Albert Frederick Calvert

“ There is not a single argument of the hundreds that have been advanced to deprive Shakespeare of his mantle which can stand the test of investigation. Carlyle declared Bacon to be as incapable of writing Hamlet as of making this planet. Spedding, who devoted thirty years of his life to the study of Bacon, emphatically asserts that, “if there were any reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author (of Shakespeare) , I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not Bacon.” ”

“ But there are acts in the life of Bacon that, shorn of all the swaddling clothes of specious explanation, reveal the man in a light which, in spite of valiant speculation and portentous argument, in spite even of Bacon’s sworn word, render his claims to the mantle of Shakespeare an absurdity—and an impertinence. ”

“ To the jaundiced mind of Robert Greene, the accumulation of means by an actor was a crime in itself, but that a mere mummer should dare to compete with the scholar and the poet in the composition of plays—more, that he should write plays that exceeded in popularity those of the superior person, the student—was a personal affront. ”

“ It is safe to assume that no writer who had produced poems or plays inferior to those of Shakespeare could be attributed with the authorship of these plays—Shakespeare can only be compared with himself. And the only author who cannot be compared, in this way, to his instant discomfiture, is Bacon, whose published work is, in form and style and essence utterly dissimilar from that of Shakespeare. ”

“ Baconianism is so wilful and so obstinate that it is not amenable to any treatment that has yet been invented. It has its root in an entire misconception of the character and temperament of the man Bacon; it is nourished on the grossest misrepresentation of the man Shakespeare that the memory of an author has ever been subjected to. ”

“ It has been my endeavour to show that, while all that we know of Bacon’s private life and his public career—the evidence of his deeds, his sentiments, his prose, and his verse—prove him to have been a man incapable of conceiving the poetry131 of the Plays, there is nothing in the life of Shakespeare, when freed of the miserable misrepresentations and baseless accusations introduced by his traducers, which makes it difficult for us to regard him as the rightful author. One thing we must recognise in the writer of the greatest poetry of all times—his genius. ”

“ The biographers of Bacon have been burdened with the ungrateful necessity of finding excuses, and of making endless apologies for their hero. Bacon’s greatest editor, the scholar who devoted some 30 years to the work—who brought more knowledge, and disclosed more analytical acumen and skilled judgment in his task than any editor ever brought to bear upon the life and works of a single author—has stated his reasons for his disbelief in the Baconian theory. ”

“ His advice and his opinions betray a mean view of life and its obligations. He had no sense of duty towards his fellow men where duty clashed with his personal interests. His methods are instinct with craft, artifice, and finesse—his advice to Essex, and to the King, was, for this very reason, misleading and abortive. It is incontrovertible that Bacon’s writings and Shakespeare’s plays are crammed with all kinds of erudition, and Coleridge has claimed for the latter that they form “an inexhaustible mine of virgin wealth.” ”

“ If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar, or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education. Given the faculties (which nature bestows as fully on the poor as on the rich) you will find that the required knowledge, art and dexterity which the Shakespearean plays imply, were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation, and had nothing else to do. ”

“ In propounding their theory that Bacon was the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, the Baconians rely on two main arguments: the plausibility of the idea that they should have emanated from the man whom Macaulay declared to possess the “most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men,” and the extraordinary unlikelihood that a man of Shakespeare’s origin and antecedents should have written them. ”

“ It is clearly impossible to credit any of Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatists with the authorship, because their acknowledged work is so immeasurably inferior to his, that any such suggestion must appear ridiculous. ”

“ Great writers, being contemporary, have many features in common; but if they are really great writers, they write naturally, and nature is always individual. I doubt whether there are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles, and practised in such observations. I was myself well read in Shakespeare before I began with Bacon, and I have been forced to cultivate what skill I have in distinguishing Bacon’s style to a high degree ”

“ The argument of the Baconians—the term is uniformly employed here to mean the supporters of the Baconian theory of the authorship of Shakespeare—is based on the honest belief that the varied qualifications necessary for the production of the Plays were possessed by only one man of the period in which they were written. And having resolutely determined that the man could be no other than Francis Bacon, they set themselves to work with the same resoluteness, to bend, twist, and contort all facts and evidence to suit their theory. ”

“ For every act of Bacon’s life we are met with apologies, explanations, and extravagant defences. Lord Macaulay’s bitter and brilliant analysis of the Lord Chancellor (a retaliatory treatise prompted by the ingenuity and perversions of his enamoured champions) , has been robbed of its sting by the less brilliant, but more knowledgable and judicious Spedding, who in his Evenings with a Reviewer, clearly and dispassionately reduces Macaulay’s estimate to its correct biographical and critical level. ”

“ He was consistently and characteristically indifferent as to what became of his plays, and in this he forms a striking contrast to Bacon, who had a mania for preserving and publishing every particle of his writings. In Shakespeare, this neglect, if surprising, is at least consistent; in Bacon it is too antagonistic to what is known of his idiosyncracies to be entertained for a single moment. Bacon must have realised that his versification of the Psalms was of less merit than the poetry in the plays. ”

“ A politician by heredity, a student by nature, a courtier and place-seeker by force of circumstances, he fulfilled his inevitable destiny. In a court in which the politics were based on the teachings of Machiavelli, in which intrigue was a sport and a fine art, where flattery and lying were necessities, and personal advancement the one incentive to every act, Bacon intrigued, supplicated, flattered, cringed, and lied himself into prominence. ”

“ Bacon, he contends, was not writing his plays for fame, but for the money it brought him. Mr. Theobald contends that the plays could not have been written by Shakespeare because he was too busily employed in “carving his own fortune” ... “filling his pockets” ... “working for the present, not for the future,” to devote the necessary leisure to literary pursuits. Bacon himself, according to the bi-literal cipher discoveries of Mrs. Gallup, declares that so far from receiving remuneration for his plays, he paid “a sufficient reward in gold” to Shakespeare for the use of his name. ”

“ The people who read Shakespeare form a pitiably insignificant proportion of the community, but they are multitudinous compared with those who have the remotest acquaintance with the works of Francis Bacon. ”

“ The Baconian students cannot deny that there are many characteristics in their candidate which only the most devout can reconcile with the spirit of the plays. It, therefore, became further necessary to ring the changes on their candidate; to employ the arguments of induction and deduction as best suited the exigencies of the task. In creating the idol of Bacon, much had to be read into the subject, and it would seem that the simplest method by which they could advance the claims of Bacon was by discrediting the claims of Shakespeare. ”

“ Bacon is an extinct volcano. The fact is not creditable to the culture of the age, but it is incontrovertible.
It has, on this account, been found necessary for Baconians to describe to their readers what manner of man this was whom they would perch on Shakespeare’s pedestal, and they have accomplished their task in the manner best calculated to lend plausibility to their theories. Moreover, they have displayed a subtle appreciation of the magnitude of their undertaking. The Shakespeare plays, in common with all great works, reflect in some degree the personality of their creator. ”

“ Those who would deck out the memory of Bacon with the literary robe, “the garment which,” according to Mr. R. M. Theobald, is “too big and costly” for the “small and insignificant personality” of Shakespeare, will not concede that he was better educated than his father, who—the error does not lose for want of repetition—“signed30 his name by a mark.” Supporters of the traditional theory, however, reply, “we do not require evidence to show that he was an educated man—we have his works, and the evidence of Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell to prove it.” ”

“ An author’s morality, or rather his lack of it, may not detract from the grace and clarity of his style, but it must inevitably leave its mark in his matter. There is poetry that reveals only the brilliance of the writer’s brain—if such can be termed poetry; there is prose which lays bare the writer’s heart. In Shakespeare we have verse which evidences the possession of both the mental and the temperamental qualities in the highest perfection. There is5 Shakespeare the genius, the artist, the creator, the master manipulator of theatrical machinery. ”

“ Sinnett, in common with Mr. Theobald and, indeed, all other upholders of the Baconian theory, has a distinctly original way of dealing with matters of fact. Mr. Theobald invents his facts to suit his argument; Mr. Sinnett ignores all facts that prove intractable. Thus Mr. Sinnett in The National Review: “All through the plays there is no allusion to Stratford.” And again: “While Bacon seems to have gone North to curry favour with James on his accession, Macbeth was written just after that event. Certainly there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare ever went to Scotland.” ”