When Mr. Theobald gets away from his biographical pabulum and plunges into the literary arguments for Bacon’s authorship of the plays, he has little that is original to reveal, but much that is new in the way of parallels and coincidences. In the first place, he takes it for granted that Shakespeare could not, by any possibility, have written the plays. He does not prove it, but—cela va sans dire. Then he proceeds, to the extent of some four hundred pages of matter, to demonstrate, by reference to the significant Baconian characteristics in the plays, and the still more significant parallels between the poetry of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Bacon, that Bacon must be the author of both. Bacon, for instance, appears to have had a “very curious habit” of striking himself on the breast when he wished to emphasise an argument. Brutus, Ophelia, Clarence’s little boy, and Claudio, are all represented as using a similar gesture. Some such lamentations as Bacon may be supposed to have uttered after his fall, are to be found in King Lear, and Lucrece’s self-condemnation of herself to death for an offence of which she is entirely innocent is, of course, inspired by Bacon’s behaviour in making a full and humble submission to the Lords in respect of offences which he never committed. The mere fact that Lucrece was published in 1594, and that Bacon’s downfall did not take place until 1621, is a point of no moment—we can readily agree with Mr. Theobald that “there is a very curious reflection of Bacon’s character and temperament in the poem of Lucrece.” Lucrece absolves herself in the reflection,

Everybody knows that Bacon, “for some time after his condemnation, expected to resume his ordinary functions as counsellor to Parliament, and adviser to the King”—ergo Lucrece was Bacon’s prototype—in petticoats. Moreover, in the Essays, Bacon affixes to a meditative reflection in one of his philosophical propositions the phrase, “I cannot tell.” The same phrase, scarcely remarkable in itself, occurs several times in the Plays. Mr. Theobald devotes a whole chapter of his book to emphasising this remarkable coincidence. He advances pages of historical parallels, and he remarks, almost enthusiastically, that both Shakespeare and Bacon have dilated with pitiless logic on “the uselessness of hope.”

But Mr. Theobald is most amusing when he compares Bacon’s Essay of Love with the treatment of Love in Shakespeare. We know Bacon’s opinion of love, as expressed in the Essay, and we find it difficult to reconcile it with the rhapsodies that we find in the Plays; we remember Romeo and Juliet, and the exquisite comment, “Imagine Juliet as the party, loved”—or, rather, we should do so, if Mr. Theobald was not at our elbow to explain the apparent contradiction in thought and term. Love, it would appear, has two sides. There is the “bosom” side, and the business side. Here we have a full and convincing explanation of the difference between the views of love as expressed in the Essay, and the Shakespearean application of the sentiment as displayed in his dramas. In the Plays, Bacon regarded love from the “bosom” point of view, while in the Essay, the “very brief, very aphoristic, very concentrated, never discoursive or rhetorical, but severely reflective and practical essay,” he was dealing with Juliet as a “business” detail—a contracting party, in short—“the party loved.” Nothing could be more convincing! It would almost lead us to entertain a greater admiration for Bacon than Spedding could hope for. He has not only voiced two such entirely contradictory views of love as we find in the Essay of Bacon and the plays of Shakespeare, but he has, with the aid of Mr. Theobald, showed that, “curiously enough,” the two conflicting expressions are “significantly identical.” There is surely no need to proceed further. Mr. Theobald has proved his contention, and we must perforce accept his conclusions that Shakespeare, the arch-impostor, the champion literary fraud of all time, was “either entirely uneducated, or very imperfectly educated; that his Latin was small, his Greek less, and his pure English least of all; that such handwriting as his could never have figured on a University examination paper—this is the opinion, it will be observed, of an M.A., and a former editor of The Bacon Journal—that his whole life was too full of business, too much devoted to money to leave any extensive opportunities for study, or for large, broad, world-covering experience.”

But if we make it a sine qu non that the writer of the Plays was a man of leisure not devoted to mammon, “with ample opportunity for study, and of a broad-world covering experience” (whatever that may precisely mean), it is proof positive that he was not the man whom we know as Francis Bacon. Bacon’s whole life was devoted to business, and to the getting of money; he had no leisure, as he is for ever telling us, for his life’s work, and his experience of the world of men was so superficial and misleading that it sent Essex to the block, brought the King to loggerheads with his Parliament, and encompassed the utter downfall and disgrace of the cunning Chancellor. We need not be flustered by Mr. Theobald’s hysterical opinion that Shakespeare’s writing was “so execrably bad, so unmistakably rustic and plebean, that one may reasonably doubt whether his penmanship extended beyond the capacity of signing his name to a business document,” because we have Spedding’s statement that Shakespeare’s signature is simply characteristic of the caligraphy of the time, and we know by comparison that it is in advance, both in style and legibility, of that of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the father of the great Pretender.

Mr. Harold Bayley, the author of The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon, is, in the same degree, disdainful of facts. He declares that he will quote verbatim from Mr. Sidney Lee’s well-known Life of Shakespeare which would be most commendable in him if he did it—but he doesn’t. Rather he quotes the opinion of Richard Grant White, who says that “Shakespeare was the son of a Warwickshire peasant,” who “signed his name with a mark,” and that the Poet was “apprenticed to a butcher.” It is but waste of space to repeat that such assertions are palpably false. It may be true, as Mr. Bayley states, that Stratford, in 1595, was in an unsanitary condition, and that the Metropolitan theatres were the resort of undesirable persons—even that Shakespeare entered the play-house as a servitor, but all this proves nothing. It is also true that, up to the time that Shakespeare’s plays began to be produced, “there had been nothing in his career that would cause us to suppose he was a sublime genius,” but until Homer, or Michael Angelo, or Rudyard Kipling began to produce their masterpieces, we knew of nothing in them to make us accept them as heaven-born geniuses. Mr. Bayley assumes that Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon in 1585 with “Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and, perhaps, Hamlet, in his pocket.” The reason for his assumption is not vouchsafed to us. True, our dramatist left Stratford in 1585, but Venus was not published until 1593, and it was not until 1602 that Hamlet was produced. The mere fact that “in the sixteenth century the provincial dialects were so marked that the county gentry ... had difficulty in making themselves understood, except to their provincial neighbours,” proves that both these works were composed after Shakespeare had been for some time a resident in London, and indeed it is ridiculous to suppose that it took him eight years to find a publisher for Venus and Adonis. Donnelly deciphered the Bishop of Worcester’s opinion that Shakespeare was “a butcher’s rude and vulgar apprentice,” who “in our opinion was not likely to have writ them (the Plays).” “In our opinion” is scarcely evidence. Mr. Bayley’s contemptuous reference to Shakespeare’s handwriting as “five strange scrawls,” is combated by Spedding’s authoritative dictum, and his immediately succeeding conclusion that the classical allusions and references in the Plays prove the author to have been “a cultured aristocrat,” robs his entire argument of sapiency or merit.

Mr. Harold Bayley’s The Tragedy of Francis Bacon, is, in my opinion, an inconsequential contribution to the controversy. In the chapter on Papermarks, his contention that every fresh device necessitates a new mould (p. 38) is correct, but his deductions are senseless; the fact being that the paper is contributed from very many—mostly foreign—mills. Take one of Caxton’s books—say, The Golden Legend—and you will find 50 different water-marks in one volume; if all the copies could be examined, probably double or treble the number would be revealed. One hasn’t the patience to follow Mr. Bayley’s “reasoning”: he believes one of the paper-marks (No. 55) to be Rosicrucian—it is the Divine monogram, and traceable to the first century. No. 14, the “fool’s-cap,” gives the name to a size of paper still extant—so of the vase, or “pott.” The symbols are allusive, heraldic, or “canting,” mostly emblematic, or in rebus form. That is all. What more natural for the paper-maker Lile than to take the Fleur-de-lys for his trade symbol? With respect to printers’ headlines, tail-pieces, etc., they were (and are) simply fancy types used for decorative purposes. The oak, and its fruit the acorn—the rose, Tudor or otherwise, the lily, typifying our conquest of France, only erased from the Royal Arms temp. George III., would all, from a national standpoint, become the commonest form of ornament, and each, in its turn, lend itself to the fancy of the designer, who, Mr. Bayley would have us think, were all under the direction of Francis Bacon, who wove a wonderful story by this puerile means. As for the printers’ “hieroglyphics,” as Mr. Bayley calls them, they have been used almost from the invention of the art to the present time. Amongst publishers, too, they are common. The printer of The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon employs one: a lion supporting the trade symbol of Aldus. I have not consulted Mr. Whittingham, but (if he knows anything at all about it) he would probably say the device signifies that he is the English successor of the Venetian printer!