Bacon and Shakespeare 5

Bacon and Shakespeare 5

Bacon and Shakespeare Contrasted._

 

 

The argument of the Baconians--the term is uniformly employed here

to mean the supporters of the Baconian theory of the authorship

of Shakespeare--is based on the honest belief that the varied

qualifications necessary for the production of the Plays were possessed

by only one man of the period in which they were written. And having

resolutely determined that the man could be no other than Francis

Bacon, they set themselves to work with the same resoluteness, to

bend, twist, and contort all facts and evidence to suit their theory.

It is clearly impossible to credit any of Shakespeare’s contemporary

dramatists with the authorship, because their acknowledged work is so

immeasurably inferior to his, that any such suggestion must appear

ridiculous. It is safe to assume that no writer who had produced poems

or plays inferior to those of Shakespeare could be attributed with

the authorship of these plays--Shakespeare can only be compared with

himself. And the only author who cannot be compared, in this way, to

his instant discomfiture, is Bacon, whose published work is, in form

and style and essence utterly dissimilar from that of Shakespeare.

If a brilliant intellect, wide knowledge, and classical attainments

were the only requisite qualifications for the production of the

greatest poetry of the world, then Bacon’s claim would stand on a sure

foundation. He was intimately acquainted, no man better, with the

philosophy of the law; he was an eminent classical scholar, a writer of

beautiful English, compact in __EXPRESSION__, and rich in fancy. He had an

extensive acquaintance with literature and history, he was a brilliant

orator; but unto all these great gifts was not added the gentle nature,

the broad sympathy and knowledge of humanity, the wealth of humour, the

depth of passion, the creative power of poetry, which is so strikingly

manifested in the plays of William Shakespeare.

 

Our knowledge of the gentleness of Shakespeare’s nature, his

uprightness, his honesty, his modesty, is disclosed in his poems, and

corroborated by the evidence of his contemporaries. His poetry breathes

the gentleness and the lovable nature with which his personal friends

credited him. What is there in any analysis of Bacon, beyond his

marvellous mental attainments, which single him out as the probable,

even possible, creator of King Lear, Brutus, Juliet, Rosalind, and

Shylock? Coldness of heart, and meanness of spirit, are faults of

temperament which cannot, by the greatest stretch of imagination be

associated with the author of Lear’s desolating pathos and Arthur’s

deeply pathetic appeal to Hubert. The points in Bacon’s career,

which have been dealt with in the foregoing pages, were selected of

_malice prepense_; not to detract from the greatness of the Lord

Chancellor, as a literary genius and philosopher, but as demonstrating

the impossibility of associating such a nature with the authorship

of the poetry attributed to him. By his deeds we know him to have

been a man whose nature was largely made up of ingratitude, untruth,

flattery, meanness, cruelty, and servility. His treatment of Essex,

of Cecil, and of Yelverton, can only be stigmatised as “peculiarly

cold-blooded and ungrateful;” his persecution of Peacham convicts him

of cruelty, bordering on savageness; his meanness is illustrated by

the selfish unreasonableness displayed by his attitude towards Trott,

his long-suffering creditor. His servile submission to Buckingham has

scarcely a parallel in English history.

 

Deep as was his mind, and profound his knowledge, Bacon possessed no

high standard of virtue or morality; he had no intuitive knowledge of

mankind, and even as regards his dealings with the people amongst whom

his life was passed, he evidenced a singular defectiveness as a reader

of character. The sweeping generalities of his observations would be a

poor stock-in-trade for a writer of melodrama. In his books he exhibits

the cunning, the casuistry and unscrupulousness of an Elizabethan

politician and time server. His advice and his opinions betray a mean

view of life and its obligations. He had no sense of duty towards his

fellow men where duty clashed with his personal interests. His methods

are instinct with craft, artifice, and finesse--his advice to Essex,

and to the King, was, for this very reason, misleading and abortive.

It is incontrovertible that Bacon’s writings and Shakespeare’s plays

are crammed with all kinds of erudition, and Coleridge has claimed for

the latter that they form “an inexhaustible mine of virgin wealth.” But

not a single argument can be advanced to show that Shakespeare could

not easily have acquired such erudition and scholarship as the writing

of the plays entailed, while we have all the books of Bacon to prove

that the poetic genius, the colossal personality, the deep, intense

appreciation of nature, and the unrivalled knowledge of man, which are

the sovereign mark of the Plays, were not possessed by Bacon.

 

In editing the existing biographies of Lord Bacon to bolster up their

theory, the Baconians have only conformed to the laws of absolute

necessity. The cold, unvarnished facts that have been set forth

in the foregoing pages are so contrary to the popular impression

of what constitutes a “concealed poet,” that a more than ordinary

amount of colorisation was required to make them acceptable in the

author of _The Tempest_. But although there is reasonable excuse,

and even some justification for this rose-colorisation process as

applied to Bacon--for great men have almost invariably been given,

by their biographers, the greatest benefit that be derived from all

doubts--the champions of Bacon have far exceeded their prerogative

in their attempts to defame and belittle Shakespeare. So much

incorrect deduction, so much groundless suspicion, and so much

palpable inaccuracy have been put forward by the Baconians, that it is

imperative the few known facts in the poet’s life should be clearly

stated. The following sketch is frankly intended, not so much to

support the claim of Shakespeare as the author of the Plays, as to

refute the many misconceptions and untruths by which his enemies have

endeavoured to traduce him.

 

 

 

 

_Baconian Fallacies Respecting Shakespeare._

 

 

It is only necessary to read the facts concerning Shakespeare’s

ancestry and parentage to dissipate some of the absurd suggestions as

to the obscurity and illiteracy of the family. The poet came of good

yeoman stock, and his forebears to the fourth and fifth generation

were fairly substantial landowners. John Shakespeare, his father, was

at one period of his life a prosperous trader in Stratford-on-Avon. He

played a prominent part in municipal affairs, and became successively

Town Councillor, Alderman, one of the chamberlains of the borough, and

auditor of the municipal accounts. The assertion that he could not

write is a distinct perversion of fact, as “there is evidence in the

Stratford archives that he could write with facility.”

 

On the subject of the education of William Shakespeare it is inevitable

that there should be conflicting opinions. Those who would deck out the

memory of Bacon with the literary robe, “the garment which,” according

to Mr. R. M. Theobald, is “too big and costly” for the “small and

insignificant personality” of Shakespeare, will not concede that he

was better educated than his father, who--the error does not lose for

want of repetition--“signed his name by a mark.” Supporters of the

traditional theory, however, reply, “we do not require evidence to show

that he was an educated man--we have his works, and the evidence of

Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell to prove it.” Mr. Theobald

argues that because there is no positive proof that he had any school

education, it is logical to conclude that he had none. Mr. A. P.

Sinnett, with the same reckless disregard for facts, says, “We know

that he (William Shakespeare) was the son of a tradesman at Stratford,

who could not read or write.” And in another place, “there is no rag

of evidence that he (William Shakespeare) ever went to school.” Mr.

W. H. Mallock describes him, still without “a rag of evidence” to

support his assertion, as “a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems

to have found some difficulty in signing his own name.” All evidence

we have to guide us on this point of Shakespeare’s schooling is that

he was entitled to free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford,

which was re-constituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. As

the son of a prominent and prosperous townsman, he would, for a moral

certainty, have been sent by his father to school (Mr. Sidney Lee

favours the probability that he entered the school in 1571), where

he would receive the ordinary instruction of the time in the Latin

language and literature. The fact that the French passages in _Henry

V._ are grammatically correct, but are not idiomatic, makes it certain

that they were written by a school-taught linguist, and not by a man

like Bacon, who, from his lengthy residence on the Continent, must

have been a master of colloquial, idiomatic French. Ben Jonson, in his

profound, and somewhat self-conscious command of classical knowledge,

spoke slightingly of Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek,” which

is all that his plays would lead us to credit him with. His liberal

use of translations, and his indebtedness to North’s translations of

_Plutarch’s Lives_, also substantiates this theory.

 

We cannot regard, as a great scholar, an author who “gives Bohemia a

coast line, makes Cleopatra play billiards, mixes his Latin, and mulls

his Greek.” Mr. Reginald Haines, who has made a study of Shakespeare

for the express purpose of testing his classical attainments, denies

emphatically that he shows any acquaintance with Greek at all. His

conclusions are worthy of consideration: “Of course there are common

allusions to Greek history and mythology such as every poet would have

at command, but no reference at first hand to any Greek writer....

As far as I know there are but four real Greek words to be found in

Shakespeare’s works--_threne_, _cacodemon_, _practic_, and _theoric_.

It is impossible to suppose that Bacon could have veiled his classical

knowledge so successfully in so extensive a field for its display, or

that he could, for instance, have perpetrated such a travesty of Homer

as appears in _Troilus and Cressida_. With Latin, the case is somewhat

different. Shakespeare certainly knew a little grammar-school Latin.

He was familiar with Ovid, and even quotes him in the original; and he

certainly knew Virgil, and Seneca, Cæsar, and something of Terence and

Horace, and, as I myself believe, of Juvenal. But he very rarely quotes

Latin, unless it be a proverb or some stock quotation from Mantuanus or

a tag from a Latin grammar. When he uses conversational Latin, as in

_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, the idiom is shaky. The quotations from Horace,

&c., in _Titus Andronicus_ are certainly not by Shakespeare. Nor are

the Latinisms like “palliament” in that play. Still he has a very large

vocabulary of Latin words such as _renege_, to _gust_ (taste), and we

may fairly say that Shakespeare knew Latin as well as many sixth form

boys, but not as a scholar.” Two years ago a writer in the _Quarterly

Review_, who had gone through all the alleged examples of erudition and evidences of wide and accurate classical scholarship in the Shakespearean plays, showed them to be entirely imaginary.