Part 16 (2/2)
about Ess.e.x. The words are his own! (1604). No plays, no Venus and Adonis, nothing but enthusiastic service of Ess.e.x and the Sonnets.
Mr. Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn some pageant of Ess.e.x (November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed such matter as ”Mr.
Bacon in Praise of Knowledge” (containing his usual views about regenerating science), and ”Mr. Bacon's Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.” {279b} Both are excellent, though, for a Court festival, not very gay.
He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson's (?) famous indictment of Elizabeth's Government, in Observations on a Libel. {280a} What with ruminating on Ess.e.x, and this essay, he was not solely devoted to Venus and Adonis and to furbis.h.i.+ng-up old plays, though, no doubt, he MAY have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and indulged his luscious imaginations in Venus and Adonis.
I would not limit the potentialities of his genius. But, certainly, this amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention his severe ”study and meditation” on science.
All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis, do not exhaust his exercises. Bacon, living laborious days, plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth's disgrace, and vainly competed with c.o.ke for the Attorney-Generals.h.i.+p, and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Ess.e.x's affairs, to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit for the Solicitors.h.i.+p; to trifle with the composition of ”Formularies and Elegancies” (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for the Masters.h.i.+p of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed Ess.e.x (1600-1), while always ”labouring in secret” at that vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied him, he says, and distracted his attention from his practice and from affairs of State. {281a} Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the most onerous. He was also writing The Advancement of Learning (1605). ”I do confess,” he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, ”since I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from that I have done.” {281b} His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning: this came between him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and his private schemes and suits. To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare's company, and the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets. Even without this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but with it--he needs the st.u.r.dy faith of the Rationalist to accept him and his plot--to write plays under the pseudonym of ”William Shakespeare.”
Talk of miracles as things which do not happen! The activities of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man's mind and heart,-- especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his pa.s.sionately adored Ess.e.x to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older. No wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Oth.e.l.lo, and saw life en noir: man delighted him not, nor woman either.
The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon, do not make his authors.h.i.+p of the plays a physical impossibility. But they make it an intellectual miracle. Perhaps I may be allowed to set off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere's knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. {282a} I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip of his pen. Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and his legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious productions. (But why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholars.h.i.+p and history?)
By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of the Folio. {282b} ”If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays, he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the Folio, and the style of it” (stuffed with terms of law) ”would be accounted for.” Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote the Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature.
”Legal terms abounded in all plays and poems of the period,” says Sir Sidney Lee, and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word ”all.” {283a} However he says, ”We must admit that this use of legal jargon is frequently found in lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan period--in sonnets for example, where it seems to us intolerable.”
Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes. {283b} The lawyers all agree, however, that Shakespeare does the legal style ”more natural,”
and more accurately than the rest. And yet I cannot even argue that, if he did use legal terms at all, he would be sure to do it pretty well.
For on this point of Will's use of legal phraseology I frankly profess myself entirely at a loss. To use it in poetry was part of the worse side of taste at that period. The lawyers with one voice declare that Will's use of it is copious and correct, and that their ”mystery” is difficult, their jargon hard to master; ”there is nothing so dangerous,” wrote Lord Campbell, ”as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry.” I have not tampered with it.
Perhaps a man of genius who found it interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily than lawyers deem possible. But Will, so accurate in his legal terms, is so inaccurate on many other points; for example, in civil and natural history, and in cla.s.sic lore. Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally at sea as a naturalist.
On the habits of bees, for example, ”his natural history of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.” {284a} Virgil, though not a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared with Will. About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed. His Natural History was folklore, or was taken from that great mediaeval storehouse of absurdities, the popular work of Pliny. ”He went to contemporary error or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to nature,” says a critic quoted by Mr. Greenwood. {284b} Was that worthy of Bacon?
All these charges against le vieux Williams (as Theophile Gautier calls our Will) I admit. But Will was no Bacon; Will had not ”taken all knowledge for his province.” Bacon, I hope, had not neglected Bees! Thus the problem, why is Will accurate in his legal terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quant.i.ty, in history, in cla.s.sic matters, is not by me to be solved. I can only surmise that from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason, he had read law- books, or drawn information from Templars about the meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was technically accurate.
We have now pa.s.sed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian arguments against Will Shakespeare's authors.h.i.+p of the plays and poems. Their chief argument for Bacon is aut Diabolus, aut Franciscus, which, freely interpreted, means, ”If Bacon is not the author, who the devil is?”
We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them, namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early years of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent place in the world of the drama. His authors.h.i.+p is explicitly vouched for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic, Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had been one of Henslowe's ”hands,” and lived into the Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within, and HIS ”mellifluous Shakespeare” is ”Will,” as his Beaumont was ”Frank,” his Marlowe ”Kit,” his Fletcher, ”Jack.” The author of Daiphantus (1604), mentioning the popularity of Hamlet, styles it ”one of friendly Shakespeare's tragedies.” Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known and friendly character. The other authors of allusions did not need to say WHO their ”Shakespeare” was, any more than they needed to say WHO Marlowe or any other poet was.
We have examined the possibly unprecedented argument which demands that they who mention Shakespeare as the poet must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly that he is also the actor.
”But all may have been deceived” by the long conspiracy of the astute Bacon, or the Nameless One. To believe this possible, considering the eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival playwrights, is to be credulous indeed. The Baconians, representing Will almost as incapable of the use of pen and ink as ”the old hermit of Prague,” destroy their own case. A Will who had to make his mark, like his father, could not pose as an author even to the call-boy of his company. Mr. Greenwood's bookless Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power of ”b.u.mbasting out a blank verse,” is a rather less impossible pretender, indeed; but why and when did the speaker of patois, the bookless one, write blank verse, from 1592 onwards, and where are his blank verses? Where are the ”works” of Poet-Ape?
As to the man, even Will by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was ”a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant, smooth wit.” To his fellow-actors he was ”so worthy a friend and fellow” (a.s.sociate). To Jonson, ”he was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed so freely that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.” If Jonson here refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had that extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as remarkable originality of richly figured expressions, which is so characteristic of the style of Shakespeare's plays. In this prodigality he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks; ”panting Time toils after him in vain,” and even the reader, much more the listener, might say, sufflaminandus est; ”he needs to have the brake put on.” {287a}
Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will. Only despair can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare, Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as ”falling into those things which could not escape laughter . . . which were ridiculous.” But to this last poor s.h.i.+ft and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians and Baconians reduced.
Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.
But it is ”impossible” that a man should have known so much, especially of cla.s.sical literature and courtly ways, and foreign manners and phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five years at a Latin school, and five or six years in that forcing-house of faculty, the London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.
”With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished,” says a contemporary. {288a} If a doubter will look at the cheap and common books of that day (a play in quarto, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold for fippence) in any great collection; he will not marvel that to a lover of books, poor as he might be, many were accessible. Such a man cannot be kept from books.
If the reader will look into ”the translations and imitations of the cla.s.sics which poured from the press . . . the poems and love- pamphlets and plays of the University wits” (when these chanced to be printed), ”the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste,” {288b} he will understand the literary soil in which the genius of Shakespeare blossomed as rapidly as the flowers in ”Adonis' garden.”
The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated with cla.s.sical myths, anecdotes, philosophic dicta--a world of knowledge of a kind then ”in widest commonalty spread,” but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore seems recondite learning.
The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to ”dispute their way through Europe,” made the Italian tour, and, notoriously, were ”Italianate.” They would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence, Venice, and Rome. Actors visited Denmark and Germany. No man at home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious Venetian ”tranect or common ferry,” the gondolas, and the Rialto.
There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the foreign wars. Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish. That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works. For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly's Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the houses of the great. As to untaught n.o.bility of manners, there came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding village on the marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of exquisite grace, propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her: of her manners and swift wit and repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant evidence. Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the historic record is unimpeached as regards that child of genius, Jeanne d'Arc.
<script>