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Mr. Theobald, a Baconian by Intuition

Mr. Theobald’s “preliminaries” are chiefly remarkable for three diverse reasons. We learn therefrom that he is a Baconian by intuition – “the persuasion took hold of his mind” as soon as Holme’s Authorship of Shakespeare was placed in his hand – that he does not admit the existence of genius, and that he is intolerant of “clamours and asperities, denunciations and vituperations,” and the personal abuse employed by anti-Baconians, whom he alludes to as Hooligans, and compares with geese. So long as he keeps to the trodden path of Baconian argument, he is only about as perverse and incorrect as the rest of – to use his own expression as applied to Shakespearean students – “the clan.” But he becomes amusing when he ventures to present new arguments in support of Bacon’s claim, variously abusive in his references to Shakespeare, and desperately dogmatic in his pronouncement of the faith that is in him.

“Among the many shallow objections brought against the Baconian theory,” writes Mr. Theobald in his chapter on Bacon’s literary output, “one is founded on the assumption that Bacon was a voluminous writer, and that if we add to his avowed literary productions, the Shakespearean dramas, he is loaded with such a stupendous literary progeny as no author could possibly generate. Moreover, he was so busy in state business as a lawyer, judge, counsellor, member of Parliament, confidential adviser to the King, and the responsible rulers in State and Church, that he had very little spare time for authorship.”

In order to demonstrate that this shallow objection, as Mr. Theobald calls it, is a well-founded and irrefutable statement of fact, we have only to refer to Lord Bacon’s life and to his letters. From 1579, when he returned from France, until the end of his life he was distracted between politics and science; he put forward as his reason for seeking office that he might thereby be able to help on his philosophic projects which with him were paramount, and the poignant regret of his last years was that he had allowed himself to be diverted from philosophy into politics. He found “no work so meritorious,” so serviceable to mankind, “as the discovery and development of the arts and inventions that tend to civilise the life of men.” In his letter to Lord Burghley in 1592, he expressed the hope that in the service of the State he could “bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries – the best state of that province” – the province embracing all nature which he had made his own. But office was denied him, and he returned to “business” and to his constant bewailings of the fact that he had no time for literature. In 1607 he settled the plan of the Instauratio Magna; which had been foreshadowed in his Advancement of Learning, published two years previously. In 1609 he wrote to Toby Mathew, “My Instauratio sleeps not,” and again, in the same year, “My great work goeth forward; and after my manner I alter ever when I add; so that nothing is finished till all is finished.” From 1609 to 1620 Bacon spent such leisure as he could snatch from his other work in revising the Novum Organum (the second part of his Magna Instauratio), of which his chaplain, Rawley, says that he had seen “at least twelve copies revised year by year, one after another, and amended in the frame thereof.” In 1620, when the Novum Organum was published, the author sent it into the world uncompleted, because he had begun to number his days, and “would have it saved.” This was the book he alluded to as “my great work” – the work of his life, and he issued it as a fragment because he had not been able to find time to finish it. The belief that he had “very little spare time for authorship” is no shallow objection brought against the Baconian theory – it is an irrefutable fact, proved not only out of the mouth, but in the life, of Lord Bacon.

In spite, however, of all positive evidence to the contrary, Mr. Theobald proceeds to bolster up his contention that Bacon had time, and to spare, for literary pursuits, by the following most amazing piece of logic. He contends, in the first place, that “an estimate of the entire literary output of Bacon, as a scientific and philosophical writer, proves the amount to be really somewhat small.” He takes the fourteen volumes of Spedding’s Life and Works, subtracts the prefaces, notes, editorial comments, and the biographical narrative, puts aside as of “no literary significance whatever,” all business letters, speeches, State papers, etc., and thus reduces the total amount of literature to Bacon’s credit in the seven volumes devoted to the Life to some 375 pages. “If we calculate the whole amount contained in the fourteen volumes, we shall find it may be reckoned at about six such volumes, each containing 520 pages. On this method of calculation and selection, all that Mr. Theobald can find, “for his whole life, amounts to about 70 pages per annum, less than six pages a month.” Turning from Bacon to Shakespeare, Mr. Theobald finds that here again is a man whose literary output has been greatly exaggerated, for “if the Shakespeare poetry was the only work of William Shakespeare, certainly he was not a voluminous writer. Thirty-one years may be taken as a moderate estimate of the duration of his literary life, i.e., from 1585 till his death in 1616. And the result is 37 plays and the minor poems – not two plays for each year.” Mr. Theobald, it will be seen, possesses the same weakness for statistics that Mr. Dick evinced for King Charles’ head; he drops in his little estimate in season and out of season, and his appraisements are as manifold as they are fallacious. The period of Shakespeare’s dramatic output was confined to twenty years, from 1591 to 1611 – if he had continued writing plays till his death in 1616, Bacon’s alleged playwriting would not have ceased with such significant suddenness in 1611. But what conclusion does Mr. Theobald arrive at as the result of his estimates? No less than this, that if the whole of Shakespeare, and the whole of Bacon’s acknowledged works belong to the same author, “the writer was not a voluminous author —not by any means so voluminous as Miss Braddon or Sir Walter Scott.” That Mr. Theobald should not hesitate to class Miss Braddon’s novels with the plays of Shakespeare, which belong to the supreme rank of literature, or even with Bacon’s “royal mastery of language never surpassed, never perhaps equalled,” is the most astounding link in this astounding chain of so-called evidence. But Mr. Theobald advances it with the utmost confidence. “Therefore,” he sums up, “let this objection stand aside; it vanishes into invisibility as soon as it is accurately tested” —i. e., weighed up, like groceries, by the pound.

Mr. Theobald is scarcely complimentary to Shakespeare’s champions in this controversy, but his language is positively libellous when he refers to Shakespeare himself. His personality is “small and insignificant;” – he is a “shrunken, sordid soul, fattening on beer, and coin, and finding sweetness and content in the stercorarium of his Stratford homestead” – a “feeble, and funny, and most ridiculous mouse.” Mr. Theobald almost argues himself not a Baconian by his assertion that “no Baconian, so far as I know, seeks to help his cause by personal abuse, or intolerant and wrathful speech.”

Was Shakespeare the “Upstart Crow?”

All that we can allege with any certainty about Shakespeare, between 1586 and 1602, is that he must have obtained employment at one or other of the only two theatres existing in London at that time (The Theatre, and The Curtain) – perhaps, as Malone has recorded, in the capacity of call-boy – that he became an actor, was employed in polishing up the stock-plays presented by the Company, and that Love’s Labour’s Lost was produced in the Spring of 1591. Assuming that Shakespeare was the author of this play – assuming, that is to say, that Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell were neither arrant fools, nor wilful perjurers – it is evident that the “insignificant,” “shrunken, sordid soul,” “this ridiculous mouse” had education, application, a natural taste for the stage; and what is more – and more than Mr. Theobald can comprehend – he had genius. Mr. Theobald does not arrive at any such conclusion. Apart altogether from Mrs. Gallup’s cipher revelations, he is convinced by another “flash of intuition” that Ben Jonson was a fellow conspirator with Bacon in the ridiculous plot of foisting Bacon’s plays upon the world as the work of Shakespeare, and that Heming and Condell were but the tools of the disgraced Lord Chancellor.

But if Shakespeare was not advancing towards prosperity by the feasible methods I have conjectured, how can Mr. Theobald account for his ultimately emerging from the “depths of poverty” into a position of comparative affluence? The explanation is simplicity itself: “If a needy, and probably deserving vagabond” (page 11). – Why deserving? He was a “shrunken, sordid soul” on page 7! – “dives into the abyss of London life, lies perdu for a few years, and then emerges as a tolerably wealthy theatrical manager; you know that he must have gained some mastery of theatrical business.” So far the inference is legitimate and convincing; but how? Must he not have disclosed exceptional ability as an actor or playwright, or – ? listen to Mr. Theobald! – “he must have made himself a useful man in the green room, a skilful organiser of players and stage effects – he must have found out how to govern a troop of actors, reconciling their rival egotisms, and utilising their special gifts; how to cater for a capricious public, and provide attractive entertainments. Anyhow, he would have little time for other pursuits – if a student at all, his studies would be very practical relating to matters of present or passing interest. During this dark period he has been carving his own fortune, filling his pockets, not his mind; working for the present, not for the future. But it was exactly then that the plays began to appear.”

Mr. Theobald’s argument can only be described as a reckless, illogical, and absurd distortion of possibilities, and it is the more inconsequential since it proceeds to defeat its primary object. In the first place it is supremely ridiculous to assume that the paltry services of Shakespeare in the green room and the carpenter’s shop, secured for him his pecuniary interest in the Globe Theatre, or the respect and friendship of the leading dramatists of his day, or even the enmity of jealous rivals in the craft. Yet Mr. Theobald attempts to substantiate his conclusions by distorting the obvious meaning of Robt. Greene’s reference to Shakespeare in A Groat’s Worth of Wit. Greene was not an actor, but a dramatist; he was a man of dissolute habits, a poet of rare charm, but a playwright of only moderate ability and repute. He was a gentleman by birth, and a scholar by training. He had the lowest opinion of actors – he envied them their success, and despised their avocation. In The Return from Parnassus he betrays his prejudice in the following lines, which are put into the mouth of a poor and envious student: —

 
“England affords these glorious vagabonds,
That carried erst their fardels on their backs,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,
Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,
And pages to attend their masterships;
With mouthing words that better wits had framed,
They purchase lands, and now esquires are made.”
 

To the jaundiced mind of Robert Greene, the accumulation of means by an actor was a crime in itself, but that a mere mummer should dare to compete with the scholar and the poet in the composition of plays – more, that he should write plays that exceeded in popularity those of the superior person, the student – was a personal affront. On his death-bed, in 1592, Greene found an outlet for his resentment in writing an ill-natured farewell to life, in which he girded bitterly at the new dramatist, whose early plays had already brought him into public notice. He warns his three brother playwrights – Marlowe, Nash, and Peele – against the “upstart crow, the only Shake-scene in the country” who “supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” How it is possible to interpret these words to mean that the “upstart crow” was not an author, “but only an actor who pretended to be an author also,” the oldest inhabitant of Colney Hatch and Mr. Theobald must decide between them. These anything but “cryptic” words, as Mr. Theobald describes them, can have but one interpretation, and that is the one their author intended. They do not imply that Shakespeare, the “upstart crow,” is not the author of the plays imputed to him, but that he considers his plays as good as those of the older dramatists. His profession of authorship is not questioned, but the quality of his work is savagely challenged. Any other construction put upon the passage is sheer nonsense. Mr. Theobald appeals to the “most gentle and gentlemanly critics” to be patient and tolerant with the Baconians – “men as sound in judgment and as well equipped in learning as yourselves” – but it is high time that this kind of wilful misrepresentation and perversion of common sense should be condemned in plain language. If Greene had believed that Shakespeare was wearing feathers that did not rightfully belong to him, if he were pretending to be what he really was not; if, in Mr. Theobald’s confident explanation, he had no right to profess himself an author at all, we may be quite certain that Greene would have said so outright – he would not have adopted a “cryptic” style, and left it for Mr. Theobald to decipher his meaning.

Mr. Theobald’s alternative theory that the word “Shake-scene” does not refer to Shakespeare at all, is even more preposterous. “In 1592 ‘Shakespeare’ did not exist at all, and only two or three of the plays which subsequently appeared under this name could have been written.” But those two or three plays included, as far as we can tell, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Comedy of Errors– plays of sufficient promise to secure any author recognition as a poet and dramatist. If Mr. Theobald entertains any serious doubts as to the identification of Shakespeare in the “Shake-scene” of Greene, he may be advised to read the apology for this attack which Henry Chettle, the publisher, prefixed to a tract of Greene’s in the same year. “I am as sorry,” Chettle wrote, “as if the originall fault had been my fault, because myselfe have seene his (i. e., Shakespeare’s) demeanour no lesse civill than he (is) exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art.”

“For my burial I desire it may be in St. Michael’s Church, near St. Albans; there was my Mother buried, and it is the only Christian Church within the walls of Old Verulam.

“For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.”

This apology put forth by Henry Chettle is an invaluable attestation to the character and literary standing of Shakespeare – “his uprightness in dealing” is a matter of public report, and “his facetious grace in writing” is frankly acknowledged. At a period when professional rivalries ran strong, and no man’s reputation was above attack, a publisher and fellow author is seen regarding Shakespeare not only as a man to whom an apology was due, but to whom it appeared expedient to make one. In treating of the personal history of Shakespeare, it must be borne in mind that although the duly-attested facts regarding him are regrettably few, the poet was widely known to the leading literary and theatrical men of his day. Ben Jonson, his brother actor and dramatist, and Michael Drayton were his intimate friends. Condell and Heming remained in close relationship with Shakespeare until his death, and Richard Burbage was his partner in the business of the Globe Theatre. In Pericles and Timon, Shakespeare worked in collaboration with George Wilkins, a dramatic writer of some repute, and William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays. There were besides, the members of the Globe Company, men who lived their lives beside him, rehearsed under him, learned from him, interpreted him. Yet none of these men appear to have entertained the slightest doubt upon the genuineness of his claims to authorship, while every contemporaneous reference to him is couched in terms of affection and admiration. The only possible explanation of this remarkable fact is that Shakespeare and Bacon were one and the same person – a theory that the most hardened Baconian has not yet thought it advisable to advance.

Wm. Shakespeare, Money Lender and Poet

Mr. Theobald is unfortunate in his selection of the points he raises in Shakespeare’s career in order to belittle the character of the poet. He writes: “His known occupations, apart from theatre business, were money-lending, malt-dealing, transactions in house and land property.” There is not the slightest evidence to show that Shakespeare traded as a money-lender; his only interest in malt-dealing was confined to one transaction, and his transactions in houses and lands were those of any man who invests his savings in real estate. The phrase is, as the most superficial Shakespeare student will recognise, misleading in substance, and incorrect as a statement of fact. In another part of his determinedly one-sided book, Mr. Theobald dismisses, in a paragraph, the contention that Shakespeare’s poems are illuminated and illustrated by Shakespeare’s life. The obvious rejoinder is that there is nothing in the life of Shakespeare that makes it difficult for us to accept him as the author of the Plays, whereas the whole life and character of Bacon makes his pretensions more than difficult, even impossible, of acceptance.

In 1593, Venus and Adonis was published by Shakespeare’s friend and fellow townsman, Richard Field, and in the following year Lucrece was issued at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Both poems were dedicated to Shakespeare’s first and only patron, the Earl of Southampton, with whom Bacon is not known to have sought any intimacy until 1603, when he addressed to him a characteristic letter of conciliation. (In 1621, when Bacon was accused of corruption, the Earl of Southampton pointed out the insufficiency of the Lord Chancellor’s original confession, and it was largely the result of his firm and unfriendly attitude that Bacon’s abject submission and acknowledgment of the justice of the charges, was placed before the Lords). These poems constituted Shakespeare’s appeal to the reading public. The response was instantaneous and enthusiastic. “Critics vied with each other,” writes Mr. Sidney Lee, “in the exuberance of the eulogies, in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author had gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus.” Lucrece, Michael Drayton declared, in his Legend of Matilda (1594), was “revived to live another age.” In 1595, William Clerke, in his Polimanteia, gave “all praise” to “Sweet Shakespeare” for his Lucrecia. John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to “honey-tongued” Shakespeare in his Epigrams (1595), eulogised the two poems as an unmatchable achievement, although he mentions the plays Romeo, and Richard, and “more whose names I know not.” Richard Carew, at the same time, classed him with Marlowe, as deserving the praises of an English Catullus. Printers and publishers of the poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers. No fewer than seven editions of Venus appeared between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617. Lucrece achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare’s death. The Queen quickly showed him special favour, and until her death in 1603, Shakespeare’s plays were repeatedly acted in her presence.

When the sonneteering vogue reached England from Italy and France, Shakespeare applied himself to the composition of sonnets, with all the force of his poetic genius. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive, the greater number were probably composed in 1593 and 1594. Many are so burdened with conceits and artificial quibbles that their literary value is scarcely discernible; but the majority, on the other hand, attain to supreme heights of poetic expression, sweetness, and imagery. They are of peculiar interest, as disclosing the relationship that existed between Southampton and Shakespeare. No less than twenty of the sonnets are undisguisedly addressed to the patron of the poet’s verse: three of them are poetical transcriptions of the devotion which he expressed to Southampton in his dedicatory preface to Lucrece. The references are direct and unmistakable. In 1603, when the accession of James I. opened the gates of Southampton’s prison, Bacon was meekly writing to him: “I would have been very glad to have presented my humble service to your Lordship by my attendance if I could have foreseen that it should not have been unpleasing to you,” and hypocritically assuring him, “How credible soever it may seem to you at first, yet it is as true as a thing God knoweth, that this great change (i. e., the release of Southampton, and his favour with the new monarch, whose good-will Bacon ardently desired), hath wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely be now that which I was truly before.” The Earl of Southampton considered these protestations of friendship so incredible, as coming from the man who had consigned Essex, Bacon’s own friend and patron, to the headsman, and sent Southampton himself to the Tower, that he appears to have made no response to this letter, and twenty years afterwards he materially contributed to the Lord Chancellor’s discomfiture. One has only to compare this letter with the sonnet with which Shakespeare saluted his patron on his release from the Tower, to recognise the impossibility of regarding the two compositions as the work of the same man.