Part 10

Now there is no evidence fit to be trusted that Shakspere, or, to give him the title he coveted, Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, gentleman, was ever a lover of books, none that he ever possessed, or would have cared to possess anything in the shape of a library. Among the various specific bequests of his essentially vulgar Will no such thing as a book is even suggested. About 1613 Shakspere exchanged the mentally stimulating atmosphere of London for the deadly dullness of a mean provincial town. His departure, unwept, unsung, and seemingly not even noticed by any member of the literary world he is supposed to have adorned, may have been demanded by keen personal interest in an enclosure scheme which was then agitating the petty community at Stratford. There is no evidence, no hint even, that it was due to ill-health, and it certainly cannot have been due (as the whole action of Prospero was) to preoccupation with the marriage of a daughter. Daughters he had, it is true, and the younger of them (Judith) married one Thomas Quiney a vintner or tavern-keeper, son of Richard Quiney (an old friend of the Shaksperes) who, or whose widow, also kept a tavern. But Judith’s marriage took place long after her father’s retirement from London must have been resolved on. Shakspere’s _highest ambition_--Mr. Sidney Lee tells us--_was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father’s misfortunes had imperilled_. This father it seems was a chandler or general dealer, not more illiterate probably than others of the family, who began life in a humble way and afterwards came to grief. If, as is likely, his debts were inconsiderable, his _ambitious_ son should have found little difficulty in restoring the _family repute_, such as it was. The fat-witted lines--_Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here_, etc.--which this same son seems to have selected, or composed, or ordered, for his monument, though quite out of keeping with mountains of surmise, are entirely in keeping with all we can properly be said to know of the man. Yet this is the man who is said, on eminent authority, to have conceived and executed _The Tempest_, and what is more to my immediate purpose, to have drawn Prospero in his own image! Belief in this might have been possible, had we known next to nothing about Shakspere or his environment. But the finds of a Halliwell-Phillipps (to take him as a type) have had an effect which the industrious finder certainly did not foresee or intend.

More than thirty years ago the writer came to the double conclusion, (a) that whoever _Shakespeare_ might have been, Shakspere was not the man; (b) that of all the known poets of that day, it was Bacon and Bacon alone who seemed to possess the necessary qualifications. Many of the reasons--none of them beholden to cypher, cryptogram or hocus-pocus of any kind--which made for that conclusion are set forth in a little book, _Bacon-Shakespeare, An Essay_ (signed E. W. S., Rome, but published, 1900, in London). Most of the reasons there given have, however, no very definite relation to _The Tempest_ and its symbolism.

Shelley saw and asserted that _Bacon was a poet_. But students of Bacon need no Shelley to inform them that Bacon was indeed a poet. His earlier work betrays him. Even the _Advancement of Learning_ (1605), tinctured as it is by the pedantic style then coming into fashion, holds just the same truth in solution. To many such students, apology is due for labouring the point. My excuse is the existence of a strong prepossession to the contrary. By what seems to have been an oversight on the part of Bacon, his executors and intimate friends, a letter of his to Sir J. Davies, also a poet, has come down to us, unedited for the public. In this letter Bacon confesses himself a poet, ranks himself in effect amongst _concealed poets_. Aubrey too, thanks probably to a similar oversight, lets us into the same secret that Bacon was a _concealed poet_. Of Bacon’s affection for poetry the product (Bacon himself calls it the _work or play_) of the imagination, there is no room for doubt. If other evidence were wanting, the _Sapientia Veterum_ (1609) would almost suffice to prove it. As Porphyry’s reverence for the elder gods is deducible from his attempt to extract philosophy out of the oracles of antiquity, so Bacon’s reverent affection for poetry manifests itself in that elaborate attempt of his to distil philosophy out of what is at bottom a medley of poetical fables. That Bacon, like Prospero, delighted in _poesis_ (making) is equally clear. _Poesy_, he says in the _De Augmentis_--_Poesy is a dream of knowledge_ (_or_ culture), _a thing sweet and varied and that would fain be held partly divine_.... _But now it is time for me to awake_ (ut evigilem) _and cleave the liquid ether of philosophy_, etc. This passage, written after 1605, obviously means more than affection for poetry the product. Only a poet who loved to dream, only a poet for whom the awaking was fraught with pain, however glorious the promise of the dawn, would have written that.

Bacon again, like Prospero, was a lover of books, and happy like him, in the possession of a well-filled library (at Gray’s Inn, or Gorhambury, or both). He was an omniverous reader, _tasting_ some books (mathematical and astronomical, for example), _swallowing_ others, _chewing and digesting a few_. His biographer says of him: _He was a great reader_, but _no plodder upon books_.

About 1607-9, Bacon (in one of his _impetus philosophici_) imagined that at last he really had hit upon an infallible Method of vastly enlarging man’s dominion over Nature. The problem was how to launch this Method to the best advantage. Knowing only too well that he would receive no encouragement from living experts in science--the scientists who had arrived as distinguished from those who had not yet started--he fixed his hopes on ingenuous, open-minded Youth. But this is a prosaic way of looking at the matter, and Bacon was a poet. To him the desideratum presented itself as a marriage, a marriage between his _darling philosophy_, as he was wont to call it, and an ideal husband. In the _Redargutio Philosophiarum_ men are exhorted to devote themselves to the task of bringing about _a chaste and legitimate wedlock between the mind and nature_. In the _Sapientia Veterum_ the same idea appears in a different form: _facultates illas duas Dogmaticam et Empiricam adhuc non bene conjunctas et copulatas fuisse_.[74] In the _Delineatio_ (c. 1607) he writes: _We trust we have constructed a bride-bed for the marriage of Man’s Mind with the Universe_. The same idea (hardly as yet an obsession) makes one of its earliest appearances in a _Speech in Praise of Knowledge_, forming part of a dramatic _jeu d’esprit_ entitled _A Conference of Pleasure_ (1592). In this _Speech_ several things are said to _have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. And what the issue of so honourable a match may be it is not hard to consider._ With the actual merits of the Method we are but distantly concerned here. What is of importance here is the certainty that Bacon would lose no opportunity of repudiating every suggestion that his beloved child owed anything to the imagination. _It was an usual speech of his lordship’s_, says his biographer, _that his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as men have made it, for it hath nothing of the imagination_.

By this time the inner meaning of _The Tempest_, and also the editorial reason for thrusting it into the leading place of the _First Folio_, may have become apparent. Miranda stands for Bacon’s _Darling Philosophy_, and the ingenuous young Ferdinand for the unsophisticated mind of man, the human intellect _cleared and delivered_ from _idols_, particularly _idols of the theatre_. The issue of so auspicious a match is left, in _The Tempest_, as in the _Conference of Pleasure_, to the imagination. Prospero’s ceremonious rejection of his magic robes is an adumbration of Bacon’s anxiety to preserve his Philosophy from being calumniated as a poetical dream, a thing _infected with the style of the poets_, as he once (in a fragmentary _Essay of Fame_) confessed himself to be. Devotion to Miranda again is the motive for Prospero’s resolve to dismiss Ariel from his service, at a time when Ariel could ill be spared, one feels, by his ageing master. The words _my dainty Ariel I shall miss thee_ are eloquent of pain, pain self-inflicted and unexplained, except by a promise wholly uncalled-for by anything that appears on the surface. Ariel on the other hand, tricksy Ariel, incapable of human affection, sick of expecting a long-promised freedom, feels no pain, no regret, nothing but joy at the prospect of slaving it no longer for a despotic master: _Merrily, merrily shall I live now, Under the blossom that hangs on the bough_.

The last words of one of Prospero’s closing speeches, _Every third thought shall be my grave_, followed up as they are by the thinly veiled pathos of his appeal in the Epilogue, perplex and distress the reader. _Prospero triumphans_, without one word of warning or explanation, has changed into _Misero supplicans_. Why this sudden revulsion? To my untutored mind it intimates a working-over of the play after Bacon’s fall, for the purpose of adapting it, not too obviously, to the altered circumstances of the original author, that _unfortunate_ Chancellor who, according to Ben Jonson, _hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome_. The date of this (last) working-over would probably synchronise with the first public or semi-public appearances of the _First Folio_ (of _Shakespeare_), of Bacon’s _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, and of Ben Jonson’s _Time Vindicated_, these four events--with perhaps a Court performance of the adapted _Tempest_ thrown in--being, I venture to think, intimately connected with what may be called an Apotheosis of Bacon.

“A remarkable story indeed”--an objector may say--“but do you seriously believe that Bacon can be proved to have been the Author, and _Shakespeare_ the pen-name? Besides, does it really matter--except to Stratford and Verulam--whether _Shakespeare_ hailed from this place or that? We have the poems and we have the plays, and that is enough. As for your reading of _The Tempest_, it may be ingenious, but it is not convincing. Patience, with a modicum of ingenuity, has probably never despaired of cajoling almost any given meaning out of any fable--fables, like dreams and Delphian utterances, being almost as plastic as wax. Moreover, the inner meaning you claim to have disclosed, involves the absurdity of supposing that a fable was invented for the express purpose of wrapping up the said meaning, so effectually as to ensure its being missed by all the world, a few esoteric contemporaries only excepted. The idea, to be quite candid, belongs rather to Bedlam than to Bacon.”

Strict proof, I reply, is hardly to be expected either now or hereafter. A high degree of probability, resting on evidence of various kinds and different degrees of cogency, is all that the writer has ever contended for. The history of literature abounds in instances of pseudonymity. Of these one of the most apposite that occurs to me is that of Aristophanes, who made use of the name Callistratus, a contemporary actor, to mask his (own) authorship of the _Birds_, _Lysistrata_, etc. There are differences, of course, between the two cases, one being that in that of Aristophanes there were no very obvious reasons for concealment, whereas in the case of Bacon there were several. Whether it really matters who the great poet was depends on the word “really.” It certainly does not matter in the sense in which the high price of coal, the low price of Consols, England’s relations with other Powers, etc., matter. It does matter for _The Tempest_, the symbolism of which probably extends beyond Miranda and Prospero, as far as Neapolis, and possibly further. It cannot fail to affect the interpretation of other plays of _Shakespeare_. It solves, or helps to solve, interesting problems in the life and acknowledged works of Bacon. It matters in short for all genuine admirers of English literature. As to plasticity--where the fable to be juggled is vague, undocumented, variously and incoherently documented, or frugal of features, the operation will be child’s play. With such a fable as _The Tempest_ the trick can only be brought off by singling out one or two features and shutting the eye to all the rest. One objection only remains to be dealt with. The reference to Bedlam with which it concludes might have been omitted, but no discussion of this question seems quite in order without some innuendo that the unorthodox person is mad or a crank. The objection itself (though the phrasing might be challenged as favouring the objector) is pertinent enough, and may be answered as follows: Bacon was an inveterate treasure-seeker. The unsunned treasures he sought were not material things like gold and silver, but gems of thought hidden away in the dreamlands of poetry. The genesis of this habit was no doubt closely related to his theory that poesy enables the artist in words to _retire_ and _obscure_ ... _secrets and mysteries_ by _involving_ them in _fables_ invented for the purpose, a practice by no means uncommon, he firmly believed, among the poets of antiquity when they wished to reserve information for _selected auditors_.

So far the discussion has been grave to the point of dullness. Would that I had been able to enliven it, if only because _The Tempest_ is a comedy--heads the file of the comedies in the _First Folio_. Possibly the following quotation from the work of an eminent critic may help to remedy the fault: _Miranda_ ... _and her fellow Perdita are idealizations of the sweet country maidens whom Shakspere_ (sic) _would see about him in his renewed family life at Stratford_.[75]

THE COMMON KNOWLEDGE OF SHAKESPEARE AND BACON

Many years ago, when, not having bestowed a thought upon the subject, I was, naturally, of the orthodox Stratfordian faith, and knew nothing of the Baconian “heresy” except the time-honoured joke that “Shakespeare” was not written by Shakespeare, but by another gentleman of the same name (which I thought “devilish funny”) I happened to be reading Bacon’s _Essay on Gardens_. This passage at once arrested my attention: “In April follow, the double violet; the wall-flower; the stock-gilliflower; the cowslip; _flower-de-luces, and lillies of all natures_.” Why, thought I, those last words are almost identical with some used by Perdita at the conclusion of her lovely catalogue of flowers! I turned to the _Winter’s Tale_ (IV. 4) and there read:

lillies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one.

For at least half a minute I thought, in my innocence, that I had made a discovery! But reflection of course, told me that so startling a parallelism must have been observed by hundreds before me. “Lillies of all kinds,” says Shakespeare; “lillies of all natures,” says Bacon; and each specifies “the flower-de-luce” as one of them! Surely, I said to myself, this is no mere coincidence! Surely one of these writers must have, consciously or unconsciously, taken the words from the other! On closer inspection, too, I found a remarkable resemblance between the two lists of flowers, Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s; that they are in fact substantially the same. Did then Shakspere borrow from Bacon? Very possibly, I thought; but on investigation I found that the _Essay on Gardens_ was first printed in 1625, nine years after player Shakspere’s death. Well, then, did Bacon borrow from Shakspere in this instance? Few, I think, would be inclined to adopt that hypothesis. The author of the _Essay_ had made a life-long study of gardens, and, as Mr. James Spedding writes (though I did not discover this till years afterwards), “it is not probable that Bacon would have anything to learn of William Shakespeare [i.e., Shakspere of Stratford] concerning the science of gardening.” “Moreover,” says the same writer, “the scene in _Winter’s Tale_ where Perdita presents the guests with flowers ... has some expressions which, if the _Essay_ had been printed somewhat earlier, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it!”[76] Yes, indeed, and these “expressions,” almost identical in both, have made some persons “suspect” that the same pen wrote both the _Essay_ and the _Scene_.

There are, as all those who have studied the two authors are aware, many other striking coincidences to be found in the writings of Shakespeare and Bacon. In this chapter I propose to consider some of them only, namely those which, nearly twenty years ago, formed the subject of a controversy between the late Judge Webb, and the late Professor Dowden.

In the year 1902 the late Judge Webb, then Regius Professor of Laws, and Public Orator in the University of Dublin, published a book which he called _The Mystery of William Shakespeare_.

The eighth chapter of that work treats “Of Shakespeare as a Man of Science,” and here the learned Judge put forward a number of parallelisms taken from Shakespeare’s plays and Bacon’s works (mainly from the _Natural History_, which was published eleven years after the death of Shakspere of Stratford), in order to show that “the scientific opinions of Shakespeare so completely coincide with those of Bacon that we must regard the two philosophers as one in their philosophy, however reluctant we may be to recognize them as actually one.”

To this the late Professor Dowden replied, in _The National Review_ of July, 1902, and brought forward an immense amount of learning to show that these coincidences really prove nothing, because “all which Dr. Webb regards as proper to Shakespeare and Bacon was, in fact, _the common knowledge or common error of the time_.” Whereunto the Judge, in a brief rejoinder (_National Review_, August, 1902), intimated that all he was concerned with was “the common knowledge and common error of Shakespeare and Bacon,” his case being that in matters of science these two, as a fact, show an extremely close agreement. The question for the reader, therefore, is whether or not that agreement is so remarkable that something more than “the common knowledge or common error _of the time_” is required to explain it.

Here the matter has been left, but I think it may be of interest to consider once more the points at issue between these two learned disputants. Let me premise that I do not write as a “Baconian.” The hypothesis that Bacon was the author of the plays of Shakespeare, or some of them, or some parts of them, may be mere “madhouse chatter,” as Sir Sidney Lee has styled it, or we may be content with more moderate language, and merely say that the hypothesis is “not proven.” I leave that _vexata quæstio_ on one side. But, whatever may be our opinion with regard to it, it must, I think, be admitted that some of the “parallelisms,” or “coincidences,” between Bacon and Shakespeare are really very remarkable, and the controversy between Judge Webb and Professor Dowden, which I here pass under review, has not, as it seems to me, so conclusively explained their existence as to leave nothing further for the consideration of an impartial critic.

Let me take an example. Bacon in his _Sylva Sylvarum_, or _Natural History_[77] (Cent. I, p. 98), speaks of “the spirits or pneumaticals that are in all tangible bodies,” and which, he says, “are scarce known.” They are not, he tells us, as some suppose, virtues and qualities of the tangible parts which “men see,” but “they are things by themselves,” i.e., entities. And again (Cent. VII, 601), he says, “all bodies have spirits, and pneumatical parts within them,” and he goes on to point out the differences between the “spirits” in animate, and those in inanimate things. Further on (Cent. VII, 693), Bacon writes: “It hath been observed by the ancients that much use of Venus doth dim the sight,” and the cause of this, he says, “is the expense of spirits.” Now in Sonnet 129 Shakespeare writes:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action.

Here we certainly seem to have a remarkable agreement between Shakespeare and Bacon. Both use the very same expression “the expense of spirit” and (which constitutes the real strength of the parallel) both use it in exactly the same application. What is Professor Dowden’s explanation? He says that “the mediæval theory of ‘spirits’ will be found in the _Encyclopædia of Bartholomew Anglicus on the Properties of Things_,” which he says was “a book of wide influence.” He says further: “The popular opinions of Shakespeare’s time respecting ‘spirits’ may be read in _Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy_, 1586, and _Burton’s Anatomy_, 1621, and in many another volume.... Bright, in his _Melancholy_, seems almost to anticipate the theory of Bacon, and possibly he was himself influenced by Paracelsus.” As to the expression “expense of spirit,” he says it may be found in this book of Bright’s (pp. 62, 237, and 244), and in Donne’s _Progress of the Soul_. I do not understand the Professor to suggest that the Stratford player had consulted these works (Burton, of course, is out of the question) for he writes: “The language of Shakespeare is popular, and connected probably neither with what Bright nor what Bacon wrote, but if a theory be required, it can be found as easily in a volume which Shakespeare might have read, as in a volume published after his death.” Bacon, however, we may say with confidence, knew these books, and had, in all probability, read them. The Professor, for instance, refers to Paracelsus, and subsequently, on another point, to Scaliger. Bacon, as we know, was familiar with both these writers, and makes reference to them (see, for instance, _Natural History_, Cent. IV, 354, and Cent. VII, 694), whereas it will, I suppose, hardly be suggested that the player had sought inspiration in the works of these scholars.

The first question, then, which suggests itself is this. Are we to conclude, because there is a theory of “spirits” (which Bacon says “are scarce known”) to be found in Bartholomew Anglicus, and Bright, and Paracelsus, that it was a matter of “popular” knowledge, a subject with which Shakspere of Stratford, as well as the philosopher of Gorhambury, would have been likely to be familiar? This question seems to me a very doubtful one, but if it is to be answered in the affirmative, then we have to ask: Is this assumed popular knowledge, or popular error, sufficient to account for the use by both Shakespeare and Bacon of exactly the same expression in exactly the same collocation? And in considering this question we must remember that the evidence is cumulative, i.e., this coincidence is not a solitary instance, but only one of many, and it is but fair, if we wish to come to a just decision, that all of them should be considered together.