Part 22

Before leaving this part of the subject, however, there are still one or two points of interest to be mentioned. Shakespeare shows a fondness for the use of phrases and illustrations taken from the law; and on such grounds our Delia-Baconians argue that the plays must have been written by an eminent lawyer, such as the Lord Chancellor Bacon undoubtedly was. They feel that this is a great point on their side. One instance, cited by Nathaniel Holmes and other Baconizers, is the celebrated case of Sir James Hales, who committed suicide by drowning, and was accordingly buried at the junction of crossroads, with a stake through his body, while all his property was forfeited to the Crown. Presently his widow brought suit for an estate by survivorship in joint-tenancy. Her case turned upon the question whether the forfeiture occurred during her late husband's lifetime: if it did, he left no estate which she could take; if it did not, she took the estate by survivorship. The lady's counsel argued that so long as Sir James was alive he had not been guilty of suicide, and the instant he died the estate vested in his widow as joint-tenant. But the opposing counsel argued that the instant Sir James voluntarily made the fatal plunge, and therefore before the breath had left his body, the guilt of suicide was incurred and the forfeiture took place. The court decided in favour of this view, and the widow got nothing.

There can be little doubt that this decision is travestied in the conversation of the two clowns in "Hamlet" with regard to Ophelia's right to Christian burial. The first clown makes precisely the point upon which the ingenious counsel for the defendant had rested his argument: "If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches; it is to act, to do, and to perform." In making this distinction the counsel had maintained that the second branch, or the doing, was the only thing for the law to consider. The talk of the clowns brings out the humour of the case with Shakespeare's inimitable lightness of touch.

The report of the Hales case was published in the volume of "Plowden's Reports" which was issued in 1578; and Mr. Holmes informs us that "there is not the slightest ground for a belief, on the facts which we know, that Shakespeare ever looked into 'Plowden's Reports.'" This is one of the cases where your stern Baconizer will not hear of anything short of absolute demonstration. Mere considerations of human probability might disturb the cogency of a neat little pair of syllogisms:--

(1.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. Shakespeare never read Plowden. Therefore Shakespeare was not the author of "Hamlet."

(2.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. The lawyer, Bacon, must have read Plowden. Therefore Bacon wrote "Hamlet."

With regard to the major premise here, one might freely deny it. The author of "Hamlet" might easily have got all the knowledge involved from an evening chat with some legal friend at an alehouse. Then as to the minor premise, what earthly improbability is there in Shakespeare's having dipped into Plowden? Can anybody but lawyers or law students enjoy reading reports of law cases? I remember that, when I was about ten years old, a favourite book with me was one entitled "Criminal Trials of All Countries, by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar." I read it and read it, until forbidden to read such a gruesome book, and then I read it all the more. One of the most elaborate reports in it was that of the famous case of Captain Donellan, tried in 1780 on a charge of poisoning his wife's brother, Sir Theodosius Boughton, a dissipated and diseased young man, who died very suddenly one day. A post-mortem inspection showed spots in the intestine, which three ordinary country doctors ascribed to poisoning by laurel water, while Sir John Hunter, one of the greatest authorities in Europe, testified that they might equally well have ensued upon death from apoplexy. The judge, Sir Francis Buller, saw fit, in his charge, to reckon this as the testimony of three experts against one; and thus the jury were driven to a verdict of murder, though it was not proved that any murder had been committed. Captain Donellan, who lived in his brother-in-law's house, was a man of blameless life, an amateur chemist, much given to fooling with odorous liquids and hissing retorts. It was proved that he had been distilling laurel water, and one or two other suspicious circumstances were alleged. The whole trial was begun and ended on the same day, the jury were about twenty minutes in finding the captain guilty, and three days afterward he was hung. It was a case where reason was submerged and drowned under a wave of angry prejudice shrieking for a victim.

Now, if I did not forthwith write a play, and take the occasion to ridicule the judge's charge to the jury, it was because I could not write a play, not because I did not fully appreciate the insult to law and common sense which that unfortunate case involved. In view of this and other experiences, when I now read a play or a novel that contains an intelligent allusion to some law case, I am far from feeling driven to the conclusion that it must have been written by a lord chancellor.

If Shakespeare's dramas are proved by such internal evidence to have been written by a lawyer, that lawyer, by parity of reasoning, could hardly have been Francis Bacon. For he was preëminently a chancery lawyer, and chancery phrases are in Shakespeare conspicuously absent. The word "injunctions" occurs five times in the plays, once perhaps with a reference to its legal use ("Merchant of Venice," II. ix.); but nowhere do we find any exhibition of a knowledge of chancery law. His allusions to the common law are often very amusing, as when, in "Love's Labour's Lost," at the end of a brisk punning-match between Boyet and Maria, he offers to kiss her, laughingly asking for a grant of pasture on her lips, and she replies, "Not so; my lips are no common, though several they be." Again, in "The Comedy of Errors," "Dromio asserts that there is no time for a bald man to recover his hair. This having been written, the law phrase suggested itself, and he was asked whether he might not do it by fine and recovery, and this suggested the efficiency of that proceeding to bar heirs; and this started the conceit that thus the lost hair of another man would be recovered."[39] In such quaint allusions to the common law and its proceedings Shakespeare abounds, and we cannot help remembering that Nash, in his prefatory epistle to Greene's "Menaphon," printed about 1589, makes sneering mention of Shakespeare as a man who had left the "trade of Noverint," whereunto he was born, in order to try his hand at tragedy. The "trade of Noverint" was a slang expression for the business of attorney; and this passage has suggested that Shakespeare may have spent some time in a law office, as student or as clerk, either before leaving Stratford, or perhaps soon after his arrival in London. This seems to me not improbable. On the other hand, "The Merchant of Venice" contains such crazy law that it is hard to imagine it coming even from a lawyer's clerk. At all events, we may safely say that the legal knowledge exhibited in the plays is no more than might readily have been acquired by a man of assimilative genius associating with lawyers. It simply shows the range and accuracy of Shakespeare's powers of observation.

Let us come now to the second part of the Delia Bacon theory. Having satisfied herself that William Shakespeare could not have written the poems and plays published under his name, she jumped to the conclusion that Francis Bacon was the author. Surely, a singular choice! Of all men, why Francis Bacon?[40] Why not, as I said before, George Chapman or Ben Jonson, men who were at once learned scholars and great poets? Chapman, like Marlowe, could write the "mighty line." Jonson had rare lyric power; his verses sing, as witness the wonderful "Do but look on her eyes," which Francis Bacon could no more have written than he could have jumped over the moon. To pitch upon Bacon as the writer of "Twelfth Night" or "Romeo and Juliet" is about as sensible as to assert that "David Copperfield" must have been written by Charles Darwin. After a familiar acquaintance of more than forty years with Shakespeare's works, of nearly forty years with Bacon's, the two men impress me as simply antipodal one to the other. A similar feeling was entertained by the late Mr. Spedding, the biographer and editor of Bacon; and no one has more happily hit off the vagaries of the Baconizers than the foremost Bacon scholar now living, Dr. Kuno Fischer, in his recent address before the Shakespeare Society at Weimar.[41] I used to wonder whether the Bacon-Shakespeare people really knew anything about Bacon, and, now that chance has led me to read their books, I am quite sure they do not. To their minds, his works are simply a storehouse of texts which serve them for controversial missiles, very much as scattered texts from the Bible used to serve our uncritical grandfathers.

Francis Bacon was one of the most interesting persons of his time, and, as is often the case with such many-sided characters, posterity has held various opinions about him. On the one hand, his fame has grown brighter with the years; on the other hand, it has come to be more or less circumscribed and limited. Pope's famous verse, "The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," may be disputed in all its three specifications. Bacon's treatment of Essex, which formerly called forth such bitter condemnation, has been, I think, completely justified; and as for the taking of bribes, which led to his disgrace, there were circumstances which ought largely to mitigate the severity of our judgment. But if Bacon was far from being a mean example of human nature, it is surely an exaggeration to call him the wisest and brightest of mankind. He was a scholar and critic of vast accomplishments, a writer of noble English prose, and a philosopher who represented rather than inaugurated a most beneficial revolution in the aims and methods of scientific inquiry. He is one of the real glories of English literature, but he is also one of the most overrated men of modern times. When we find Macaulay saying that Bacon had "the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men," we need not be surprised to find that his elaborate essay on Bacon is as false in its fundamental conception as it is inaccurate in details. For a long time it was one of the accepted commonplaces that Bacon inaugurated the method by which modern discoveries in physical science have been made. Early in the present century, such writers on the history of science as Whewell began to show the incorrectness of this notion, and it was completely exploded by Stanley Jevons in his "Principles of Science," the most profound treatise on method that has appeared in the last fifty years. Jevons writes: "It is wholly a mistake to say that modern science is the result of the Baconian philosophy; it is the Newtonian philosophy and the Newtonian method which have led to all the great triumphs of physical science, and ... the 'Principia' forms the true Novum Organon." This statement of Jevons is thoroughly sound. The great Harvey, who knew how scientific discoveries are made, said with gentle sarcasm that Bacon "wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor;" yet Harvey would not have denied that the chancellor was doing noble service as the eloquent expounder of many sides of the scientific movement that was then gathering strength. Bacons mind was eminently sagacious and fertile in suggestions, but the supreme creative faculty, the power to lead men into new paths, was precisely the thing which he did not possess. His place is a very high one among intellects of the second order; but to rank him with such godlike spirits as Newton, Spinoza, and Leibnitz simply shows that one has no real knowledge of the work which such men have done.

So much for Bacon himself. With regard to him as possible author of the Shakespeare poems and plays, it is difficult to imagine so learned a scholar making the kind of mistakes that abound in those writings. Bacon would hardly have introduced clocks into the Rome of Julius Cæsar; nor would he have made Hector quote Aristotle, nor Hamlet study at the University of Wittenberg, founded five hundred years after Hamlet's time; nor would he have put pistols into the age of Henry IV., nor cannon into the age of King John; and we may be pretty sure that he would not have made one of the characters in "King Lear" talk about Turks and Bedlam. In this severely realistic age of ours, writers are more on their guard against such anachronisms than they were in Shakespeare's time; in his works we cannot call them serious blemishes, for they do not affect the artistic character of the plays, but they are certainly such mistakes as a scholar like Bacon would not have committed.

Deeper down lies the contrast involved in the fact that Bacon was in a high degree a subjective writer, from whom you are perpetually getting revelations of his idiosyncrasies and moods, whereas of all writers in the world Shakespeare is the most completely objective, the most absorbed in the work of creation. In the one writer you are always reminded of the man Bacon; in the other the personality is never thrust into sight. Bacon is highly self-conscious; from Shakespeare self-consciousness is absent.

The contrast is equally great in respect of humour. I would not deny that Bacon relished a joke, or could perpetrate a pun; but the bubbling, seething, frolicsome, irrepressible drollery of Shakespeare is something quite foreign to him. Read his essays, and you get charming English, wide knowledge, deep thought, keen observation, worldly wisdom, good humour, sweet serenity; but exuberant fun is not there. In writing these essays Bacon was following an example set by Montaigne, but, as contrasted with the delicate effervescent humour of the Frenchman, his style seems sober and almost insipid. Only fancy such a man trying to write "The Merry Wives of Windsor"!

Both Shakespeare and Bacon were sturdy and rapacious purloiners. They seized upon other men's bright thoughts and made them their own without compunction and without acknowledgment; and this may account for sundry similarities which may be culled from the plays and from Bacon's works, upon which Baconizing text-mongers are wont to lay great stress as proof of common authorship. Some such resemblances may be due to borrowing from common sources; others are doubtless purely fanciful; others indicate either that Shakespeare cribbed from Bacon or _vice versa_. Here are a few miscellaneous instances:--

Where Bacon says, "Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others" ("Essay of Wisdom"), Shakespeare says:--

"To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."

(Hamlet, I. iii.)

This looks as if one writer might have copied from the other. If so, it is Bacon who is the thief, for the lines occur in the quarto "Hamlet" published in 1603, whereas the "Essay of Wisdom" was first published in 1612.

Again, where Bacon, in the "Essay of Gardens," says, "The breath of flowers comes and goes like the warbling of music," it reminds one strongly of the exquisite passage in "Twelfth Night" where the Duke exclaims:--

"That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour."

I have little doubt that Bacon had this passage in mind when he wrote the "Essay of Gardens," which was first published in 1625, two years later than the complete folio of Shakespeare. This effectually disposes of the attempt to cite these correspondences in evidence that Bacon wrote the plays.

Another instance is from "Richard III.:"--

"By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust Ensuing danger; as, by proof, we see The waters swell before a boisterous storm."

Bacon, in the "Essay of Sedition," writes, "As there are ... secret swellings of seas before a tempest, so there are in states." But this essay was not published till 1625, so again we find him copying Shakespeare. Many such "parallelisms," cited to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works, do really prove that he read them with great care and remembered them well, or else took notes from them.

An interesting illustration of the helpless ignorance shown by Baconizers is furnished by a remark of Sir Toby Belch in "Twelfth Night." In his instructions to that dear old simpleton, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, about the challenge, Sir Toby observes, "If thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss." In Elizabethan English, to address a man as "thou" was to treat him as socially inferior; such familiarity was allowable only between members of the same family or in speaking to servants, just as you address your wife, and likewise the cook and housemaid, by their Christian names, while with the ladies of your acquaintance such familiarity would be rudeness. The same rule for the pronoun survives to-day in French and German, but has been forgotten in English. In the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1604, Justice Coke insulted the prisoner by calling out, "Thou viper! for I _thou_ thee, thou traitor!" Now, one of our Baconizers thinks that his idol, in writing "Twelfth Night," introduced Sir Toby's suggestion in order to recall to the audience Coke's abusive remark. Once more, a little attention to dates would have prevented the making of a bad blunder. We know from Manningham's Diary that "Twelfth Night" had been on the stage nearly two years before Raleigh's trial. On the other hand, to say that the play might have suggested to Coke his coarse speech would be admissible, but idle, inasmuch as the expression "to _thou_ a man" was an every-day phrase in that age.

Here it naturally occurs to me to mention the "Promus," about which as much fuss has been made as if it really furnished evidence in support of the Baconian folly. There is in the British Museum a manuscript, in Bacon's handwriting, entitled "Promus of Formularies and Elegancies." "Promus" means "storehouse" or "treasury." A date at the top of the first page shows that it was begun in December, 1594; there is nothing, I believe, to show over how many years it extended. It is a scrap-book in which Bacon jotted down such sentences, words, and phrases as struck his fancy, such as might be utilized in his writings. These neatly turned phrases, these "formularies and elegancies," are gathered from all quarters,--from the Bible, from Virgil and Horace, from Ovid and Seneca, from Erasmus, from collections of proverbs in various languages, etc. As there is apparently nothing original in this scrap-bag, Mr. Spedding did not think it worth while to include it in his edition of Bacon's works, but in the fourteenth volume he gives a sufficient description of it, with illustrative extracts. In 1883 Mrs. Henry Pott published the whole of this "Promus" manuscript, and swelled it by comments and dissertations into a volume of 600 octavo pages. She had found in it several hundred expressions which reminded her of passages in Shakespeare, and so it confirmed her in the opinion which she already entertained that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works. Thus, when the "Promus" has a verse from Ovid, which means, "And the forced tongue begins to lisp the sound commanded," it reminds Mrs. Pott of divers lines in which Shakespeare uses the word "lisp," as for example, in "As You Like It," "you lisp and wear strange suits;" and she jumps to the conclusion that when Bacon jotted down the verse from Ovid, it was as a preparatory study toward "As You Like It," and any other play that contains the word "lisp:" therefore Bacon wrote all those plays, _Q. E. D._! On the next page we find Virgil's remark, "Thus was I wont to compare great things with small," made the father of Falstaff's "base comparisons," and Fluellen's "Macedon and Monmouth," as well as honest Dogberry's "comparisons are odorous." When one reads such things, evidently printed in all seriousness, one feels like asking Mrs. Pott, in the apt words of Shakespeare's friend Fletcher, "What mare's nest hast thou found?" ("Bonduca," V. ii.)

There are many phrases, however, in the "Promus" which undoubtedly agree with phrases in the plays. They show that Bacon heard or read the plays with great interest, and culled from them his "elegancies" with no stinted hand. As for Mrs. Pott's bulky volume, it brings us so near to the final _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Bacon theory that we hardly need spend many words upon the gross improbabilities which that theory involves. The plays of Shakespeare were universally ascribed to him by his contemporaries; many of them were published during his lifetime with his name upon the title-page as the author; all were collected and published together by Hemminge and Condell, two of his fellow actors, seven years after his death; and for more than two centuries nobody ever dreamed of looking for a different authorship, or of associating the plays with Bacon. But this Chimborazo of _prima facie_ evidence becomes a mere mole-hill in the hands of your valiant Baconizer. It is all clear to him. Bacon did not acknowledge the authorship of these works because such literature was deemed frivolous, and current prejudices against theatres and playwrights might injure his hopes of advancement at the bar and in political life. Therefore, by some sort of private understanding with the ignorant and sordid wretch Shakespeare,[42] at whose theatre they were brought out, their authorship was ascribed to him, the real author died without revealing the secret, and the whole world was deceived until the days of Delia Bacon.

But there are questions which even this ingenious hypothesis fails to answer. Why should Bacon have taken the time to write those thirty-seven plays, two poems, and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, if they were never to be known as his works? Not for money, surely, for that grasping Shakespeare seems to have got the money as well as the fame; Bacon died a poor man. His principal aim in life was to construct a new system of philosophy; on this noble undertaking he spent such time as he could save from the exactions of his public career as member of Parliament, chancery lawyer, solicitor-general, attorney-general, lord chancellor; and he died with this work far from finished. The volumes which he left behind him were only fragments of the mighty structure which he had planned. We may well ask, Where did this overburdened writer find the time for doing work of another kind voluminous enough to fill a lifetime, and what motive had he for doing it without recompense in either fame or money? Baconizers find it strange that Shakespeare's will contains no reference to his plays as literary property. The omission is certainly interesting, since it seems to indicate that he had parted with his pecuniary interest in them,--had perhaps sold it out to the Globe Theatre. If this omission can be held to show that Shakespeare was lacking in fondness for the productions of his own genius, what shall be said of the notion that Bacon spent half his life in writing works the paternity of which he must forever disown?