The Tempest in the form in which it originally left the author’s hand belongs, it would seem, with A Winter’s Tale, to the period 1607-1610, nearer probably to the 7 than the 10. The ground-plot may well have been adapted, as Herr Dorer suggested, from a story which ultimately got into a Spanish collection of Tales, called Winter Nights. Of the actual plot it is not necessary to say much. Twelve years before the opening of the play, Prospero, poet and enchanter, the victim of a wicked cabal, found himself and his daughter, then a mere babe, stranded on a barren island. Fortunately part of his library, consisting of volumes which he prized above everything else in the world, except Miranda, had somehow been allowed to accompany him. In the beloved society of these books and Miranda he managed to pass the time until relief came in the shape of a commotion brought about by his own consummate art.

The true centre of the play, the Sun about which its system revolves, is Miranda. It is for her sake, hers alone, that Prospero displays, and then for ever renounces, an art which he dearly loves and is certain he will miss.

Now there is no evidence fit to be trusted that Shakspere, or, to give him the title he coveted, Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, gentleman, was ever a lover of books, none that he ever possessed, or would have cared to possess anything in the shape of a library. Among the various specific bequests of his essentially vulgar Will no such thing as a book is even suggested. About 1613 Shakspere exchanged the mentally stimulating atmosphere of London for the deadly dullness of a mean provincial town. His departure, unwept, unsung, and seemingly not even noticed by any member of the literary world he is supposed to have adorned, may have been demanded by keen personal interest in an enclosure scheme which was then agitating the petty community at Stratford. There is no evidence, no hint even, that it was due to ill-health, and it certainly cannot have been due (as the whole action of Prospero was) to preoccupation with the marriage of a daughter. Daughters he had, it is true, and the younger of them (Judith) married one Thomas Quiney a vintner or tavern-keeper, son of Richard Quiney (an old friend of the Shaksperes) who, or whose widow, also kept a tavern. But Judith’s marriage took place long after her father’s retirement from London must have been resolved on. Shakspere’s highest ambition—Mr. Sidney Lee tells us—was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father’s misfortunes had imperilled. This father it seems was a chandler or general dealer, not more illiterate probably than others of the family, who began life in a humble way and afterwards came to grief. If, as is likely, his debts were inconsiderable, his ambitious son should have found little difficulty in restoring the family repute, such as it was. The fat-witted lines—Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here, etc.—which this same son seems to have selected, or composed, or ordered, for his monument, though quite out of keeping with mountains of surmise, are entirely in keeping with all we can properly be said to know of the man. Yet this is the man who is said, on eminent authority, to have conceived and executed The Tempest, and what is more to my immediate purpose, to have drawn Prospero in his own image! Belief in this might have been possible, had we known next to nothing about Shakspere or his environment. But the finds of a Halliwell-Phillipps (to take him as a type) have had an effect which the industrious finder certainly did not foresee or intend.

More than thirty years ago the writer came to the double conclusion, (a) that whoever Shakespeare might have been, Shakspere was not the man; (b) that of all the known poets of that day, it was Bacon and Bacon alone who seemed to possess the necessary qualifications. Many of the reasons—none of them beholden to cypher, cryptogram or hocus-pocus of any kind—which made for that conclusion are set forth in a little book, Bacon-Shakespeare, An Essay (signed E. W. S., Rome, but published, 1900, in London). Most of the reasons there given have, however, no very definite relation to The Tempest and its symbolism.

Shelley saw and asserted that Bacon was a poet. But students of Bacon need no Shelley to inform them that Bacon was indeed a poet. His earlier work betrays him. Even the Advancement of Learning (1605), tinctured as it is by the pedantic style then coming into fashion, holds just the same truth in solution. To many such students, apology is due for labouring the point. My excuse is the existence of a strong prepossession to the contrary. By what seems to have been an oversight on the part of Bacon, his executors and intimate friends, a letter of his to Sir J. Davies, also a poet, has come down to us, unedited for the public. In this letter Bacon confesses himself a poet, ranks himself in effect amongst concealed poets. Aubrey too, thanks probably to a similar oversight, lets us into the same secret that Bacon was a concealed poet. Of Bacon’s affection for poetry the product (Bacon himself calls it the work or play) of the imagination, there is no room for doubt. If other evidence were wanting, the Sapientia Veterum (1609) would almost suffice to prove it. As Porphyry’s reverence for the elder gods is deducible from his attempt to extract philosophy out of the oracles of antiquity, so Bacon’s reverent affection for poetry manifests itself in that elaborate attempt of his to distil philosophy out of what is at bottom a medley of poetical fables. That Bacon, like Prospero, delighted in poesis (making) is equally clear. Poesy, he says in the De Augmentis—Poesy is a dream of knowledge (or culture), a thing sweet and varied and that would fain be held partly divine.... But now it is time for me to awake (ut evigilem) and cleave the liquid ether of philosophy, etc. This passage, written after 1605, obviously means more than affection for poetry the product. Only a poet who loved to dream, only a poet for whom the awaking was fraught with pain, however glorious the promise of the dawn, would have written that.

Bacon again, like Prospero, was a lover of books, and happy like him, in the possession of a well-filled library (at Gray’s Inn, or Gorhambury, or both). He was an omniverous reader, tasting some books (mathematical and astronomical, for example), swallowing others, chewing and digesting a few. His biographer says of him: He was a great reader, but no plodder upon books.

About 1607-9, Bacon (in one of his impetus philosophici) imagined that at last he really had hit upon an infallible Method of vastly enlarging man’s dominion over Nature. The problem was how to launch this Method to the best advantage. Knowing only too well that he would receive no encouragement from living experts in science—the scientists who had arrived as distinguished from those who had not yet started—he fixed his hopes on ingenuous, open-minded Youth. But this is a prosaic way of looking at the matter, and Bacon was a poet. To him the desideratum presented itself as a marriage, a marriage between his darling philosophy, as he was wont to call it, and an ideal husband. In the Redargutio Philosophiarum men are exhorted to devote themselves to the task of bringing about a chaste and legitimate wedlock between the mind and nature. In the Sapientia Veterum the same idea appears in a different form: facultates illas duas Dogmaticam et Empiricam adhuc non bene conjunctas et copulatas fuisse.[74] In the Delineatio (c. 1607) he writes: We trust we have constructed a bride-bed for the marriage of Man’s Mind with the Universe. The same idea (hardly as yet an obsession) makes one of its earliest appearances in a Speech in Praise of Knowledge, forming part of a dramatic jeu d’esprit entitled A Conference of Pleasure (1592). In this Speech several things are said to have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. And what the issue of so honourable a match may be it is not hard to consider. With the actual merits of the Method we are but distantly concerned here. What is of importance here is the certainty that Bacon would lose no opportunity of repudiating every suggestion that his beloved child owed anything to the imagination. It was an usual speech of his lordship’s, says his biographer, that his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as men have made it, for it hath nothing of the imagination.

By this time the inner meaning of The Tempest, and also the editorial reason for thrusting it into the leading place of the First Folio, may have become apparent. Miranda stands for Bacon’s Darling Philosophy, and the ingenuous young Ferdinand for the unsophisticated mind of man, the human intellect cleared and delivered from idols, particularly idols of the theatre. The issue of so auspicious a match is left, in The Tempest, as in the Conference of Pleasure, to the imagination. Prospero’s ceremonious rejection of his magic robes is an adumbration of Bacon’s anxiety to preserve his Philosophy from being calumniated as a poetical dream, a thing infected with the style of the poets, as he once (in a fragmentary Essay of Fame) confessed himself to be. Devotion to Miranda again is the motive for Prospero’s resolve to dismiss Ariel from his service, at a time when Ariel could ill be spared, one feels, by his ageing master. The words my dainty Ariel I shall miss thee are eloquent of pain, pain self-inflicted and unexplained, except by a promise wholly uncalled-for by anything that appears on the surface. Ariel on the other hand, tricksy Ariel, incapable of human affection, sick of expecting a long-promised freedom, feels no pain, no regret, nothing but joy at the prospect of slaving it no longer for a despotic master: Merrily, merrily shall I live now, Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

The last words of one of Prospero’s closing speeches, Every third thought shall be my grave, followed up as they are by the thinly veiled pathos of his appeal in the Epilogue, perplex and distress the reader. Prospero triumphans, without one word of warning or explanation, has changed into Misero supplicans. Why this sudden revulsion? To my untutored mind it intimates a working-over of the play after Bacon’s fall, for the purpose of adapting it, not too obviously, to the altered circumstances of the original author, that unfortunate Chancellor who, according to Ben Jonson, hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. The date of this (last) working-over would probably synchronise with the first public or semi-public appearances of the First Folio (of Shakespeare), of Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum, and of Ben Jonson’s Time Vindicated, these four events—with perhaps a Court performance of the adapted Tempest thrown in—being, I venture to think, intimately connected with what may be called an Apotheosis of Bacon.

“A remarkable story indeed”—an objector may say—“but do you seriously believe that Bacon can be proved to have been the Author, and Shakespeare the pen-name? Besides, does it really matter—except to Stratford and Verulam—whether Shakespeare hailed from this place or that? We have the poems and we have the plays, and that is enough. As for your reading of The Tempest, it may be ingenious, but it is not convincing. Patience, with a modicum of ingenuity, has probably never despaired of cajoling almost any given meaning out of any fable—fables, like dreams and Delphian utterances, being almost as plastic as wax. Moreover, the inner meaning you claim to have disclosed, involves the absurdity of supposing that a fable was invented for the express purpose of wrapping up the said meaning, so effectually as to ensure its being missed by all the world, a few esoteric contemporaries only excepted. The idea, to be quite candid, belongs rather to Bedlam than to Bacon.”

Strict proof, I reply, is hardly to be expected either now or hereafter. A high degree of probability, resting on evidence of various kinds and different degrees of cogency, is all that the writer has ever contended for. The history of literature abounds in instances of pseudonymity. Of these one of the most apposite that occurs to me is that of Aristophanes, who made use of the name Callistratus, a contemporary actor, to mask his (own) authorship of the Birds, Lysistrata, etc. There are differences, of course, between the two cases, one being that in that of Aristophanes there were no very obvious reasons for concealment, whereas in the case of Bacon there were several. Whether it really matters who the great poet was depends on the word “really.” It certainly does not matter in the sense in which the high price of coal, the low price of Consols, England’s relations with other Powers, etc., matter. It does matter for The Tempest, the symbolism of which probably extends beyond Miranda and Prospero, as far as Neapolis, and possibly further. It cannot fail to affect the interpretation of other plays of Shakespeare. It solves, or helps to solve, interesting problems in the life and acknowledged works of Bacon. It matters in short for all genuine admirers of English literature. As to plasticity—where the fable to be juggled is vague, undocumented, variously and incoherently documented, or frugal of features, the operation will be child’s play. With such a fable as The Tempest the trick can only be brought off by singling out one or two features and shutting the eye to all the rest. One objection only remains to be dealt with. The reference to Bedlam with which it concludes might have been omitted, but no discussion of this question seems quite in order without some innuendo that the unorthodox person is mad or a crank. The objection itself (though the phrasing might be challenged as favouring the objector) is pertinent enough, and may be answered as follows: Bacon was an inveterate treasure-seeker. The unsunned treasures he sought were not material things like gold and silver, but gems of thought hidden away in the dreamlands of poetry. The genesis of this habit was no doubt closely related to his theory that poesy enables the artist in words to retire and obscure ... secrets and mysteries by involving them in fables invented for the purpose, a practice by no means uncommon, he firmly believed, among the poets of antiquity when they wished to reserve information for selected auditors.

So far the discussion has been grave to the point of dullness. Would that I had been able to enliven it, if only because The Tempest is a comedy—heads the file of the comedies in the First Folio. Possibly the following quotation from the work of an eminent critic may help to remedy the fault: Miranda ... and her fellow Perdita are idealizations of the sweet country maidens whom Shakspere (sic) would see about him in his renewed family life at Stratford.[75]{159}