active 19th century E. W. Smithson

“ 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.” ”

“ Find that man, find the author of Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello—to give but a few examples—and you will have found the true “Shakespeare.” But set your hearts at rest; you will never find him in the man whose vulgar and banal life (in the course of which not one—I do not say generous but—even respectable action can be discovered by all the researches of his biographers) is to be read in the pages of Halliwell-Phillipps and Sir Sidney Lee—the life of which so little is known, and yet so much too much! ”

“ I am convinced that every one who has preserved an independent opinion concerning the Shakespeare problem will recognise that the old positions of the traditional doctrine can no longer be maintained.... The laws of psychology, and, what is more, of simple common sense, ought to banish for ever the absurd theory which would have us believe in an incomparable writer whose life was absolutely out of harmony with the marvellous works which appeared in his name. ”

“ Waiving this point for the moment, the presumption of an early preoccupation with Science will be seen at a glance to be incompatible with what we know of Bacon’s attainments in that direction. A speech of his about 1592 in praise of “Knowledge”—a word which covered everything knowable—contains some of his finest and most characteristic thoughts. The praise of knowledge, he declares, is the praise of mind, since “knowledge is mind.... The minde itself is but an accident to knowledge, for knowledge is a double of that which is. The truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one.” ”

“ To assert that the fixed stars are “fire” is surely not to be taken as a proof of scientific ignorance! The sun itself is but a star, and all of us have read of the “mighty flames,” as Sir Robert Ball calls them, that leap from the surface of the sun. [86] But to affirm “that the sun doth move” as one of the certainties of human knowledge was in Shakespeare’s time tantamount to a rejection of the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus and Bruno in favour of the old Ptolemaic system, or, at any rate, of a system in which the earth is supposed to be at rest. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ That Bacon was Shakespeare, the only Shakespeare that matters, is merely a working hypothesis. Of other hypothetical Shakespeares who have been put forward, a certain Earl of Rutland would have deserved serious consideration, had he been as able a writer as was his father-in-law, Sidney. The only formidable competing hypothesis might seem to be that of a Great Unknown. ”

“ The Advancement of Learning is the work not of a scholar in the technical sense, but of an omnivorous apprehensive imaginative reader. It is the expression by an artist in words of the serried thoughts of a mind steeped in poetry, deep versed in human nature, but certainly not versed in natural philosophy as understood by his contemporaries—Galileo for example, Gilbert and others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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{137} 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. ”

“ Fame at last lets herself go: “Commonly (says she) The Curious are ill-natured and, like flies, seek Time’s corrupted parts to blow upon, but may the sound ones live with fame and honour, free from the molestation of these insects.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is likewise another and more subtle error which has crept into the human mind, namely, that of considering art as merely an assistant [79] to nature, having the power indeed to finish what nature has begun, to correct her when lapsing into error, or to set her free when in bondage, but by no means to change, transmute, or fundamentally alter nature. And this has bred a premature despair in human enterprises. ”

“ Judge Webb, while denying the allegation that “all that is proper to Shakespeare and to Bacon was the common knowledge or common error of the time,” writes as follows: “Whatever inferences may be deduced from the fact, it surely is a fact that the poet, like the philosopher, maintained the theory of pneumaticals, the theory of the transformation of species, the theory that the sun is the efficient cause of storms, the theory that flame is a fixed body, the theory that the stars are fires, and the theory that the heavens revolve around the earth. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Again, what sort of ignorance was threatened by the beauty and finish of Shakespeare’s lines? The ignorance of persons who for Shakespeare mistook a man untinctured with literature? The “Sweet Swan of Avon” apostrophe suggests comparison with what, in his Masque of Owles (1626) , Jonson wrote about “Warwick Muses.” These charming creatures are there represented as inspired, not by “Pegasus,” but by a “Hoby-horse.” [47] Was this sarcasm reminiscent of the well-known lines which an Oxford graduate informs us were “ordered” by the Stratford man “to be cut upon his tombstone”? ”

“ On one side, then, we are brought into contact with a poet or maker whose poems elude us. On another side we are confronted with poems whose poet or maker eludes us—some of us. What if Shakespeare were to Bacon what Callisthenes, Aristophanes’ actor-friend, was to Aristophanes? Suppose by way of working hypothesis that such was the case, that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s. ”

“ Without the aid of hypotheses, science were impossible: Astronomers would still be expounding the once venerated doctrine of a stable Earth and a revolving Sun, a doctrine daily corroborated by the testimony of our eyes. Moreover, the “venerable belief” that Shakspere and Shakespeare were one and the same is mainly founded on the hypothesis that Ben Jonson’s famous Ode to Shakespeare (1623) is all to be taken at face-value. Praise—splendid praise—is unquestionably its dominant constituent; but other ingredients—enigma, jest, make-believe—are commingled with the praise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The poet in Bacon, as in Wordsworth and others, had expired with the passing of youth. (3) Bacon imagined himself the Discoverer of a New Instrument or method, by which human life would be so beatified that posterity would revere him as one of its greatest benefactors; if only men of science (such as Harvey) were for ever deprived of excuse for pooh-poohing the Novum Organum, merely because its inventor was none other than Shakespeare, sonneteer and dreamer of dreams. ”

“ Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
Upon this Judge Webb comments that Bacon, notwithstanding the teaching of Bruno, and of Galileo, maintained that “the celestial bodies, most of them, are fires or flames as the Stoics held,” and that, notwithstanding the teaching of Copernicus, he held the mediæval doctrine of “the heavens turning about in a most rapid motion.” And he adds, with a touch of sarcasm: “The marvel is that the omniscient Shakespeare with his superhuman genius maintained these exploded errors as confidently as Bacon.” ”

“ He sums up Gilbert in terms of contempt, his own contribution to the subject of magnetism being: “There is formed in everything a double nature of good, the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a part or member of a greater or more general form. Therefore we see the iron in particular sympathy moveth to the loadstone, but yet if it exceed a certain quantity, it forsaketh the affection to the loadstone and like a good patriot moveth to the earth which is the region or country of massy bodies.” ”

“ 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.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Harrison does not say, as Shakespeare and Bacon say, that the art is part of nature (“The art itself is nature”) . He merely speaks of art as an additamentum quoddam{176} naturæ, which is just the proposition that Bacon (and Shakespeare, by implication) condemns as fallacious. Professor Dowden then tells us that this thought as to art and nature was prominent in the teaching of Paracelsus whom Bacon refuses to honour. But whether or not Bacon refuses to honour Paracelsus he was, at any rate, familiar with him, and makes frequent mention of 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. ”