In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?” The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name, whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy men have borne—which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity, thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, Bacon and Shakspeare; an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866 appeared in New York, a book called The Authorship of Shakspeare, the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other striking merits, this unique one—of being such that no man could possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in one direction”—perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now—“now that the triumph seems so near at hand, we cannot resist coming to the front to congratulate those that have fought the battle upon their success, and, we candidly own, to show ourselves as a veteran who has survived the campaign, and is ready to give an honest account of the stores which still remain on his hands.” This congratulation and these stores may be read and seen in another little pamphlet just published by Mr. Smith, and to be bought at Mr. Skeffington’s shop in Piccadilly. It is in no spirit of cavil or disparagement that we overhaul those stores, but solely out of curiosity. We have read Mr. Smith’s last pamphlet, and read again his two earlier ones, with the most lively interest and amusement. Indeed, we have never for our part, been able to see the necessity for that “lyric fury” into which some of Mr. Smith’s opponents have lashed themselves. His theory has amused thousands of readers—readers of Bacon (both Francis and Delia), of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Smith; it has harmed nobody; it has added fresh lustre to the memories of two great men. Surely, then, we should do ill to be angry, and to be angry with one so courteous and good-humored as Mr. Smith would be a twofold impossibility. Moreover, we have always felt that there was a great deal to be said for the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays printed under the name of William Shakspeare, just as there is a great deal to be said for the converse of the theory, or for any other speculation with which the restless mind of man chooses for the moment to concern itself. After a certain lapse of years there can be no proof positive, no mathematical proof, that any man did or did not write anything. The mere fact of a work having gone for any length of time under such or such a name proves nothing; that the manuscript is confessedly in a particular man’s handwriting, or the undisputed receipt of a manuscript from a particular man, really, when one comes to consider it, proves nothing, so far as authorship is concerned. Take the excellent ballad of “Kafoozleum,” for instance. That, like Shakspeare’s plays, was known and popular before it was printed; like those, it was printed anonymously; no manuscript of it is known to exist; the authorship is unknown. A hundred years hence who will be able to prove it was not written by Lord Tennyson, let us say? One line in it runs “A sound there falls from ruined walls.” Why should not some speculative Smith a hundred years hence point to this line as proof conclusive that it must be the work of him who wrote, “The splendor falls on castle walls”? The parallel would be at least incomparably closer than any of those as yet found in the undisputed writings of Bacon and the alleged writings of Shakspeare. Let this be, however; we are not now concerned with any attempt to destroy Mr. Smith’s theory, for which, we repeat, we still feel, as we have always felt, there is very much to be said—very much to be said, of course, on both sides; the puzzle is how very little Mr. Smith, and those about him, have found to say on their side. And, in truth, little as Mr. Smith had found to say in 1856-57 he has found still less to add now in 1884. His “stores” are still very scanty. He has, indeed, satisfied himself (he had “an intuitive idea” of it in 1856) that Shakspeare could neither read nor write, beyond The well-known passage in the Sonnets (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s) And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand, receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is the vice, says Bacon, in the Novum Organum, of high and discursive intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his Bacon and Shakspeare! Take one instance only:—In the Life of Henry VII. occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him”; in Richard II. is this line, “Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in Hamlet this, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr. Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word “heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr. Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of Dolores and the author of the Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse must be one and the same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom, the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence:—“The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude, little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier” wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have sympathized with his Christian prisoner:— But they feared the grizzly despot and his myrmidons in steel, So their sympathy descended in the fruitage of Seville. We cannot conclude without offering to Mr. Smith, in all humility, a little theory of our own, vague as yet and unsubstantial, but worth, we do venture to think, his consideration or the consideration of anybody who is in want of a theory to sport with. This is, that these plays, or at any rate a considerable number of them, were really and truly written by Walter Raleigh. We have not as yet had time to examine this theory very closely, or (like Mr. Smith with his) to find very much evidence in support of it. But of what we have done in that direction we freely make him a present. The following plays were all produced after the year 1603, the year when Raleigh was sent to the Tower for his alleged share in the Cobham plot:—Othello, Measure for Measure, Lear, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Henry VIII., Taming of the Shrew. It has been allowed on Mr. Smith’s side that Bacon, amid all his variety of business, both public and private, must have been very hard put to it to find the mere time to write the plays. No man of that age could have had at that time |