Part 2

“This is, after all [says Mr. Townsend], as good a summary as can be given of the wretched arguments upon which Mr. William Henry Smith bases his new, preposterous and altogether untenable theory. They may be dismissed in a few sentences. 1. Shakespeare’s character could not possibly be the biography of another man. 2. Bacon’s ability for dramatic composition can not be accepted as proof that he wrote plays, to the authorship of which he never laid claim, and which were attributed to, and acknowledged by, one of his contemporaries. 3. Lord Southampton, the friend of Shakespeare and Bacon, is, as we shall see more fully in another chapter, a witness against Mr. William Henry Smith and his theory. 4. Bacon’s leisure and want of funds will never justify even the suspicion that he wrote the plays of Shakespeare. 5. The assertion that Shakespeare was a man of business rather than poetry is directly at variance with the truth, as any person who has perused the _Venus and Adonis_, _Lucrece_, and the _Sonnets_, will at once admit. It is equally false to assert that Shakespeare did not claim the authorship of these dramas.”

Here is the author’s comparison of Bacon and Shakespeare:

“No two minds could be more dissimilar than those of Bacon and Shakespeare; they were both monarchs in the realms of literature, but they sat upon different thrones; theirs was not a joint sovereignty; they ruled over different empires. Shakespeare possessed great natural genius; Bacon’s mind was a store-house of learning. The one had power to create, the other to mould all human knowledge to his mighty will. Bacon was a dictator amongst philosophers and schoolmen; Shakespeare, a king among poets. The one dived deep beneath the surface, and brought up rich pearls of thought; the other plucked the flowers as he passed along; received his inspiration direct from all-bounteous Nature, and held mysterious communion with her.”

(Mr. Townsend is better known as the author of the _Manual of Dates_ and _Men of the Time_. He resided in London, and died there in 1869. A series of disappointments so affected his mind as to lead him to take his own life.)

16 REVIEWS OF TOWNSEND’S SHAKESPEARE NOT AN IMPOSTOR.

_a_--In the _Athenæum_, London, February 14, 1857, p. 213.

_b_--In the _Literary Gazette_, London, Feb. 21, 1857, p. 181.

_Pro-Sh._

“The book is honestly meant, but can its writer conceive that any such book was needed? If he does, the fact is as noticeable as Mr. William Henry Smith’s lucubrations.”--_Athenæum._

17 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE UNFOLDED. By DELIA BACON. With a Preface by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. London: Groombridge & Sons, 1857. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1857. 8vo. pp. 582.

_Anti-Sh._

Miss Bacon’s book was mainly written during her residence in London. In it she makes no attempt to deal with the historical side of the question--that being reserved for another volume, never published. She confines herself to the development of her theory of a hidden under-current of philosophy in the works of both Bacon and Shakespeare, veiled in cipher and allegory for the Elizabethan times, but to be read and understood by a future age. This is outlined in Mr. Hawthorne’s preface:

“In the present volume, accordingly, the writer applies herself to the demonstration and development of a system of philosophy, which has presented itself to her as underlying the superficial and ostensible text of Shakespeare’s plays. Traces of the same philosophy, too, she conceives herself to have found in the acknowledged works of Lord Bacon, and in the works of other writers contemporary with him. All agree in one system; all the traces indicate a common understanding and unity of purpose in men among whom no brotherhood has hitherto been suspected, except as representatives of a grand and brilliant age, when the human intellect made a marked step in advance.”

As to the authorship, Miss Bacon points to Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and possibly others of the wits and dramatists of the age. Her style of writing is so redundant that no brief extract can be made, within the limits of this work, which will give anything like a clear statement of her theories. In the following, the theme is the Shakespearian dramas:

“Man, as he is, booked, surveyed--surveyed from the continent of nature, put down as he is in her book of kinds, not as he is from his own interior, isolated conceptions only--the universal powers and causes as they are developed in him, in his untaught affections, in his utmost sensuous darkness--the universal principle instanced where it is most buried, the cause in nature found--man as he is in his heights and in his depths, ‘from his lowest note to the top of his key’--man in his possibilities, in his actualities, in his thought, in his speech, in his book language, and in his every day words, in his loftiest lyric tongue, in his lowest pit of play-house degradation, searched out, explained, interpreted. * * * * It is man’s life, and the culture of it, erected into an art or science, that these books contain. In the lowness of the lowest, and in the aspiration of the noblest, the powers whose entire history must make the basis of a successful morality and policy are found. It is all abstracted or drawn into contemplation, ‘that the precepts of cure and culture may be more rightly concluded.’ ‘For that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.’”

“It is not necessary to illustrate this criticism in this case, because in this case the design looks through the execution elsewhere. The criticism of the Novum Organum, the criticism of the Advancement of Learning, and the criticism of Raleigh’s History of the World, than which there is none finer, when once you penetrate its crust of profound erudition, is here on the surface. And the scholasticism is not more obtrusive here, the learned sock is not more ostentatiously paraded, than in some critical places in these performances; while the humor that underlies the erudition issues from a depth of learning not less profound.”

For a sketch of the theory of the book, see the extract (Title 20) from the _National Review_.

18 REVIEW OF DELIA BACON’S PHILOSOPHY OF SHAKESPEARE UNFOLDED. In the _Athenæum_, London, April 11, 1857, p. 461.

_Pro-Sh._

19 REVIEW OF THE BOOKS OF DELIA BACON AND W. H. SMITH. In the _Literary Gazette_, London, May 9, 1857.

_Pro-Sh._

20 THE ALLEGED NON-EXISTENCE OF SHAKESPEARE. In the _National Review_, London, July, 1857.

_Pro-Sh._

A very long and caustic review of Delia Bacon’s book. We give the commencement of it, from its value to the reader as an interpretation of the book itself.

“American philosophy delights in hiding its light under a bushel. Emerson is not easy reading; the Poughkeepsie seer (not that we wish to class them together) is sometimes difficult of construction; but Delia Bacon is harder still. We have met with nothing in the range of literature so like the attempt to find a needle in a bundle of hay, as the task of extracting a definite meaning from the vast body of obscure verbiage and inconsequential reasoning in which she has folded up her ideas. As far as we can make out, however, the following is her theme and the thread of her argument:

In the days of Elizabeth and James, a conquest more complete and more degrading than that of the first Norman King had overwhelmed England. At the same time, the first fruits of the revival of learning were ripening in England. There was a body of men here, at the head of whom were Raleigh and Lord Bacon, of boundless penetration, wisdom, and philanthropy. The cause of freedom and human advancement was that to which their whole souls and lives were devoted. Some of them ventured an overt act against the government, which was speedily crushed. It was necessary to conceal the new light which it was their mission to shed forth upon the world. Yet so to hide it, that while it should not betray itself to the jealous scrutiny of a tyrannical autocracy, it yet should be discoverable to the gifted eye, and buried only to be disinterred, in its due time, by the sagacity of future generations. We know that in his youth Lord Bacon busied himself with ciphers; he speaks of word ciphers as well as letter ciphers; be sure, then, that in ciphers he has hidden the learning he dared not lay bare to the face of day. Those who search his works with a discriminating eye, will find abundant hints scattered through them that they have an esoteric meaning subtly hidden beneath their obvious expressions. He was the master-mind of a ‘secret association’ of men who made it their business to perfect and transmit to posterity a ‘new and all-comprehending science of life and practice.’ It is in the later and more finished works of this school--the Advancement of Learning, Hamlet, Lear, the Tempest, and the Novum Organum--that the key to the secret doctrines of which it is the object of Miss Bacon’s work to furnish the interpretation is best found; but it lies also wrapt up, like the tree in the bud, in the earliest and most faulty plays of the collection.”

21 BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. An Inquiry Touching Players, Play-Houses, and Play-Writers, in the days of Elizabeth. By WILLIAM HENRY SMITH, ESQ. To which is appended an abstract of a MS. respecting Tobie Matthew. London: John Russell Smith, 1857. 12mo. pp. 162.

_Anti-Sh._

This is an enlargement and extension of the letter to Lord Ellesmere.

“To consider the probability of these plays having been written by William Shakespeare, and to attack the evidence by which the assertion that they were is supported, is our present object.”

“Proof that they were written by some other person, we do not yet hope to be able to adduce, but merely such evidence of the probability of this being the case, as may induce some active inquiry in the direction indicated.”

A short summary of Mr. Smith’s arguments will be found under the answer of Mr. Townsend to the Ellesmere letter (Title 15). Mr. Smith says in his epitome:

* * * “Very little indeed is known of the history of Shakespeare, and that in no way connects him with these plays--that the writer of them must have possessed a vast variety of talents, such as have been reported to have been found in Francis Bacon, and in him alone; that the wit and poetry are of a kind that were peculiarly his--that William Shakespeare, of Stratford-on-Avon, connected himself with a class which had only recently sprung into existence, and which were held in the utmost contempt--that he was neither eminent as an actor, nor as a writer, during his life time, nor celebrated as such in the period immediately succeeding his death--that there are some remarkable coincidences of expression in these plays and in the writings of Bacon, and that the latter was ever careful to note any thing like a quotation * * * [and, as reasons why Bacon did not claim the plays] that literary labor was not at that time voluntarily pursued for pecuniary recompense, and the few that followed such an occupation were regarded with the utmost contempt--that a play was hardly considered a literary work, and ranked infinitely below a sonnet, and that learned men would as little have prided themselves upon writing one, as upon writing a _bon mot_.” * * * * *

22 NOTICE in the _Athenæum_, London, August 15, 1857, of the correspondence between Hawthorne and William Henry Smith, p. 1036.

_Pro-Sh._

Mr. Smith transmits a copy of the correspondence above mentioned, but the _Athenæum_ declines to be convinced that he knew nothing of Delia Bacon’s theory previous to the publication of his Ellesmere letter.

23 SHAKESPEARE IN MODERN THOUGHT. In the _North American Review_, October, 1857. [By REV. C. C. SHACKFORD.] 24 pages.

_Pro-Sh._

A portion of the article is devoted to a review of Miss Bacon’s book.

“There is, on the other hand, in Miss Bacon’s work, a spirit of subtile analysis, a deep moral insight, and a penetrating research, which, separated from the monomania of her particular theory, enlists our admiration, and is adapted to throw much light upon Shakespeare’s genius, and makes us feel that there are in him vast depths of thought, and presentations of great human and social laws of development, of which, as yet, we have scarcely dreamed. On every page, nay, over almost every paragraph, we are forced to exclaim: ‘O matter and impertinency, mixed reason in madness!’ The significant contents of the political and philosophical _status_ of that age are minutely exhibited. The particular theory of the book, and the special pleading through inferences, hints, and analogies in thought and expression, to prove that the philosophy and the plays of the age proceeded literally from the same brain and the same hand, we may put aside as impertinent, and a merely fine-spun, fanciful speculation, and there will be left a valuable contribution to the real criticism of Shakespeare, as embodying the whole spirit of the Baconian philosophy, and as the ripe flower and consummated product of the tendencies and outstreaming influences of that wonderful period of development for the English genius.”

24 HARRINGTON: A STORY OF TRUE LOVE. [By WILLIAM D. O’CONNOR.] Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860, 12mo. pp. 558. (See Chapter XII, pages 215-221).

_Anti-Sh._

To explain this unique title: Hawthorne, in his _Recollections of a Gifted Woman_ (Title 27), says of Miss Bacon’s book:

“I believe it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader. But, since my return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me--whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work--it belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity.”

The “young man” referred to (in 1863) is the author of this novel. The story itself is of the times of the Fugitive Slave Law. Mr. O’Connor introduces his own Baconian theories through the dialogue of his title-hero, Harrington. He also renders an acknowledgment to Miss Bacon as their source, in a note at the end of the book:

“The reader of the twelfth chapter of this book, may already have observed that Harrington, if he had lived, would have been a believer in the theory regarding the origin and purpose of the Shakespearian drama, as developed in the admirable work by Miss Delia Bacon, entitled, ‘The Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Plays Unfolded,’ in which belief I should certainly agree with Harrington. I wish it were in my power to do even the smallest justice to that mighty and eloquent volume, whose masterly comprehension and insight, though they could not save it from being trampled upon by the brutal bison of the English press, yet lift it to the dignity, whatever may be its faults, of being the best work ever composed upon the Baconian or Shakespearian writings. It has been scouted by the critics as the product of a distempered ideality. Perhaps it is. But there is a prudent wisdom, says Goethe, and there is a wisdom that does not remind us of prudence; and, in like manner, I may say that there is a sane sense, and there is a sense that does not remind us of sanity. At all events, I am assured that the candid and ingenuous reader Miss Bacon wishes for, will find it more to his profit to be insane with her on the subject of Shakespeare, than sane with Dr. Johnson.”

(Mr. O’CONNOR resides in Washington, and is an officer connected with the Treasury Department. It is understood that he has finally obeyed the injunction Hawthorne put upon him, “to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity,” and has prepared an article on the subject, which will soon be published.)

25 EDITORS AND COMMENTATORS, in the Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare. By SIR JAMES PRIOR. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1860.

_Unc._

Writing of a date about 1780-90, Sir James Prior says of the Shakespearian discussions:

“Editors and commentators appear at every turn in all societies. In the club-house we meet three or four of a morning; in the park see them meditating by the Serpentine, or under a tree in Kensington Gardens; no dinner table is without one or two; in the theatre you view them by the dozens. Volume after volume is poured out in note, comment, conjecture, new reading, statement, or mis-statement, contradiction, or variation of all kinds. Reviews, magazines, and newspapers report these with as little mercy on the reader, as to give occasional emendations of their own. Some descant upon his sentiments, some upon his extravagancies, some upon his wonderful creations, or flights of imagination, some upon his language, or phraseology. Several suppose that he wrote more plays than he acknowledged; others, that he fathered more than he had written, while the last opinions are still more original and extraordinary--that his name is akin to a myth, and _that he wrote no plays at all_! Every new aspirant in this struggle for distinction aims to push his predecessor from his stool.”

26 NOTES AND QUERIES. London: THIRD SERIES. From T. J. Buckton, II, 502, Dec. 27, 1862.

_Unc._

27 RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. In the _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1863. (See pages 43-58.) Reprinted also with Hawthorne’s Works in _Our Old Home_.

_Unc._

This is interesting as a record of Miss Bacon’s experiences in England while writing her book, and especially so as to her efforts to have the tomb of Shakespeare opened, believing that she would find within it manuscript proofs of her theory. Hawthorne himself, though he wrote the preface to her book, was not a believer. “Being conscious within myself of a sturdy unbelief,” he says.

“I had heard, long ago, that she believed that the material evidences of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare’s grave. Recently, as I understood her, this notion had been somewhat modified, and was now accurately defined and fully developed in her mind, with a result of perfect certainty. In Lord Bacon’s letters, on which she laid her finger as she spoke, she had discovered the key and clue to the whole mystery. There were definite and minute instructions how to find a will and other documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed (when and by whom she did not inform me) in a hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare’s grave-stone. Thus the terrible prohibition to remove the stone was accounted for. The directions, she intimated, went completely and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of coming at the treasures; and even, if I remember right, were so contrived as to ward off any troublesome consequences likely to ensue from the interference of the parish-officers. All that Miss Bacon now remained in England for--indeed, the object for which she had come hither, and which had kept her here for three years past--was to obtain possession of these material and unquestionable proofs of the authenticity of her theory.”

28 THE IDENTITY OF SHAKESPEARE AS A WRITER OF PLAYS. A chapter in _The Biography and Bibliography of Shakespeare_. By HENRY G. BOHN. Privately-printed (40 copies) for the Philobiblon Society. London, 1863. (See pages 291-300.)

_Pro-Sh._

This chapter gives a sketch of the various anti-Shakespearian works, following it by the historical and contemporary evidence in favor of Shakespeare, derived from Ben Jonson, Francis Meres, Milton, Greene, Basse, etc., and adds:

“The positive testimony of Ben Jonson alone, who, though Shakespeare’s friend, was a rival, and not at all likely to concede more than belonged to him, ought in itself be a sufficient answer. He was constantly near the poet; knew what he wrote, and when he wrote; and after his death was engaged in promoting the publication of his works. In conjunction with him, John Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s intimate friends and fellow-players, and who are recognized as such in his will, attest the authorship of all the plays in the first folio, by subscribing themselves as witnesses. This volume, too, is dedicated to those high-minded noblemen, William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, who would not, and could not, have consented to let themselves be made party to a notorious fraud. Indeed, King James himself, as well as the Earl of Southampton (who was intimate with both Lord Bacon and Shakespeare) and all the players, playwrights, and literati of the day, must have been acquiescent in the contemptible and gratuitous deception--may we not say forgery?”

* * * * *

“In conclusion, we will only observe that Shakespeare had jealous and watchful rivals enough to expose him had any suspicion existed of his not being the actual author of the fame-absorbing plays which bore his name during his life-time.”

29 LORD PALMERSTON. An article in _Fraser’s Magazine_, London, November, 1865.

_Anti-Sh._

Page 666 contains the paragraph usually relied upon to prove Lord Palmerston’s belief in the Baconian theory:

“Literature was the fashion of Lord Palmerston’s early days, when (as Sydney Smith remarked) a false quantity in a man was pretty nearly the same as a _faux pas_ in a woman. He was tolerably well up in the chief Latin and English classics; but he entertained one of the most extraordinary paradoxes touching the greatest of them, that was ever broached by a man of his intellectual calibre. He maintained that the plays of Shakespeare were really written by Bacon, who passed them off under the name of an actor, for fear of compromising his professional prospects and philosophic gravity. Only last year when this subject was discussed at Broadlands, Lord Palmerston suddenly left the room, and speedily returned with a small volume of dramatic criticisms, in which the same theory (originally started by an American lady) was supported by supposed analogies of thought and expression. ‘There,’ he said, ‘read that and you will come to my opinion.’ When the positive testimony of Ben Jonson, in the verses prefixed to the edition of 1623, was adduced, he remarked, ‘O, those fellows always stand up for one another, or he may have been deceived like the rest.’ The argument had struck Lord Palmerston by its originality, and he wanted leisure for a searching exposure of its groundlessness.”

The volume alluded to was Smith’s _Bacon and Shakespeare_.

30 MISS DELIA BACON. Chapter XL, in Mrs. JOHN FARRAR’S _Recollections of Seventy Years_. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866. 16mo. (Pages 319-331.)

_Unc._

An interesting account of Miss Bacon’s historical lectures, and of her subsequent experiences in England.