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Bacon, the Poet

The whole of the new matter that we find in the play under notice is so dissimilar from that of Shakespeare in style, language, and expression, that it might be the work of any author, American or English, even – if we accept the statement of Spedding – of Bacon himself. It is difficult to form any correct estimate of Bacon’s talent as a poet, because, apart from his own description of himself as a “concealed poet,” and his versification of the Psalms, we have nothing to guide us. Spedding doubtless had these Psalms in his mind when he pronounced so emphatically upon the absence of similarity between the writings of Shakespeare and Bacon. There is little extant verse of the period which is so un-Shakespearean as this product of Bacon’s maturity, which was dedicated to the pious and learned George Herbert, whose verses on Bacon were printed in 1637. The publication is a proof that Bacon thought well of his work – it is not on record that anybody else has endorsed that opinion. Indeed, these seven Psalms give us all that we have, or want, of Bacon’s poetry. The following is an extract from the first psalm:

 
“He shall be like the fruitful tree,
Planted along a running spring,
Which, in due season, constantly
A goodly yield of fruit doth bring;
Whose leaves continue always green,
And are no prey to winter’s pow’r;
So shall that man not once be seen
Surprised with an evil hour.”
 

His rendering of the 90th psalm is not all as bald and discordant as the following:

 
“Begin Thy work, O Lord, in this our age,
Shew it unto Thy servants that now live;
But to our children raise it many a stage,
That all the world to Thee may glory give.
Our handy-work likewise, as fruitful tree,
Let it, O Lord, blessed, not blasted be.”
 

The beautiful 14th and 15th verses of the 104th psalm are thus rendered by our “concealed poet”:

 
“Causing the earth put forth the grass for beasts,
And garden herbs, served at the greatest feasts,
And bread that is all viands firmament,
And gives a firm and solid nourishment,
And wine, man’s spirits for to recreate,
And oil, his face for to exhilarate.”
 

There can be no two opinions as to the merits of these metrical efforts, which Bacon thought good enough to print and to dedicate to his friend George Herbert. Spedding says of them, “In compositions upon which a man would have thought it a culpable waste of time to bestow any serious labour, it would be idle to seek either for indications of his taste or for a measure of his powers.” And again, “of these verses of Bacon’s, it has been usual to speak not only as a failure, but as a ridiculous failure; a censure in which I cannot concur. An unpractised versifier (fancy styling the author of the Faerie Queene and Adonis, an ‘unpractised versifier!’) – who will not take time and trouble about the work, must, of course, leave many bad verses; for poetic feeling and imagination, though they will dislike a wrong word, will not of themselves suggest a right one that will suit metre and rhyme; and it would be easy to quote from the few pages, not only many bad lines, but many poor stanzas.” Spedding concludes with the comment: “Considering how little he cared to publish during the first sixty years of his life, and how many things of weightier character and more careful workmanship he had then by him in his cabinet, it was somewhat remarkable that he should have given these Psalms to the world.” Dr. Abbott, another friendly biographer and admirer of Bacon’s “magnificent prose,” says: – “Some allowance must be made (no doubt) for the fact that Bacon is translating, and not writing original verse. Nevertheless a true poet, even of a low order, could hardly betray so clearly the cramping influence of rhyme and metre. There is far less beauty of diction and phrase in these verse translations than in any of the prose works that are couched in an elevated style… But I cannot help coming to the conclusion that, although Bacon might have written better verse on some subject of his own choosing, the chances are that even his best would not have been very good.”

But despite the appalling evidence of poetical incapacity presented by this versification of the Psalms, a staunch Baconian, by a train of argument which is only equalled by that employed by Mr. Theobald, has proved, to his own satisfaction, that Bacon was a poet, by locating the position which the Plays occupy in the scheme of Bacon’s works. This ingenious logician has discovered that the two most extraordinary facts connected with Bacon’s philosophy are (a) that the most eminent students have been unable to understand his “method of interpretation,” and (b) that the last three parts of the Instauratio Magna are apparently wholly lost. Because Ellis and Spedding both declare that “of his philosophy they can make nothing,” and that “he failed in the very thing in which he was most bent,” therefore he must be a poet. Because the last three books of the Instauratio are “apparently wholly lost” – which is the writer’s perversion of the indubitable fact that they were never written – therefore the comedies, histories, and tragedies of Shakespeare actually form the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of “the great work.” Firstly (to present this argument fairly), Bacon declared his intention to insinuate his philosophy into men’s minds by a method which would provoke no controversy; secondly (this is not exactly proved, but just stated as a fact), Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare; and thirdly, the Plays are the treasure house of all art, science, and wisdom. The natural and inevitable deduction is that they must form the missing —i. e., the unwritten – parts of the Instauratio Magna.

I am afraid that we must decline to accept so ingenious a piece of sophistry. Until it is proved that the Psalms are a forgery, or that they have been erroneously attributed to Bacon, we have a gauge of his poetical ability which is fatal to his pretensions to the authorship of the Plays, of Spenser, or of any one of the books which we are asked to believe emanated from his stupendous intellect.

“Did Shakespeare Write Bacon?”

Mr. Leslie Stephen, with amazing nerve and a fine sense of humour, has carried the war of the rival claims into the enemies’ country, and propounded the theory, with no little plausibility, that so far from Bacon being the author of the Plays, Shakespeare was the real writer of Bacon’s philosophical works. Mr. Theobald claims to prove that Bacon had ample leisure in which to write all Shakespeare and his own books as well. Mr. Stephen has come to the conclusion that his time was so fully occupied with business, and political and financial anxieties, that he never found the opportunity he was always seeking to perfect his great philosophical reform. Up to the year of the accession of James I., he had not been able to prepare any statement of his philosophic ideas. His desire, as we know from his letters, was to stand well with the King; his scruples, as we also gather from his letters, did not make him hesitate to employ questionable practices when he had his own interests to serve. If he had not time to write, he could get a book written for him. He selected Shakespeare, who at this period had a great reputation as the author of Hamlet, for the purpose. Why Shakespeare, it may be asked? Because, says Mr. Stephen, he knew Shakespeare through Ben Jonson; he knew Southampton as a friend and patron of Shakespeare, and he therefore employed Shakespeare through Southampton – the present of £1,000, which it is known was made to Shakespeare by his youthful patron, being money paid by Bacon on account, for the writing of the Advancement of Learning.

If the supposition that Shakespeare wrote this book for Bacon be correct, argues Mr. Stephen, “he might naturally try to insert some intimation of authorship to which he could appeal in case of necessity.” Mr. Stephen sought for the intimation in the Advancement, and he discovered it in the first 81 letters. The opening words are, “There were under the law, excellent King, both daily sacrifices and free will offerings the one pro” (ceeding, &c.) These letters (to the end of pro) can be re-arranged to make the following: “Crede Will Shakespeare, green innocent reader; he was the author of excellent writing; F. B. N. fifth idol. lye.” For the assistance of any one who cares to verify the cipher, Mr. Stephen explains that in both cases (the original and the decipheration) A occurs in 4 places, B in 1, C in 3, D in 3, E in 15, F in 4, G in 2, H in 4, I in 6, K in 1, L in 6, N in 6, O in 4, P in 1, R in 7, S in 3, T in 5, U in 1, W in 3, X in 1, and Y in 1.

Mr. Stephen assumes that Shakespeare explained this saucy little anagram to Bacon when the work was published, and that Bacon retaliated by “getting at” the printers of the folio after Shakespeare’s death, and inserting a cryptogram claiming the authorship for himself. Bacon is imagined to have said to himself, “If Shakespeare succeeds in claiming my philosophy, I will take his plays in exchange.” “He had become,” says our theorist, “demoralised to the point at which he could cheat his conscience by such lamentable casuistry.” In 1608 Bacon was Solicitor-General, and a rich man. He approached Shakespeare a second time with the object of having his great philosophical work continued. Three years afterwards, Shakespeare left the stage, and retired to pass the last five years of his life at Stratford. Why did he retire? “Because,” says Mr. Stephen, “Bacon had grown rich and could make it worth his while to retire to a quiet place where he would not be tempted to write plays, or drink at the ‘Mermaid,’ or make indiscreet revelations.” If it should be asked what he was doing, the answer is obvious. He was writing the Novum Organum. Baconians and Mr. Leslie Stephen are agreed that the Novum Organum is the work of a poet, and that it was written by the author of the Plays. But if it is conceded that Shakespeare wrote Novum Organum, it still remains a mystery to Baconians as to who wrote Shakespeare. After Shakespeare’s death, Bacon, in De Augmentis, wrote that “the theatre might be useful either for corruption or for discipline; but in modern times there is plenty of corruption on the stage, and no discipline.” Mr. Stephen deduces from this that in order to aim a back-handed blow at Shakespeare, Bacon would blaspheme the art of which he claimed to be master – that he was, in fact, according to our other theorist, fouling the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of his Instauratio Magna.

Neither of the theories we have just reviewed need be taken seriously. We know that Bacon himself gave an account of the scheme of the Magna Instauratio in a section of the Novum Organum, called the Distributio Operis. The fourth book was to have contained examples of the “new method,” and of the results to which it led. The fifth was to contain what Bacon had accomplished in Natural Philosophy without the aid of his own method, and the sixth was to set forth the New Philosophy – the results of the application of the new method, and all the Phenomena of the Universe. Mr. Leslie Ellis tells us that Bacon never hoped to complete the sixth part; he speaks of it as a thing et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata. Mr. Leslie Stephen’s whimsical retort to the Instauratio theory may be regarded as a jeu d’esprit.

The Case for Shakespeare

In propounding their theory that Bacon was the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, the Baconians rely on two main arguments: the plausibility of the idea that they should have emanated from the man whom Macaulay declared to possess the “most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men,” and the extraordinary unlikelihood that a man of Shakespeare’s origin and antecedents should have written them. More recently, the disclosure of the bi-literal and the “word” ciphers, running through certain editions of the plays, and in Bacon’s works, have placed a new weapon in the hands of Shakespeare’s traducers. Already some of the supporters of Bacon’s claims have assumed a sceptical attitude towards the “cipher speculations” – partly, I suspect, on account of their American origin – and Mr. A. P. Sinnett, whilst claiming that if the bi-literal cipher is substantiated, the Bacon case is demonstrated up to the hilt, hedges himself behind the assertion that the curious allegations now brought forward do not affect, one way or the other, the general force of the literary argument that supports the Baconian idea. But, unless a gigantic fraud is being attempted – which we have no reason to suppose is the case – Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup’s bi-literal cipher can easily be substantiated. When this is accomplished, we only get to the point that Bacon claims to have been the author of the plays put forth by all his contemporaries, while the conviction still remains, as it was expressed by Carlyle, that “Bacon could no more have written Hamlet than he could have made this planet.”

It is interesting in this connection to briefly sum up the concensus of expert opinion that the leading scholars and students of Elizabethan literature hold on the subject. Mr. Sidney Lee, whose Life of William Shakespeare has been called “the most useful, the most judicious, and the most authoritative of all existing biographies of the poet,” regards the theory as “fantastic.” The substance of Mr. Lee’s conclusions is that “the abundance of the contemporary evidence attesting Shakespeare’s responsibility for the works published under his name, gives the Baconian theory no rational right to a hearing; while such authentic examples of Bacon’s effort to write verse as survive prove, beyond all possibility of contradiction, that great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. Defective knowledge and illogical, or casuistical, argument alone render any other conclusion possible.”

Dr. N. H. Hudson, in his Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Character, has on the Baconian theory four things to say: – 1. Bacon’s requital of the Earl’s bounty (the Earl of Essex) was such a piece of ingratitude as I can hardly conceive the author of King Lear to have been guilty of. 2. The author of Shakespeare’s plays, whatever he may have been, certainly was not a scholar. He had certainly something far better than learning, but he had not that. 3. Shakespeare never philosophises. Bacon never does anything else. 4. Bacon’s mind, great as it was, might have been cut out of Shakespeare’s without being missed.

But if, in the absence of anything bearing an even remote resemblance to proof, we find ourselves compelled to make a synopsis of expert opinion on the subject, we shall find no man’s conclusions more deserving of respect and acceptance than those of the late James Spedding. Without intending to cast any reflection upon the critics and others who have plunged with ebullient enthusiasm into this controversy, it may not be out of place to point out that Spedding is head and shoulders above all disputants in knowledge, and second to none in critical ability. His knowledge of Shakespeare was intimate and profound, and he knew his Bacon more thoroughly than it has been the lot of any other man of letters to be known by his fellow man. He gave up his position in the Colonial Office, and declined the position of Under-Secretary of State, with £2,000 a year, in order to devote his whole time to the study of the life and works of Lord Bacon – a task which occupied him for nearly thirty years. Sir Henry Taylor, in a letter to a friend in 1861, wrote as follows: – “I have been reading Spedding’s Life and Letters of Lord Bacon with profound interest and admiration – admiration not of the perfect style and penetrating judgment only, but also of the extraordinary labours bestowed upon the works by a lazy man; the labour of some twenty years, I believe, spent in rummaging among old records in all places they were to be found, and collating different copies of manuscripts written in the handwriting of the 16th century, and noting the minutest variations of one from another – an inexpressibly tedious kind of drudgery, and, what was, perhaps, still worse, searching far and wide, waiting, watching, peering, prying through long years for records which no industry could recover. I doubt whether there be any other example in literary history of so large an intellect as Spedding’s devoting itself, with so much self-sacrifice, to the illustration of one which was larger still, and doing so out of reverence, not so much for that largest intellect, as for the truth concerning it.” Sir Henry Taylor, in this passage, not only does justice to the diligence and genius of the author, but recognises the spirit in which the work was undertaken. Spedding spent thirty years in quest of the truth concerning this remarkable man, and having discovered it, he was prepared to maintain his conclusions with all the power of his knowledge and commanding intelligence. These qualities he exercised with paralysing effect against Lord Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon. It has been claimed by one champion of Shakespeare’s cause that Macaulay’s “well-known depth of research, comprehensive grasp of facts and details, and his calm method of presenting honest conclusions, renders him pre-eminent as a safe authority.” The exact opposite is, of course, the case, but the possession of these very qualities are revealed by Spedding in his Evenings with a Reviewer, to the utter spoliation of a great number of Macaulay’s cherished calculations and conclusions. “No more conscientious, no more sagacious critic,” according to G. S. Venables, “has employed in a not unworthy task the labour of his life,” and the same writer has also declared that “the historical and biographical conclusions which he (Spedding) established depend on an exhaustive accumulation of evidence arranged and interpreted by the clearest of intellects, with an honesty which is rarely known in controversial discussion.” Spedding is, in brief, universally acknowledged to be not only the greatest authority on Bacon, but also of the times in which he lived. His acquaintance with Elizabethan literature, its history, and its manuscripts was unique – he was, it may be said without fear of contradiction, a master of his period. “His knowledge of Shakespeare,” says Venables, in the prefatory notice to Evenings with a Reviewer, “was extensive and profound, and his laborious and subtle criticism derived additional value from his love of the stage.” The opinion of such an authority on such a subject as the authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare is, in default of proof to the contrary, of the highest possible value – to a close student of Spedding it must appear incontrovertible.

Spedding’s article on the question, which is included in the volume of Reviews and Discussions (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1879) was written in reply to Professor Nathaniel Holmes’ treatise on The Authorship of Shakespeare. In his opening sentence, he says, “I have read your book … faithfully to the end, and if my report of the result is to be equally faithful, I must declare myself not only unconvinced, but undisturbed.”

He is instant and decisive with his reasons. “To ask me,” he continues, “to believe that a man who was famous for a variety of other accomplishments, whose life was divided between public business, the practice of a laborious profession, and private study of the art of investigating the material laws of nature – a man of large acquaintance, of note from early manhood, and one of the busiest men of his time, but who was never suspected of wasting his time in writing poetry, and is not known to have written a single blank verse in all his life – that this man was the author of fourteen comedies, ten historical plays, and eleven tragedies, exhibiting the greatest, and the greatest variety, of excellence that has been attained in that kind of composition, is like asking me to believe that Lord Brougham was the author, not only of Dickens’s novels, but of Thackeray’s also, and of Tennyson’s poems besides.”

Spedding, himself a genius, finds no difficulty in appreciating the quality of genius in Shakespeare. It was not scholarship, or environment, or training that enabled William Shakespeare to become the author of the most wonderful series of dramas in the world. Of Shakespeare’s gifts, he frankly states the wonder is that any man should have possessed them, not that the man to whose lot they fell was the son of a poor man called John Shakespeare, and that he was christened William. If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar, or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education. Given the faculties (which nature bestows as fully on the poor as on the rich) you will find that the required knowledge, art and dexterity which the Shakespearean plays imply, were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation, and had nothing else to do.”

What Spedding failed to grasp was the difficulty which the Baconians find in believing that Shakespeare was as likely to be the author of the plays as any other man of his generation. In endeavouring to solve the extraordinary difficulty of the old theory of the authorship of the plays by substituting a new one, they have only made confusion worse confounded. “That which is extraordinary in the case,” Spedding maintains, “is that any man should possess such a combination of faculties as must have met in the author of these plays. But that is a difficulty which cannot be avoided. There must have been somebody in whom the requisite combination of faculties did meet, for there the plays are; and by supposing that this somebody was a man who, at the same time possessed a combination of other faculties, themselves sufficient to make him an extraordinary man too, you do not diminish the wonder, but increase it… That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should exist, is extraordinary. That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Bacon should exist, is extraordinary. That two such human beings should have been living in London at the same time was more extraordinary still. But that one man should have existed possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary to make both, would have been the most extraordinary thing of all.”

It may be contended, and with justice, that in the foregoing we have arguments that did not require the special knowledge and experience of a Spedding to prefer. It may not be, it probably is not, regarded by Baconians as serious argument, and, as Mr. R. M. Theobald would say, it would be simply a waste of time and words to discuss it. Certain is it that none of the pro-Bacon writers realise the necessity of answering, and, if possible, contravening these simple arguments. It is difficult to find any satisfactory reason for their reticence. But whether it is that they question the value of the views of the greatest student of Bacon on this subject, or are ignorant of his essay, or – what is more likely – are unable to combat so plausible a view coming from so eminent an authority, the fact remains that Spedding’s opinion is consistently disregarded.

It is not, however, that part of his argument which we have quoted, but the part which follows which carries conviction to those who are familiar with the work both of Bacon and of Spedding. The resemblances in thought and language, which are to be found in Shakespeare and Bacon, are accepted by Spedding as inevitable between writers nourished upon a common literature, employing a common language, and influenced by a common atmosphere of knowledge and opinion. “But to me,” he declares, “I confess, the resemblances between Shakespeare and Bacon are not so striking as their differences. Strange as it seems that two such minds, both so vocal, should have existed within each other’s hearing without mutually affecting each other, I find so few traces of any influence exercised by Shakespeare upon Bacon, that I have great doubt whether Bacon knew any more about him than Gladstone (probably) knew about Tom Taylor (in his dramatic capacity). Shakespeare may have derived a good deal from Bacon. He had, no doubt, read the Advancement of Learning and the first edition of the Essays, and most likely had frequently heard him speak in the Courts and in the Star Chamber. But among all the parallelisms which you have collected with such industry to illustrate the identity of the writer, I have not observed one in which I should not have inferred, from the difference of style, a difference of hand. Great writers, being contemporary, have many features in common; but if they are really great writers, they write naturally, and nature is always individual. I doubt whether there are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles, and practised in such observations. I was myself well read in Shakespeare before I began with Bacon, and I have been forced to cultivate what skill I have in distinguishing Bacon’s style to a high degree; because in sifting the genuine from the spurious, I had commonly nothing but the style to guide me. And to me, if it were proved that any one of the plays attributed to Shakespeare was really written by Bacon, not the least extraordinary thing about it would be the power which it would show in him of laying aside his individual peculiarities and assuming those of a different man.”

There we have Spedding’s reasons for rejecting the Baconian theory – let us summarise his conclusions in his own words: “If you had fixed upon anybody else rather than Bacon as the true author,” he says – “anybody of whom I knew nothing – I should have been scarcely less incredulous, because I deny that a prima facie case is made out for questioning Shakespeare’s title. But if there were any reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author, I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not Bacon. The difficulties which such a supposition would involve would be almost innumerable, and altogether insurmountable. But,” he adds, “if what I have said does not excuse me from saying more, what I might say more would be equally ineffectual.”