Part 2

“Simple common sense.” Aye, but when I spoke not long ago to a well-known writer, who is a Stratfordian _enragé_, of “common sense” in this matter, what was his reply? “_Oh, damn common sense!_”--a characteristic interjection which might well be adopted as the motto of all the “Stratfordian” highbrows of the present day.

But, adds Professor Lefranc, “If many still refuse to admit the existence of a Shakespeare problem, yet the time is at hand when nobody will any longer venture to deny it, unless he is prepared at the same time to deny all the evidence in the case. It is clear that a new era of Shakespearean study has recently presented itself. Scepticism with regard to the Stratford man is spreading in spite of the resistance of the multifarious defenders of the old tradition. A number of beliefs, accepted for many years as dogmas, are disappearing every day. The rock of credulity is crumbling away. The Stratfordians will, sooner or later, be reduced, under the pressure of a more enlightened public opinion, to change their tactics and modify the assumptions of their creed. In truth, speaking generally, the best-established reproach to which the learned men who have concerned themselves with Shakespeare, according to the rules of Stratfordian orthodoxy, have laid themselves open, is not so much that they have maintained the traditional doctrine with regard to the poet-actor, but rather that in the face of the innumerable enigmas which are involved in the history of his life, and his [supposed] works, and even of the text of those works, they have never had the candour to admit even the existence of all these obscure problems. At every step in Shakespearean study these difficulties and incoherences are encountered, but these learned men affect not to see them.... Truly, in view of such superb assurance, the lay reader could never imagine the existence of all the gratuitous assumptions, the naïve assertions, the inadmissible interpretations that are to be found in the works of these gentlemen, which the public have been accustomed to accept as infallible authorities. Yet, even the most famous and the most admired amongst them would have to yield to an investigation conducted according to the simple rules of the art of reasoning, that is to say of sound common sense. The hour has come when the representatives of the ‘Shakespearean’ dogma will have to change their attitude. They will have to renounce both their silence and their credulity. Above all, they will have to admit the necessity of inquiries, and discussions hostile to their creed, to make a _tabula rasa_ of many points, and to take in hand once more the investigation thereof _ab imis fundamentis_, resolutely putting away those prejudices which have so long blinded them to the truth.”

So writes Professor Abel Lefranc, with much more to the same purport and effect, and, in my judgment, he writes both wisely and well. But if he really believes that our hidebound Pundits and Mandarins of the Stratfordian faith will ever “put away those prejudices which have so long blinded them to the truth,” and give impartial consideration to the facts of the Shakespeare Problem in the light of reason and “commonsense,” I fear me he reckons without his host and is destined to be very sadly undeceived.[15]

We are brought back, however, to the question: Who, then, is the real “Shakespeare”? That is a question which I have never attempted to answer. It has been quite sufficient for me to confine my arguments to the negative side of the Shakespeare Problem. The positive, or constructive side I have hitherto been content to leave to others.

Now, there is a large number of persons, many of them rational and intelligent men and women, of quite sound mind and understanding, who believe that the real “Shakespeare” is to be found in the person of Francis Bacon. But there are “Baconians and Baconians.” There are the wild Baconians who find Bacon everywhere, but especially in ciphers, cryptograms, anagrams, acrostics, and in all sorts of occult figures and emblems[16]--those who believe amongst other things, that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth, that he lived in philosophic concealment many years after the date usually assigned as that of his death, that he wrote practically all the English literature worthy of that name of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, and that he hid his “Shakespearean” manuscripts in the mud of the River Wye or some other equally inappropriate and ridiculous place, where no sane man would ever dream of looking for them.

The wild and unrestrained “Baconians” have, undoubtedly, done great injury to the cause which they desire to advocate; and not only have they injured that cause, but they have greatly prejudiced the discussion of the Shakespeare Problem as a whole. For in such cases we are all liable to be “tarred by the same brush,” and the sanest of “Anti-Stratfordian” reasoners has, unfortunately, not escaped the back-wash of the ridicule which these eccentrics have brought upon themselves.

There are, however, “Baconians” of another class--the sane “Baconians” who are content to argue the matter--and some of them have argued it with great knowledge and ability--in the calm light of reason and common sense. Of these one of the sanest and ablest was my friend the late Edward Walter Smithson, whose little book _Shakespeare--Bacon. An Essay_,[17] published anonymously some three and twenty years ago, attracted no little attention, and did much to help the cause in support of which it was written. He published, however, nothing more on the subject till 1913, in November of which year there appeared in _The Nineteenth Century_ an article from his pen entitled “Ben Jonson’s Pious Fraud.” The greater part of this article I have quoted by way of preface to his essay now published on Jonson’s Masque of _Time Vindicated_,[18] and it may be as well to cite the commencement of it at this place:

The writer is one of those persons who consider it highly probable that Shakespeare was at first a mere pen-name of Bacon’s, and regard Shakspere, Shaxper, or Shayksper--easily mistaken for Shakespeare--as the usual patronymic from birth to death of an illiterate actor: he thinks, moreover, that there must have been some sort of understanding between the poet and the actor (resembling perhaps that between Aristophanes and the actor Callistratus), and conjectures that it may have covered proprietary rights or shares in theatrical ventures.

When and how I came by such views can be of little or no interest to anyone but myself. To prevent misconception, however, it may be well to explain that my conversion dates from 1884-5. An essay of mine (_Shakespeare-Bacon_, Sonnenschein, 1900)[19] belonging in substance to 1885, would have been published long before the date of actual publication but for the appearance of a portent called the _Great Cryptogram_, which put me out of love with the subject. My earliest suspicions were suggested not by heretics--Mr. W. H. Smith, Lord Campbell, Lord Penzance, and the rest--whose opinions were absolutely unknown to me, but, if memory serve, by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps and the New Shakspere Society (of which I must have been an early member). Since 1885, I have tried to keep in touch with what orthodoxy has had to say for itself, and against us. Some of our opponents regard Ben Jonson as their prophet. To him they fly for counsel and comfort. They throw his sayings at our heads whenever they get a chance. In the index to Mr. Lang’s _Shakespeare-Bacon and the Great Unknown_ (1912) Ben Jonson’s name takes up more space than even Shakespeare’s. According to Mr. Lang “it is easy to prove that Will (i.e. the Stratford man) was recognised as the author by Ben Jonson.” If this were true there would be no Shakespeare question at all, none at least so far as I am concerned. But it is not true. Ben Jonson--whose _Works_ ought to be familiar to all students of Shakespeare--is in fact what lawyers would call a difficult witness, and to assert that he is on the side of orthodoxy is simply to beg the question.[20] Some of Mr. Lang’s admirers will have it that he has crushed Mr. G. G. Greenwood much as a motor-car might crumple up a bicycle. But a reading of Mr. Lang’s book leaves me in doubt whether Mr. Greenwood’s main contentions (_The Shakespeare Problem Restated_) are anywhere shaken, and I am not likely to be very strongly biassed in Mr. Greenwood’s favour, seeing that he ostentatiously disclaims being a Baconian. Mr. Greenwood indeed may be said to have quitted Stratford for good and travelled a great many miles. Where he pulls up it is not easy to say, but he does pull up somewhere--perhaps where the rainbow ends. Mr. Lang, though he refrains from imputing imbecility to Mr. Greenwood, is apparently unable to be quite so lenient to Baconians. He explains, or would like to explain, the Baconian views of Lord Penzance and Judge Webb as partly due to senile decay. How he accounts for the views of Lord Campbell,[21] Mr. George Bidder, Q.C., and others of less note does not appear. When an unfamiliar theory happens to be at grips with a popular one, the habit of thinking and calling an opponent infatuated or not more than half mad is easily caught. Bacon did not escape it, but he took care to give it a turn which saved it from mere _brutalité_. In his day two notable theories were at loggerheads, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, with Galileo for the Copernican Achilles. Convinced that the Sun moved round the Earth, Bacon smiled at his opponents for doubting the immovability of our planet and dubbed them “car-men,” “terrae aurigas,” chauffeurs, in other words. No other student of _The Advancement of Learning_ (1605), written be it remembered when Bacon was fully mature, will be surprised at this. Bacon avowedly took “all knowledge for his province,” and _The Advancement_ is a comprehensible survey of that province--as Bacon understood it. Of mathematics he probably knew little or nothing. It is an open question whether Induction owes anything to the _Novum Organum_. His acquaintance with the phenomena of nature (as distinct from human nature) was derived for the most part from poets and men of letters. More significant still, his splendid natural gifts were not adapted to scientific research. His true province in short was literature, above all, poetry. And here it may not be amiss to note (1) that John Dryden’s appreciation of Shakespeare--in whom, says J. D., are to be found “all arts and sciences, all moral and natural philosophy”--coincides as closely as may be with the traditional estimate of Bacon, and (2) that Shakespeare seems to have been of one mind with Bacon upon the motion of the Sun round the Earth.

With the tons of printed matter on the Baconian side, my acquaintance has always been of the smallest. In a recent pamphlet by Sir E. Durning Lawrence, that gentleman with the aid of a newspaper called _The Tailor and Cutter_ labours the point, already sufficiently obvious, that the figure which does duty as frontispiece to the first folio of Shakespeare must have been meant for a caricature.

What the Shakespeare theory is needs no telling. It is developed in _Biographies_, _Lives_, and so forth, within the reach of every one.

The Bacon theory on the other hand is still in the rough. “You may well say that,” an opponent exclaims. “You, Baconians, differ among yourselves almost as widely as you differ from us. With some of you it is an article of faith that Bacon looked for fame (poetical) to after ages, and took unheard-of pains to secure it. Baconians who hunt for ciphers, key-numbers and so forth, not only in books, but even under the river Wye belong to this class. You on the contrary have convinced yourself, I know not how, that Bacon intended his secret to die with him. What are we to do? How can we help thinking that there is no such thing as a passably authentic Baconian theory?” My acquaintance with Baconians, I reply, is far too limited to justify any important attempt at sketching an authoritative theory. My object is less ambitious. It is to set down, as briefly and simply as possible, by way of introduction to Ben Jonson, certain probable constituents of a reasonable Baconian theory.

(_a_) Shakespeare was a pseudonym adopted by Bacon to mask his personality whenever he created or “made” for the stage.

(_b_) The date at which Bacon gave up writing for public theatres coincided pretty nearly with the beginning of his rise to high place in the State.

(_c_) By the year 1623 (if not earlier) Bacon’s friends and admirers must have become very uneasy about the fate of his still unpublished plays. These plays had long been hidden away from the public eye. What if the veil should never be lifted? Lest that should happen, publication, and the sooner the better, must have been eagerly desired by all lovers of literature. The conditions were not unpromising. Softened by misfortune, Bacon would be open to entreaty, and publication just then would put it in the power of influential friends to minister with perfect delicacy to the more urgent needs of the fallen man, “old, weak, ruined, in want, a very subject of pity.” Provided that his true name could be for ever kept from contact with the “family” of her who had once been his “mistress,”[22] his consent or rather acquiescence might be hoped for. Values it is true, literary and poetical values especially, were no longer what they had been in the days of the late Queen. But a parent’s affection for the offspring of his brain is never perhaps wholly uprooted. Even so, the task was one for a master of literary craft. But the thing had to be done and that quickly, if it was to be of any use to the great man who, to quote Jonson’s _Discoveries_, had “filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compar’d or preferr’d either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” No considerable help was to be looked for from Bacon himself. The lie downright was to be avoided if possible; but the motive being perfectly clean, economy of truth and suggestion of untruth were neither of them barred. The pseudonym was ready to hand, and the players Heminge and Condell were not likely to deny their names to any prefatory matter whatever which the editor might think fit to invent.

(_d_) Among the notable persons who openly interested themselves in the publication of the First Folio were the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Montgomery, and Ben Jonson. But it is safe to say that they were not the only promoters of the undertaking, and in my opinion King James (himself a poet in days gone by), Prince Charles, and some _alter ego_ of Bacon’s (possibly Sir T. Mathews) were of the number.

(_e_) A private printing press may have been among the tools habitually employed by the author. Heminge and Condell in the First Folio are made to say: “We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare) a blot in his papers.” As an allusion to the use of a press this statement would pass muster.[23] It occurs in the prefatory matter, thoroughly Jonsonian, which seems to have served as receptacle for what he preferred to put upon other shoulders than his own.

(_f_) As for Shakspere--the man who emerged from and returned to Stratford somehow and somewhen--he while he lived was a nobody outside Stratford, and by the year 1622 must have been almost forgotten even there, except as a good sort of fellow who, having made money in London, had invested it in Stratford with a view to enjoying the congenial society of its artless natives. His _Apotheosis_ probably began with the publication of Jonson’s own Ode.

“Guesswork!” exclaims one. “Mere figments of the brain!” says another. Well, where is the theory which does not consist of such material? Take away from any orthodox life-story of Shakspere all figments of somebody’s brain, and what remains? According to Professor Saintsbury, “almost all the received stuff of his life-story is shreds and patches of tradition, if not positive dream-work.”

Here it becomes necessary to say a word in explanation of the present work. The late Edward Smithson left by his Will a sum of money to myself and a friend who prefers to remain anonymous, with the suggestion that it might be made use of in the endeavour to ascertain--to use his own words--“the true parentage of Shakespeare (not Shakspere),” meaning thereby, as there can be no doubt, that such sum might be employed, if thought well--for there was no definite trust attached to it--in furtherance of the quest of the true “Shakespeare,” whether he might be found in Francis Bacon (as he himself thought was the case) or in some other writer of the period in question. Moreover, he had left in type certain “Baconian” essays, which, although he gave no specific directions to that effect, it was known that he desired to be published as his last words on a matter in which he was so deeply interested, and these, at the request of his wife who survives him, I have supervised and prepared for publication. Here a difficulty presented itself. Some of these essays deal, to a certain extent, with the same subject matter, and, consequently, the reader will find in them a certain amount of repetition. At first I thought it might be possible to avoid this by collating the various manuscripts, and fusing them together, as it were, into one volume. It soon became apparent, however, that such “fusion” would lead to “confusion,” and would be detrimental to Mr. Smithson’s work. I trust, therefore, that the recurrence of various arguments, or sentiments, in the following essays, will meet with generous toleration on the part of the reader. After all, a certain amount of repetition is, sometimes, likely to do more good than harm. The famous Mr. Justice Maule, while still at the Bar, was once arguing a case before three Judges, one of whom, finding the distinguished counsel somewhat prolix on this occasion, and inclined to repeat his arguments, exclaimed testily: “Really, Mr. Maule, that is the third time you have made that observation!” “Well,” replied Maule, quite imperturbably, “there are _three_ of your Lordships!” To repeat an argument once for each Judge on the Bench was, then, in this great advocate’s opinion, quite a right, proper, and useful thing to do. I am in hopes, therefore, that there may be the same justification for a considerable amount of repetition in the case now presented to a court--that of the reading public--which, it is hoped, may consist of many more Judges than those addressed by Mr. Justice Maule.

I would make this further observation with regard to Edward Smithson’s Essays, though perhaps it is hardly necessary to make it. Although it has been a pleasure to me to edit them, so far as they required editing at all, I have, of course, no responsibility for the arguments or the opinions expressed in them. Mr. Smithson, in the passage I have quoted above from his article in _The Nineteenth Century_, says that I “ostentatiously disclaim being a Baconian.” I am sorry if that disclaimer was made “ostentatiously,” but speaking now, after the lapse of many years, and I trust without a shred of “ostentation”--which, certainly, would be very much out of place--I must say that I am still unwilling to label myself as a “Baconian.” It was, I think, Professor Huxley who said that, if asked whether he believed that there were inhabitants in Mars, his reply would be that he neither believed nor disbelieved. He did not know. This is the “agnostic” position in which I find myself with regard to the hypothesis that Bacon is the true Shakespeare. I really do not know. Nevertheless, an astronomer who had adopted Professor Huxley’s position concerning the possible existence of inhabitants in Mars, might without prejudice to that agnostic position, find himself impelled to set forth certain arguments which seemed to him to tell in favour of such a possibility. In the same way it occurred to me some years ago to write certain essays on the Baconian side of the case, two of which I now venture to publish as a sequel to those of Mr. Smithson’s authorship. I recognise that there is much that may quite fairly and reasonably be urged in favour of the Baconian case. Merely to ridicule that case appears to me to be indicative of folly rather than wisdom on the part of those who adopt such an attitude. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, I am far from thinking that the Baconian authorship of any of the plays or poems published in the name of “Shakespeare” has been actually proved. That Francis Bacon had, at any rate, something to do with the production of some of these plays and poems is, at least, a very plausible hypothesis. As Professor Lefranc writes, “Que l’auteur du théâtre Shakespearien ait été en rapport avec Francis Bacon, c’est ce que nous avons toujours été porté à admettre pour bien des raisons,”[24] and in support of that hypothesis I may be said to hold a brief _pro hâc vice_ in the two “Baconian” Essays which I now venture to publish. But that is all. I endeavour to keep an open mind upon this, as upon many other doubtful questions. Professor Lefranc himself has shown, with great learning and conspicuous ability, that a strong case can be made in favour of William Stanley, Sixth Earl of Derby, as the author of some, at any rate, of the “Shakespearean” plays, and more especially of that extraordinary play _Love’s Labour’s Lost_.[25] But the constructive side of the “Shakespeare Problem” I must be content to leave to younger and abler men, and such as have much more time to devote to it than I have. With regard, however, to “the man from Stratford,” as Mr. Henry James styles him, or the “Stratford rustic,” as Messrs. Garnett and Gosse do not hesitate to characterize him, _his_ supposed authorship may, and, indeed, must be, set aside as one of the greatest and most unfortunate of the many delusions which have, from time to time, imposed themselves upon a credulous and “patient world.”[26]

I cannot conclude this note without a brief reference to two articles which have lately appeared in the _Quarterly Review_ (October, 1921, and January, 1922), under the heading of “Recent Shakespearean Research,” by Mr. C. R. Haines. I can find little or nothing that can be recalled “recent” in them unless we give a quite unwonted extension to the meaning of that word. Mr. Haines even includes such _vieux jeu_ as the Plume MSS. in his “recent” Shakespearean Research, but they certainly contain some very remarkable statements. I will, however, here content myself by quoting the following letter which I sent to the _Nation and Athenæum_ after reading the first of these articles, and which appeared in that paper on November 26th, last:

“RECENT SHAKESPEAREAN RESEARCH.”