SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY

And though full loth, ’cause their ill natures urge,I’ll send abroad a satire with a scourge,That to their shame for this abuse shall strip them,And being naked in their vices whip them.And to be sure of those that are most rashNot one shall ’scape him that deserves the lash.

There is also an Epigram to “Time,” in which Wither asks:

Now swift-devouring, bald, and ill-fac’t Time,Dost not thou blush to see thyself uncloak’t?

Another Epigram is to “Satyro-Mastix,” the last lines of which are:

Then scourge of Satyrs hold thy whip from mine,Or I will make my rod lash thee and thine.

“Withers Motto” (1621) was “nec habeo nec careo nec curo.” This was satirised by John Taylor, the Water-Poet, in the words “et habeo, et careo, et curo,” and is obviously alluded to in Jonson’s Masque, where “Nose” says “The gentleman-likeSatyrecares for nobody.”

Wither, moreover, quarrelled with the Stationers’ Company and the printers (who disapproved of his independent method of business), which also was a subject for Jonson’s ridicule in the Masque:

One is his Printer in disguise, and keepesHis presse in a hollow tree, where to conceale him,He workes by glow-worme light, the moon’s too open, etc., etc.

In theDict: of National Biographywe are told that “Jonson quarrelled with Alex. Gill the elder for having quoted Wither’s work with approval in his ‘Logonomia Anglica’ (1619), and Jonson revenged himself by caricaturing Wither under the title of ‘Chronomastix’ in the Masque ofTime Vindicatedpresented at Court 1623-4,” and allusion is made to Jonson’s sarcasm with regard to Wither’s quarrel with his printers.

Further, we find John Chamberlain writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, on January 25, 1622-3, as follows with reference to the Masque ofTime Vindicated: “Ben Jonson they say is like to hear of it on both sides of the head for personatingGeorge Withers, a poet or poetaster he terms him, as hunting after some, by being a Chronomastix, or whipper of the time, which is become so tender an argument that it must not be admitted either in jest or earnest.” (The Court and Times of James the First.Ed. 1848. Vol. II, p. 356.)

These facts seem to have been well known to Mr. Smithson, for not only does he quote John Chamberlain’s letter in hisNineteenth Centuryarticle, where he expresses the opinion that “Chronomastix” is “a caricature compounded in unequal proportions of George Wither and the Ovid Junior of Jonson’sPoetaster(as to which see an interesting chapter inShakespeare-Bacon, headed “A Caricature of some Notable Elizabethan Poet,” together with the chapter following), but among his manuscripts were found certain Notes with reference to George Wither which I cite lower down. It will be seen, however, that he was convinced that Jonson, while lampooning and ridiculing Wither, the scourger of the time, had for his main object the glorification of the Shakespearean drama under cover of aMasque—those glorious works wherein “Time,” which had been vilified by Wither, found its all-sufficient and splendid “Vindication.”[35]

The following are Mr. Smithson’s Notes to which I have made reference:

“Wither sends

Abroad a Satyr with a scourge;That to their shame for this abuse shall strip them,And being naked in their vices whip them.(Abuses Stript and Whipt.Ed. 1622, p. 305.)

He gives Justices of Peace a warning lest they be put out of the Commission for partiality (p. 318). Ruffling Cavaliars also are touched (p. 320).

In the address to the reader ofShepheard’s Hunting, Wither to some extent recants his disgust at Time—says he has been ‘persuaded to entertain a better opinion of the Times than I lately conceived, and assured myself, that Virtue had far more followers than I supposed.’ Curiously enough, therefore, Wither’s frame of mind in 1622[36]seems to have been similar to that of Jonson inTime Vindicated. The coincidence would help perhaps to mislead the judgment of the time, and may have so commended itself to Jonson.

I don’t think Wither knows why, or by whom he was persecuted. (See Philarate to Willy in Eclogue I, and last page but two of ‘Address to the Reader.’)

He calls Time ‘bald and ill-fac’d,’ ‘shameless time,’ speaks of his ‘deformities,’ ‘blockish age,’ that ‘truth’ in this age gets ‘hatred,’ ‘while love and charitie are fled to heaven.’

He took upon him to scourge Time, and he was certainly arrogant enough, in form at any rate, for Chronomastix.

I therefore take him to have been the stalking-horse or blind used by Jonson, the Prince, and some others, to conceal the true object.”

[The Notes of this Essay (except those inserted by the Editor) which are denoted by Roman Numerals, will be found at the end of it.]

Therecent discovery of an entry in a domestic expenses account book of the Mannours or Manners family has attracted some notice. According to Mr. Sidney Lee[37]the terms of the entry, under the head “Payments for household stuff, plate, armour,” etc., are: “1613. Item 31 Martii to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lorde’s impreso [the terminaloshould bea] xliiijs., to Richard Burbadge for paynting and making yt in gold xliiijs.. [Total] iiijliviijs.” An impresa Camden describes as “a device in picture with his motto or word borne by noble and learned personages to notifie some particular conceit of their own,” its nearest modern analogue being the book-plate.[38]Burbage seems to have made, as well as painted, the thing. What there was for Mr. Shakespeare to do is by no means clear. The motto, if motto there were, would to a certainty be designated by the “noble and learned personage” himself. Moreover, some three years later (1616) Burbage appears to have executed a similar commission for the same Earl of Rutland, entirely without assistance. That the clerk who made the entry denied to Burbage the “prefix of gentility” which he bestowed upon “Mr. Shakespeare” is a fact of trivial import. If—to take an imaginary case—Nick Bottom had been living “on his means” at South Place, Stratford-at-the-Bow, this clerk would have dubbed him Mr. Bottom as a matter of course in the same circumstances. Mr. Lee is of opinion that “the recovered document discloses a capricious sign of homage on the part of a wealthy and cultured nobleman to Shakespeare.” If he had suggested that the two-guinea payment to “Mr. Shakespeare” may have been preceded by a hearty meal in the buttery, without exciting any feeling of resentment on the part of either recipient that the meal was not served in the dining-hall, I should have been more disposed to agree with him.

The situation is a curious one. But any serious discussion of it would be premature until we are actually in possession of the “rich harvest of new disclosures” which Mr. Lee teaches us to expect.[39]Meanwhile the Bacon theory regarded as a development of the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s is certainly notcrushed, if it be not actually encouraged, by this Belvoir disclosure, since no one in his senses would think of denying the existence of “Mr. Shakespeare” or his acquaintance with Richard Burbage.

In Gilbert Wats’ English version (1640) of Bacon’sInstauratio Magna, Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Vicont St. Alban, who is designated as “Tertius a Platone Philosophiæ Princeps,” is represented pen in hand, tall hat on head, a voluminous lace ruff round his neck, in the act of inditing:Mundus Mens Connubio Jungam Stabili.[40]On the opposite page two worlds, aMundus Visibilisand aMundus Intellectualisare shown clasping hands across space, in order, no doubt, to give emphasis to the idea of a world and mindconnubium. The picture typifies the conception of Bacon which has prevailed ever since. A skater on his way to the Engadine declared he was at a loss to understand why anyone ever went to Switzerland in summer forpleasure. Some of us would have been tempted to smile at the remark. But the prevailing conception of Bacon is probably quite as inadequate as this skater’s conception of Switzerland. The age of Queen Elizabeth probably had no presage—not a hint—that Francis Bacon would ever develop into a “prince of philosophy.” In my opinion the Bacon known to it was not a natural philosopher1even in aspiration, but an artist—an artist in words, who, if circumstances, more especially family circumstances, had been favourableany time between 1580 and 1590 would have openly confessed that poetry was his ideal, and declared himself a poet. As it was, he took the line of least friction, and sooner or later acquired the title of “concealed poet.” How far the concealment extended in the early days it is impossible to discover. To Sir Philip Sidney,2Sir J. Harrington, and other accomplished young men of their class, the true state of the case was doubtless an open secret.

Professor Nichol (Francis Bacon, Part I), though he thinks that Bacon “did not write Shakespeare’s plays,” considers that “there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they 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 country in our age. They are similar in this respect for rank,” etc. Shelley discerned that Bacon “was a poet,” and Macaulay perceived that the “poetical faculty” was “powerful” in Bacon. Taine held that Bacon “thought as artists and poets habitually think,” that he was one of the finest of a “poetic line,” that “his mentalprocédéwas that of the creator, not reasoning but intuition.” Bacon, then, was essentially a poet, belonged to the same race as Sidney for example. Sidney died young, and his poetic activity ceased some time before he died. Yet Sidney’s poetical achievement has come down to our day. What has become of Bacon’s poetical achievement? Was it also concealed?

Hallam, in theIntroduction to the Literature ofEurope, confessed he was unable to identify “the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.” Emerson (Representative Men) declared: “The Egyptian verdict of Shakespearean societies comes to mind, that Shakespeare3was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man in wide contrast.” It would be easy to adduce other evidence pointing in the same direction. But Hallam and Emerson, unexceptionable witnesses, will serve the turn. 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. In that case his ultimate intention as to dropping or retaining the mask of pseudonymity would be affected by various considerations extending far beyond the family circle. (a) To be “rewarded of” the stage-manager was probably nothing less than degrading to a man of good birth. (b) The conditions under which the hypothetical Shakespeare must have written, were unfavourable to careful work. A man who is half ashamed of what he is doing is hardly likely to do his best, especially when moreor less concealed. Certainly many of the plays suffer from faulty construction, inconsistency, obscurity, bombast and so forth, and what is more important, Shakespeare himself4was probably quite as conscious of these blemishes as were any of his critics. (c) With us the daily paper exerts a certain influence on public opinion. In Bacon’s day the theatre was one of the most effective means of appeal to any considerable audience, and in that way the name Shakespeare probably got entangled in controversies with which Bacon felt no desire to meddle autonymously.5(d) The moral tendency of Shakespearean work published before 1609,Venus and Adonisfor example, was not such as to forward any of the hypothetical author’s schemes for place. (e) Early in the seventeenth century Bacon seems to have convinced himself that for purposes of moment Latin was destined to supplant English. He was haunted moreover by fear of impending civil commotions, and augured ill for that “fair weather learning which needs the nursing of luxurious leisure.” (f) Had there been no other considerations than these, Bacon, even after he became Solicitor-General, might have been induced himself to give to the world some at least of his hypothetical offspring really “perfect of their limbes as he conceived them.” It is not to be supposed that he would ever have claimed all or nearly all that passed for Shakespeare’s. Much would have been disavowed altogether, and many of the more inconvenient things would, quite fairly, have been ascribed to collaboration, misprints, inexperience, haste, carelessness, etc. But theaction of the ill-conditioned group which in 1609 engineered the publication of theSonnetsof Shakespeare, must have greatly reduced the chance that Bacon would ever consent to edit anything of Shakespeare’s. So far as intimate friends were concerned, the piratical publication, however irritating,6would be comparatively innocuous, and as for charitable strangers, they might be trusted to discover extenuating circumstances in the youth of the author and the fashion of the time. But the great indiscriminating public, unaccustomed to make allowances, and led by an enemy like Sir Edward Coke, would chortle over the self-revelations suggested by the book, and put the worst construction on everything. Rather than face such a prospect, Bacon would be willing to pay almost any price, and the price he may be supposed to have paid was to seem to know nothing and care nothing about “Shakespeare” or anything that was his. Adherence to this policy would not necessarily involve any visible change of attitude or conduct. On the contrary, the hypothetical Shakespeare would be urged to hold on his usual course by the fear that any sudden stoppage, of the supply of plays for instance, might arouse suspicions which otherwise would have slept. Parenthetically it may be observed that Bacon had already known what it was to give to the world things—the Essays of 1597—which he would rather have kept back, but was compelled to publish because “to labour the state of them had been troublesome and subject to interpretation.”

The parting between Prospero and Ariel hasbeen thought to adumbrate the farewell of Shakespeare, whoever he was, to Poetry—a view that is plausible enough. It would explain the position assigned toThe Tempestin the First Folio, and suggest an interesting answer to the question why Prospero, who “prized his books above his dukedom” threatened—only threatened—to drown a particular “book.” But no one knows within several years whenThe Tempestwas written. Nor is it at all certain that the poem was wholly Shakespeare’s.[41]For anything we know to the contrary, the editor of the First Folio may have interpolated the striking invocation—to mention one passage only—which begins: “Ye elves of hills.”7The Tempestthen, does not enable us to fix the date of Shakespeare’s practical renunciation of poetry. I say,practicalrenunciation, because certain passages inHenry the Eighthwhich feelingly represent the insecurity of greatness mightex hypothesihave been contributed by Bacon just after his fall, though his practical renunciation could hardly have taken place later than 1612.[42]But whether the date were 1612 or somewhat earlier, the hypothetical Shakespeare was amply provided with other interests andpursuits. (a) Rhetoric had long held a high place in his affections. “Rhetoric and Logic,” says he, “these two, rightly taken, are the gravest of the sciences, being the arts of arts,”8and what excellence he attained in the former of these arts we know from Ben Jonson. (b) Though poesy, the recreation of his leisure—Bacon would never have allowed that it was anything but a recreation—were denied him, prose, splendid inimitable prose was his to command. (c) The delightful days and months and years which he had spent with poets both ancient and modern, particularly Ovid,9might be turned to philosophical account. (d) Historical projects allured him. In theAdvancement of Learning, a history—a prose history no doubt—of England from the “Wars of the Roses” downwards is noted as a desideratum, and seems to have been begun.The History of the Reign of King Henry VII(1622), however, is the only portion of the desiderated history which reached completeness. (e) Legislative projects also attracted him, less strongly no doubt than historical. (f) But at this time theGreat Instaurationhad possessed itself of the chief place in his affection: “Of this I can assure you that though many things of great hope decay with youth,10yet the proceeding in that work doth gain upon me, upon affection and desire,” he writes, about 1609, to his bosom friend Matthew. The instauration, say rather transfiguration, of human knowledge—that was the vision which now fascinated him. When the spell began to work it is difficult to determine. Early in the seventeenth century his conception of human“learning” or “knowledge” or “science”—three words to which he attached practically the same meaning—included Poetry, not as an appendix, but as one of three fundamental constituents. Perhaps the word “culture,” with “barbarism” for antithesis, would now come nearest to what he then meant by learning. TheAdvancement of Learningis 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. A passage in the first of its two books runs: “No man that wadeth in learning or contemplation thoroughly but will find printed in his heartnil novi super terram.” It is incredible that Bacon can at this time have caught so much as a glimpse of the “New Logic,” “New Art,” or—to give its latest name—Novum Organum, which he afterwards declared was “quite new, totally new in every kind.”11But though theAdvancementwas in fact a plea for culture, in Bacon’s intention it was a serious attempt to grapple with philosophy, an attempt so serious that he afterwards declared theNovum Organumitself to be the “same argument sunk deeper.” Moreover, in my opinion, it was his first serious attempt in that direction, hence its importance to any right apprehension of his genius.12

About the year 1609, the philosophical enthusiasm reached a climax.Cogitata et Visa deInterpretatione Naturæ,Redargutio Philosophiarum,Sapientia Veterum, and other pieces, some of which Boswell, one of his executors, seems to have calledimpetus philosophici, were thrown off in rapid succession. As early as 1610, however, he solicits the King to employ him in writing a history of his Majesty’s “Time,” a hint surely that the philosophical impetus had begun to abate. The change, whether it began that year, or a year or two later, is intelligible enough. Science had not claimed him her deliverer. Harvey is reported to have sneered at his philosophy. Gilbert and Napier may have started the sneer; for Bacon obviously undervalued mathematics, and spoke almost contemptuously of Gilbert (whom Galileo fully appreciated). About this time, too, he probably began to suspect that somewhere in theNew Art, there lurked a defect which would have to be cured before the apparatus would work. The truth is that in the philosophical work published or privately circulated by Bacon before 1610, though there was much to appeal to the æsthetic side of the human mind, much to stimulate the cultivated layman’s admiration for knowledge, for the devoted student of science there was very little help of a constructive kind, the only kind of help he really needed.13

TheSapientia Veterum, 1609, is based on a number of myths selected from the poets and fabulists of antiquity in virtue of a certain congruity with Bacon’s intuitions and predilections.The Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History, his latest work, is based on an assemblage of what by way of distinction might be called facts. The dissonancebetween the two works is amazing. TheSapientia, which was intended to bespeak a favourable hearing for the New Art, busies itself with venerable fictions. From theNatural Historyon the other hand, poetry and fable were to have been rigorously excluded. Bacon’s biographer, Rawley, wrote for the first edition of the work (1627), an address “To the Reader,” which winds up: “I will conclude with an usual speech of his lordship’s; that this work of his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as man made it; for it hath nothing of imagination.”

Several years before theSylvawas written, Galileo had censured as paper philosophers certain contemporaries of his, who set about the investigation of nature as if she were a “book like the Æneid or the Odyssey.” One at least of Bacon’s intimate friends, Sir Tobie Mathew, was no stranger to Padua and Florence, and it is quite possible that he may have informed Bacon of these strictures of Galileo’s not long after they were uttered. But, be this as it may, a momentous change must have taken place after 1609, not in Bacon’s aspiration to be the greatest of human benefactors to man, but in his conception of the means by which his vast expectations were to be realised. Had the change been less than “fundamental,” “a good and well ordered Natural History” would not have been described in thePhenomena Universi(1622), as holding the “keys both of sciences and of operations.” After 1612 Bacon became for some eight or nine years so immersed in affairs, as Attorney-General, Privy Councillor—no sinecure then—Lord Chancellor, etc., that it must have been impossible for him to give to his New Logic a tithe of the attention it required. “At this period,” says Dr. Abbott: “there is a great gap in the series of Bacon’s philosophical works. In 1613 he was appointed Attorney-General, and from that time till 1620 no literary work of any kind published or unpublished is known to have issued from his pen. All that he did was apparently to rewrite repeatedly and revise theNovum Organum.14TheOrganummade its appearance in 1620 with a dedication to the King by no means confident of either the worth or the use of his offering. But as he says in theproemiumthat “all other ambition whatsoever was in his opinion lower than the work in hand,” one would infer that his zeal for philosophy had begun to revive even before the tragedy of 1621. The remaining five years of the great man’s life—“a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more,” he calls it—were more or less distracted with anxieties in no way connected with philosophy. He hoped, nevertheless, to present the old King with a “good history of England, and a better digest” of the laws, and the young King with a history of the “time and reign of King Henry the Eighth.”15But after the most distressfulsequelæof his fall had been relieved, his grandiose, imposing scheme for the renovation or transfiguration of philosophy must have regained the position it had held some ten or a dozen years earlier. Without it, life for him would have been a mean and melancholy failure. “God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image ofthe universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof ... and not delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out the ordinances which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.”16This capacity, this wonder-working exaltation of the mind had been neglected, and all but lost, by reason of the interference of Aristotle and other insolent dictators, and Bacon imagined himself destined to rehabilitate it, to usher in a new era, to endow the human race, not with knowledge alone, but with legions of beneficent arts,17and for reward to go down to the ages as pre-eminently the Friend of man.18Compared with a vision so magnificent, his youthful dream of a poet’s immortality would seem paltry, stale, and unprofitable. No wonder the old love, poetry, was forsaken. The wonder would have been if for the sake of the old love he had done or permitted or countenanced anything which he thought might possibly prejudice posterity against the new love, his “darling philosophy.”19

The more vulnerable points of this tentative theory20of Bacon’s relation to poetry seem to be three. First, Bacon’s final perseverence in ignoring his hypothetical offspring. Second, hisTranslation of certain Psalms into English Versewhich, according to Dr. Abbott, “so clearly betrays the cramping influence of rhyme and verse, that it could hardly have been the work of a true poet even of a low order.” Third, the detailed treatment of poetry in theAdvancement of Learningis essentially and flagrantly defective. Objection number one—Bacon’s persistent neglect of the plays—is easily answered.21The reasons for continuing to ignore them may in the aggregate have been even more cogent at the close, than at the opening of his career. For a Lord Chancellor, one who had been a “principal councillor and instrument of monarchy,” to publish not verses merely, but common plays, would have been a disgrace to the peerage, and ingratitude, if not disloyalty, to the sovereign to whom he owed his many promotions. Amongst the reasons for concealment, which did not exist at the opening of life, two more may be mentioned: one, the publication of theSonnets, has been sufficiently discussed; the other, solicitude for theGreat Instauration, has not. In casting about for an explanation of his frigid reception by contemporary science, Bacon must have hit upon a suspicion, shared maybe by King James,22that his true greatness after all lay rather in the domain of poetry than in that of philosophy.23Disappointed in his contemporaries, he would turn to the ages unborn, resolved that they at any rate should not start with a bias against his message. Any suggestion therefore, that he should allow his true name to be put to a volume of poetry, so distinguished from versified theology, would be unconditionally rejected.

To the objection founded on theTranslation of certain Psalms into English Verseseveral answers suggest themselves. No artist is always at his best, least of all in illness and old age, and theTranslationbelongs to 1624 when Bacon was recovering from an attack of a painful disease. In the delightfulpreface to his select edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, Matthew Arnold writes: “Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him (Wordsworth) with evident unconsciousness of its defects and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.” Yet no competent judge of poetry would think of denying that Wordsworth was a “true poet” of a “high order.”[43]Again, conventional feeling may have been partly responsible for the dullness of thisTranslation. Dr. Abbott surely underrates the consequence of his admission that “theological verse like theological sculpture might seem to require something of the archaic, and a close adherence to the simplicity of the original prose.” Grant that Bacon was under the influence of some such feeling, and the objection we are considering is virtually answered, such was “Bacon’s versatility in adapting language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose.” Once more, the evidence that Bacon was a “concealed poet” is strong enough to hold its own against every argument that can fairly be urged against it, and to concealment dissimulation is apt to prove indispensable. It was so considered by Bacon, and Bacon’s experience of the device was extensive, if not unique. In a famous Essay he carefully distinguishes between Simulation and Dissimulation, and lets it be seen that he regarded the former aspositively culpable, the latter as not only permissible but necessary.24A man dissimulates when he “lets fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is.... He that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage.... They will so beset a man with questions and draw him on and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence he must show inclination one way.... So that no man can be secret except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is as it were but the skirts or train of secrecy.” The application is obvious. Bacon’sTranslation of Certain Psalmsis uninspired, lacks “choiceness of phrase ... the sweet falling of the clauses,” etc! Why? Possibly because the author “is letting fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is!” The fact that a thing so trivial as thisTranslationshould have been published, instead of being reserved for private circulation only—published too on the heels of the Shakespeare First Folio—lends additional probability to this explanation.25

Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for the essential inadequacy of theAdvancement of Learningin relation to poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In theAdvancement, dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name, “dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilstlyric, elegiac, and several other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of theAdvancement, however, theDe Augmentis Scientiarum, published some eighteen years after theAdvancement, not only restores to “representative poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentionselegias,odes,lyricos, etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at the date of theAdvancement, Bacon had still to learn what poetry essentially was, a defect which at the date of theDe Augmentishe had contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its absurdity, one has only to compare theAdvancement of Learningwith theApologie for Poetryby the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with slight additions in 1596.26One of the many resemblances involved in the comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely. Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in theAdvancementthan in theApologie, inevitably, considering the scope of theAdvancement, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In those days,however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an unusually large proportion of the same authors.27It may, therefore, be urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to theApologie for Poetriegeometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only constituents of the science of mathematics. TheAdvancement of Learningappears to take the same view. (b) According to theApologie“knowledge of a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is “well doing and not well knowing only.” TheAdvancementholds “the end and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to “active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to theApologie“metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. TheAdvancementdefines “metaphysic”—which includes mathematics—as the science of “that which is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) TheApologiecensures philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and “school art.” In theAdvancement, Bacon condemns “the over early and peremptory reduction of knowledgeinto acts and methods.” It is a theme on which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, theNovum Organum, a congeries of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against premature systematisation. (e) TheApologiecontrasts the necessary limitations of other artists28with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is.” TheAdvancement, in a charming passage, instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) TheApologieholds “that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” TheAdvancementaffirms that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of theApologievenerated learning—“the noble name of learning,” he calls it—as if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of theAdvancement, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent identical, for the first book of theAdvancementwas a vindication of the dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of “learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of theAdvancementthat reading it one seems to be continually in touch with Sidney—assuming him to have been author of theApologie. The effect in my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate—though that is quite possible—but that Bacon when writing theAdvancementwas thoroughly familiar with theApologie.

It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of theAdvancement, to whatever cause they may have been due—and honest dissimulation is the most likely cause—were not due to ignorance of poetry. Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.

“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to find with thecriticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even occurred to me.

For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to that fullness of joy which according to M. Poincaré (Le Science et l’Hypothèse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.

NOTES TO SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY[1]Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is to be understood in its modern sense.[2]From Sidney’sApologie for Poetrie(of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the secret of some “Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan, and who are better content to suppress the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in hisArte of English Poesie(1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without their names to it.” TheArte of English Poesiewas dedicated to Bacon’s uncle andquasiguardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice: “Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their youth.”[3]From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two—without prejudice to the question whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form “Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or “Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.[4]Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and elsewhere—agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays—negatives a mechanical explanation.[5]In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’sApologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex. 1604.)[6]Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of theSonnets. Even so they would be seriousimpedimentato a Solicitor-General on his way to the Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.[7]It is obviously borrowed,mutatis mutandis, from Ovid’sMetamorphoses. “Deeper than did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’sMedea, but it seems to me from Act III, Sc. 3, ofThe Tempestitself. Golding’s English version of theMetamorphosesmay well have been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.[8]Advancement of Learning.“Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”[9]Theidée mèreof theSapientia Veterum—allegorisation—is one which I think no notable man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it toOrlando Furioso(1591), is areductio ad absurdumof the fashion.[10]Poetry for example![11]The second book of theAdvancement—where “rational knowledges” or “arts intellectual” are being discussed—promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into two parts; whereof the one I termexperientia literata, and the otherinterpretatio naturæ, the former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of conjecture. PossiblyValerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former,experientia literata, we may learn from theDe Augmentis Scientiarum, the authorised Latin version of theAdvancement of Learning, quite as much as any of us need wish to know.It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, theAdvancement of Learningcontains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work—prudentia activa—digested into aphorisms.[12]The nebulousTemporis Partus Maximus, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s “apparently unacknowledged”Conference of Pleasure, 1592, andGesta Graiorum, 1594, though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.[13]According to Professor Fowler (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed experimental science under any obligation at all.[14]No student I suppose would willingly be without the volume here quoted, “Francis Bacon”, by Edwin A. Abbott.[15]Rawley’s dedication, 1627, of theNatural Historyto Charles the First.[16]Advancement of Learning.Book I.[17]The art of prolonging life was, he thought, one of the most desirable.[18]He “bequeathed” his soul and body to God. “For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”[19]Rawley in the dedication of 1627 uses this expression as if it were Bacon’s rather than his own.[20]I am not aware that in its integrity it is shared by anyone.[21]More easily by far than Mr. Shakespeare’s neglect of his supposed poetical issue more especially after his retirement to Stratford. What was there, what would there be in the Stratford of those days with its Quineys, Harts, Sadlers, Walkers, and the rest, to interest a spirit so finely touched as Shakespeare’s? But this is too large a question to be discussed here.[22]James I is reported to have said of theNovum Organum: “It is like the peace of God which passeth all understanding.”[23]Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge—history with memory for its organ, poetry with imagination, and philosophy with reason—is well known. When he made this division the poetic use of the imagination was one which few may have known better than he. That he was equally well acquainted with the scientific use of the imagination is highly improbable.[24]Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest dissimulation.”[25]Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting something less than admirationof his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of theSapientia Veterum, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.” His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother tongue.[26]It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’sOrlando Furioso, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to hisApologie for Poetry(along with theArte of English Poesie, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’sApologie—odi profanum vulgus et arceo—touches the motto to Shakespeare’sVenus and Adonis; thatKing Leartouches theArcadia; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.[27]It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in bothAdvancementandApologie, that theApologieendorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one day.” Another of theApologie’sreferences to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason,” gives one to think. TheAdvancementdisapproves, it may be added, of tying modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances.”[28]Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered asarts, whilst poetry ranks as ascience.

[1]Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is to be understood in its modern sense.

[2]From Sidney’sApologie for Poetrie(of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the secret of some “Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan, and who are better content to suppress the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in hisArte of English Poesie(1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without their names to it.” TheArte of English Poesiewas dedicated to Bacon’s uncle andquasiguardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice: “Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their youth.”

[3]From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two—without prejudice to the question whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form “Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or “Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.

[4]Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and elsewhere—agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays—negatives a mechanical explanation.

[5]In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’sApologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex. 1604.)

[6]Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of theSonnets. Even so they would be seriousimpedimentato a Solicitor-General on his way to the Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.

[7]It is obviously borrowed,mutatis mutandis, from Ovid’sMetamorphoses. “Deeper than did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’sMedea, but it seems to me from Act III, Sc. 3, ofThe Tempestitself. Golding’s English version of theMetamorphosesmay well have been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.

[8]Advancement of Learning.“Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”

[9]Theidée mèreof theSapientia Veterum—allegorisation—is one which I think no notable man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it toOrlando Furioso(1591), is areductio ad absurdumof the fashion.

[10]Poetry for example!

[11]The second book of theAdvancement—where “rational knowledges” or “arts intellectual” are being discussed—promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into two parts; whereof the one I termexperientia literata, and the otherinterpretatio naturæ, the former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of conjecture. PossiblyValerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former,experientia literata, we may learn from theDe Augmentis Scientiarum, the authorised Latin version of theAdvancement of Learning, quite as much as any of us need wish to know.It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, theAdvancement of Learningcontains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work—prudentia activa—digested into aphorisms.

It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, theAdvancement of Learningcontains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work—prudentia activa—digested into aphorisms.

[12]The nebulousTemporis Partus Maximus, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s “apparently unacknowledged”Conference of Pleasure, 1592, andGesta Graiorum, 1594, though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.

[13]According to Professor Fowler (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed experimental science under any obligation at all.

[14]No student I suppose would willingly be without the volume here quoted, “Francis Bacon”, by Edwin A. Abbott.

[15]Rawley’s dedication, 1627, of theNatural Historyto Charles the First.

[16]Advancement of Learning.Book I.

[17]The art of prolonging life was, he thought, one of the most desirable.

[18]He “bequeathed” his soul and body to God. “For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”

[19]Rawley in the dedication of 1627 uses this expression as if it were Bacon’s rather than his own.

[20]I am not aware that in its integrity it is shared by anyone.

[21]More easily by far than Mr. Shakespeare’s neglect of his supposed poetical issue more especially after his retirement to Stratford. What was there, what would there be in the Stratford of those days with its Quineys, Harts, Sadlers, Walkers, and the rest, to interest a spirit so finely touched as Shakespeare’s? But this is too large a question to be discussed here.

[22]James I is reported to have said of theNovum Organum: “It is like the peace of God which passeth all understanding.”

[23]Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge—history with memory for its organ, poetry with imagination, and philosophy with reason—is well known. When he made this division the poetic use of the imagination was one which few may have known better than he. That he was equally well acquainted with the scientific use of the imagination is highly improbable.

[24]Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest dissimulation.”

[25]Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting something less than admirationof his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of theSapientia Veterum, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.” His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother tongue.

[26]It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’sOrlando Furioso, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to hisApologie for Poetry(along with theArte of English Poesie, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’sApologie—odi profanum vulgus et arceo—touches the motto to Shakespeare’sVenus and Adonis; thatKing Leartouches theArcadia; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.

[27]It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in bothAdvancementandApologie, that theApologieendorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one day.” Another of theApologie’sreferences to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason,” gives one to think. TheAdvancementdisapproves, it may be added, of tying modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances.”

[28]Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered asarts, whilst poetry ranks as ascience.

Anotherexasperating lucubration on the Shakespeare problem! We have the Plays themselves. Why disturb a venerable belief by hypotheses incapable of proof, and neither venerable nor even respectable?To answer offhand—Curiosity about theHowof remarkable events is not likely to die out so long as intelligent beings continue to exist: 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.

The exordium of this Ode consists of sixteen laborious lines:

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