CON VERSUS KESPEARE IRGE SEIBEL ^ Bacon versus Shakespeare BOOKS BY GEORGE SEIBEL The Mormon Saints Price $1.00; paper 50 cents The Fall: A Tale of Eden Price 35 cents The WinC'Bills of Omar Khayyam Price 25 cents THE LESSING COMPANY Box 383 . . . Pittsburgh, Pa. Bacon versus Shakespeare PTho Wrote the Plays? y By GEORGE SEIBEL Pittsburgh The Lessing Company 1919 '<^'€,\s<< 5 did not discover America. Our Baconian friends, not content with proving Shakespeare's ancestors illiterate, also insist that his daughter Judith could neither read nor write. Shakespeare had another daughter, named Susannah, who was called ^^ witty above her sex." The Baconians forget to mention her, perhaps because they are afraid some one might suggest that Susannah Shakespeare wrote the plays. John Milton's oldest daugh- ter could not write, but that does not in- validate his claim to be the author of Paradise Lost. But what difference does it make how dull or how clever the other members of the Shakespeare family were? No one suspects or accuses them of having written the plays. We are concerned only with Master William . 12 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. At this point the Baconian hastens to ex- hibit a series of Shakespeare's own auto- graphs — roughly scrawled and variously spelled. These, if they are genuine, are all the traces left by Shakespeare's pen — five badly written signatures, not a syllable more. An additional signature has been dis- covered by Prof. C. W. Wallace in the British Record Office. Baconians argue that this signature is not Shakespeare's, but the clerk's who drew up the deposition in the lawsuit. Careful comparison shows that the signature is different from the clerkly script and strikingly resembles the writing on the will. This paucity of papers might be hard to get over, if we had bales of manuscript by other Elizabethan writers . But from most of them we have not even a single signa- ture. As for poor writing showing ab- sence of genius, many a man can write copper-plate script, but has not a thought worthy of setting down. Horace Greeley wrote such a wretched scrawl that fre- quently he himself could not decipher it. Of course, that settles it : Horace Greeley never wrote any editorials in the Tribune. It would be very easy to manufacture such negative Baconian evidences by the bushel. The first William Shakespeare there is any record of was hanged for rob- 13 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. bery in 1248 — and, of course, it will be readily admitted that high poetic genins could not flourish in a family disgraced by an outlaw. As three William Shake- speares were living in Warwickshire be- tween 1560 and 1614, it might be readily as- serted that the name was so common as to occur at once to Bacon when he needed a nom de plume, just as the well-known citi- zen nowadays arrested in a raid on a po- ker-palace invariably gives the name of John Smith. The Baconians have actually discovered one Shakespeare who was so thoroughly ashamed of his name that he had it changed to Saunders . Following up their assumption of heredi- tary illiteracy in the Shakespeare family, the Baconians go on to assert that Wil- liam must have received very scant school- ing. As if the plays of Shakespeare re- quired a profound knowledge of Latin and Greek, science and philosophy, historic and juristic lore for their writing! In truth, they exhibit sad lack of these things, al- though Shakespeare possessed a very fair education for that period and his station in life. We have letters in Latin written by two of his schoolmates at the Stratford free school; one of these lads, at the age of eleven, displays a very respectable Latinity. There is no reason for sup- posing that Master Will was behind his 14 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. chums in class. They also learned the rudiments of Greek under a headmaster from Oxford. Besides these classic tongues Shakespeare had some French, a smattering of Italian, and perhaps a bit of Spanish. There is testimony to all this from his friends and companions, and it may be seen in the plays. At the same time his knowledge of these languages was neither extensive nor exact, as Bacon's was. Shakespeare knew the world better than books. He read the hearts of men, rather than the pages of dead poets and philosophers. Not vast learning and deep erudition were required to produce his plays, only the flash and flame of genius. ^^I could write like Shakespeare if I had the mind,'' said a vain poet, and a caustic wit retorted, ^^You could — if you had the mind." As Emerson has written, ^4t is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the in- visible, to abolish the past and refuse all history. ' ' Was it not strange, if Bacon wrote the plays, that in one play whose plot is almost a free invention, he gives us glimpses and souvenirs of some of Shakespeare's neigh- bors at Stratford-on-Avon? That play is The Merry Wives of Windsor — and, by the way, it contains excerpts from the very Latin grammar that was in use at the 16 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Stratford Latin School during Shake- speare ^s boyhood. Was it also a mere co- incidence that when Shakespeare had his Venus and Adonis printed, the first work to bring him prominently before the public, he gave the job to a printer who had come to London from Stratford a few years be- fore him I There were other printers, but he went to his townsman, Eichard Field. It is true that Shakespeare left no manu- scripts, and upon this fact the Baconians base many triumphant sneers. It is a great pity that we haven't a copy of Ham- let in Shakespeare's handwriting to con- fute them. But it should be very easy for them to produce a copy of Hamlet in Bacon's handwriting, should it not? In- deed, if Bacon had written the plays, we probably would have the manuscripts. He was not, like Shakespeare, careless of his literary reputation. He would have fished the pages of copy out of the dust-bins of the London printers. Perhaps also he would have been prudent enough to write on asbestos, so that the book of the play or the actors' parts would not have been destroyed in the burning of the Globe Theater in 1613, nor in the great fire of London in 1666. It would be marvelous, indeed, if any of Shakespeare's manu- scripts had escaped destruction. Of some contemporaries not even a printed line sur- 16 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. vives. Eichard Hathway, highly praised by Francis Meres, was one of the most pop- ular authors of comedy, yet we have not a single line of one of his comedies, though we know the titles of sixteen. Coming to an even later age, no one knows where there is a single page of the manuscript of Milton's Paradise Lost. Besides leaving no manuscripts, it has been said, Shakespeare left no books. What of that! His library, doubtless, was small. It included North's Plutarch and Holinshed's Chronicles. We have a copy of Florio's Montaigne with Shakespeare's autograph and some notes, commenting on thoughts imbedded in the plays. Per- haps neither the notes nor the autograph are genuine, but the argument in their fa- vor summed up by Gervais is better than that for Bacon's so-called Promus, which we shall examine later. Having thus in various indirect ways cast suspicion upon Shakespeare's ability to write the plays, the Baconians launch in- to the wildest assertions with regard to Shakespeare's life and fame. We know almost nothing about Shakespeare, they have said so many times, that many people who are not Baconians have come to be- lieve this true. The fact is that we know more of Shakespeare's life than we know about any other poet of that age, except 17 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Ben Jonson. We even know that Shake- speare ^s father was fined twelve pence for having a heap of dirt before his door, and that in 1598 the dramatist himself default- ed his own taxes in London. We can connt about three hundred references and allu- sions to Shakespeare in the writings of contemporaries between 1591 and the date of his death, 1616. For a mere butcher, brewer, and pawnbroker, as the Baconians depict him, this means much ! To say, as the Baconians do, that when Shakespeare died no one in England dreamed of mourning the death of a great poet, that no obituaries in prose or verse show he was held in high esteem, is a fab- rication that can proceed only from cheer- ful ignorance or supreme audacity. With- in a few years of the Bard's death, a monu- ment was erected to him in Stratford — with an epitaph whose laudatory phrases would have been extravagant if applied to any other — ^while many contemporary writers lament the world's loss and pro- phesy the dead poet's immortal renown. Shakespeare cannot have been dead more than a few years when the poet William Basse glorified him in a sonnet — naming him with Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont, who lay buried in Westminster Abbey, bidding them lie closer to make 18 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. room for Shakespeare, and then deciding it would be more fitting that "In this uncarved marble of thy own, Sleep, brave tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone." Having, as they think, put Shakespeare out of the way by their pen-pricks, ''with twenty trenched gashes on his head,'' every cryptic utterance or allusion made by Bacon or his friends at any time is con- strued by the Baconians as a reference to Bacon's authorship of the plays. He once wrote to King James that, with a full un- derstanding of what he was doing he sup- pressed his name and genius. What war- rant is there for assuming that this had any reference to the Shakespearean plays ? When Bacon writes of works that would make his name far more celebrated than it was, if they were published as his own, he may have spoken truly, but how could they be published as his own if he had not writ- ten them I When he writes that ''I have (though in a despised weed) procured the good of all men," there is nothing to show he was referring to any adventures in dra- matic authorship. Again, when removed from office, he is quoted as writing to the Spanish ambassador that he would now ''retire from the stage of civil action and betake myself to letters, and to the instruc- tion of the actors themselves and the ser- vice of posterity." Since all of Shake- 19 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. speare's plays were written long before 1621 — the latest being produced in 1613, eight years before Bacon decided to betake himself to letters, and thirteen years be- fore he died — it is impossible to establish any connection between this utterance and the genesis of the great dramas. And Bacon's chief claim to have served pos- terity is as the discoverer of cold storage, not as founder of a dramatic school. We are told that Bacon advocated the use of a pen-name for literarj^ men. Why, then, did he not publish his Essays and other authentic works under a pen-name? The same severe logicians who tell ' us Shakespeare's parents were illiterate, as- sure us that Bacon's father published a great deal anonymously and under as- sumed names. Do they wish us to believe that perhaps Bacon's father wrote Shake- speare's plays? They insist that Bacon's mother pub- lished translations from the Latin, but never allowed her name to appear on the title-page. The work she translated was Bishop Jewell's Apology for the Church of England^ and, as the worthy prelate's own name does not appear on the title-page, we cannot draw any weighty deductions from the absence of hers . Right here, however, arises another con- sideration . Several of the ciphers found 20 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. by ingenious Baconians in the works of Shakespeare assert that Bacon was really the son of Queen Elizabeth. Being very learned, the Queen herself might have made those translations; if so, the monu- mental self-effacement of the other lady is accounted for. If not, and if Queen Eliza- beth was really Mrs. Leicester, and Bacon's mother, how can the fact that Lady Anne Bacon did not print her name on the title-page of a theological tract prove that her adopted son must have written the works of Shakespeare? Bacon wrote a prose history of Henry VII, which we are told fills the gap in the king dramas, between Richard III and Henry VIII . Why, if he wished to fill the gap, didn't he w^rite a play around Henry VII? Why did he leave so many other gaps unfilled — three Henrys, five Edwards, to say nothing of Richard I? The inconvenient little word ^Svhy" is the rock upon which most of the Baconian arguments go to pieces. Do they really deserve to be called arguments? Because in The Merry Wives of Windsor^ Mistress Quickly says, '' Hang-hog is Latin for Bacon," and because Bacon's crest was a boar with a halter, and because ' ' Ham-let ' ' may be a diminutive derivative of a pig, we are expected to doubt all the plain tes- timony of Shakespeare's friends and 21 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Bacon's. As John Fiske said, ^^By such methods one can prove anything.'' Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, a fierce Baconian, produces a queer line of argu- ment from As You Like It. In Touch- stone, "the courtier who is playing clown," he recognizes Bacon. '' Notice that Touchstone refuses to be married to Audrey (who probably represents the plays of Shakespeare) by a Mar-text^ and she declares that the Clown William ^has no interest in me in the world.' William — shall we say Shakespeare of Stratford? — enters, and;" — but why go on with this far-fetched fancy, which to the Baconian type of mind is close-knit reasoning. Another staggering argument asserts that thirty-two obituaries written on Bacon laud him as the greatest of drama- tic poets. Is it not strange that a secret so widely known should have been so sacredly kept until a crazy American wo- man guessed it after two hundred years or more? Of course, it is admitted that obituaries and epitaphs always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Many a man whose endorsement was not worth thirty cents during his life- time, might borrow a fortune in any bank if he could come back with his tombstone as evidence of his high standing in the community. 22 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Those odes, written about Bacon after he had died, were collected by his friend William Rawley. In one of them the Muse of Tragedy exclaims, '^Give me back my Apollo!" Since Apollo never wrote any comedies or tragedies, how could this mean that Bacon did? Another ode calls Bacon ^^Quirinus'' — a Latin word which may be twisted to mean ^ ^ Spear-Shaker. ' ^ Romulus, the founder of Rome, was like- wise called ^^Quirinus;" are we to deduce that he wrote Julius Caesar f Another ode in the collection calls Bacon ^^Pinus,'' which also, we are told, means ^'Shake- Spear.'' Now ^^Pinus" means '^ pine- tree,'' and by metonymy, since spears were made of pine-trees, it was sometimes used for ' ' spear, ' ' but certainly it did not mean '^ Shake-Spear." ^^Pinus" in the same way means ''ship;" did Bacon write Mother SMpton's Prophecy 1 It also means "torch;" did he write Rostand's Aiglon and portray himself as Flambeau? Such is Baconian reasoning — it almost in- clines one to believe the Baconians have little Latin and less common sense. Dean Williams extols Bacon as ''the greatest pride of the Muses and the Apollo to the Chorus." Up to date the Nine La- dies from Helicon have not been heard from in regard to the matter. George Wither addresses Bacon as "Chancellor 23 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. of Parnassus'' — ^which to the Baconians is fraught with tremendous significance. If some one had called Bacon door-keeper of the universe, the Baconians would scent therein an allusion to the Globe Theater. But one of the references most fondly cited by the Baconians should effectively dispose of all the claims that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. Doctor Sprat said of him in 1607 : ^ ^ I am sure he does the work of twenty men. ' ' Evidently Bacon was far too busy all his life to write thirty-seven plays ! The waggish poet of a Chicago newspa- per has satirized the Baconians in an amusing poem entitled Bacon's Busy Day: Sir Francis Bacon rose at five And said : *'As sure as Fm alive, Tve got to get a move on me If ever famous I shall be." He nibbed his quill, and fixed his ink, And rubbed his head, and tried to think; And then, like gathering blackberries, He wrote J. Caesar's Commentaries. To while away an hour he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, with a note To the effect that Bunyan should Be called the author, if he would; Then, yawning ere he should begin, He wrote a work on medicine. And, just to save a lot of pother. He named Hippocrates as author. 24 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Then to his breakfast, but between The grapefruit and the ham 'twas seen He scribbled still, by fits and jerks, The most of old Josephus' works; Then, smoking, with his long legs crossed. Wrote Paradise Regained, and Lost, And Scottish Chiefs, while as a solo He sang the works of Marco Polo. *Tm lazy," sighed he, '^what's the use?" And wrote the books of Mother Goose; Then penned, to start his cipher steps. The diary of Samuel Pepys ; R. Crusoe's thrilling tale was next To leave his pen with flowing text. And then, to please his maiden auntie, He wrote the rampant rhymes of Dante. The works of Virgil then he penned, And Homer's verse, from start to end; Then Fox's Martyrs, and a bit Of quaint Aristophanic wit — And then all day he worked like sin To put the hidden ciphers in. That night, with many a splashy shiver, He sank all this beneath a river. One Bacomaniac makes exultant refer- ence to a statement by Jonson that Bacon ''filled up all numbers/' which is said to mean that ''he wrote poetry in every con- ceivable meter. ' ' As the works of Shake- speare do not contain poetry in every con- ceivable meter, it would seem reasonably certain that Jonson was thinking of some- 25 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. thing else. Bacon wrote verses. Most competent critics who have read them agree that they are not poetry at all, but badly rhymed prose. Eead the poems as- cribed to Bacon, and you will never sus- pect him of Romeo and Juliet or Timon of Athens. After scanning the paraphrases of some Psalms that Bacon published, one is sure he never penned the sublime pray- er of Lear nor the torrential passion of Antony and Cleopatra. What if Jonson did call him the greatest word-painter in the English language? If it were sober truth, instead of delirious adulation, it would not prove that he had written Shake- speare. Parallel thoughts by the thousand are found in Bacon and Shakespeare — by the Baconians. When other people examine these parallelisms, they sift down to a score or so. There are more parallels be- tween Shakespeare and almost any other Elizabethan poet than between Shake- speare and Bacon. At most, such parallels are only proof that Shakespeare had read Bacon, or that Bacon had read Shake- speare, or that both had read in the same authors . Superficial resemblances between the vo- cabulary of Bacon and that of Shake- speare really have very little significance. The vocabulary of all Elizabethan writers 26 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. is very much alike. Bacon uses many words that Shakespeare used; but Shake- speare uses many words that Bacon never knew . Bacon, who almost thought in Latin, whose literary style was modeled upon Tacitus and Cicero, lacked the airy aban- don of Shakespeare's unpremeditated art. Doctor Rawley said of him: ^^ Neither was he given to any light conceits, or descant- ing upon words, but did ever purposely and industriously avoid them. ' ' Would he have let Hamlet make his first bow with a pun? Shakespeare plays with words as with colored balls, tossing them carelessly about; Bacon counts them carefully like golden coins. Not so the Baconians. As has been said before, even puns be- come potent arguments in the Baconian armory. We are told to look at Bacon's signature. After the ' ' B " there is an in- terval and ^^acon" standing all by itself. We are told that ^^acon" is Greek for ^^ javelin" — ^that it is an obsolete word de- scribing a peculiar sort of spear. The word is not ^^acon,"*but ^^akontium;" it was not obsolete, and there is nothing pe- culiar about it except the use to which it is put by the Baconians. The appropriate answer to this whole argument is furnished by Doctor Johnson: ^^A man that will 27 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. make so poor a pun will not hesitate to pick a pocket. ' ' There is yet worse to come. Bacon was Baron of Vernlam ; ' ' veru " is a Latin word meaning ^^ spear/' and the old English word ^4am'' is equivalent to '^ shake.'' All through the plays of Shakespeare, even in Hamlet, are many puns, but none quite so vile as this hybrid ; therefore we cannot believe that the man who perpetrated the ^^Verulam" atrocity was the same that wrote the plays. The Baconians are also very fond of scanning title-pages of early editions of Shakespeare's dramas, finding in the arabesques the syllables ^^Ba" and ^^con." These mystic scrolls are usually visible only to Baconians, who are as adept as Po- lonius at descrying anything suggested to them in the clouds of their fantastic theory. It never occurs to them that the syllable ^^Ba" may be an expression of contempt for the ' ' con, ' ' a slang term for a swindle, of which they are the victims . A head-piece exhibited by the Baconians shows a bag and the figure of a ^ ^ cony, ' ' the Old English name for the rabbit. Can it be that Bacon also wrote Wild Animals I Have Knoivn, which is commonly attribut- ed to Ernest Thompson Seton, and the Uncle Remus tales a gullible generation be- 28 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. lieved were written by Joel Chandler Harris? One of these Baconians has declared that some title-pages labeled with the name of Shakespeare are adorned with a head- piece flanked by birds for "B,^^ and in the center are the letters ^^acon'' — ^together constituting ' ' Bacon. ' ' Only a little more ingenuity would be needed to prove clearly that Bacon wrote the works ascribed to Audubon. The birds give us the clue. Pray note that both names end alike, and that four letters of Bacon's name are in the name of Audubon. Many Baconian arguments are built upon less solid foun- dations. Perhaps all this may explain Robert Greene's bitter diatribe against Shake- speare — ^^an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." Indeed, this passage is often pointed to as proof that Shakespeare was masquerading in borrowed plumage. Since Greene was complaining that the feathers had been plucked from himself and his friends, he does not make a very good witness for the Bacon claimants — ^be- fore an intelligent jury. Now comes the weightiest evidence of all. If a man admits a crime, his convic- tion would appear to be certain. Bacon, in a letter to the poet Sir John Davies, asked him '^to be good to all concealed 29 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. poets. ^ ^ If Bacon was a poet, he concealed it so effectually that the greater part of the world has not yet discovered him. Spedding, the best of Bacon's editors and biographers, has deliberately written : ''If it could be proved that Shakespeare did not write the plays, I should believe that any one else had written them sooner than Bacon." That is the testimony of the man who knew the subject better than any other modern critic. He was familiar not only with Bacon's life, but also with every line Bacon had written, and he was one of Bacon's most loyal admirers. Yet he as- sures us that he believes Bacon was alto- gether unqualified to produce the plays as- cribed to Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the Baconians, because Bacon mentioned ''con- cealed poets, ' ' are ready to believe that he wrote The Tempest and The Winter^s Tale. When on another occasion, having written a sonnet to greet Queen Elizabeth, he excused its defects by saying, "I pro- fess not to be a poet," this is regarded as double-dyed dissimulation and accepted as circumstantial evidence to clinch the case. "Trifles light as air" are to the Baco- nians "confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ." They insist that Bacon, in the midst of his prose, often dropped into poetry and even into rhyme. So did Silas 30 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Wegg — shall we accuse him of the Ode to a Grecian Urn? Not satisfied with Bacon's own confes- sion, the Baconians summon his secretary, who testifies that ^^ everything he wrote sounded like poetry.'' That secretary would have made a fine press agent. He deserves more credit for admiring loyalty than for literary discrimination. No won- der Bacon, in his last will and testament, left him five hundred pounds! Still, it will be readily admitted that even Bacon's poems sound like poetry, though they are not. And now comes Sir Tobie Matthew, a great traveler, Bacon's literary friend, his successor in Parliament. Sir Tobie, we are told, wrote to Bacon that 'Hhe greatest of all poets bears your lordship's name, though he be known under another. ' ' The exact words of Tobie Matthew are as fol- lows : ^^The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another . ' ' Being written on the continent, th.is could only mean that Matthew had there met somebody whose name was Bacon, though he went under another. There was such a man on the continent at the time — a learn- ed Jesuit known as Thomas Southwell, 31 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. whose real name was Bacon. Matthew, a recent convert to Catholicism, was very likely to be thrown into just such society, and to form an extravagant estimate of such a man. So much for Sir Tobie ! With regard to the publication of Shake- speare 's plays, some amazing statements are made — as, for instance, that the great majority first appeared anonymously. A few did appear anonymously, but none ap- peared without Shakespeare's name after his great fame had been established, though fhey were pirated and printed without his consent. Indeed, his popu- larity was so great that booksellers as- cribed to him many dramas that were not his; and despite the allegations of the Baconians, Shakespeare thought enough of his literary reputation to make a bookseller upon one occasion remove his name from the title-page of a spurious work. This was a poem, The Passionate Pilgrim — his dramatic works he does not appear to have regarded as real literature, but rather as a journalist of our day might view his ephemeral pot-boiling editorials . If it is contended that the plays re- mained anonymous until 1600, even as to the entries in the Hall of Records, we might point to Lady Anne Bacon, who omitted her well-known name from the title- page of a very popular work. The truth is BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. that Love's Labor's Lost, probably Shake- speare's first play written alone, was print- ed in 1598 with his name on the title-page. The first play printed that we know of, Romeo and Juliet, had appeared only one year earlier, in 1597. Francis Meres, writing in 1598, knew no less than twelve of Shakespeare's plays, and attests that their authorship was widely known. ^^The Muses," he says, ^' would speak Shake- speare's fine filed phrase, if they could speak English. ' ' After Shakespeare's popularity had be- gun, the booksellers never omitted his name. On the title-page it was spelled Shakespere or Shake-speare. In the authentic autographs we have, the name is spelled S-h-a-k-s-p-e-r-e, minus an ^^e" and an ^ ^ a. " Much has been made of this by the Baconians, but at most it proves only that the piratical booksellers may not have known how to spell the name of the man whose property they had stolen. People at that time spelled phonetically — according to the Go-as- You-Please Spelling rediscovered by Andrew Carnegie and Prof. Brander Matthews, the Great Simpli- fiers . This being so, the name of Shake- speare 's father, found sixty-six times in the Stratford registers, is there speUed sixteen different ways. Surely the name of Sir Walter Kaleigh was well known; 33 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. yet his name in contemporary documents is spelled in about forty different Avays. He himself spelled it sometimes Rardey and sometimes Ralegh — jet he was one of the learned men of that age. Curious and recondite hints about Bacon's authorship of Shakespearean plays are discovered everj^vhere — ^by the Baconians. In the First Folio of 1623, the last comedy but one is As Yon Like It: the title of the last but one of Bacon's Essays, we are told, also reads As You Like It. In order to realize how baseless and irrele- vant this argument is, remember that the First Folio was published by a printers' syndicate and some of Shakespeare's actor friends, so that Bacon had nothing what- ever to do "wdth the arrangement of the plays. As for an essay of such title. Bacon's works fail to reveal it. It is worth noting, because of the pecu- liar light it sheds upon the mathematical processes of Bacomania, that in this enu- meration one is asked to count backward, starting from the end of the whole of Bacon's Essays and from the end of the first division of the plays in the Folio. It is a fundamental principle of Bacomania that you begin to count am^vhere you like, so long as you end where you wish. One arithmetical Sherlock Holmes discovers profound significance in the fact that An- 34 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. tony and Cleopatra is the tenth tragedy, and that the tenth essay of Bacon likewise deals with Antony's mad infatuation for Cleopatra. This time the count begins at the beginning of the complete Essays and at the beginning of the second division of the plays. Bacon merely mentions An- tony and his affinity in the essay, which has no relation whatever to Shakespeare's tragedy. But from a little molehill such as this, a Baconian easily makes a Chimbo- razo. The word ^'honorificabilitudinitati- bns," in Lovers Labor ^s Lost, has been made the basis of computations like those by which crazy millennarians fix the pre- cise date of the world's end from the books of Daniel and Revelation. Edwin Bormann, a German humorist who perpetrated an unconscious master- piece in a book on the Baconian theory, declares that whenever Francis Bacon had time on hand, volumes of Shakespeare were published. How Herr Bormann found out when Bacon had nothing to do, is not quite clear. Probably by reverse reason- ing he deduced that Bacon had nothing to do whenever plays by Shakespeare made their appearance. According to all his biographers. Bacon led a very busy life; one of them, as we have seen, says ^^he did the work of twenty men. ' ' The Shake- speare Quartos began to appear in num- 35 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. erous editions from 1597 to 1611, in the very years when Bacon should have been most occupied. No new plays were pro- duced after Shakespeare's death in 1616, though Bacon lived ten years longer, and toward the last had practically nothing to do, having in 1621 retired from public of- fice in disgrace. The statement that during the five clos- ing years of Bacon's life a number of new Shakespearean dramas were published is based upon the fact that many of the plays in the First Folio of 1623 are there printed for the first time. It is certain, however, that they had been written and performed long before — and as we have seen, Bacon had nothing to do with their publication. Heminge and Condell, actor friends of Shakespeare, remembered by him in his will, caused the Folio to be printed, seven years after his death, as a monument to his memory. Every one who knows the story of the First Folio, the most precious book in the world, a copy of which would bring at auction twenty thousand dollars, knows that no better proof of Shake- speare's authorship could be adduced. Has any other poet ever had a memorial to compare with the First Folio? Arguments based upon certain of the plays deserve some consideration. It has been pointed out, for instance, that Henry 36 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. VIII could not possibly have been written in its present form before 1621, whereas Shakespeare died in 1616. In the scene showing the dismissal of Cardinal Wolsey, the two gentlemen who acted in Wolsey's case do not appear ; in their place are the four nobles who in 1621 came before Francis Bacon to demand that he surren- der the Great Seal of the Eealm, after he had pleaded guilty to charges of corrup- tion and bribery. The four nobles re- ferred to are the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earl of Surrey and the Lord Chamberlain. We might well ask whether there were no earlier Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, whether the Earl of Surrey and the Lord Chamberlain were inven- tions of Bacon? But that would not re- move a peculiar coincidence. The dif- ficulty is cleared up when we recall that Shakespearean scholars are practically agreed that only a few scenes of Henry VIII are by Shakespeare; Fletcher and Massinger likely have written the rest. So the point raised becomes one of minor moment . But we also know that the play was acted in 1613, when the Globe Thea- ter was burned down by a fire caused by discharging cannon during the perform- ance; hence attempts to connect it with Bacon's disgrace eight years later are somewhat far-fetched. If any alteration 37 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. was made in the cast, Ben Jonson, who was friendly to Bacon, may have done it at a later revival, for the sake of the sym- pathy to be enkindled by such an allusion. Bacon, after his disgrace and fall, wrote the king a letter in which he compared him- self with the great cardinal. ^^ Cardinal Wolsey said" — these are Bacon's words — ^^that if he had pleased God as he pleased the king, he had not been ruined. My conscience saith no such thing. But it may be if I had pleased men as I have pleased you, it w^ould have been better with me.'' In these words the Baconians detect a startling similarity to Wolsey 's oft-quoted lines: "Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, He would not in mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies.'* This similarity, at most, would prove that Bacon had read or seen Shakespeare's play, and quoted from it imperfectly. But as the words are actually Wolsey 's own, recorded by George Cavendish in his life of the Cardinal, written before either Shakespeare or Bacon was born, not even this faint contact can be established . Ac- cording to Cavendish, Wolsey said: ^^If I had served God as diligent^ as I have done the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs. " Shakespeare is more faithful to the record than Bacon. 38 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Two literary finds have been used as props for the Baconian theory — the so- called Promiis and the ^^Northumberland Manuscripts. ' ' Mrs. Pott, a more industrious than in- genuous exponent of the Baconian the- ory, came across the memorandum-book now known as the Promus. It is assumed that this memorandum-book was owned by Bacon, and it is broadly alleged that it contains notes afterward used in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. To call the Promus a memorandum-book is the first piece of presumption. It is merely a school-boy ^s copy-book, and has no apparent connection with either Bacon or Shakespeare. Eduard Engel examined the Promus, which is in the British Museum, and ex- pressed the opinion that it contains the scribblings of three different school-boys. Bacon's hand-writing does not resemble any of the three. Aside from proverbs in Latin and English, the profound thoughts which it contains consist of phrases like ^^Good-morning!'' ^^Good-evening!" and similar commonplaces. Moreover, Mrs. Pott has apparently resorted to deliberate misreading to score a point. She has sub- stituted for the plainly legible word ^^vane," at the end of a Latin quotation, the word ^^rome," in order to secure a re- mote resemblance to the word ^^Eomeo." 39 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. The expressions ^^ golden sleep'' and ^^up- rouse'' are found in the Promus; they also occur in Romeo and Juliet. This, to Mrs. Pott, is proof conclusive that the Promus was Bacon's note-book in writing Romeo and Juliet. To the Shakespearean scholar nothing could be more ridiculous, more transparent, than this Promus humbug. Before it can be used to prove anything about either Bacon or Shakespeare, some one must prove that Bacon wrote it or had anything to do with it. A somewhat more interesting problem is presented by the ^^Northumberland Manu- script," discovered at Northumberland House in 1867. This was a packet of miscellaneous manuscripts by various authors — Bacon, Shakespeare, Nash, and others. On the title-page the names Wil- liam Shakespeare and Francis BaCon are written side by side over a dozen times. Only a few of Bacon's own manuscripts remained in the packet; of course it would not occur to the Baconians that the owners of the other manuscripts might have come to claim them. In one part of the manu- script, where Richard II and Richard III are mentioned, the name of Francis Bacon has been crossed out, and the name of Wil- liam Shakespeare substituted. What does this indicate except that whoever wrote the index of the contents had made a mistake 40 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. and corrected it? The Baconians find a deep significance in the crossing out of Bacon's name. They wonld have an ar- gument of real weight if Bacon's name had not been crossed out, or if Shakespeare's had been crossed out and Bacon's put in. Coming to the portraits of Shakespeare, the Baconians are in clover. We are told that the Folio edition of the dramas has the author's portrait, and that this does not in the least resemble Shakespeare's bust in Stratford Church. We are also in- formed that the Shakespeare of the Folio wears the costume of a courtier. The costume has little to do with it. Shakespeare was an actor, and may have worn costumes of various kinds. He was a court favorite, and may very well have worn court dress when at court, or the art- ist may have invested him with a new suit. Rodin has made a perfectly nude statue of Victor Hugo, but it does not follow that Victor Hugo walked about the streets of Paris unadorned. The Droeshout engraving in the Folio is accompanied by ten lines of verse in which Ben Jonson tells the reader to "Look Not on his picture, but his book." The meaning of this is very plain. The book was Shakespeare himself; the picture but a poor representation of him. Nobody 41 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. but a Baconian could possibly misunder- stand what Jonson meant. A Baconian can misunderstand anything. Both this portrait and the Stratford bust — whitewashed, repainted, restored every now and then — ^were crude and inartistic attempts at a posthumous likeness. We know how little the newspaper cuts of our day resemble the originals — many of them would justify the victim in a libel suit. In Shakespeare's age, the artists were even less adept and less conscientious, and Mar- tin Droeshout was just beginning his ca- reer. Other Shakespeare portraits by Janssen, Soest, Gilliland, Donford, and others, are all painted from tradition, not from life. That any of all these pictures resemble one another or the Stratford bust is more remarkable than that they differ. What is known as the Chandos portrait bears a slight likeness to the portraits of Bacon, observable mostly by Baconians. This portrait was once owned by Sir Wil- liam D'Avenant — the same who, as a boy,^ spoke of Shakespeare as his godfather, and was warned by some village wiseacre not to take the name of God in vain. D'Ave- nant's brother, who became a parson in later life, used to tell with pride that when he was a child, Shakespeare had given him ^^a hundred kisses" on visits to their father's inn. In his youth D'Avenant 42 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. must have seen Shakespeare often, and this would justify the belief that the Chandos portrait must have been a good likeness. This applies also to the Shake- speare bust at the Garrick Club in London ; this bust came from D^Avenant's theater, and was likely made from the Chandos portrait. A superficial resemblance to some of Bacon's portraits surely can have no bearing upon the question who wrote the plays. Some portraits of Beethoven look like Napoleon — did the Corsican com- pose the Eroica? We are told that Byron, Coleridge, Beaconsfield, Bright, Hallam, Dickens, Whittier, and others have doubted Shake- speare's authorship. This claim resolves itself into the wonderment exhibited by these men over the fact that one born in Shakespeare's station should divulge such brilliant genius. Such surprise might be more justly expressed over Burns, Chat- terton, and a host of others. The mother of Euripides sold vegetables ; Ben Jonson himself was a bricklayer's son; Marlowe's father was a shoemaker. Genius is the blue flower that grows upon the Alpine height, to be plucked by the wayfarer who went forth with no such purpose. It is the sudden star that flashes through the night unheralded by any trump of angel from the high heavens. It is no more pos- 43 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. sible to trace the genesis of genius, than to unravel the strands of the rainbow or to trace ocean's waves to their generative cloud. ^^A man's education is to be inferred from his actual works, not his possible works from his education/' writes Horace J. Bridges. But even admitting the ignor- ance of Shakespeare, would not establish Bacon as the author. The Baconians in- sist that whoever wrote Shakespeare's works must have understood Latin and Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish — they insist that Bacon had mastered all these languages, whereas the unlearned actor Shakespeare knew nothing of them. But that Shakespeare's ignorance is a myth has been already shown. Ben Jonson, who knew him well, says he ^^had small Latin and less Greek," whence it follows that he had some Greek and more Latin. His knowledge of French, displayed in the woo- ing of Katharine in King Henry V, is not anything to boast of; and his knowledge of Italian is somewhat doubtful, as the Italian stories supplying some of his plots had all become accessible in English trans- lations, except the sources of Othello and The Merchant of Venice. His acquaint- ance with Spanish is still more problema- tic; Montemayor, who furnished the sug- gestion for The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 44 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. had been translated into English shortly before Shakespeare made use of that ma- terial. Still, aside from his schooling, there is nothing essentially improbable in Shakespeare's having acquired a certain facility in all these languages, living in a large seaport where ships and sailors of every nation came together. There is a strong probability that in the plague year 1603 he may have visited Italy; and if he did so, he probably went through France, or more likely through Germany, which many companies of English comedians vis- ited about that time. Certainly Jakob Ayrer, a Nuremberg poet, either knew of The Tempest^ or else Shakespeare knew of Ayrer 's Beautiful Sidea. I like to think that possibly Shakespeare may have met this disciple of Hans Sachs and discussed with him, over a stoup of foaming Bava- rian beer, the decay of the drama, since the inspired cobbler had been laid to rest. It is a sad mistake to assume that su- perior erudition was required to write the works ascribed to Shakespeare. They contain nothing that any man of average intelligence might not have learned in five or six years of miscellaneous reading. There are hundreds of blunders and incon- sistencies, from the clock which strikes three in Julius Caesar to the cannons in Macbeth, the seacoast of Bohemia, etc., 45 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. which SO learned a scholar as Bacon would never have let pass. Would he let Hector talk of Aristotle eight centuries before the Stagirite was born, or make Giulio Ro- mano, born in the year of America's dis- covery, contemporaneous mth the Delphic Oracle, which Theodosius abolished A. D. 392? Would he pass sixpences as current coin in Ephesus, or make allusion to spec- tacles in King Lear — a tragedy which plays ^^when Joas reigned in Juda,'' while spectacles were probably invented about 1290 A. D.? Shakespeare made these blunders; Bacon would not have made them. It is not the learning that is in Shakespeare's plays that makes them the rarest jewels in the world's literature. It is the magical mastery of language, the deep insight into the souls of men and women, the marvelous dramatic power in every scene and char- acter, that puts the plays upon a pinnacle. These things Bacon did not have, while the learning which we know he had is not in evidence in the plays any more than his laborious touch. In a letter to Sir Tobie Matthew, who translated the Essays into Italian, Bacon says : *^My great work goeth forward; and af- ter my manner, I alter ever when I add. 46 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. So that nothing is final until all be fin- ished. ' ' It is said that Bacon rewrote the Essays thirty times. Rawley saw at least twelve copies of the Instauratio, revised year by year. This, as we learn from Jonson's sneering criticism, was entirely different from the literary method of Shakespeare, who rarely altered a line. When Heminge and Condell thought to praise Shake- speare's fluency, saying they had ''scarce received from him a blot in his papers,^' Jonson vehemently wished that he ''had blotted a thousand lines.'' Jonson was one of Shakespeare's friends, one with whom he had many wit combats at the Mermaid Tavern, and he owed Shakespeare a great debt of grati- tude, for Shakespeare used his influence at the theater to secure the acceptance and production of Rare Ben's first play. Jon- son is one of those who have borne wit- ness to Shakespeare's renown, though the Baconians make much ado over the fact that, in a list of great English poets, he does not mention Shakespeare, but calls Francis Bacon the greatest of all poets. We know that Jonson was also a friend of Bacon's, and that he was somewhat en- vious of Shakespeare; we know that he said Shakespeare "wanted art," and had "small Latin and less Greek;" but in all 47 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. that Jonson ever wrote he never voiced any doubt that his friend Shakespeare had produced the plays, and it is to him we owe the verdict : ^^He was not for an age, but for all time.'' The cool assertion that whoever wrote Shakespeare must have been a lawyer, be- cause the plays abound in judicial argu- ments and legal allusions, all exhibiting the mind of a great jurist like Bacon, is almost answered sufficiently by the tradi- tion that Shakespeare was in his youth a noverint, or lawyer's clerk. The Bacon- ians, however, in their efforts to blacken the Stratford man's character, crow loudly over the fact that he was continually en- gaged in lawsuits to recover loans or an- nex real estate ; and if this be so, he may easily have acquired his legal knowledge by association with lawyers, or from his father, who is known to have been involved in over forty lawsuits. One Baconian, when confronted with strong evidence that the plays contain hints of a lawsuit in which Shakespeare himself was interested, suggested that Bacon must have been Shakespeare's counsel. There are at most one hundred and fifty legal allusions in the plays, and they by no means justify the statement of Thomas Nash that ''the author of Hamlet was a jurist and the son of a jurist." He might as well have said 48 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. that the author of The Tempest was a sailor and the son of a sea-cook. All snch deductions from the supposed knowledge or supposed ignorance of the two men lead much further than desired. For instance, it would be easy to show from many passages about horses that Shakespeare was a great lover of the horse, and knew horses better than most men did. There being a tradition that, soon after he came to London, Shakespeare was em- ployed at holding horses in front of the theaters, this by Baconian logic should be taken as proof that he, and none other, could have written the plays. The natural history we have in Shakespeare's plays is such as he would have learned in Warwick- shire and along the Avon; it is not the natural history derived from books and scientific research, such as most of Bacon's was. The medical lore contained in the plays also is empiric; not such learned matter as Bacon had excogitated. The utterly unpoetic bent of Bacon's mind, apart from the proof afforded by his so-called poems, is shown by the fact that in all his writings he makes no mention of, or reference to, any contemporary English poet — not Shakespeare, nor Spenser, nor Chaucer, nor Sidney, nor any other of the golden-throated choir that made his age the most illustrious since the days of Peri- 49 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. cles. Poetry was to him a sealed book — with all his scholarship he does not appear to have heard of Dante or Petrarch, of Eonsard or de Bellay, nor does he often allude to Ovid or Virgil, with whose poetry Shakespeare was saturated. Eead Bacon's essay on Love — love, which he called ^Hhe child of folly ; ' ' then read Romeo and Juliet — it is not possible to conceive of the same pen writing both. Read Bacon's masque, The Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine, and then read any of the interludes in Shakespeare's plays — the stilted classi- cism of the one and the romantic grace of the others afford a most instructive con- trast. ^^ There is as great a difference between Shakespeare and Bacon," writes Walter Savage Landor, ^'as between an American forest and a London timber- yard.'' Gruff old Thomas Carlyle just about hit the nail on the head when he bluntly told poor Delia Bacon: '^Your Bacon could have created the earth as easily as Hamlet. ^ ^ Eventhe moral character of the men is fundamentally dissimilar. Bacon's in- gratitude and treachery toward his friend and benefactor Essex is a black blot upon his fame. One might paraphrase the words of Antony: ^^For Essex, as you know, was Bacon^s angel." When Essex became involved in a conspiracy against 50 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Queen Elizabeth, Bacon assisted the prose- cuting attorney, and it was Bacon's mer- ciless argument that sent Essex to the axe. No compunction restrained the brilliant and self-seeking man from this much-cen- sured action, which rendered him very un- popular in England, and afterward he wrote a book to malign the friend he had slain. What was Shakespeare's attitude under similar circumstances? Southamp- ton, to whom was dedicated Venus and Adonis, was involved in the same conspir- acy, and was exiled. Shakespeare, though a favorite at the court of Queen Elizabeth, is the only one of the noted poets of that time who wrote no threnody of grief when the Queen died — and the reason commonly assigned for this was her harsh treatment of his friend and patron, who was recalled when James ascended the throne. Here we see Shakespeare, the warm-hearted and impulsive player, in contrast with the cold- blooded and calculating lawyer. It was utterly unlike Bacon to put friendship ahead of policy and pride ahead of profit . There probably never has been another in- tellect as masterful as Bacon's coupled with a heart so pusillanimous and grov- eling. His abject humility is almost ori- ental — Pope called him the ''meanest of mankind/^ 51 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. To my mind there is one conclusive chain of evidence which shows the great plays were written by the actor William Shake- speare. One might possibly conceive of Bacon's having written them, and using another man's name, but certainly if he had written them, this lawyer would never have permitted another man to reap the rew^ards . Bacon was chronically hard up ; he was once arrested in the street for a debt; he was a prodigal spendthrift, who as judge accepted bribes to make ends meet ; when he died he owed more than one hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to nearly a million in our day. Shakespeare, on the other hand, accumulated a consider- able fortune as the result of his various activities — as playwright, as player, as manager. During his best years his in- come has been estimated at six hundred pounds or about three thousand dollars a year, equivalent to nearly twenty-five thousand in our day. Now if Lord Bacon wrote the plays, why did he not 'Hake the cash," even though he '4et the credit go"? The other argument, to my mind no less conclusive, is that the plays were undoubt- edly written by an actor, by a man famil- iar with the traditions of the stage, by a man who had one eye upon the people in the pit, and the other upon the pile of coin in the box-office. Bacon knew almost 52 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. nothing of the theater. In the same year that saw the appearance of the First Folio, Bacon wrote that "the drama had flour- ished in ancient days, but now was in neglect." At that very time there were fourteen theaters in London, giving daily performances before many thousands, and producing plays by a galaxy of dramatists whose like the world had not seen since the days of Sophocles and Menander. The author of the Shakespeare plays shows that he is a player even by his fondness for similes of the theater. It would never occur to a lawyer like Bacon to write the picturesque apologue of life uttered by the melancholy Jaques : "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." None but an actor, and a good one, could have written the advice to the players in Hamlet. None but an actor would have thought of Macbeth 's pathetic figure of Life as "A poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more." None but an actor would or could have written the delicious comedy scenes in A Midsummer Night ^s Dream, where the ef- 53 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. forts of amateurs are mocked with true professional superiority. None but a share-owner in a theater would have scored the rivalry of the children's companies, which were hurting the regular play- houses, as Shakespeare scores them in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. There is even a reference to ^^a fellowship in a cry of players'' by Hamlet, with an appre- ciation of the difference in value between ^^half a share" and "sl whole one," which points to Shakespeare the manager. ParoUes, in All's Well That Ends Well, making sport of Captain Dumaine's ^^ex- pertness in war," declares that ^^he has led the drum before the English trage- dians." It may be that we have here a reminiscence of a continental tour, and probably an allusion to the players' parade through the towns they visited. "As in a theater, the eyes of men After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious." This utterance, put into the mouth of the king's uncle, the Duke of York, in Richard 11, is another of those similes from the playhouse which show Shakespeare to have been an actor. Take the lines — "Like a strutting player whose conceit Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich To hear the wooden dialogue and sound Twixt his stretcht footing and the scaffolage." 54 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. Only a player who had heard the hollow planks echo his haughty tread, and had re- joiced in the noise he was making to im- press the ears of his audience, could have written these lines in Troilus and Cressida. None but an actor could have portrayed stage-fright as he does in Sonnet XXIII : "As an imperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put beside his part." Two actors of Shakespeare's company, Lowin and Taylor, who survived him by fifty years, had been coached by him, one m the part of Hamlet, the other in Henry VHI. Christopher Beeston, another of Shakespeare's fellow players, told his son that Shakespeare ^^did act exceedingly well," and also that ^^he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country,'' which may account for the pedagogic echoes in some of the early plays. It may be said that this testimony is hearsay, but it may be answered that hearsay of this nature, too simple to be invention, has greater validity than all the testimony ex- tracted by Baconian torture from sen- tences meaning something quite different. Shakespeare may have been a mere actor, descended from generations of no- bodies, or he may have been of the bluest- blooded stock in England — what care we? Mrs. Charlotte C. Stopes, one of the most 55 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. indefatigable of Shakespearean students, contends in her book on Shakespeare^ s Family, that ^^by the Spear-side his family was at least respectable, and by the Spindle-side his pedigree can be traced straight back to Gny of Warwick and the good King Alfred. ' ' Little the world cares — no royal lineage could add to the glory of his name, which is Shakespeare. It is absurd to suppose that such a secret as Bacon's authorship of the Shake- speare plays could have been kept, since it must have been known to so many others besides Shakespeare and Bacon — to the actors, to the printers, to the families and friends of both men. To get over this difficulty, the Baconians say that Ben Jonson, Rawley, Matthew, and the writers of the Odes undoubtedly did know Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays, and that many allusions to such knowledge are found in their pages. Since Jonson re- peatedly bears witness to Shakespeare's authorship of the plays — since neither he nor any of the others ever denied it— these fancied allusions are absolutely pointless. No one questioned Shakespeare's author- ship until crazy Delia Bacon started all the Donnellies, Gallups, Potts, and Booths to hunting ciphers, and as each of them has found a different cipher, we are warranted 56 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. in taking them all with several grains of salt. The theories invented to account for Bacon's concealment of an activity he should have been proud to acknowledge, surpass the frenzied fictions of E. Phillips Oppenheim and the veracious revelations of Prussian spies. Two witnesses would suffice to put the whole case of the Baconians out of court. First let us call Francis Meres, born in 1565, who studied at Cambridge and wrote a literary history of his period, entitled Palladis Tamia, Wit^s Treasury^ which was published in 1598 and written about two years earlier. Meres, put upon the wit- ness-stand, gives this testimony: '^As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey- tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared son- nets among his private friends, etc. ^^As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labour's Lost, his Love's Labour's Wonne, his Mid- summer Night's Dream, and his Merchant 57 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. of Venice; for Tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Androniciis, and his Romeo and Juliet. " A^ Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus' tongue, if they would speak Latin ; so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speak English. ' ' Francis Meres was a scholar, writing in mature years, in the midst of the matters he describes — a competent reporter of the current knowledge of his age. His evidence outweighs a hundred guesses and a hun- dred doubts. But let us put Francis Bacon himself on the witness stand, to testify as to his ability to write poetry. He boasts in his Apology concerning Essex that he once prepared a sonnet, '^and I remember I shewed it to a great person, and one of my lord's nearest friends who commended it." We demand to see this sonnet, but it is not among the exhibits of the case. At last the witness produces a real poem which he wrote, and which was published in a collec- tion by Thomas Farnaby in 1629. Here it is: The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span, 58 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. In his conception wretched from the wombe, So to the tombe; Curst from the cradle, and brought up to yeares With cares and feares. Who then to frail mortality shall trust, But limmes the water, or but writes in dust. Yet, since with Sorrow here we live opprest, What life is best? Courts are but only superficial Schooles To dandle Fooles : The Rurall parts are turn'd into a Den Of savage men : And where's a City from all Vice so free, But may be termed the worst of all the three? Domesticke Cares afflict the Husband's Bed, Or paines his Head: Those that live single, take it for a Curse, Or doe things worse: Some would have Children, those that have them none; Or wish them gone : What is it then to have, or have no W^ife, But single Thraldome, or a double Strife? Our owne Affections still at home to please. Is a Disease: To crosse the Sea to any forraigne Soile, Perils and Toile : Warres with their noyse affright us : when they cease, Ware worse in Peace : What then remaines? but that we still should cry, Not to be borne, or being borne, to dye. After consideration of this poem, no doubt a genuine production of Francis Ba- con's, we should be ready to acquit him at 59 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. once of the charge against him, that he forged the works of William Shakespeare. He might be capable of producing the works of Isaac Watts or Michael Wiggles- worth, but hardly any higher flights. No other witnesses are needed. The Baconian theory is the abdication of common-sense and the apotheosis of hum- bug. Started by Delia Bacon, encouraged by the Potts and the Donnellies, the para- dox has fascinated such minds as Lord Palmerston, Wilhelm Preyer, and Fried- rich Nietzsche. It even became fashion- able in certain pseudo-literary circles to doubt whether Shakespeare could have written the plays, and to admit that Bacon might have done so. What is the value of the testimony of a hundred people who do not know? Even though Theodore Roose- velt and Doctor Munyon, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Billy Sunday announced their belief that Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare, that would not alter the plain facts known to every sane man that knows something about Shakespeare. We know all the essential points of his life ; we know that the plays were produced at the theater of which he was part owner ; we know that all his friends and contemporaries consid- ered him the author, and that he gathered the financial rewards of authorship; we 60 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. know that before he died, playwrights like Drayton and Jonson visited him at Strat- ford — for what reason if not to talk shop? And we know that after he died, certain of his player friends collected his scattered plays and had them printed as a memorial to the author. No one dreamed of con- necting Francis Bacon with them; no one to-day, who has read both Bacon and Shakespeare, should suspect Bacon of be- ing able to write Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare of being able to write Bacon. They are two minds of entirely different metal. Shakespeare was a syn- thetic genius; he built up, out of all the materials accumulated in miscellaneous reading, a world of his own — a world peopled by a multitude of characters not even surpassed by Balzac and Dickens. Bacon's mind was of the analytic type, which takes apart the knowledge of the world, dissects its parts, penetrates into the vital recesses of truth. Knowing so much about both men, we find hardly a niche in the life of either, into which the necessary postulates of the Baconian the- ory would fit. It must be dismissed as one of the strangest delusions, the almost in- comprehensible aberrations, that the hu- man mind has ever been guilty of. It is merely another proof of the fact that any truth, however clear and venerable, can be 61 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. obscured by sly insinuation and rancons denial; that any theory, however tenuous and absurd, will find adherents if it is pro- pagated vociferously and persistently. It would be far better if these people, who *^ mistake assumption for argument and possibility for proof,'' were to expend their misdirected energy in reading Shake- speare — especially the cryptic utterance of the Fool in Twelfth Night: ^^ There is no darkness but ignorance,'' and the signifi- cant, almost prophetic, exclamation of Puck: *^Lord, what fools these mortals be!^' 62 Shakespeare by Robert G. Ingersoll One of the most magnificent tributes ever delivered by a supreme orator to a supreme poet. Bound in paper, 25 cents •iiiiiiiiiiiiiii Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle by H. N. 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