Part 2
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised, Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give That I in thy abundance am sufficed, And by a part of all thy glory live."
In 1590 Shakspere was part owner of a theater.
In 1590 Bacon obtained his first show of favor from the court; he became Queen's counsel extraordinary, but the office was without emolument. At this time plays for the theater were written and rewritten again and again to meet the demand. Young lawyers and poets produced them rapidly. Each theatrical company kept from one to four poets in its pay (Amer. Cyc.) Shakspere appeared to be ready to father anything that promised success, and there are at least six plays published under his name or initials which most critics say are not his, nor have they ever appeared in the genuine canon. In 1591 a poem by Spenser was published containing these lines:
"And he, the man whom Nature's self has made To mock herself and truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimic shade:
"Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late: With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded and in dolor drent."
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From 1590 until Shakspere retired from the stage, how could it be said that he was "poor," bewailing his "outcast state" and "cursing his fate?" But it is certain that Bacon's condition answered precisely to that description up to November, 1594, when Essex gave him an estate worth L1,800; aye, even until 1604, when King James granted him a pension of L60; if not even up to 1607.
Mark now the modesty of the poet in 1590:
"If thou survive my well contented day, When that churl Death with bones my dust shall cover, And shalt by fortune once more resurvey These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover, Compare them with the bettering of the time, And though they be outstripp'd by every pen, Reserve them for thy love, not for their rhyme, Exceeded by the height of happier men."
"My name be buried Where my body is, and live no more to shame nor me nor you, for I am shamed by that which I bring forth, and so should you, to love things nothing worth."
We have already quoted a verse from Spenser in praise of "Willy," first published in 1591; we now adduce a passage from one of "Willy" Bacon's poems first published in 1599 in praise of Spenser:
"Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such As, passing all conceit, needs no defense."
This verse is in "The Passionate Pilgrim," the first two numbers of which are Sonnets 138 and 144 with slight variations. John Dowland, a musician, was born
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in 1562 and died 1625. Spenser was eight years older than Bacon.
But coupled with this modesty of the author of the "Sonnets," note how he praises his friend and how famous that friend appears at the time:
"Oh, how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might, To make me tongue-tied, speaking of your fame.
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is, The humble as the proudest sail doth bear, My saucy bark, inferior far to his, On your broad main doth wilfully appear; Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat, Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride; Or being wrecked, I am a worthless boat, He of tall building and of goodly pride; Then if he thrive and I be cast away, The worst was this: my love was my decay."
The other superior (?) poet referred to is undoubtedly Spenser, among whose "Sonnets, addressed by the author to his friends and patrons," in January, 1590, is one "To the most honorable and excellent Lord the Earl of Essex, great master of the horse to her highness, and knight of the noble order of the garter, etc." Essex became master of the horse in 1587, and knight of the garter in 1588.
We proceed with the quotations from the Shaksperian Sonnets:
"Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten, From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though, I once gone, to all the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
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Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse When all the breathers of this world are dead; You shall still live--such virtue hath my pen-- Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
From Sonnet 42 it appears that the young Earl had won the heart of the widow Sidney:
"That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, And yet it may be said I loved her dearly; That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief, A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders! thus I will excuse ye: Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her, And for my sake even so doth she abuse me, Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain, And losing her, my friend hath found that loss; Both find each other, and I lose both twain, And both for my sake lay me on this cross: But here's the joy: my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."
The second part of the "Sonnets," after 126, is addressed to the Earl's bethrothed; we quote Sonnet 134:
"So now I have confessed that he is thine. And I myself am mortgaged to thy will, Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still; But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous and he is kind; He learned but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind, The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, Thou usurer that put'st forth all to use, And sue a friend came debtor for my sake; So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me, He pays the whole, and yet am I not free."
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Incidentally it may be noted how familiar the writer of the above lines must have been with the practice of law. Shakspere's legal knowledge has amazed the lawyers.
The next Sonnet introduces the name of "Will," and puns upon it profusely:
"Whoever hath her wish thou hast thy Will, And Will to boot, and Will in overplus; More than enough am I that vex thee still, To thy sweet will making addition thus, Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious, Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious, And in my will no fair acceptance shine? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store:
So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one Will."
How preposterous to believe that a common-place play actor, with a wife and children, addressed such sentiments to the bride of his dearest friend! At no time do the sentiments or circumstances of the poem fit the person of the actor, of whom the dying and dissipated playwright, Greene, wrote in 1592:
"There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that with his Tygers heart, wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his owne conceyt, the onely Shake-scene in a countne."
But, on the other hand, frequent evidence appears that Bacon, up to the time he was made Attorney-General in 1613, was constantly engaged in secret literary work. But not so secret as to be unknown
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to a circle of friends and perchance a few enemies; for, in 1599, when he interceded with the Queen for his dear friend Essex, then under arrest on account of a treasonable pamphlet being dedicated to him, her Majesty flung at Bacon "a matter which grew from him, but went after about in others' names," being in fact the play of "Richard II," which, in that and the preceding year, had a great run on the stage, and had gone through two editions, but, for prudential reasons, with the scene containing the deposition of the king left out.
But even in the "Sonnets" the fact appears that the author has been writing for the stage:
"Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offenses of affections new; Most true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely; but by all above, These blenches gave my heart another youth, And worse essays proved thee my best of love."
"O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me then and wish I were renewed."
Here is not only a private confession of being compelled to produce plays for subsistence, but a sorrowful acknowledgment that thereby his "name receives a brand."
Yet it must not be supposed that Bacon was publicly known at any time as a play writer. His first
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publication, the "Essays," was in 1597, and Shakspere's name first appeared on the title page of a Play in 1598, by which time nearly half of the Plays had been written or sketched, and six had been printed, all without the author's name. And when the first collection was published in the "Folio" of 1623, (seven years after Shakspere's death,) it included some Plays never before heard of, and eighteen never before printed.
Lord Coke, who was Bacon's most jealous rival and adversary, seems never to have suspected him of play writing. Nor did the watchful Puritanic mother of the two bachelors of Gray's Inn ever dream that her studious younger son was engaged in such sinful work.
In Sonnet 76 the writer deplores his want of variety of style, and fears that this fault will almost disclose his secret authorship:
"Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside, To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth and where they did proceed?"
Bacon having begun to produce plays for Shakspere's theater before 1590, the authorship of which was afterward assumed by the actor and proprietor, it became necessary also to avoid being publicly known as a writer of sonnets. Therefore, in view of the circulation and ultimate publication of this poem, he facetiously disguised the identity of the writer by calling himself "Will." Three years later he dedicated a
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published poem to his young friend Southampton under the name of "William Shakespeare," and again another in 1594. But the "Sonnets" were not published until 1609, when Essex had been dead eight years, and his widow had been married six years to a third husband. It would never do for the Solicitor-General to be known as the author of such a poem; so when it came out in print it was dedicated to "Mr. W. H." by "T. T.," and no one until a few years ago ever seems to have suspected that Bacon wrote the poem, nor, so far as we are aware, has any one ever suspected until July 31, 1883, that "W. H." was the accomplished and famous Earl of Essex.
The young widow Sidney was the only daughter of the Queen's principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, for whom Bacon drafted an important state paper in 1588 on the conduct of the government toward Papists and Dissenters. And that Bacon was intimate with the Secretary's daughter, aye, even one of her lovers, appears from many of the Sonnets addressed to her. He describes her playing on the harpsichord, envies the keys "that nimbly leap to kiss her hand," and says:
"Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss."
And from other passages it is quite evident that he had often kissed her.
No fact has been found incompatible with Bacon's authorship of the "Sonnets." The following line might seem to indicate a writer past the age of 29:
"Although she knows my days are past the best."
But in 1599, when Shakspere was only 35, this very verse was published as his in the "Passionate Pilgrim," where Sonnet 138 appears as number one.
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But again, we have a letter written in 1592 by Bacon to his uncle, Lord Treasurer Burleigh, in which he says:
"I wax somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass."
At the age of 31 he thinks himself "somewhat ancient" two years earlier he apprehends that forty winters will entirely deface the youthful Earl's beauty; and to the lovely young widow he says: "My days are past the best."
This misconception therefore, whether pretended or real, becomes a strong proof of Bacon's authorship.
It has been boldly alleged by some that Bacon was no poet. Such, however, was not the judgment of his biographer, the late James Spedding. Before he could have heard it claimed that Shakspere did not write the plays he said that Bacon might have taken the highest rank as a poet. And that judgment was based upon the versification of a few Psalms by the old man on a sick bed. Since 1867 the substantial proofs of Bacon's secret authorship have been adduced. Aside from innumerable parallels in the works of Bacon and Shakspere there is much external evidence. For example:
We know that Bacon wrote Sonnets to Queen Elizabeth and excused himself by saying: "I profess not to be a poet."
We know that he composed Masques anonymously before Shakspere's name appeared as a play writer, and that those Masques were essentially poetical compositions, in the nature of plays, and sometimes contained verses in rhyme equal in merit to the average of Shakspere's.
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In one of those Masques a speaker is made to say: "The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power; the verses of the poet endure without a syllable lost, while states and empires pass many periods." Two years later, in 1596, the composer of that speech, writing to Sir Fulke Greville on his studies, said: "For poets I can commend none, being resolved to be ever a stranger to them." Greville (1554-1628) was a poet, and wrote the life of Sir Philip Sidney.
In 1603 Bacon wrote a private letter to the poet John Davies, begging him to speak a good word for the writer to the incoming King James I., and closing with these words: "So, desiring you to be good to _concealed poets_, I continue."
Bacon's most intimate friend, Toby Matthew, in a letter with cancelled date, but as late as 1605, acknowledged the receipt of some work by Bacon, and added this postscript:
"I will not return you weight for weight, but _Measure for Measure_."
"Mesur for Mesur," by "Shaxberd," was played before King James, at Whitehall, December 26, 1604.
Again, about the time of the publication of the Shakespere Folio, 1623, Matthew acknowledged in a letter without date, the receipt of a "great and noble favor," and added the following:
"P. S.--The most prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another."
BACON IDENTIFIED AS THE CONCEALED POET IGNOTO
Spenser's "Faery Queen" was begun in 1582, and published in 1590. The Dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh is dated 23 January, 1589 (i. e., 1590.) Raleigh in return praised the poem in two Sonnets. These, together with five other versified encomiums by "Hobynoll" (Gabriel Harvey,) "R. S.," "H. B.," "W. L.," and "Ignoto," are prefixed to Spenser's work.
In 1599 "The Passionate Pilgrim," a collection of twenty-one sonnets, songs, etc., was published with the name of W. Shakspere on the title page. The authorship of several of the pieces is disputed.
In regard to No. xviii. "My flocks feed not," Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, says:
"There is a somewhat brief version of this song in the collection of Madrigals, etc., by Thomas Weelkes 1597, this person being the composer of the music, but not necessarily the author of the words. A copy of it as it is seen in the Passionate Pilgrim also occurs in England's Helicon, 1600, entitled 'The Unknowne Sheepheards Complaint,' and is there subscribed _Ignoto._"
Again, in regard to No. xx, "Live with me and be my love," the same author, says:
"The first of these very pretty songs is incomplete, and the second, called 'Love's answer,' still more so. In England's Helicon, 1600, the former is given to Marlowe, the latter to _Ignoto_; and there is good reason to believe that Christopher
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Marlowe wrote the song, and Sir Walter Raleigh the nymph's reply; for so we are positively assured by Isaac Walton, who has inserted them both in his Complete Angler under the character of 'that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago; and an answer to it which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days:--old fashioned poetry but choicely good.' Both these songs were exceedingly popular and are afterwards found in the street ballads. The first is quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor."
Again, in regard to No. xxi, "As it fell upon a day," Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, says:
"This charming idyl occurs, with the absence of two lines, amongst the Poems in Divers Humours appended to Bamfield's Encomion of Lady Pecunia, in 1598, and the first twenty-six lines with the addition of two new ones are found in England's Helicon, 1600. This latter version follows in that work No. xviii of this list, ["My flocks feed not,"] is also subscribed _Ignoto_, and is headed: 'Another of the same Sheepheards.' The probability is that the copies of these little poems, as given in the Helicon, were taken from a Common Place book in which the names of the authors were not recorded; the two supplementary lines just noticed having the appearance of being an unauthorized couplet improvised for the sake of giving a neater finish to the abridgment."
We will now reproduce the aforesaid poems from "England's Helicon," second edition, 1614. A brief version of the first song, No. xviii of "The Passionate Pilgrim," says Halliwell-Phillipps, appeared in 1597:
*The unknown Shepherd's Complaint.*
My flocks feed not, my ewes breed not, My rams speed not, all is amiss; Love is denying, Faith is defying; Hearts ren[e]ging, causer of this.
All my merry jigs are quite forgot, And my lady's love is lost, God wot: Where her faith was firmly fixed in love, There a nay is placed without remove.
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One silly cross wrought all my loss; O frowning fortune, cursed fickle Dame, For now I see, inconstancy More in women than in men remain.
In black mourn I, all fears scorn I, Love hath forlorn me, living in thrall; Heart is bleeding, all help needing, O cruel speeding, fraughted with gall.
My shepherd's pipe can sound no deal, My wether's bell rings doleful knell. My curtail dog that wont to have played, Plays not at all, but seems afraid.
With sighs so deep, procure to weep, In howling-wise to see my doleful plight, How sighs resound, through heartless ground, Like a thousand vanquished men in bloody fight.
Clear wells spring not, sweet birds sing not, Green plants bring not forth their dye; Herds stand weeping--flocks all sleeping, Nymphs back peeping fearfully.
All our pleasures known to us poor swains, All our merry meeting on the plains, All our evening sports from us are fled, All our love is lost, for love is dead.
Farewell sweet lass, thy like ne'er was, For sweet content, the cause of all my moan: Poor Corydon must live alone, Other help for him, I see that there is none.
Finis Ignoto
The variations from the version of 1599 are few, the only important one being "ren[e]ging" for "renying." The latter has no meaning; _the former is used twice in the plays._
The only question in regard to the authorship of this poem is, whether Shakspere or "Ignoto" wrote it.
The next poem printed in the "Helicon" is a part of No.xxi of the "Passionate Pilgrim.":
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Another of the Same Shepherds.
As it fell upon a day In the merry month of May, Sitting in a pleasant shade Which a grove of myrtles made; Beasts did leap, and birds did sing, Trees did grow and plants did spring; Everything did banish moan, Save the nightingale alone.
She, poor bird, as all forlorn, Lean'd her breast against a thorn; And there sung the dolefull'st ditty, That to hear it was great pity.
Fie, fie, fie, now would she cry; Teru, teru! by and by; That to hear her so complain Scarce I could from tears refrain; For her griefs, so lively shown, Made me think upon mine own.
Ah! thought I, thou mourn'st in vain! None takes pity on thy pain: Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee, Ruthless beasts they will not cheer thee: King Pandion he is dead; All thy friends are lapp'd in lead; All thy fellow birds do sing, Careless of thy sorrowing! Even so, poor bird, like thee, None alive will pity me.
Finis. Ignoto.
The last two lines, Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says, are new ones added to the first twenty-six in "The Passionate Pilgrim." Our own edition of the latter has those two lines, and the only variation is in the tenth line--"up-till" for "against." There are thirty lines more in our edition. But we have another version of the whole, omitting the aforesaid two lines and a subsequent couplet. This version, curiously enough, is
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Leaded "Address to the Nightingale," and is credited to Richard Barnfield, "about 1610." (Encyc. of Poetry No. 121.) In 1598 it is said that the first twenty-six lines of this idyl appeared in an appendix to Barnfield's "Encomium in 1599 it reappeared enlarged to twice the length and was credited to Shakspere; in 1600 the first twenty-eight lines were republished in "England's Helicon" and subscribed "Ignoto."
We now transcribe from the "Helicon," No. xx of "The Passionate Pilgrim" much amended and enlarged:
The Passionate Shepherd to his love. Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, [and] hills and fields, Woods, or steeple mountains yields.(1)