Another exasperating 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 the How of 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:

This emphatic disclaimer of any intention to draw envy, ill-will, discredit, on the august name Shakespeare, had a deep meaning, or Jonson would not have given it such prominence. It reads as if addressed to a living person, and the subsequent apostrophe, “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,” chimes with this suggestion. The root difficulty of the passage lies in the obviously genuine conviction of the author that Shakespeare was in danger of being hurt by praise, noble, sincere and universally allowed to be just. As for the assertion that Shakespeare was “indeed above” the reach of harm, it is only pretence. Having dispatched this tiresome business, the eulogist lets himself go:

Passing by the half serious “Thou art a Moniment without a tombe”, we are pulled up by the line: “And though thou hadst small Latine,” etc. The internal evidence of his poems and plays proves that Shakespeare must have had a regular education, as distinguished from mere smatterings picked up in a village school of the sixteenth century. As to Latin in particular, the etymological intelligence shown in the handling of words derived from that language is almost conclusive. The evidence of contemporaries tells the same tale. “W.C.,” for instance, in Polimanteia (c. 1595) intimates that Shakespeare was a “schollar,” and a member of one of our “Universities.”[45] But there is no need to labour the point of Shakespeare’s culture. Indeed the innuendo of “small Latin” as applied to Shakespeare is sufficiently refuted by other passages in the Ode itself. “All scenes of Europe,” classico-historical as well as modern, owe him “homage.” He was another “Apollo”; each of his “well turned and true-filed lines” was sufficient to enlighten “ignorance.” What then are we to make of a jibe, apparently levelled at Shakespeare, that he was a quite unlettered rustic? Some years after the date of the Ode, and in order, as he says, to justify his “owne candor,” Jonson told “posterity” (as we shall see) that Shakespeare wrote with a “facility” so unbridled that he often blundered.[46] But even then, though his mood in the interval had veered right round from eulogist to candid critic, Jonson dropped no hint that Shakespeare lacked Latin or Greek. The jibe therefore, did not fit Shakespeare, but must have been made to the measure of some one else.

To continue our examination of the Ode. What can Jonson have meant by interspersing it with trashy jests upon the two syllables of the name (no longer august) Shakespeare? “Shake a stage”; “shake a lance, as brandished at the eyes of ignorance.” Was there something irresistibly funny about the name? Again, what sort of ignorance was threatened by the beauty and finish of Shakespeare’s lines? The ignorance of persons who for Shakespeare mistook a man untinctured with literature? The “Sweet Swan of Avon” apostrophe suggests comparison with what, in his Masque of Owles (1626), Jonson wrote about “Warwick Muses.” These charming creatures are there represented as inspired, not by “Pegasus,” but by a “Hoby-horse.”[47] Was this sarcasm reminiscent of the well-known lines which an Oxford graduate informs us were “ordered” by the Stratford man “to be cut upon his tombstone”? Certainly Pegasus was innocent of them. Here they are:

To return to the Ode. The lines which follow the “Sweet Swan” apostrophe are deserving of notice, chiefly because they tell us that King James (as well as Queen Elizabeth) was under the spell of Shakespeare. Then comes the ejaculation: “But stay! I see thee in the hemisphere advanced, and made a constellation there.” Is it possible that Jonson expected his readers—such of them as were not in the secret—to follow him here? To behold Shakespeare, À la Berenice’s hair, translated into the constellation Cygnus? Not he; that were an order too large for credulity itself to honour. What Jonson had in his mind’s eye was not the starry heaven, but the British House of Peers.[48] Such is this famous Ode. It suffers from manoeuvres, the object of which had to be kept dark; and this I take to be the reason for its exclusion from the second volume (1640) of Jonson’s Works, where it would have been quite at home amongst the Odes, Sonnets, Elegies and so forth, which go to make up that volume.

Turn we now to Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries, a work written years after the Ode and not printed till 1641, some three or four years after his death. These Discoveries consist in the main of passages lifted from Latin writers, notably Seneca the father (ControversiÆ), and entered promiscuously in Jonson’s Commonplace books. The borrowings are often mutilated and always treated without ceremony. For our purpose it is the application, not the accuracy of translation that matters. In quoting from them I shall give italics and capital letters as they appear in the slovenly print (1641), of which I have several copies, one of which by the way is inscribed “J. P. Collier” on the title page. A Discovery concerning Poets, runs thus:

The next Discovery is more to my purpose:

From this the reader will gather that under “Eliza and our James,” lawyer-poets who masked their poems—“in a players hide,” perhaps—were likely candidates for legal honours.

The next Discovery but one runs thus:

Another Discovery (p. 99)[49] censures “all the Essayists, even their Master Montaigne.” The slur suggested by this censure upon Bacon is significant. We were wont to believe that Bacon’s fame as a master of English rested securely on his Essays, and perhaps among his acknowledged works no better foundation is discoverable. Jonson’s estimate (to be quoted presently) of Bacon’s achievement “in our tongue,” is at least as high as ours. Yet Jonson does not appreciate Bacon’s Essays. The dilemma seems to be this: either Jonson was writing at random, or he knew of unacknowledged Baconian work which he was not free to disclose.

Another Discovery treats De claris Oratoribus, and among them of Dominus Verulamius[50] in these words:

On the next page after an appreciative notice of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, which was published almost simultaneously with the Shakespeare Ode, Jonson over-praises and misreads the Novum Organum in these words:

My object in giving these two quotations is only to show that there is nothing in them to lead up to the arresting praise of Bacon expressed in my next quotation, which comes after a list of English writers or wits, the elder Wiat, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney (a “great Master of wit,”) Lord Egerton, the Chancellor, and runs thus:

In order to appreciate this passage, the reader should grasp (1) that Jonson’s mind at the time was full of memories of Bacon; (2) that in a subsequent Discovery—De Poetica—he distinguishes Poetry from oratory as “the most prevailing,” “most exalted” “Eloquence,” and describes the Poet’s “skill or Craft of making” as the “Queene of Arts”; (3) that Jonson, proud of his own mÉtier as poet, would never have allowed, still less asserted, that Bacon had “filled up all numbers,” had he not known that Bacon was a great poet. Where is this wonderful poetry to be found? The answer is ready to hand. The famous writer who, according to the Discovery, had “perform’d that in our tongue” which neither Greece nor Rome could surpass, is the very man who, according to the Ode, had achieved that in English which defied “comparison” with “all” that Greece or Rome, or the civilisations that succeeded Greece and Rome, had given to the World. Bacon is that Man, and Shakespeare was his pen-name.

This hypothesis—that Shakespeare was the pen-name of Bacon—will pilot us through our difficulties. The disclaimer (in the Ode) for example, of any intention to injure the august name need puzzle us no longer. Bacon’s reputation was imperilled by publication of the great Book; for if the Public once got wind that he had trafficked with “common players” his name, already smirched by the verdict of the House of Peers, would have been irreparably damaged. A passage from an anonymous Essay of mine (Bacon-Shakespeare; projected 1884-5: published 1899), may be tolerated here. The Essay, after having suggested that Greene’s allusion to Shakespeare as having a “tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide” pointed to concealment behind an actor, proceeds:

To return again to the Ode. Its jests about shaking a stage (compare Greene’s “Shakescene”), shaking a lance, and its ecstatic vision of Shakespeare enthroned among the stars were no doubt intended to amuse the two Earls, and other patrons of the famous Folio.

As for the sweeping accusation in the Timber or Discoveries, that Poetry had been a mean Mistress to openly professed as distinguished from furtive or concealed poets, it would have been unpardonable had the Stratford man been a poet; for William Shakspere, Esq., of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, spent his last years in the odour of prosperity.

Other testimony, quite independent of Jonson’s, to the existence of an intimate relation between Bacon and the Muses, Apollo, Helicon, Parnassus, is abundant enough. Here are a few samples: Thomas Randolph shortly after Bacon’s death accuses Phoebus of being accessory to Bacon’s death, lest the God himself should be dethroned and Bacon be crowned king of the Muses.[52] George Herbert calls Bacon the colleague of Apollo. Thomas Campion, addressing Bacon says: “Whether ... the Law, or the Schools (in the sense of science or knowledge), or the sweet Muse allure thee,” etc. At a somewhat later date, Waller said that Bacon and Sidney were nightingales who sang only in the spring (the reference has escaped me, and memory may possibly deceive me).[53] Coming to comparatively recent times we find Shelley, an exceptional judge of poetry, was of opinion that Bacon “was a poet.” It may possibly be objected that Bacon’s versified Psalms (in English) are not poetical.[54] But these Psalms belong to about 1624, when Bacon—ex hypothesi—had turned his back on poetry for ever. What they prove, if they prove anything, is that Bacon was a literary Proteus who could take on any disguise that happened to suit his purpose, a faculty which no student of Bacon would ever think of disputing.

Inferences drawn from Bacon’s reticence or extracted from his works have yet to be weighed. In the nineties of the sixteenth century he can be shown to have devoted much time and thought to the writing and preparation of a species of dramatic entertainment known as Devices. Even after he became Lord Chancellor, he risked injuring his health rather than deny himself the pleasure of assisting at a dramatic performance given by Gray’s Inn. As a student of human nature, moreover, he had scarcely an equal (bar “Shakespeare.”) And yet he seems to have been ignorant of the existence of any such person as Shakespeare, although that name must have been bandied about and about in the London of his day, especially among members of the various Inns of Court, his own Gray’s in particular.

Neglecting Bacon’s poetical and interesting Devices, I confine my observations to the Advancement of Learning (1605), which though not written in what Waller held to be the singing time of life, reveals (while trying to conceal) the true bent of his genius. The Work was expressly intended to embrace the totality of human knowledge then garnered. Yet with the air of one who had no misgivings about the propriety of his classification he divides his vast subject into three categories, three only, and one of these is Poesie. The other two are History and Philosophie, the latter of which embraces “Natural Science,” divided into “Phisicke” and “Metaphisicke,” “Mathematicke” pure and mixt, anatomy, medicine, mental and moral science, and much besides. The work teems with poetical quotations, similies, allusions. Dealing with medicine the author gravely informs his readers that “the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body, and reduce it to harmony.” He cannot refrain from telling us that the pseudo-science of the alchemist was foretold and discredited by the fable of Ixion and the Cloud. With him, what we mean by endowment of research becomes provision for encouraging “experiments appertaining to Vulcan and DÆdalus,” etc. No wonder the Harveys, Napiers, and other pioneers of 17th. century science did not join in that chorus of admiration for Bacon, which seems to have included all 17th century men of letters. Sir Henry Wotton (for example) will have it that Bacon had “done a great and ever living benefit to all the children of Nature; and to Nature herself in her uttermost extent ... who never before had so noble nor so true an interpreter, or so inward a secretary of her cabinet.” One can imagine the laughter with which Galileo would have greeted this preposterous assertion.

Out of sight of philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, etc., and in the presence of poetry, the author is in his element and speaks with authority. In handling the subject of mental culture—“Georgics of the mind” is his phrase—he takes for granted that poets (with whom he couples historians) are the best teachers of this science, for in them:

“Poesie,” he says elsewhere, is “for the most part restrained in measure of words,” but in “other points extreamely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination.” Its use, he goes on to say:

Why, when he was enumerating the various kinds of poesie, did he eschew the apt word dramatic, and choose the vague word representative instead? Why hurry away from his subject (poetry) by reason of its intimate connection with the theatre? The answer leaps to the eye. For him, poetry, especially dramatic poetry, was like (the name) Shakespeare, under taboo.

The Bacon hypothesis, it may be urged, solves a few riddles. But what of the difficulties it involves? For example, it seems incredible that Bacon should ever have resolved to disown his wonderful offspring; except indeed on the impossible assumption that he, with his unrivalled knowledge of human nature and command of all the arts of expression—that he of all men was incapable of appreciating the children of his brain. Here, once more, my anonymous Essay suggests pertinent considerations:

In other words, the Novum Organum, the potent New Instrument that was to enlarge man’s dominion over every province of Nature, was Bacon’s chief solace for an unparalleled renunciation. Posterity, he was determined, should never know that the inventor of that Instrument had once revelled in the play of the imagination, lest men of science should have it in their power to pooh-pooh it as the fabric of a brain that had invented A Midsummer-night’s Dream, and The Tempest.

Bacon and his friends (moved by the fascination of the man, and pity for his fall) would naturally destroy all tell-tale correspondence they could lay hands on. Two private letters, and so far as we know, two only, escaped the flames. One from a bosom friend, Sir T. Mathew to Bacon (“Viscount St. Alban”), bears the following postscript: “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation ... is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” This letter is given in Dr. Birch’s Letters, etc., of Francis Bacon, 1763. Mathew himself made a Collection of Letters which included many of his own to Bacon, but excluded the one just quoted, an exclusion dictated, I imagine, by loyalty to his friend. Montague gives the letter in his Bacon, but I have not found it in Spedding’s Work. The other escape was a letter of Bacon’s to another of his friends, the poet Davies, written some twenty years earlier than Mathew’s letter. In this letter (to Davies), after commending himself to Davies’s “love,” and “the well using of my name ... if there be any biting or nibling at it, in that place” (the Royal Court), Bacon concludes: “So desiring you to be good to concealed poets, I continue,” etc. My quotation is from a copy dated 1657 (bound up with Rawley’s Resuscitatio), in which “concealed poets” is in italics. Spedding gives the words without the italics, and contents himself with saying that he cannot explain them. For another letting out of the secret we have to thank Aubrey’s notebooks, which inform us that Bacon was “a good poet but concealed, as appears by his letters.” Lastly there are the “Shakespeare” and “Bacon” scribbles on the half-burnt MS. of Bacon’s “Device,” A Conference of Pleasure. Possibly the “letters” referred to by Aubrey, or evidence more important, may yet be discovered in libraries unexplored, or explored only by orthodox searchers intent on proving their own case. A library in so unlikely a place as Valladolid seems, about eighty years ago, to have possessed a First Folio of Shakespeare which belonged to and was perhaps annotated by Count Gondomar, a friend of Bacon’s last years.[55]{114} If Spain held such a treasure so recently what may not Great Britain still hold? Florence, for whose Duke Sir T. Mathew had Bacon’s Essays translated into Italian, contained a copy of this translation not long ago. But my searches there, and in Venice, Milan, Padua, were far too hurried to justify any conclusion as to possible finds in Italy.

It is probably safe to take for granted that Bacon was acquainted with Shakspere; that the relation between them began maybe as early as 1588, and was concerned with playhouse property; that this property was held by Shakspere on trust for Bacon; and that it was sold, perhaps to the trustees, by Bacon’s orders some time before 1613.

The name of “Shakespeare” seems to have made its first public appearance in print with Venus and Adonis,[56] a poem which was dedicated in perfectly well-bred terms to an earl; licensed by an archbishop who had once been Bacon’s tutor;[57] and expressed on its title page patrician contempt for all things vulgar. By whose order was the name Shakespeare printed at foot of its Dedication to the Earl of Southampton? In the dearth of evidence the following guesses may pass muster. They are put into an unhistorical present in order to show at a glance that they, or most of them, are mere guess-work:—About 1592, Bacon makes up his mind to publish Venus and Adonis. Publication in his own name is vetoed by fear of offending powerful friends, his uncle Burghley in particular; and he prefers pseudonymity to anonymity. What he wants is a temporary mask which he fully expects to be able to throw off before long. In this mood, he calls on Richard Field, a London printer hailing originally from Stratford, and recommended to him by Sir John Harington, whose Orlando Furioso Field has just printed. Field happens to mention Shakspere which he pronounces Shaxper. Bacon, already acquainted with the young fellow of that name, decides that a fictitious person, whose name he pronounces Shakespeare, shall be the putative father of his Poem. Little dreams he, poet though he be, that he is thereby preparing a human grave for that immortality of Fame (as poet) which he has begun to anticipate for himself. The Poem appears in 1593; and is followed next year by Lucrece, fathered by the same Shakespeare, and dedicated to the same young Earl. Some years later, the name is stereotyped by Meres’s Commonwealth of Wits, where Shakespeare is mentioned seven or eight times—as the English Ovid; as one of our best tragic and best comic poets; as one of our most “wittie” and accomplished writers, and so forth.[58] A few years later still, Bacon begins to be perplexed what to do with his Shakespeare copyright, and his perplexity rises with every advance in his profession. Before succeeding to the Attorney-Generalship he realises once for all that complications, professional, social, and various, have made it impossible for him to think of fathering even a selection of his poetical offspring. In despair to escape from the impasse, he even talks of burning MSS. But the threat is not carried out. Soon after his melancholy downfall sympathetic and admiring friends, notably the two Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery—Southampton probably stood aloof, memories of the Essex affair still rankling in his mind—take counsel together, expostulate with him, entreat him to let them bear all expenses and responsibilities connected with publication, and to clinch their argument tell him that they have sounded the literary dictator of the day, Ben Jonson, and got his promise to undertake the work of editing, collecting, writing the necessary prefatory matter, and so forth. Bacon yields consent on certain conditions, the most embarrassing of which is that the true authorship of the plays be for ever kept dark—by means of “dissimulation,” if dissimulation will serve; if not, then by “simulation,” i.e., the lie direct.[59] The conditions are accepted with misgivings on Jonson’s part. He is aware that he will have no trouble with Mr. Shakspere’s executors, their interest in the copyrights involved being as negligible as their testator’s had been. And he knows Heminge and Condell well enough to feel certain that they will not have the smallest objection, either to being assigned prominent places in the forthcoming Book, or to his putting into their mouths statements, etc., concerning Shakespeare, which he himself would shrink from uttering. But even so, the task is no sinecure.

Here guess-work ends.

The famous Folio, with its apparatus of Dedication, prefatory Address, Ode, to “my beloved the author,” etc., made its appearance in 1623. The Dedication intimates (with ironical emphasis on the word “trifles”) that the author of these “trifles” was dead, “he not having the fate common with some to be exequutor to his owne writings.... We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians: without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare.”

The Address expresses a wish that the Author had lived to set forth “his owne writings. But since it hath bin ordain’d otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends the office” of collection, etc. This is followed by a statement, probably half jest, half irony, that the Author uttered his thoughts with such “easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot on his papers.” That Heminge and Condell had no hand in either Dedication or Address is sufficiently proved by turns and phrases characteristically Jonsonian. They, I suppose, had given Jonson carte blanche, and he made use of the gift, in the interest of literature which might otherwise have suffered irreparable loss. In this way the fiction of Shakespeare’s identity with Shakspere was so plausibly documented, that Jonson might have spared himself any further trouble on that score. But either to make assurance doubly sure, or to show his dexterity, he set about the writing of his Ode as if the fiction had not been planted already. Some of the Ode’s features need no further comment than they have received. But the “small Latin” and “Swan of Avon” allusions deserve a word or two more. Both passages point at Shakspere and away from Shakespeare. What was their raison d’Être? They were exceptionally significant touches to an elaborate system of camouflage, by which posterity, including ourselves, was to be deluded.

Hitherto the accent has been too much on the unessentials of the Ode, and far too little on its beauties. No nobler contemporary appreciation of Shakespeare has reached our ears, and that is a cogent reason for gratitude to its author. Before taking leave of him, I venture to make free with one of his apostrophes. The lines would then run thus:

In order to correct misapprehensions which may have arisen through my having slipped into positive statements, where ex hypothesi or conditional ones might have been desired, I wish expressly to disclaim any intention to dogmatise. Scientific certainty is out of the question. High probability we may reach, perhaps have reached. But that is the limit. That Bacon was Shakespeare, the only Shakespeare that matters, is merely a working hypothesis. Of other hypothetical Shakespeares who have been put forward, a certain Earl of Rutland would have deserved serious consideration, had he been as able a writer as was his father-in-law, Sidney. The only formidable competing hypothesis might seem to be that of a Great Unknown. But this essentially is a confession of ignorance, and some of its supporters are sceptics who amuse themselves by falling upon every hypothesis in turn.[60]{121}