bacon in ‘Promus’ is writing down ‘Formularies and Elegancies,’ modes of salutation. He begins with ‘Good morrow!’ This original remark, Mrs. Pott reckons, ‘occurs in the plays nearly a hundred times. In the list of upwards of six thousand words in Appendix E, “Good morrow” has been noted thirty-one times… “Good morrow” may have become familiar merely by means of “Romeo and Juliet.”’ Dr. Abbott is so struck by this valuable statement that he writes: ‘There remains the question, Why did Bacon think it worth while to write down in a notebook the phrase “Good morrow” if it was at that time in common use?’

Bacon wrote down ‘Good morrow’ just because it WAS in common use. All the formulae were in common use; probably ‘Golden sleepe’ was a regular wish, like ‘Good rest.’ Bacon is making a list of commonplaces about beginning the day, about getting out of bed, about sleep. Some are in English, some in various other languages. He is not, as in Mrs. Pott’s ingenious theory, making notes of novelties to be introduced through his plays. He is cataloguing the commonplace. It is Mrs. Pott’s astonishing contention, as we have seen, that Bacon probably introduced the phrase ‘Good morrow!’ Mr. Bucke, following her in a magazine article, says: ‘These forms of salutation were not in use in England before Bacon’s time, and it was his entry of them in the “Promus” and use of them in the plays that makes them current coin day by day with us in the nineteenth century.’ This is ignorant nonsense. ‘Good morrow’ and ‘Good night’ were as familiar before Bacon or Shakespeare wrote as ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good night’ are to-day. This we can demonstrate. The very first Elizabethan handbook of phrases which we consult shows that ‘Good morrow’ was the stock phrase in regular use in 1583. The book is ‘The French Littelton, A most Easie, Perfect, and Absolute way to learne the Frenche Tongue. Set forth by Claudius Holyband. Imprinted at London by Thomas Vautrollier, dwelling in the blacke-Friers. 1583.’ (There is an edition of 1566.)

On page 10 we read: —

         ‘Of Scholars and Schoole.

‘God give you good morrow, Sir! Good morrow gossip: good morrow my she gossip: God give you a good morrow and a good year.’

Thus the familiar salutation was not introduced by Bacon; it was, on the other hand, the very first formula which a writer of an English-French phrase-book translated into French ten years before Bacon made his notes. Presently he comes to ‘Good evening, good night, good rest,’ and so on.

This fact annihilates Mrs. Pott’s contention that Bacon introduced ‘Good morrow’ through the plays falsely attributed to Shakespeare. There follows, in ‘Promus,’ a string of proverbs, salutations, and quotations, about sleep and waking. Among these occur ‘Golden Sleepe’ (No. 1207) and (No. 1215) ‘Uprouse. You are up.’ Now Friar Laurence says to Romeo: —

          But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain          Doth couch his limbs, there GOLDEN SLEEP doth reign:          Therefore thy earliness doth me assure,          Thou art UP-ROUSED by some distemperature.

Dr. Abbott writes: ‘Mrs. Pott’s belief is that the play is indebted for these expressions to the “Promus;” mine is that the “Promus” is borrowed from the play.’ And why should either owe anything to the other? The phrase ‘Uprouse’ or ‘Uprose’ is familiar in Chaucer, from one of his best-known lines. ‘Golden’ is a natural poetic adjective of excellence, from Homer to Tennyson. Yet in Dr. Abbott’s opinion ‘TWO of these entries constitute a coincidence amounting almost to a demonstration’ that either Shakespeare or Bacon borrowed from the other. And this because each writer, one in making notes of commonplaces on sleep, the other in a speech about sleep, uses the regular expression ‘Uprouse,’ and the poetical commonplace ‘Golden sleep’ for ‘Good rest.’ There was no originality in the matter.

We have chosen Dr. Abbott’s selected examples of Mrs. Pott’s triumphs. Here is another of her parallels. Bacon gives the formula, ‘I pray God your early rising does you no hurt.’ Shakespeare writes: —

                    Go, you cot-quean, go,          Get you to bed; faith, you’ll be sick to-morrow          For this night’s watching.

Here Bacon notes a morning salutation, ‘I hope you are none the worse for early rising,’ while Shakespeare tells somebody not to sit up late. Therefore, and for similar reasons, Bacon is Shakespeare.

We are not surprised to find Mr. Bucke adopting Mrs. Pott’s theory of the novelty of ‘Good morrow.’ He writes in the Christmas number of an illustrated sixpenny magazine, and his article, a really masterly compendium of the whole Baconian delirium, addresses its natural public. But we are amazed to find Dr. Abbott looking not too unkindly on such imbecilities, and marching at least in the direction of Coventry with such a regiment. He is ‘on one point a convert’ to Mrs. Pott, and that point is the business of ‘Good morrow,’ ‘Uprouse,’ and ‘Golden sleepe.’ It need hardly be added that the intrepid Mr. Donnelly is also a firm adherent of Mrs. Pott.

‘Some idea,’ he says, ‘may be formed of the marvellous industry of this remarkable lady when I state that to prove that we are indebted to Bacon for having enriched the English language, through the plays, with these beautiful courtesies of speech, ‘Good morrow,’ ‘Good day,’ etc., she carefully examined SIX THOUSAND WORKS ANTERIOR TO OR CONTEMPORARY WITH BACON.’

Dr. Abbott thought it judicious to ‘hedge’ about these six thousand works, and await ‘the all-knowing dictionary’ of Dr. Murray and the Clarendon Press. We have deemed it simpler to go to the first Elizabethan phrase-book on our shelves, and that tiny volume, in its very first phrase, shatters the mare’s-nest of Mrs. Pott, Mr. Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke.

But why, being a great poet, should Bacon conceal the fact, and choose as a mask a man whom, on the hypothesis of his ignorance, every one that knew him must have detected as an impostor? Now, one great author did choose to conceal his identity, though he never shifted the burden of the ‘Waverley Novels’ on to Terry the actor. Bacon may, conceivably, have had Scott’s pleasure in secrecy, but Bacon selected a mask much more impossible (on the theory) than Terry would have been for Scott. Again, Sir Walter Scott took pains to make his identity certain, by an arrangement with Constable, and by preserving his manuscripts, and he finally confessed. Bacon never confessed, and no documentary traces of his authorship survive. Scott, writing anonymously, quoted his own poems in the novels, an obvious ‘blind.’ Bacon, less crafty, never (as far as we are aware) mentions Shakespeare.

It is arguable, of course, that to write plays might seem dangerous to Bacon’s professional and social position. The reasons which might make a lawyer keep his dramatic works a secret could not apply to ‘Lucrece.’ A lawyer, of good birth, if he wrote plays at all, would certainly not vamp up old stock pieces. That was the work of a ‘Johannes Factotum,’ of a ‘Shakescene,’ as Greene says, of a man who occupied the same position in his theatrical company as Nicholas Nickleby did in that of Mr. Crummles. Nicholas had to bring in the vulgar pony, the Phenomenon, the buckets, and so forth. So, in early years, the author of the plays (Bacon, by the theory) had to work over old pieces. All this is the work of the hack of a playing company; it is not work to which a man in Bacon’s position could stoop. Why should he? What had he to gain by patching and vamping? Certainly not money, if the wealth of Shakespeare is a dark mystery to the Baconian theorists. We are asked to believe that Bacon, for the sake of some five or six pounds, toiled at refashioning old plays, and handed the fair manuscripts to Shakespeare, who passed them off, among the actors who knew him intimately, as his own. THEY detected no incongruity between the player who was their Johannes Factotum and the plays which he gave in to the manager. They seemed to be just the kind of work which Shakespeare would be likely to write. BE LIKELY TO WRITE, but ‘the father of the rest,’ Mr. Smith, believed that Shakespeare COULD NOT WRITE AT ALL.

We live in the Ages of Faith, of faith in fudge. Mr. Smith was certain, and Mr. Bucke is inclined to suspect, that when Bacon wanted a mask he chose, as a plausible author of the plays, a man who could not write. Mr. Smith was certain, and Mr. Bucke must deem it possible, that Shakespeare’s enemy, Greene, that his friends, Jonson, Burbage, Heming, and the other actors, and that his critics and admirers, Francis Meres and others, accepted, as author of the pieces which they played in or applauded, a man who could write no more than his name. Such was the tool whom Bacon found eligible, and so easily gulled was the literary world of Eliza and our James. And Bacon took all this trouble for what reason? To gain five or six pounds, or as much of that sum as Shakespeare would let him keep. Had Bacon been possessed by the ambition to write plays he would always have written original dramas, he would not have assumed the part of Nicholas Nickleby.

There is no human nature in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he publishes ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the actor’s care all his sonnets to the Queen, to Gloriana, and for years these manuscript poems are handed about by Shakespeare, as his own, among the actors, hack scribblers, and gay young nobles of his acquaintance. They ‘chaff’ Shakespeare about his affection for his ‘sovereign;’ great Gloriana’s praises are stained with sack in taverns, and perfumed with the Indian weed. And Bacon, careful toiler after Court favour, ‘thinks it all wery capital,’ in the words of Mr. Weller pere. Moreover, nobody who hears Shakespeare talk and sees him smile has any doubt that he is the author of the plays and amorous fancies of Bacon.

It is needless to dwell on the pother made about the missing manuscripts of Shakespeare. ‘The original manuscripts, of course, Bacon would take care to destroy,’ says Mr. Holmes, ‘if determined that the secret should die with him.’ If he was so determined, for what earthly reason did he pass his valuable time in vamping up old plays and writing new ones? ‘There was no money in it,’ and there was no reason. But, if he was not determined that the secret should die with him, why did not he, like Scott, preserve the manuscripts? The manuscripts are where Marlowe’s and where Moliere’s are, by virtue of a like neglect. Where are the MSS. of any of the great Elizabethans? We really cannot waste time over Mr. Donnelly’s theory of a Great Cryptogram, inserted by Bacon, as proof of his claim, in the multitudinous errors of the Folio. Mr. Bucke, too, has his Anagram, the deathless discovery of Dr. Platt, of Lakewood, New Jersey. By manipulating the scraps of Latin in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ he extracts ‘Hi Ludi tuiti sibi Fr. Bacono nati’: ‘These plays, entrusted to themselves, proceeded from Fr. Bacon.’ It is magnificent, but it is not Latin. Had Bacon sent in such Latin at school, he would never have survived to write the ‘Novum Organon’ and his sonnets to Queen Elizabeth. In that stern age they would have ‘killed him – with wopping.’ That Bacon should be a vamper and a playwright for no appreciable profit, that, having produced his deathless works, he should make no sign, has, in fact, staggered even the great credulity of Baconians. He MUST, they think, have made a sign in cipher. Out of the mass of the plays, anagrams and cryptograms can be fashioned a plaisir, and the world has heard too much of Mrs. Gallup, while the hunt for hints in contemporary frontispieces led to mistaking the porcupine of Sidney’s crest for ‘a hanged hog’ (Bacon).

The theory of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and poems has its most notable and recent British advocate in His Honour Judge Webb, sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Regius Professor of Laws, and Public Orator in the University of Dublin. Judge Webb, as a scholar and a man used to weighing evidence, puts the case at its strongest. His work, ‘The Mystery of William Shakespeare’ (1902), rests much on the old argument about the supposed ignorance of Shakespeare, and the supposed learning of the author of the plays. Judge Webb, like his predecessors, does not take into account the wide diffusion of a kind of classical and pseudo-scientific knowledge among all Elizabethan writers, and bases theories on manifest misconceptions of Shakespearean and other texts. His book, however, has affected the opinions of some readers who do not verify his references and examine the mass of Elizabethan literature for themselves.

Judge Webb, in his ‘Proem,’ refers to Mr. Holmes and Mr. Donnelly as ‘distinguished writers,’ who ‘have received but scant consideration from the accredited organs of opinion on this side of the Atlantic.’ Their theories have not been more favourably considered by Shakespearean scholars on the other side of the Atlantic, and how much consideration they deserve we have tried to show. The Irish Judge opens his case by noting an essential distinction between ‘Shakspere,’ the actor, and ‘Shakespeare,’ the playwright. The name, referring to the man who was both actor and author, is spelled both ‘Shakspeare’ and ‘Shakespeare’ in the ‘Returne from Parnassus’ (1602).* The ‘school of critics’ which divides the substance of Shakespeare on the strength of the spelling of a proper name, in the casual times of great Elizabeth, need not detain the inquirer.

*The Returne from Parnassus, pp. 56,57,138. Oxford, 1886.

As to Shakespeare’s education, Judge Webb admits that ‘there was a grammar school in the place.’ As its registers of pupils have not survived, we cannot prove that Shakespeare went to the school. Mr. Collins shows that the Headmaster was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and describes the nature of the education, mainly in Latin, as, according to the standard of the period, it ought to have been.* There is no doubt that if Shakespeare attended the school (the age of entry was eight), minded his book, and had ‘a good sprag memory,’ he might have learned Latin. Mr. Collins commends the Latin of two Stratford contemporaries and friends of Shakespeare, Sturley and Quiney, who probably were educated at the Grammar School. Judge Webb disparages their lore, and, on the evidence of the epistles, says that Sturley and Quiney ‘were not men of education.’ If Judge Webb had compared the original letters of distinguished Elizabethan officials and diplomatists – say, Sir William Drury, the Commandant of Berwick – he would have found that Sturley and Quiney were at least on the ordinary level of education in the upper classes. But the whole method of the Baconians rests on neglecting such comparisons.

*Fortnightly Review, April 1903.

In a letter of Sturley’s, eximiae is spelled eximie, without the digraph, a thing then most usual, and no disproof of Sturley’s Latinity.* The Shakspearean hypothesis is that Shakespeare was rather a cleverer man than Quiney and Sturley, and, consequently, that, if he went to school, he probably learned more by a great deal than they did. There was no reason why he should not acquire Latin enough to astonish modern reviewers, who have often none at all.

*Webb, p. 14. Phillipps’s Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, i. p.

150, ii. p. 57.

Judge Webb then discusses the learning of Shakespeare, and easily shows that he was full of mythological lore. So was all Elizabethan literature. Every English scribbler then knew what most men have forgotten now. Nobody was forced to go to the original authorities – say, Plato, Herodotus, and Plutarch – for what was accessible in translations, or had long before been copiously decanted into English prose and poetry. Shakespeare could get Rhodope, not from Pliny, but from B. R.‘s lively translation (1584) of the first two books of Herodotus. ‘Even Launcelot Gobbo talks of Scylla and Charybdis,’ says Judge Webb. Who did not? Had the Gobbos not known about Scylla and Charybdis, Shakespeare would not have lent them the knowledge.