Part 9

The external evidence that Bacon was essentially a poet is a theme so large that only a portion of it can be given here. In 1626, the year of Bacon’s death, John Haviland printed for Sir William Rawley thirty-two _monumenta insignia_ expressive of adoration and grief for the great man who had just passed away.[65] Rawley, the editor, would take care that no published offering to the _Manes Verulamiani_ should impart his Master’s secret to persons who were not in it already; and this may help to explain why all the thirty-two offerings are in Latin, not in the vulgar tongue. In his preface to the collection, Rawley informs his readers that the _monumenta_ were a selection merely from the numbers which had been entrusted to him--“very many, and those of the very best having been kept back by him” (_plurimos, enim, eosque optimos versus apud me contineo_). How tantalising! He does not even hint at his reason for such wholesale suppression of masterpieces. One of the thirty mourners declares that Bacon was a Muse more choice than any of the famous Nine. Another considers him “the hinge of the literary world.” Another bids the fountain of Hippocrene weep black mud, and warns the Muses that their bay-trees would go out of cultivation now that the laurel-crowned Verulam had left this planet. Others call upon Apollo and the Muses to weep for the loss of the great Bacon. Another laments the disaster that has befallen “us nurselings of the Muses,” and calls Bacon “the Apollo of our choir.” Another exclaims that “the morning-star of the Muses, the favourite of Apollo, has fallen,” and supposes that Melpomene in particular is inconsolable for the loss of him. Another declares that Bacon had placed all the Muses under obligations impossible to estimate. Another laments him as “the Tenth Muse ... ornament of the choir,” and imagines that Apollo can never have been so unhappy before. Another regards Bacon as the _delicium_ of his country. Another calls him the choir leader of the Pierides. Another, No. 24, will have it that Ovid, had he lived, would have been better qualified than any other poet to lay an acceptable offering on the tomb of Bacon. Why Ovid should have been pitched upon is not obvious. Perhaps the opinion of Francis Meres, that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare, witness his _Venus and Adonis_, his _Lucrece_, his _Sugred Sonnets_, among his private friends,” may have determined his choice. Here it should be mentioned that a previous contributor had hinted not obscurely at Bacon’s authorship of “some elegant love pieces or poems”--_quicquid venerum politiorum_.[66] Another contributor exclaims: “Couldst thou thyself, O Bacon, suffer death, thou who wert able to confer immortality on the Muses themselves?” The last of the thirty-two selected contributors is Thomas Randolph, a notable member of the group of wits known as _the tribe of Ben_. After having expatiated on the grief of himself and his fellow-poets for the irreparable loss they had just sustained, and borne his testimony to Bacon’s intimacy with the melodious goddesses (Camænæ), Randolph in the manner affected by contemporary poets and men of letters, proceeds to eulogise Bacon as the inventor of new scientific methods, of keys to Nature’s labyrinth, etc., and finishes: “But we poets can add nothing to thy fame. Thou thyself art a singer, and therefore singest thine own praises.” (_At nostræ tibi nulla ferent encomia musæ, Ipse canis, laudes et canis inde tuas_).

To sum up, the outstanding impression left on the mind by Randolph and his friends is that they regarded Bacon, not merely as a poet, but as the foremost poet of the age; and this impression is confirmed by the reflection that few if any of the contributors knew enough of science to be capable of appreciating the work of really scientific pioneers such as Harriot, Gilbert, Harvey, and others whose names are conspicuously absent from the roll of Bacon’s admirers.

(iii) The remaining difficulty--that of establishing a relation between Bacon and Shakespeare--has now to be dealt with. It may be well to begin by directing attention to the significant omission of the name of Jonson, head of the _tribe of Ben_, from the collection of eulogies we have just been considering. Adequate explanation of this conspicuous omission is almost impossible without the aid of the Bacon hypothesis. If any contribution of Jonson’s had appeared in the publication, the secret would have been out. Even as it was, his executors almost disclosed it when, in 1640-1, they sanctioned publication of those tell-tale notebooks in which Jonson records that Bacon “had performed that in our tongue which might be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” an appreciation almost identical with that contained in his famous Ode to Shakespeare. It is well to remember in this connection that Jonson on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday had apostrophised him as an enchanter or “mystery” worker.

Among other arguments which tend to identify the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, the following seem worthy of mention: (a) Poesy, as we know, constituted one of the three continents into which Bacon in his _Advancement of Learning_, mapped out the whole “globe” of the knowable. To ignore dramatic poetry altogether would have given rise to inconvenient curiosity. Compelled, therefore, to give it a name, Bacon rejects the natural word “dramatic” and adopts instead the out-of-the-way word “representative.” What he says, moreover, about dramatic poetry--in the proper place for saying it--is apparently intended to carry on the suggestion that he was almost a stranger to dramatic performances, a suggestion contradicted by passages in other sections of the same work. For instance, on handling what he calls the “Georgics of the mind,” he describes dramatic poetry in terms so appropriate to the best dramatic poetry of the period, that one is almost forced to say to oneself: Here surely, Bacon must have been thinking of Shakespeare! The passage will bear quoting at length. “In poetry,” it runs, “no less than in history, we may find painted forth with great life how affections are kindled and excited; how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they do fight and encounter one with another ... how to set affection against affection, and to master one by another, even as we use to hunt beast with beast.” His leave-taking, it may be added, of the whole theme or subject of poetry is effected by an ironical: “But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre,” which could only be fully appreciated I suppose, by his personal friends.

(b) Nowhere, I believe, in any extant writing of Bacon’s, whether letter, essay, or notebook, is there any mention of Shakespeare, and a like reticence is observed in the Rawley collection just cited. Assume for the moment that Shakespeare was the proper name of the man of Stratford, not the pseudonym of Bacon, or, to put it in another way, that Shakespeare and Bacon were two separate persons, and what is the result? We should have to concede that of two poets, both interested in things dramatic, both supreme judges and keen observers of human nature, its affections, passions, corruptions, and customs--that of two such poets, one, and that one Bacon, must have forbidden the very mention of the other, and this, too, for no discoverable reason.

(c) Bacon (in 1605) held that the chief function of poetry was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it.” He ranked poets among the very best of ethical teachers in virtue of their insight into human character as modifiable “by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity” and the like; and again ... “by sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising _per saltum, per gradus_ and the like.” Here again many an open-minded reader must have felt moved to reflect that he was on the track, if not in the presence, of Shakespeare.

(d) It is clear that Bacon as he grew older, came to think less and less highly of imaginative work. The mere fact that Shakespeare ultimately abandoned his poetical offspring to chance, points, it surely would seem, to a similar change of view.

(e) Though many of the coincidences between Bacon and Shakespeare may be explained as manifestations of the Time Spirit, some of them strongly suggest direct contact even when taken singly. Take for example, the _misquotation of Aristotle_ by Shakespeare in _Troilus and Cressida_, and by Bacon in the _Advancement of Learning_.[67] Take, again, the curious resemblance between the _Winter’s Tale_ and the _Essay of Gardens_. Spedding’s comment on this passage in the Essay runs: “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.”[68]

(f) Again, certain views to which Bacon gave expression in the _Essay of Deformity_, seem implicit in Shakespeare’s _Richard the Third_. Richard has his “revenge of nature” for the ill turn she did him in making him deformed. He is also “extreme bold,” ever on the watch to “observe the weakness” of others. His deformity, moreover, must, it would seem, be supposed to have “quenched jealousy” in those personages who, if he had been comely, would have foreseen and thwarted his ambitious designs.

(g) In the course of some interesting observations on the writing of history considered as an art, Bacon confesses to a liking for ready-made outlines or plots, so that the artist might be free to concentrate his powers on the more congenial work of enrichment “with counsels, speeches, and notable particularities.” The faulty plots of many of Shakespeare’s plays imply that he also grudged the labour of construction and delighted in decoration and enrichment.

(h) Several editions of Bacon’s Essays seem to have been published without their author’s consent. Shakespeare also seems to have been preyed upon by piratical publishers. Wherever concealment of authorship is a desideratum, prosecution by law must needs be difficult if not impossible.

(i) Whenever Shakespeare, as we know him in quartos and folios, stands in need of an interpreter, no contemporary author is so often consulted by orthodox critics as Francis Bacon.

(k) Compare the _Merchant of Venice_, which the editor of the First Folio rather enigmatically calls _comedy_, with Bacon’s _Essay of Usury_. The primary intention of the play was to amuse or delight; that of the Essay being of course to instruct. But the play appears to me to have combined _utile_ with _dulce_, instruction with pleasure; and the lesson as I understand it was this:--usury instead of being forbidden by the State, should be recognised and regulated, on the ground that unconditional forfeiture of pawns or pledges--the usual alternative to usury--is apt to bear more harshly on the borrower. The crisis of the play arrives near the end of Act IV, Sc. 1, where the Doge pronounces judgment. The instant and immediate effect upon Shylock is positively crushing; he would rather die than submit. But the accent of despair is quickly succeeded by the words: “I am content,” although one of the conditions just introduced by Antonio is that the wretched man Shylock should “presently become a Christian.” The change of mood is so amazing that we can hardly believe our senses. What can be the explanation? we ask ourselves. Between the judgment pronounced by the Doge and Shylock’s accent of despair, Antonio has thrown in these words: “So please my lord the Duke and all the Court to quit the fine for one half of his goods, I am content; so he [Shylock] will let me have the other half in use, to render it upon his death unto the gentleman that lately stole his daughter.” To us the words may seem insignificant. But Shylock was a sort of personification of usury, and to him they meant nothing less than victory--victory over his arch-enemy Antonio, the head and front of the anti-usury party in Venice.

Students of Bacon will remember that his _Essay of Usury_ is a plea for State recognition and regulation of interest or “use,” on utilitarian grounds similar to those suggested in the comedy.

But may not this harmony between the _Merchant of Venice_ and the Essay have been accidental, especially as there was an interval of some twenty-five years between the appearance of the _Essay_ in its present form and our _Merchant of Venice_? My answer is that the _Essay_ was based, as we know from one of Bacon’s own letters, on “some short papers of mine touching usury, how to grind the teeth of it,” etc., and these short papers may well have been written as early as 1598, when Bacon himself was in the clutches of the money-lender.[69]

(l) The relation between the play of _Hamlet_ and the _Essay of Revenge_ is quite as close as that between the _Essay of Usury_ and the _Merchant of Venice_. A reader who should consider the tragedy of _Hamlet_ with a single eye to conduct, will hardly escape the reflection that its lesson or moral is summed up to perfection in one of Bacon’s Essays, viz., the one which treats of revenge: “They doe but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s sake; but thereby to purchase himselfe Profit, or Pleasure, or Honour, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a Man, for loving himselfe better than mee?... Vindicative persons live the Life of Witches: who, as they are Mischievous, so end they Infortunate.” Such in the end was the noble Hamlet’s fate. Once possessed by the devil of revenge, he becomes a sort of upas or plague-centre, and perishes in a sorry and most unlucky broil.

(m) The existence of striking harmonies between Shakespeare and Bacon was detected by foreign students fifty years ago and more. Professor Kuno Fischer, for example, wrote: “To the parallels between them [i.e. Bacon and Shakespeare] belong the similar relation of both to Antiquity, their affinity to the Roman mind, and their divergence from the Greek.... Bacon would have man studied in his individual capacity as a product of nature and history, in every respect determined by ... external and internal conditions. And exactly in the same spirit has Shakespeare understood man and his destiny.” Gervinus in his _Commentaries_ observes: “In Bacon’s works we find a number of moral sayings and maxims of experience from which the most striking mottoes might be drawn for every Shakespearean play, aye, for all his principal characters, testifying to a remarkable harmony in their comprehension of human nature.” One more quotation, of like import and from an author with no partiality for Baconian views, may not be superfluous. Professor J. Nichol, after having ruled out the Baconian heresy by recording his opinion that Bacon did not write Shakespeare, proceeds: “But there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they [Bacon and Shakespeare] find voice for sentiments often as nearly identical when they anticipate as when they contravene the manners of thought and standards of action that prevail in our age.” (_Francis Bacon_, Vol. I, 1888).

(n) Only a lawyer by education would have hit upon the technicality which is the nucleus of the 87th Sonnet of Shakespeare. The technicality is not one which an amateur interested in common law proceedings would be likely to pick up, for it belongs to the art of conveyancing. Part of my time, fifty years ago, was spent in the chambers of a conveyancer. But for that early training I might still have been able to see intellectual beauty in the well-known bust of Shakespeare at Stratford; for my suspicion of the popular legend originated in the conviction that the Shakespeare who matters must have been bred up a lawyer.[70]

(o) In the year 1867, Mr. John Bruce discovered in Northumberland House, which then stood in the Strand, a bundle of Elizabethan manuscripts, the outermost sheet of which contains a miscellaneous list of Elizabethan writings, the majority of which are unquestionably identified with work previously known to have been due to Bacon. The minority consists of five pieces, three of which may, for anything we know to the contrary, have been enriched if not entirely written by him. The two remaining pieces figure in the list as “Rychard the Second” and “Rychard the Third.” The significance of this association with work of which there can be no doubt that Bacon was the author, is greatly increased by the fact that the cover or sheet which bears the list of contents is bescribbled at random with the names “ffrancis Bacon” and “William Shakespeare.”[71]

Mr. Spedding evidently missed what seems to me the true significance of this double association--the combination of titles in the list of contents, and the mixture of the names Bacon with Shakespeare in the scribbles. But one or two of his observations on the subject of this singular find are interesting enough. He notes, for example, that the name “Shakespeare” in the scribbles is “spelt in every case as it was always printed in those days, and not as he himself in any known case wrote it.” Another of Spedding’s observations is that the contained manuscripts, list or lists of contents, and scribbles, all belong to a period “not later then the reign of Elizabeth.”

(p) Attentive readers of almost any biography of Francis Bacon will be surprised to learn that the record of his achievements begins so late. Singularly precocious, he has already reached the ripe age--so these biographies tell us--of 36, before anything worthy of mention can be placed to his credit except a small tract or booklet of confessedly unripe _Essays_, _Religious Meditations_, and _Coulers of Good and Evil_. That there must be something very wrong with the record is proved by the fact that already in 1597, the date of the booklet, everything that came, or was suspected of coming, from the pen of Bacon, was in such request that he was compelled, as he tells his brother, to publish these crudities lest they should be stolen or mutilated by piratical printers. His first really notable work, according to the conventional record, is the _Advancement of Learning_, which was not published until two-thirds of his life was behind him. By far the greater part of the remaining third was so absorbed by public affairs, and, after his fall, so harassed by ill-health and private worries, that no literary fruit could have been looked for. Yet its closing years were marked by an unparalleled outburst of literary activity--an outburst which, like the fear of piratical printers expressed in his letter of 1597, means, I take it, that his youth and early manhood had been devoted to the art and practice of literature. Shelley’s emphatic assertion that Bacon was a poet leaves the puzzle still unsolved. So, perhaps, does the discovery of harmony after harmony between Bacon and Shakespeare.

But the tension will begin to relax so soon as we shall have taken time to grasp the significance on these two facts: first, that the dramas attributed to Shakespeare (spelt as it was always printed in those days[72]) cannot be fitted into the life of the man Shakspere who ended his life, and was evidently content to end it, in what was then a small and rather squalid country town: and second, that the evidence--Ben Jonson’s--which is commonly supposed to establish the Stratford case, turns out to be in itself an enigma rather than a solution.

The riddle is almost read when we shall have satisfied ourselves that Bacon was not only a poet but a “concealed” poet, and that by his own confession. And by the time we have been shown Sir T. Mathew’s remark, in his letter to Viscount St. Alban: “The most prodigious ... wit I know ... is of your Lordship’s name though he be known by another,” the true and only solution stands revealed.

This letter was written, I imagine, just at the time when the First Folio (of Shakespeare) was the talk of literary London. It was excluded from Sir Tobie Mathew’s own _Collection of Letters_ (published 1660), but seems to have lived on, in seclusion no doubt, till 1762, by which time all thought about the “concealed poet’s” potent art had long been buried with his bones. Basil Montagu gives a copy of it, but Spedding, if I mistake not, ignores it.

This is by no means all the evidence that a better advocate than I could bring to bear on the question in dispute. But no stronger guarantee for the truth of the Bacon hypothesis can be demanded than that it should harmonise a large number of otherwise inexplicable data; and this demand I hope I may have done something to meet.

For the rival hypothesis, of course, there is much to be said. Never was Golden Bough the child or offspring of an ilex oak. Yet Vergil’s beautiful tale for ever adorns the lovely Avernian lake. Stratford-on-Avon was even more to the Shakespeare legend, and thereby may likewise be immortalised. “Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”

“THE TEMPEST” AND ITS SYMBOLISM[73]

_The Tempest_ in the form in which it originally left the author’s hand belongs, it would seem, with _A Winter’s Tale_, to the period 1607-1610, nearer probably to the 7 than the 10. The ground-plot may well have been adapted, as Herr Dorer suggested, from a story which ultimately got into a Spanish collection of Tales, called _Winter Nights_. Of the actual plot it is not necessary to say much. Twelve years before the opening of the play, Prospero, poet and enchanter, the victim of a wicked cabal, found himself and his daughter, then a mere babe, stranded on a barren island. Fortunately part of his library, consisting of volumes which he prized above everything else in the world, except Miranda, had somehow been allowed to accompany him. In the beloved society of these books and Miranda he managed to pass the time until relief came in the shape of a commotion brought about by his own consummate art.

The true centre of the play, the Sun about which its system revolves, is Miranda. It is for her sake, hers alone, that Prospero displays, and then for ever renounces, an art which he dearly loves and is certain he will miss.