Baconian Essays :: FINAL NOTE

FINAL NOTE

There is one argument in support of the contention that Bacon was the author of Venus and Adonis which seems to me to deserve more attention than it has hitherto received.

It was, I believe, first put forward by the late Reverend Walter Begley, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, in his book, Is it Shakespeare?[114]—a work which every one interested in the Shakespeare problem ought to read, because it is replete with both information and amusement, and there is hardly a dull page in it. The argument is derived from the Satires of Marston and Hall, our early English satirists, of the sixteenth century, who wrote in bitter vein the one against the other. Both of them have a good deal to say concerning one Labeo, which is a pseudonym for some anonymous writer of the time. Now in 1598 Marston published a poem founded on the lines and model of Venus and Adonis, which he called “Pigmalion’s Image” (sic)—a love poem, not a satire—and as an appendix to it he wrote some lines “in prayse of his precedent Poem,” where “Pigmalion” had, according to the old legend, succeeded in bringing the image he had wrought out of ivory to life, and in this appendix occur the following lines:

And in the end (the end of love I wot),
Pigmalion hath a jolly boy begot.
So Labeo did complaine his love was stone,
Obdurate, flinty, so relentlesse none;
Yet Lynceus knowes that in the end of this
He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.

Now compare the following lines from Venus and Adonis (199-200):

Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel—
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth.

Here we have Labeo’s complaint almost word for word, and we are reminded that at the end of Venus and Adonis there was the “strange metamorphosis” of Adonis into a flower, quite as strange as that of “Pigmalion’s Image.”

Is it not clear, then, that by Labeo is meant the author of Venus and Adonis? It may be said, of course, that it was not the author, but Venus who complained that Adonis was “obdurate, flinty,” and relentless, but that is a futile objection, for Marston evidently puts the words of Venus into Labeo’s mouth, and it can only be the author of the poem to whom he alludes.

Who, then, was Labeo? Well, “these University wits,” as Mr. Begley writes, “were steeped in Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, and thence brought forth a nickname whenever an occasion required it.” Now in Horace we read:

Labeone insanior inter
sanos dicatur.

and we learn that M. Antistius Labeo was a famous lawyer, who, it is said, by too much free speaking had offended the Emperor Augustus.[115]

But what more have we about this sixteenth century Labeo? Well, Bishop Hall in his satires mentions him several times, and reflects upon him as a licentious writer who takes care to preserve his anonymity, and, like the cuttle-fish, involves himself in a cloud of his own making. Thus in the second book of his satires, which he called (after Plautus) VirgidemiÆ, i.e., a bundle of rods, Hall attacks Labeo in the following words:

For shame! write better, Labeo, or write none;
Or betterwrite, or, Labeo, write alone.
(Bk. II, Sat. 1)

and he ends this satire thus:

For shame! write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.

From these lines we may infer, as Mr. Begley says, that Labeo did not write alone, but in conjunction with, or under cover of, another author, and also that he did not write “cleanly,” but in a lascivious style, such as the style of Venus and Adonis, it might be.

But there is a further passage in Hall’s VirgidemiÆ (Book IV, Sat. 1) which I must quote:

Labeo is whipp’d and laughs me in the face:
Why? for I smite, and hide the gallÉd place.
Gird but the Cynick’s Helmet on his head,
Cares he for Talus or his flayle of lead?

Long as the crafty Cuttle lieth sure
In the black Cloude of his thick vomiture,
Who list complain of wrongÉd faith or fame
When he may shift it to another’s name?

It would take too long if, in this note, I were to attempt the explanation of this “Sphinxian” passage, as Dr. Grosart called it, but the general meaning seems clear enough, viz.: “I, the Satirist, whip Labeo, but Labeo merely laughs at me, for he knows he can shift the blame, and the punishment, on to another whose name he makes use of, while he himself lies, like the Cuttle, in the Cloud of his own vomiture.”[116]

Then, writes Mr. Begley, “Labeo is the writer of Venus and Adonis; and as there is every reason to think that Marston used the name Labeo because Hall had used it, we are therefore able to infer that Hall and Marston both mean the same man. We, therefore, advance another step, and infer that the author of Venus and Adonis did not write alone, that he shifted his work to another’s name (certainly a Baconian characteristic), and acted like a cuttle-fish by interposing a dark cloud between himself and his pursuers.”

But what proof or evidence is there that Labeo stood for Bacon? Well, Marston’s Satires were published, with his “Pigmalion’s Image,” in 1598, several months after Hall’s first three books of VirgidemiÆ had appeared, and in his Satire IV, entitled Reactio, Marston goes through pretty well the whole list of writers whom Hall had attacked, and defends them, but, curiously enough, he seems to take no notice of Hall’s attack on Labeo, though that attack was a marked and recurrent one. But, says Mr. Begley, “Labeo is there, but concealed in an ingenious way by Marston, and passed over in a line that few would notice or comprehend. But when it is noticed it becomes one of the most direct proofs we have on the Bacon-Shakespeare question, and, what is more, a genuine and undoubted contemporary proof.” What, then, is that proof? It is found in a line addressed by Marston to Hall:

That is to say: “What, did not even mediocria firma escape thy spite?”—or we might translate: “What, was not even mediocria safe (firma) from thy spite?”

“Mediocria firma,” therefore, stands for a writer, and one who had been attacked by Hall. And who was that writer? Of this there can, surely, be no doubt. “Mediocria firma” was Bacon’s motto, and we find it engraved over the well-known portrait of Franciscus Baconus Baro de Verulam, which appears at the commencement of his Sylva Sylvarum. Moreover, it is a motto which has never been used except by the Earls of Verulam or the Bacon family. “Mediocria firma,” therefore, stands for Bacon. But is “Mediocria firma” identical with “Labeo”?

Well, “Labeo,” as used by Marston, stands for the author of Venus and Adonis. Of that, I think, there can be no doubt. And Hall’s “Labeo,” the elusive author of a lascivious poem, who writes under a pseudonym and who is always prepared to shift the responsibility upon somebody else, seems eminently characteristic of Francis Bacon. And it is Bacon, under the guise of “Mediocria firma,” the spiteful attacks upon whom in Hall’s Satires are deprecated by Marston. In fine, it seems to be eminently probable, though it cannot be said to be absolutely proved, that “Labeo” and “Mediocria firma” are one and the same.

The above is but a brief outline of the argument put before his readers by the late Walter Begley, and I have no space to elaborate it further in this note. I should like, however, to add one final word. If Bacon was the author of Venus and Adonis, then he was also the author of Lucrece. Well, for myself, I should not be at all surprised to find that he was, in fact, the author of that long, wearisome, tedious, and pedantic poem, where the outraged matron, “aprÈs avoir ÉtÉ violÉe autant qu’on peut l’Être,” like Candide’s Cunegonde, and “pausing for means to mourn some newer way,” at last “calls to mind where hangs a piece of skilful painting, made for Priam’s Troy,” the contemplation of which leads to a prolonged train of reflection concerning Ajax and Ulysses, Paris and Helen, Hector and Troilus, Priam and Hecuba, etc., etc., all of which is singularly out of place in the mouth of Tarquin’s unhappy victim. Nor would I, in this connection, omit to refer to that long and curious and unwanted passage concerning heraldry which we find in an earlier part of the poem (lines 54-72), and upon which Mr. George Wyndham remarks that: “Whenever Shakespeare in an age of technical conceit indulges in one ostentatiously, it will always be found that his apparent obscurity arises from our not crediting him with a technical knowledge which he undoubtedly possessed, be it of heraldry, of law, or philosophic disputation.”

Here, in conclusion, I would advert to a passage in this stilted poem which is curiously illustrative of “Shakespeare’s knowledge of a not generally known custom among the ancient Romans.” When Tarquin has forced an entry into the chamber of Lucrece, we read: “Night wandering weasels shriek to see him there,”—a line which for a long time puzzled all the commentators. For what could weasels be doing in Collatine’s house or in Lucrece’s chamber? At last, however, some scholar directed attention to the note on Juvenal’s Satire XV, 7, in Mayor’s edition, where we learn that some animal of the weasel tribe was kept by the Romans in their houses for some purpose or another; and referring to Facciolati’s Dictionary, we read: “Mustela, ?a??, animal quadrupes parvum sed oblongum, flavi coloris, muribus, columbis, gallinis infestum. Duo autem sunt genera: alterum, domesticum quod in domibus nostris oberrat, et catulos suos, ut auctor est Cicero, quotidie transfert, mutatque sedem, serpentes persequitur,” etc.

The Romans then, it seems, had no knowledge of the domestic cat, and had domesticated an animal of the weasel tribe which they kept in the house to kill mice or it might be snakes, and for other purposes. Now, this is just the sort of out-of-the-way and recondite information which Bacon would have delighted in. But does any sane and reasonable man suppose that Will Shakspere of Stratford had ever heard of the “night-wandering weasel” in an ancient Roman house? The Baconian authorship of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and, I would add, the Sonnets, may be rejected as “not proven,” but the idea that these works were written by the player who came to London as a “Stratford rustic” in 1587, is surely one of the most foolish delusions that have ever obsessed and deceived the credulous mind of man. O miseras hominum mentes, O pectora cÆca!

THE END.
Cahill & Co., Ltd., London, Dublin and Drogheda.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Letters of Henry James. Macmillan, 1920, Vol. I., p. 432.

[2] See Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 1921. Article headed “Hamlet and History.”

[3] See Sidelights on Shakespeare by H. Dugdale Sykes. (The Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1919.)

[4] The theory that the handwriting of this “addition” to the play of Sir Thomas More is the same handwriting as that of the Shakspere signatures, is, I do not hesitate to say, one of the most absurd propositions ever advanced even in Shakespearean controversy.

[5] See Sonnet 144.

[6] It is only necessary to read the life of John Florio in the Dict. of National Biography or the Encyc. Brit. to appreciate the absurdity of this attempt to find him in Shakespeare’s Falstaff. An almost equally silly attempt has been made by another sapient critic to identify him with Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Now no two characters could be more dissimilar than those of Falstaff and Holofernes, yet Florio according to one wiseacre was the prototype of the former, and according to another wiseacre of the latter! But there is no limit to the absurdities which are symptomatic of the rabies Stratfordiana.

[7] English Literature. An Illustrated Record (1903), pp. 199, 200, 202. Italics mine.

[8] So says that distinguished Shakespearean scholar, Mr. Fleay, who points out that in the previous year the theatres were closed owing to the plague.

[9] Sir E. Maunde Thompson, in Shakespeare’s Handwriting, p. 26.

[10] So far, that is, as Sir Sidney’s Life of Shakespeare is, or purports to be, biographical, and setting aside the “fanciful might-have-beens.”

[11] She so appears in the Quarto, and also in the Folio in certain places (II. 1 and IV. 1, e.g.) where, as in other passages, the play seems to have been imperfectly revised.

[12] Boyet in the play (II. 1) calls upon the Princess (or Queen) to reflect that her mission to Navarre was to raise a claim “of no less weight than Aquitaine, a dowry for a Queen.”

[13] Vol. II, ch. 7.

[14] Sous le Masque, vol. I, 21. He might, I think, have included certain editors of newspapers and magazines in his statement, though not always “Érudits.”

[15] M. Abel Lefranc, it may be mentioned, is Professeur au CollÈge de France, and one of our highest authorities on Rabelais and the period of the Renaissance, not to mention MoliÉre, and other historical periods. “But, surely, we need not go to a Frenchman for enlightenment on our great English poet!” wrote a British commentator in the Press the other day—a most characteristic utterance, and superbly illustrative of the insular conceit which no entente cordiale seems to have the power to dissipate. But is it not highly probable that a French scholar, applying himself to the study of the Shakespeare Problem with an impartial mind, with no innate or national prejudices to obscure his vision, being himself an enthusiastic worshipper at the shrine of Shakespeare, the poet and dramatist, might be able to throw light upon many things which are “beyond the skyline” of those who have grown up in the school of an old and unquestioned tradition to which they cling as though it were part and parcel of the British constitution, and, as it were, a necessary ingredient of the national glory?

[16] I am, I need scarcely say, very far from denying the possible existence of ciphers, cryptograms, and anagrams, whether in “Shakespeare’s” plays and poems or in other literature of that day. It is known that such things were frequently made use of by writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Bacon himself gives us an example of the biliteral cipher, and it is known that he often employed such cryptic methods of writing. It is none the less true that the search for these things by “Baconian” enthusiasts of the present day has frequently led to very distressing results, for “that way madness lies.”

[17] Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1899.

[18] This Masque, also called “The Prince’s Masque,” forms the subject of two chapters (VI and VII) in Mr. Smithson’s book, Shakespeare—Bacon.

[19] The title-page bears date 1899. [G. G.]

[20] I may be allowed to refer to my booklet, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare (Cecil Palmer, 1921). [G. G.]

[21] But Lord Campbell cannot be quoted as a “Baconian.” [G. G.]

[22] See Jonson’s censure of Poetry in his day, for being “a meane Mistresse to such as have wholly addicted themselves to her; or given their names up to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by ... she hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions, both the Law and the Gospel, beyond all they could have hoped without her favour.” This means, I take it, that Jonson had in his eye Bacon and others as striking examples of Poetry’s generosity, and himself a shining illustration of her meanness. As for the prosperous burgher of Stratford, he was not in the picture, for Jonson was treating of poets. [Original Note.]

[23] But surely this statement, put into the mouths of the players by the author of the Folio preface, could not have referred to printed matter? If the players did indeed, receive papers with “scarce a blot” they were, doubtless, fair copies. [G. G.]

[24] See Sous le Masque de Shakespeare. Vol. I, p. 130.

[25] As for the claims of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, see “Shakespeare” Identified, by J. Thomas Looney (Cecil Palmer, 1920).

[26] With reference to the “Baconian” theory I must here quote words recently written by one who bears a highly distinguished name in the ranks of literature. Mr. George Moore, writing in reply to a criticism by Mr. Gosse, published in the Sunday Times, thus expresses his opinion upon that question: “Some of Shakespeare’s finest plays were not only revised, but remoulded; ‘Hamlet’ is one of these, and it is not an exaggeration to say that its revisions were spread over at least twenty years; and I thought when I wrote the little booklet, ‘Fragments from HÉloÏse and AbÉlard,’ that the text of ‘Othello’ in the Folio contained 160 lines that are not to be found in the quarto, and I think so still; 160 lines were added between the publication of the quarto [in 1622] and the folio [1623], and these lines cannot be attributed to any other hand but the author’s; they are among the best in the play, and among them will be found lines dear to all who hold the belief that Bacon and not the mummer was the author of the plays:

Like the Pontic Sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Helespont.”

See the Sunday Times, August 28, 1921. With reference to the 160 new lines added in the folio version of Othello and which “cannot be attributed to any other hand but the author’s,” it will be remembered that William Shakspere of Stratford died some six years before the publication of the quarto of 1622. (See Is there a Shakespeare Problem? p. 443 et seq.)

[27] In the Fortnightly Review of January, 1922, Mr. W. Bayley Kempling gravely informs us that Shakespeare bestowed the name of “Mountjoy” on the French Herald in Henry V. in honour of the “tire-maker” of that name with whom player Shakespeare lodged for a time in Mugwell (i.e., Monkwell) Street, thereby repeating the preposterous error of Dr. Wallace (often exposed by the present writer amongst others) who wrote in ignorance of the fact that “Mountjoy King at Arms” was the official name of a French Herald who, as Holinshed informs us, made his appearance at Agincourt! Had Mr. Kempling condescended to read an “heretical” author he might have been saved from this absurd mistake.

[28] This Essay was written by Mr. Smithson in 1919-20.

[29] The words of the original are:

“Who in an angle, where the ants inhabit,
(The emblems of his labours) will sit curl’d,” etc.
[Ed.]

[30] But it was not “these ‘glories’,” but the Faction of Chronomastix, and the “Fame of his own,” who, according to the real Fame, were destined to “deify a Pompion.” The suggestion which follows that the “glories” were “a selection from among the dramatis personÆ who were about to figure in the First Folio” is an hypothesis which will not, I fear, meet with general acceptance even among “Baconians.” [Ed.]

[31] It might be well here to quote the original words. Chronomastix, addressing Fame, delivers himself as follows:

“It is for you I revel so in rhyme,
Dear Mistress, not for hope I have, the Time
Will grow the better by it; to serve Fame
Is all my end, and get myself a name.”

To which Fame answers:

“Away, I know thee not, wretched impostor,
Creature of glory, mountebank of wit,
Self-loving braggart, Fame doth sound no trumpet
To such vain empty fools: ’tis Infamy
Thou serv’st, and follow’st, scorn of all the Muses!
Go revel with thine ignorant admirers,
Let worthy names alone.”

Whereupon Chronomastix makes an appeal to his “ignorant admirers”:

“O you, the Curious,
Breathe you to see a passage so injurious,
Done with despight, and carried with such tumour
’Gainst me, that am so much the friend of rumour?
I would say, Fame?
Who with the lash of my immortal pen
Have scourg’d all sorts of vices and of men.
Am I rewarded thus? have I, I say,
From Envy’s self-torn praise and bays away,
With which my glorious front, and word at large,
Triumphs in print at my admirers’ charge?

Whereat “Ears,” one of “The Curious,” exclaims:

Rare! how he talks in verse, just as he writes!
[Ed.]

[32] In Mr. Smithson’s Shakespeare-Bacon, at p. 124, we read: “A schoolmaster, for example, is engaged in turning ‘all his (Chronomastix’s) workes’ from the insular ‘English in which they were originally written into the general or continental Latine.’” It is somewhat difficult however, to find Bacon under the guise of Chronomastix.

Jonson’s words are:

“There is a school-master
Is turning all his works too into Latin,
To pure Satyric Latin; makes his boys
To learn him; call’s him the Times Juvenal;
Hangs all his school with his sharp sentences;
And o’er the execution place hath painted
Time whipt, for terror to the infantry.”

This also appears to be an allusion to George Wither. [Ed.]

[33] Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1899.

[34] Shakespeare-Bacon pp. 89-91, and Note 2 on p. 91.

[35] It may perhaps be worth while to quote some of the words put into the mouth of “Fame” when “the whole Scene opens,” and Saturn sitting with Venus is discovered above, and certain “Votaries” come forth below, “which are the chorus,” shortly before “the Masquers are discovered.”

“Within yond’ darkness, Venus hath found out
That Hecate, as she is queen of shades,
Keeps certain glories of the time obscured,
There for herself alone to gaze upon
As she did once the fair Endymion.
These Time hath promised at Love’s suit to free
As being fitter to adorn the age.
By you [i.e., King James] restored on earth, most like his own;
And fill this world of beauty here, your Court.”

What were the “certain glories of the time obscured” which Time had “promised at Love’s suit to free” is matter for speculation.

[36] But Shepheard’s Hunting appeared in 1615. Jonson, in the Grand Chorus at the end of the Masque, writes:—

“Turn hunters then
Again
But not of men.
Follow his ample
And just example,
That hates all chase of malice, and of blood,
And studies only ways of good.
To keep soft peace in breath
Man should not hunt mankind to death,
But strike the enemies of man.
Kill vices if you can,” etc.

Here was yet another hit at George Wither, but who was he whose “ample and just example” was held up as a model for imitation? [Ed.]

[37] Mr. Smithson’s references to Sir Sidney as Mr. Lee show that this Essay was written many years ago. [Ed.]

[38] But an impresa was much more than this. Imprese were employed in tournaments (e.g.). Puttenham says, “The Greeks call it Emblema, the Italians Impresa, and we a Device, such as a man may put into letters of gold and send to his mistresses for a token, or cause to be embroidered in Scutcheons of arms on any bordure of a rich garment, to give by his novelty marvel to the beholder.” On this matter of the Earl of Rutland’s Impresa (it was Francis Manners, the Sixth Earl for whom the work was executed), see my “Is there a Shakespeare Problem?” pp. 16-21. It is to be noted that in the year 1613, after all the great Shakespearean works had been written, we find Shakspere, the (alleged) great dramatist, then, as we must assume, at the zenith of his fame, engaged with his fellow-actor, Dick Burbage, to work at Lord Rutland’s new Device, for the magnificent reward of 44^s.! [Ed.]

[39] Alas, that rich harvest has never seen the light. [Ed.]

[40] In the portrait Bacon has an open book before him, across whose pages are written the words “Instaur” and “Magna.” On the left-hand page appear the words “Mundus Mens,” and on the right-hand page the words “connubio jungam stabili.” [Ed.]

[41] I venture to refer to my short article on The Tempest in “The New World” of April, 1921. The reader may also profitably consult Mr. Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified on this matter, at p. 513. [Ed.]

[42] The better opinion now seems to be that Henry VIII is not Shakespearean, but was written by Fletcher and Massinger in collaboration. Mr. James Spedding long ago tendered reasons which have convinced most of the “orthodox” critics that the better part of this play, including Wolsey’s and Buckingham’s speeches, was the work of Fletcher, and recently Mr. Dugdale Sykes, in his Sidelights on Shakespeare, published at the “Shakespeare Head Press” at Stratford-upon-Avon (1919), with preface by the late A. H. Bullen, appears to have proved that all that part of this great spectacular drama which was not written by Fletcher came from the pen of Massinger, who, as we know, frequently collaborated with him. [Ed.]

[43] Milton’s versification of the Psalms is much worse than Bacon’s, and if there were any doubt as to the authorship of Paradise Lost, and Lycidas, and L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, and Milton were known only as the writer of this versification of the Psalms, it would be confidently asserted that he could not possibly be the author of the above-mentioned works. [Ed.]

[44] This Essay was written by Mr. Smithson in the year 1919.

[45] See my Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 342. [Ed.]

[46] Jonson says “wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stop’d; Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius.” This means that he had to be “stop’d” not in writing but in talking. See my Is there a Shakespeare Problem? p. 386, seq. [Ed.]

[47] The so-called Masque of Owls begins with the stage-direction: “Enter Captain Cox on his Hobby horse,” of which animal the Captain says: “He is the Pegasus that uses to wait on Warwick Muses, and on gaudy days he paces Before the Coventry Graces.” The “Warwick Muses” are generally supposed to be the Morris-dancers of the county, with whom the hobby-horse was usually associated. [Ed.]

[48] To which, of course, Bacon had been “translated,” first as Baron Verulam, and later as Viscount St. Alban. [Ed.]

[49] This is No. LXV. Nota 6, in Sir I. Gollancz’s Edition. [Ed.]

[50] No. LXXI.

[51] No. LXXII.

[52] See Manes Verulamiani, published by Sir Wm. Rawley (1626). No. 32, by Thomas Randolph of Trinity College, Cambridge. [Ed.]

[53] Waller in the dedication of his works to Queen Henrietta Maria, speaks of Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Bacon as “Nightingales who sang only with spring; it was the diversion of their youth.” [Ed.]

[54] See note ante p. 84. [Ed.]

[55] Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Reminiscences, 1918, are, if memory fail not, my authority here. [See Mrs. H. Ward’s Recollections, pp. 255-258, and an interesting letter, headed “Shakespeare Folios,” and signed “A. R. Watson,” in The Times of April 13, 1922. Ed.]

[56] It cannot be proved that Shakspere ever spelt his name Shakespeare. Shakspere seems to be the form he preferred. Probably however, both he and his illiterate father Shaxper, Shaksper, Shakspear, or what not, were anything but fastidious about spellings. Persons who happen to be interested in the Shakspere family’s fifty or sixty ways of spelling their name will thank me for referring them to Sir George Greenwood’s Shakespeare Problem where they will find it stated that “the form Shakespeare seems never to have been employed by them.” Among examples of destructive criticism of the Stratford theory, I know not one so exhaustive and deadly as this of Sir G. Greenwood’s. In my Shakespeare-Bacon Essay, Shakspere, his irredeemably vulgar Will, and other doings, are relegated to an appendix.

[57] Whitgift to wit. [Ed.]

[58] The allusion is to Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598. [Ed.]

[59] See Bacon’s Essay Of Simulation and Dissimulation, where he will have it that dissimulation is a necessary consequence of “secrecy,” its “skirts or traine, as it were.” Simulation he holds to be “more culpable ... except it be in great and rare matters” where there is “no Remedy.” Jonson would be able to maintain that his Ode told no lies direct—its attribution of “small Latin” being merely conditional, and its “Swan of Avon” a purely imaginary bird.

[60] As to Jonson and Shakespeare, see further the extract from an article contributed by Mr. Smithson to The Nineteenth Century, prefixed to his Essay on the Masque of Time Vindicated. I may be allowed also to refer to my booklet Ben Jonson and Shakespeare (Cecil Palmer, 1921).

[61] In this place the order of the words is slightly altered, but the quoted words are Bacon’s. Here also it may be well to observe that Francis Bacon was not a pioneer in the revolt against what is called the Aristotelian, but should be called the Scholastic Philosophy. Destructive criticism of that philosophy began at least as early as the 13th century and had already done its work so far as natural science was concerned long before Francis Bacon took up the cry.

[62] This always reminds me of The Tempest and its projected match between Ferdinand, the unsophisticated mind of man, and Miranda, symbol of the new method of nature study. Naples, the New City of the Tempest, would thus stand for the model city or state expected to spring up as a result of the New Method. The New Atlantis of Bacon was another state of this kind.

[63] In a letter to his uncle, 1592, Bacon wrote: “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” May this explain the “universality” with which James I is here credited?

[64] These same goodly fields had been so diligently cultivated by Bacon that his insight into human nature was probably unequalled by any of his contemporaries, whilst his mastery of all arts of expression enabled him to portray it as it has never been portrayed before or since.

[65] “Insignia hÆc amoris et mÆstitiÆ monumenta.” These were published by Rawley under the title of Manes Verulamiani, in 1626, the year of Bacon’s death. [Ed.]

[66] S. Collins, Rector of King’s College, Cambridge, writes, in the Manes Verulamiani:

Henricus neque Septimus tacetur,
Et quicquid venerum politiorum, et
Si quid prÆterii inscius libellum
Quos magni peperit vigor Baconi.

Where the appended translation reads: “Nor must the Seventh Henry fail of mention, or if aught there be of more cultured loves, aught that I unwitting have passed over of the works which the vigor of great Bacon hath produced.” A note explains “quicquid venerum politiorum” as “stories of love more spiritually interpreted,” and refers to Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum.

The author of No. XVIII of the Manes tells us that “the Day Star of the Muses hath fallen ere his time! Fallen, ah me, is the very care and sorrow of the Clarian god [Phoebus to wit], thy darling, nature and the world’s—Bacon: aye—passing strange—the grief of very Death.

What privilege did not the crule Destiny [Atropos, one of the Fates] claim? Death would fain spare, and yet she [Atropos] would not. Melpomene, chiding, would not suffer it, and spake these words to the stern goddesses [the ParcÆ, or Fates]: ‘Never was Atropos truly heartless before now; keep thou all the world, only give my Phoebus back.’” It is to be noted that the Muse who here speaks of Bacon as her “Phoebus,” or Apollo, is Melpomene the Muse of Tragedy. [Ed.]

[67] But “moral philosophy,” the words used both by “Shakespeare” and Bacon, are the correct translation of t?? p???t????. “Political philosophy” would have been a wrong translation. Moreover, Erasmus, before “Shakespeare” and Bacon, had rightly translated p???t???? by “moral philosophy.” [Ed.]

[68] Items (e), (f), (g) and (h) are lifted without material alteration from my Bacon-Shakespeare Essay.

[69] The story of the Merchant of Venice is, as is well known, founded on the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, Day IV, Novel I. See my Is there a Shakespeare Problem? p. 91. et seq. [Ed.]

[70] See also the forty-sixth Sonnet. [Ed.]

[71] See my chapter on “The Northumberland Manuscript.” Post p. 187.

[72] Not quite “always”—there were some exceptions. [Ed.]

[73] This Essay was written by Mr. Smithson in the year 1912.

[74] See XXVI Prometheus, sive status hominis. [Ed.]

[75] It is a pity that Mr. Smithson has not given us the reference to this delightfully comic, but highly characteristic utterance. [Ed.]

[76] Bacon’s Works, edited by Spedding, vi, 486.

[77] First published in 1627, a year after Bacon’s death.

[78] This work seems to have been first published in 1612.

[79] Additamentum, an addition, or accession to.

[80] At contra, illud animis hominum penitus insidere debuerats artificialia a naturalibus, non forma aut essentia, sed efficiente solummodo differre; homini quippe in naturam nullius rei potestatem esse, prÆterquam motus, ut scilicet corpora naturalia aut admoveat, aut amoveat.... Itaque natura omnia regit: subordinantur autem illa tria; cursu, naturÆ; exspatiatio naturÆ; et ars, sive additus rebus homo.

[81] “It is the fashion to talk as if art were something different from nature, or a sort of addition to nature, with power to finish what nature has begun, or correct her when going aside. In truth, man has no power over nature except that of motion—the power, I say, of putting natural bodies together, or separating them—the rest is done by nature within.” Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, circ. 1612. Man (e.g.) as the modern writer puts it, “can bring together the radium and the bouillon, but the radiobe, whatever it may be, is none the less a product of nature.” “The art itself is nature.”

[82] Unfortunately, however, Bacon’s instances are far from satisfactory. “We see,” he says, “that in living creatures, that come of putrefaction, there is much transmutation of one into another; as caterpillars turn into flies, etc. And it should seem probable, that whatsoever creature, having life, is generated without seed, that creature will change out of one species into another.” And so forth.

[83] Judge Webb does not refer to Bacon’s remarks on the coloration of flowers which I have thought worth citing, but he quotes the Natural History to the effect that “if you can get a scion to grow upon a stock of another kind” it “may make the fruit greater, though it is like it will make the fruit baser.” But this is not much of a “parallel” with the remark of Polixenes as to marrying “a gentler scion to the wildest stock,” etc.

[84] Country Matters in Short, by W. F. Collier, p. 21.

[85] See also his remarks on the saying “homo est planta inversa,” Cent. VII, 607, and compare Burton, Anat: of Melancholy, vol. 2, p. 193. Ed. 1800. The scientific facts with regard to sex-difference in the vegetable world were not discovered till some seventy years after Shakspere’s death.

[86] At the same time we must take note, that Bacon’s theory of the flamy substance of which the stars are supposed to consist, seems to differ not a little from the modern conception of matter in a state of combustion or incandescence. See Abbott’s Life of Bacon, pp. 374-5.

[87] Sir Edward Sullivan, who appears to have been captivated by Signor Paolo Orano’s quite untenable theory that Hamlet is meant for Giordano-Bruno, makes a truly remarkable comment upon the second of the lines above-quoted, viz.: “Doubt that the sun doth move.” He says this line “is the Copernican System in little”! It is, of course, the very opposite. It is the Ptolemaic System in little! (See Sir E. Sullivan in The Nineteenth Century, February, 1918).

[88] Life, pp. 373-4. Mill remarks (Logic, vol. i, p. 253) that Newton’s discovery “is the greatest example which has yet occurred of the transformation, at one stroke, of a science which was still to a great degree merely experimental into a deductive science.”

[89] He appears on almost every page of Professor Dowden’s article.

[90] My italics. The manuscript has been damaged by fire (probably in 1780), the edges of the pages being much scorched and singed.

[91] See Spedding’s Introduction, p. xix. It is, I believe, contended by some that the word here is not “Philipp,” but as Mr. Spedding so read it when the manuscript was very much clearer than it is now, we may, I think, be content to accept his evidence, more especially as close to it, a little to the left, stands the word “Phillipp” still plain for all to read. Mr. Burgoyne, therefore, includes this letter of Sir Philip Sydney among the subjects mentioned in the supposed list of contents.

[92] The items in italics are mentioned in the list on the outside page. It will be seen that the latest date of any article of the contents is 1596. Note that six of the nine pieces are by Francis Bacon.

[93] See Spedding’s Introduction, p. xvi.

[94] “The Northumberland House Manuscript,” says Spedding, “is for the most part remarkably clear and correct; it is very seldom, that there can be any doubt what letter is intended, and the mistakes are very few.” See Mr. Burgoyne’s Facsimile.

[95] Mr. Dowse says that the only explanation of this entry that he has heard is that it was suggested by Bacon’s behaviour in the Essex case. I have, however, heard another, viz., that it is Bacon’s own reflection on the deceits and vanities of life.

[96] “The name of Shakespeare,” writes Mr. Spedding (p. xxv.) “is spelt in every case as it was always printed in those days, and not as he himself in any known case ever wrote it.”

[97] “Peeps” certainly seems better than “spies,” and it has been suggested, therefore, that this gives the line as the poet first conceived it, the alteration having been made to meet the exigency of rhyme.

[98] “Bacon,” writes Mr. A. W. Pollard, “as we should expect, reckoning his year from January.” The copy in the British Museum was bought Septimo die Februarii 39 E. R.

[99] This argument holds even if, as Mr. Dowse seeks to prove, the transcription was never carried out in the Northumberland volume. No penman would have noted the Essays for future copying if they were already in print.

[100] “To Algernoun, Lord Percy,” the Earl’s son and heir, whom he addresses as “My right noble Pupill and joy of my heart,” Davies writes, “The Italian hand I teach you.” Would that he could have taught it to William Shakspere of Stratford! It was in his time, says Mr. Dowse, “fast superseding the old court-hand.” It was, certainly, fast superseding the old German, or “Old English,” hand in which Shakspere wrote. And the author of Twelfth Night must have known the value of that Italian hand which was at that time rapidly “winning its way in cultured society,” as Sir Sidney Lee tells us, for does not he make Malvolio say, “I think we do know the sweet Roman hand”? But Mr. Dowse does not seem to have known the meaning of the term “court-hand,” which is a technical term for the scripts employed by lawyers in drawing up charters and other legal documents, and can very seldom be described as “beautiful.”

[101] The word “bounty” indeed, as the other nouns, “Beauty,” “Bays,” etc., is printed in italics in accordance with the practice of the times. That does not, of course, imply that any extra emphasis is on the word. Mr. Dowse omits the italics in the case of the word “beauty,” but emphasises “bounty” and “compells!”

[102] I do not know what evidence there is that these initials were written by Davies himself, and were not additions made by some other hand.

[103] Mr. Dowse omits the hyphen.

[104] This parenthesis is inserted by Mr. Dowse.

[105] Spedding’s Introduction, p. xxv.

[106] I have dealt with this Epigram at some length in Is there a Shakespeare Problem? at pp. 295, 353, and Appendix A. p. 559. So far as I know there is no evidence that Davies knew either Dick Burbage or Will Shakespere personally. On March 28, 1603, Bacon wrote to Davies asking him to use his influence with King James in the writer’s favour, and concluding with the words, “so desiring you to be good to concealed poets.” (Spedding. Lord Bacon’s Letters and Life, iii. 65.)

[107] Dowse pp. 4 and 10.

[108] If we were to adopt this theory we should have to put the date for the “knocking about” of the MS. even later than that assigned by Mr. Dowse, for though Overbury’s murder was discovered in 1615, Lady Somerset, as she then was, was not committed to the Tower till April, 1616, and it is not probable if turner stands for Anne Turner, that that name would be written till after the trial had brought it prominently before the public.

[109] Life of Bacon vol. i, p. 250-1.

[110] Ibid. vol. i, p. 349.

[111] We know from Archbishop Tenison’s Remains that Ben Jonson was one of Bacon’s “good pens.” Baconiana 1679, p. 60.

[112] See articles in the modern Baconiana for July, 1904, and April, 1905, on Bacon’s Scrivenery.

[113] Some think the scribbler was Bacon himself, which, if true, is certainly of no little importance.

[114] John Murray, 1903.

[115] This Labeo is alluded to as a jurist of eminence in the time of Augustus by Justinian in his Institutes. See Sandars’s Translation (Longmans, 1869), at p. 18.

[116] Mr. Begley suggests (p. 17) that the Cynic’s helmet is an allusion to the Knights of the Helmet, of whom we read in the Gesta Grayorum, and, as he writes, we know that Bacon was “responsible for this Device performed at his own Gray’s Inn during the year 1594.” As to “Talus” and his flail, see Spenser’s Fairy Queen, Bk. V, Cant. i, st. 12.

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