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which would have to be cured before the apparatus would work. The truth is
that in the philosophical work published or privately circulated by Bacon
before 1610, though there was much to appeal to the æsthetic side of the
human mind, much to stimulate the cultivated layman’s admiration for
knowledge, for the devoted student of science there was very little help of a
constructive kind, the only kind of help he really needed.13
The Sapientia Veterum, 1609, is based on a number of myths selected
from the poets and fabulists of antiquity in virtue of a certain congruity with
Bacon’s intuitions and predilections. The Sylva Sylvarum or Natural
History, his latest work, is based on an assemblage of what by way of
distinction might be called facts. The dissonance between the two works is
amazing. The Sapientia, which was intended to bespeak a favourable
hearing for the New Art, busies itself with venerable fictions. From the
Natural History on the other hand, poetry and fable were to have been
rigorously excluded. Bacon’s biographer, Rawley, wrote for the first edition
of the work (1627), an address “To the Reader,” which winds up: “I will
conclude with an usual speech of his lordship’s; that this work of his
Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as man made it; for it
hath nothing of imagination.”
Several years before the Sylva was written, Galileo had censured as
paper philosophers certain contemporaries of his, who set about the
investigation of nature as if she were a “book like the Æneid or the
Odyssey.” One at least of Bacon’s intimate friends, Sir Tobie Mathew, was
no stranger to Padua and Florence, and it is quite possible that he may have
informed Bacon of these strictures of Galileo’s not long after they were
uttered. But, be this as it may, a momentous change must have taken place
after 1609, not in Bacon’s aspiration to be the greatest of human benefactors
to man, but in his conception of the means by which his vast expectations
were to be realised. Had the change been less than “fundamental,” “a good
and well ordered Natural History” would not have been described in the
Phenomena Universi (1622), as holding the “keys both of sciences and of
operations.” After 1612 Bacon became for some eight or nine years so
immersed in affairs, as Attorney-General, Privy Councillor—no sinecure
then—Lord Chancellor, etc., that it must have been impossible for him to
give to his New Logic a tithe of the attention it required. “At this period,”
says Dr. Abbott: “there is a great gap in the series of Bacon’s philosophical
works. In 1613 he was appointed Attorney-General, and from that time till
1620 no literary work of any kind published or unpublished is known to
have issued from his pen. All that he did was apparently to rewrite
repeatedly and revise the Novum Organum.14 The Organum made its
appearance in 1620 with a dedication to the King by no means confident of
either the worth or the use of his offering. But as he says in the proemium
that “all other ambition whatsoever was in his opinion lower than the work
in hand,” one would infer that his zeal for philosophy had begun to revive
even before the tragedy of 1621. The remaining five years of the great
man’s life—“a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more,” he
calls it—were more or less distracted with anxieties in no way connected
with philosophy. He hoped, nevertheless, to present the old King with a
“good history of England, and a better digest” of the laws, and the young
King with a history of the “time and reign of King Henry the Eighth.”15 But
after the most distressful sequelæ of his fall had been relieved, his
grandiose, imposing scheme for the renovation or transfiguration of
philosophy must have regained the position it had held some ten or a dozen
years earlier. Without it, life for him would have been a mean and
melancholy failure. “God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass
capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the
impression thereof ... and not delighted in beholding the variety of things
and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out the ordinances which
throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.”16 This capacity, this
wonder-working exaltation of the mind had been neglected, and all but lost,
by reason of the interference of Aristotle and other insolent dictators, and
Bacon imagined himself destined to rehabilitate it, to usher in a new era, to
endow the human race, not with knowledge alone, but with legions of
beneficent arts,17 and for reward to go down to the ages as pre-eminently
the Friend of man.18 Compared with a vision so magnificent, his youthful
dream of a poet’s immortality would seem paltry, stale, and unprofitable.
No wonder the old love, poetry, was forsaken. The wonder would have been
if for the sake of the old love he had done or permitted or countenanced
anything which he thought might possibly prejudice posterity against the
new love, his “darling philosophy.”19
The more vulnerable points of this tentative theory20 of Bacon’s relation
to poetry seem to be three. First, Bacon’s final perseverence in ignoring his
hypothetical offspring. Second, his Translation of certain Psalms into
English Verse which, according to Dr. Abbott, “so clearly betrays the
cramping influence of rhyme and verse, that it could hardly have been the
work of a true poet even of a low order.” Third, the detailed treatment of
poetry in the Advancement of Learning is essentially and flagrantly
defective. Objection number one—Bacon’s persistent neglect of the plays—
is easily answered.21 The reasons for continuing to ignore them may in the
aggregate have been even more cogent at the close, than at the opening of
his career. For a Lord Chancellor, one who had been a “principal councillor
and instrument of monarchy,” to publish not verses merely, but common
plays, would have been a disgrace to the peerage, and ingratitude, if not
disloyalty, to the sovereign to whom he owed his many promotions.
Amongst the reasons for concealment, which did not exist at the opening of
life, two more may be mentioned: one, the publication of the Sonnets, has
been sufficiently discussed; the other, solicitude for the Great Instauration,
has not. In casting about for an explanation of his frigid reception by
contemporary science, Bacon must have hit upon a suspicion, shared maybe
by King James,22 that his true greatness after all lay rather in the domain of
poetry than in that of philosophy.23 Disappointed in his contemporaries, he
would turn to the ages unborn, resolved that they at any rate should not start
with a bias against his message. Any suggestion therefore, that he should
allow his true name to be put to a volume of poetry, so distinguished from
versified theology, would be unconditionally rejected.
To the objection founded on the Translation of certain Psalms into
English Verse several answers suggest themselves. No artist is always at his
best, least of all in illness and old age, and the Translation belongs to 1624
when Bacon was recovering from an attack of a painful disease. In the
delightful preface to his select edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, Matthew
Arnold writes: “Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and
dull, is produced by him (Wordsworth) with evident unconsciousness of its
defects and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his
best work.” Yet no competent judge of poetry would think of denying that
Wordsworth was a “true poet” of a “high order.”[43] Again, conventional
feeling may have been partly responsible for the dullness of this
Translation. Dr. Abbott surely underrates the consequence of his admission
that “theological verse like theological sculpture might seem to require
something of the archaic, and a close adherence to the simplicity of the
original prose.” Grant that Bacon was under the influence of some such
feeling, and the objection we are considering is virtually answered, such
was “Bacon’s versatility in adapting language to the slightest shade of
circumstance and purpose.” Once more, the evidence that Bacon was a
“concealed poet” is strong enough to hold its own against every argument
that can fairly be urged against it, and to concealment dissimulation is apt to
prove indispensable. It was so considered by Bacon, and Bacon’s
experience of the device was extensive, if not unique. In a famous Essay he
carefully distinguishes between Simulation and Dissimulation, and lets it be
seen that he regarded the former as positively culpable, the latter as not only
permissible but necessary.24 A man dissimulates when he “lets fall signs or
arguments that he is not that he is.... He that will be secret must be a
dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep
an indifferent carriage.... They will so beset a man with questions and draw
him on and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence he must show
inclination one way.... So that no man can be secret except he give himself a
little scope of dissimulation; which is as it were but the skirts or train of
secrecy.” The application is obvious. Bacon’s Translation of Certain Psalms
is uninspired, lacks “choiceness of phrase ... the sweet falling of the
clauses,” etc! Why? Possibly because the author “is letting fall signs or
arguments that he is not that he is!” The fact that a thing so trivial as this
Translation should have been published, instead of being reserved for
private circulation only—published too on the heels of the Shakespeare
First Folio—lends additional probability to this explanation.25
Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-
name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for
the essential inadequacy of the Advancement of Learning in relation to
poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also
be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In the Advancement,
dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name,
“dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilst lyric, elegiac, and several
other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of the
Advancement, however, the De Augmentis Scientiarum, published some
eighteen years after the Advancement, not only restores to “representative
poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentions elegias, odes, lyricos,
etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at
the date of the Advancement, Bacon had still to learn what poetry
essentially was, a defect which at the date of the De Augmentis he had
contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will
cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there
warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its
absurdity, one has only to compare the Advancement of Learning with the
Apologie for Poetry by the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is
described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its
first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with
slight additions in 1596.26 One of the many resemblances involved in the
comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same
books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely.
Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of
both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and
Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in the
Advancement than in the Apologie, inevitably, considering the scope of the
Advancement, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In
those days, however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of
literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an
unusually large proportion of the same authors.27 It may, therefore, be
urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct
intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is
incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative
force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a
sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to the
Apologie for Poetrie geometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only
constituents of the science of mathematics. The Advancement of Learning
appears to take the same view. (b) According to the Apologie “knowledge of
a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is
“well doing and not well knowing only.” The Advancement holds “the end
and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to
“active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to the Apologie
“metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the
depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. The Advancement defines
“metaphysic”—which includes mathematics—as the science of “that which
is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is
inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) The Apologie censures
philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and
“school art.” In the Advancement, Bacon condemns “the over early and
peremptory reduction of knowledge into acts and methods.” It is a theme on
which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, the Novum Organum, a congeries
of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against
premature systematisation. (e) The Apologie contrasts the necessary
limitations of other artists28 with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the
poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow
warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth
things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the
incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh
us know what perfection is.” The Advancement, in a charming passage,
instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some
shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the
nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the
soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of
divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the
shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and
bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) The Apologie holds “that there
are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written
darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” The Advancement affirms
that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is
delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and
philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of the
Apologie venerated learning—“the noble name of learning,” he calls it—as
if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of
the Advancement, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of
the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent
identical, for the first book of the Advancement was a vindication of the
dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of
“learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be
picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of
the Advancement that reading it one seems to be continually in touch with
Sidney—assuming him to have been author of the Apologie. The effect in
my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that
Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate—though that is quite possible
—but that Bacon when writing the Advancement was thoroughly familiar
with the Apologie.
 It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of the
Advancement, to whatever cause they may have been due—and honest
dissimulation is the most likely cause—were not due to ignorance of poetry.
Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.
“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not
incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to
hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it
serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The
omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to
find with the criticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It
takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon
theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest
of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do
anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even
occurred to me.
For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned
without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to
that fullness of joy which according to M. Poincaré (Le Science et
l’Hypothèse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a
favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.
 NOTES TO SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY
[1] Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean
what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is
to be understood in its modern sense.
[2] From Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the
secret of some “Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan, and who are better content to suppress
the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as
those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in
his Arte of English Poesie (1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court
that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without
their names to it.” The Arte of English Poesie was dedicated to Bacon’s uncle and quasi
guardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice:
“Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their
youth.”
[3] From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling
of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than
Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New
Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have
been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall
continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two—without prejudice to the question
whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford
player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form
“Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or
“Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.
[4] Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben
Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and
elsewhere—agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays—negatives a
mechanical explanation.
[5] In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing
of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to
screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’s Apologie in
certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex. 1604.)
[6] Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of
the Sonnets. Even so they would be serious impedimenta to a Solicitor-General on his way to the
Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.
[7] It is obviously borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “Deeper than
did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’s Medea, but it seems to me from Act III,
Sc. 3, of The Tempest itself. Golding’s English version of the Metamorphoses may well have
been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.
[8] Advancement of Learning. “Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational
knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”
[9] The idée mère of the Sapientia Veterum—allegorisation—is one which I think no notable
man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of
science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high
favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to
capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it
to Orlando Furioso (1591), is a reductio ad absurdum of the fashion.
[10] Poetry for example!
[11] The second book of the Advancement—where “rational knowledges” or “arts
intellectual” are being discussed—promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into
two parts; whereof the one I term experientia literata, and the other interpretatio naturæ, the
former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of
conjecture. Possibly Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of
Hermes Stella, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may
enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former, experientia literata, we may learn from
the De Augmentis Scientiarum, the authorised Latin version of the Advancement of Learning,
quite as much as any of us need wish to know.
It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, the
Advancement of Learning contains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a
legal work—prudentia activa—digested into aphorisms.
[12] The nebulous Temporis Partus Maximus, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more
serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s
“apparently unacknowledged” Conference of Pleasure, 1592, and Gesta Graiorum, 1594,
though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.
[13] According to Professor Fowler (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal
Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (Francis
Bacon, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great
depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his
style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if
Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed
experimental science under any obligation at all.
[14] No student I suppose would willingly be without the volume here quoted, “Francis
Bacon”, by Edwin A. Abbott.
[15] Rawley’s dedication, 1627, of the Natural History to Charles the First.
[16] Advancement of Learning. Book I.
[17] The art of prolonging life was, he thought, one of the most desirable.
[18] He “bequeathed” his soul and body to God. “For my name and memory I leave it to
men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”
[19] Rawley in the dedication of 1627 uses this expression as if it were Bacon’s rather than
his own.
[20] I am not aware that in its integrity it is shared by anyone.
[21] More easily by far than Mr. Shakespeare’s neglect of his supposed poetical issue more
especially after his retirement to Stratford. What was there, what would there be in the Stratford
of those days with its Quineys, Harts, Sadlers, Walkers, and the rest, to interest a spirit so finely
touched as Shakespeare’s? But this is too large a question to be discussed here.
[22] James I is reported to have said of the Novum Organum: “It is like the peace of God
which passeth all understanding.”
Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge—history with memory for its organ, poetry
[23]
with imagination, and philosophy with reason—is well known. When he made this division the
poetic use of the imagination was one which few may have known better than he. That he was
equally well acquainted with the scientific use of the imagination is highly improbable.
[24] Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest
dissimulation.”
[25] Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or
set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more
difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting
something less than admiration of his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of the Sapientia
Veterum, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.”
His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother
tongue.
[26] It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his
English version (1591) of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and
refers to his Apologie for Poetry (along with the Arte of English Poesie, 1589, dedicated to Lord
Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to
Sidney’s Apologie—odi profanum vulgus et arceo—touches the motto to Shakespeare’s Venus
and Adonis; that King Lear touches the Arcadia; and generally that a complete enumeration of
the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some
have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at
Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.
[27] It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in both
Advancement and Apologie, that the Apologie endorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one
day.” Another of the Apologie’s references to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most
full of reason,” gives one to think. The Advancement disapproves, it may be added, of tying
modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make
new measures of verses as of dances.”
[28] Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered as arts, whilst poetry ranks as a
science.
BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE BEN JONSON
AND SHAKESPEARE[44]
Another exasperating lucubration on the Shakespeare problem! We have
the Plays themselves. Why disturb a venerable belief by hypotheses
incapable of proof, and neither venerable nor even respectable? To answer
offhand—Curiosity about the How of remarkable events is not likely to die
out so long as intelligent beings continue to exist: Without the aid of
hypotheses, science were impossible: Astronomers would still be
expounding the once venerated doctrine of a stable Earth and a revolving
Sun, a doctrine daily corroborated by the testimony of our eyes. Moreover,
the “venerable belief” that Shakspere and Shakespeare were one and the
same is mainly founded on the hypothesis that Ben Jonson’s famous Ode to
Shakespeare (1623) is all to be taken at face-value. Praise—splendid praise
—is unquestionably its dominant constituent; but other ingredients—
enigma, jest, make-believe—are commingled with the praise.
The exordium of this Ode consists of sixteen laborious lines:

To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,

Am I thus ample to thy Booke and Fame;
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho’s right;
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise,
And thinke to ruine, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous Baud, or whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed
Above th’ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore, will begin, etc.
 This emphatic disclaimer of any intention to draw envy, ill-will,
discredit, on the august name Shakespeare, had a deep meaning, or Jonson
would not have given it such prominence. It reads as if addressed to a living
person, and the subsequent apostrophe, “Thou art a Moniment, without a
tombe,” chimes with this suggestion. The root difficulty of the passage lies
in the obviously genuine conviction of the author that Shakespeare was in
danger of being hurt by praise, noble, sincere and universally allowed to be
just. As for the assertion that Shakespeare was “indeed above” the reach of
harm, it is only pretence. Having dispatched this tiresome business, the
eulogist lets himself go:
I therefore will begin, Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome,
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe.
* * * *
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy buskin tread,
And shake a Stage; Or, when thy Sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warme
Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme.
Nature herselfe was proud of his designes,
And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines.

. . . . . Looke how the fathers face

Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which, he seems to shake a Lance,
As brandish’t at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James.
But stay. I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there.
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or Influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which since thy flight fro’ hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despaires day, but by thy Volumes Light.”
 Passing by the half serious “Thou art a Moniment without a tombe”, we
are pulled up by the line: “And though thou hadst small Latine,” etc. The
internal evidence of his poems and plays proves that Shakespeare must have
had a regular education, as distinguished from mere smatterings picked up
in a village school of the sixteenth century. As to Latin in particular, the
etymological intelligence shown in the handling of words derived from that
language is almost conclusive. The evidence of contemporaries tells the
same tale. “W.C.,” for instance, in Polimanteia (c. 1595) intimates that
Shakespeare was a “schollar,” and a member of one of our
“Universities.”[45] But there is no need to labour the point of Shakespeare’s
culture. Indeed the innuendo of “small Latin” as applied to Shakespeare is
sufficiently refuted by other passages in the Ode itself. “All scenes of
Europe,” classico-historical as well as modern, owe him “homage.” He was
another “Apollo”; each of his “well turned and true-filed lines” was
sufficient to enlighten “ignorance.” What then are we to make of a jibe,
apparently levelled at Shakespeare, that he was a quite unlettered rustic?
Some years after the date of the Ode, and in order, as he says, to justify his
“owne candor,” Jonson told “posterity” (as we shall see) that Shakespeare
wrote with a “facility” so unbridled that he often blundered.[46] But even
then, though his mood in the interval had veered right round from eulogist
to candid critic, Jonson dropped no hint that Shakespeare lacked Latin or
Greek. The jibe therefore, did not fit Shakespeare, but must have been made
to the measure of some one else.
To continue our examination of the Ode. What can Jonson have meant
by interspersing it with trashy jests upon the two syllables of the name (no
longer august) Shakespeare? “Shake a stage”; “shake a lance, as brandished
at the eyes of ignorance.” Was there something irresistibly funny about the
name? Again, what sort of ignorance was threatened by the beauty and
finish of Shakespeare’s lines? The ignorance of persons who for
Shakespeare mistook a man untinctured with literature? The “Sweet Swan
of Avon” apostrophe suggests comparison with what, in his Masque of
Owles (1626), Jonson wrote about “Warwick Muses.” These charming
creatures are there represented as inspired, not by “Pegasus,” but by a
“Hoby-horse.”[47] Was this sarcasm reminiscent of the well-known lines
which an Oxford graduate informs us were “ordered” by the Stratford man
“to be cut upon his tombstone”? Certainly Pegasus was innocent of them.
Here they are:

Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

To return to the Ode. The lines which follow the “Sweet Swan”
apostrophe are deserving of notice, chiefly because they tell us that King
James (as well as Queen Elizabeth) was under the spell of Shakespeare.
Then comes the ejaculation: “But stay! I see thee in the hemisphere
advanced, and made a constellation there.” Is it possible that Jonson
expected his readers—such of them as were not in the secret—to follow
him here? To behold Shakespeare, à la Berenice’s hair, translated into the
constellation Cygnus? Not he; that were an order too large for credulity
itself to honour. What Jonson had in his mind’s eye was not the starry
heaven, but the British House of Peers.[48] Such is this famous Ode. It
suffers from manœuvres, the object of which had to be kept dark; and this I
take to be the reason for its exclusion from the second volume (1640) of
Jonson’s Works, where it would have been quite at home amongst the Odes,
Sonnets, Elegies and so forth, which go to make up that volume.
Turn we now to Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries, a work written years
after the Ode and not printed till 1641, some three or four years after his
death. These Discoveries consist in the main of passages lifted from Latin
writers, notably Seneca the father (Controversiæ), and entered
promiscuously in Jonson’s Commonplace books. The borrowings are often
mutilated and always treated without ceremony. For our purpose it is the
application, not the accuracy of translation that matters. In quoting from
them I shall give italics and capital letters as they appear in the slovenly
print (1641), of which I have several copies, one of which by the way is
inscribed “J. P. Collier” on the title page. A Discovery concerning Poets,
runs thus:
Nothing in our Age, I have observed, is more preposterous, than the
running Judgments upon Poetry and Poets; when we shall heare those
things ... cried up for the best writings, which a man would scarce
vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his
Tobacco with them.... There are never wanting, that dare preferre the worst
 ... Poets:.... Nay, if it were put to the question of the Water-rimers workes,
against Spencer’s, I doubt not but they [the Water-rimers’] would find
more suffrages.

The next Discovery is more to my purpose:

Poetry in this latter Age, hath prov’d but 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, and now and then
tendred their visits, shee hath done much for, and advanced in the way of
their owne professions (both the Law and the Gospel) beyond all they
could have hoped or done for themselves without her favour.

From this the reader will gather that under “Eliza and our James,”
lawyer-poets who masked their poems—“in a players hide,” perhaps—were
likely candidates for legal honours.

The next Discovery but one runs thus:

De Shakespeare nostrat. I remember the players have often mentioned
it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in all his writing (whatever he penned)
hee never blotted out a line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a
thousand.... I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance who chose
that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted.
And to justifie mine owne candor, for I lov’d the man and doe honour his
memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. He was indeed honest, and
of an open and free nature; had excellent phantasie; brave notions and
gentle expressions; wherein he flow’d with that facility that sometime it
was necessary he should be stop’d.... His wit was in his owne power,
would the rule of it had beene so too.... But he redeemed his vices with his
vertues.

Another Discovery (p. 99)[49] censures “all the Essayists, even their
Master Montaigne.” The slur suggested by this censure upon Bacon is
significant. We were wont to believe that Bacon’s fame as a master of
English rested securely on his Essays, and perhaps among his
acknowledged works no better foundation is discoverable. Jonson’s estimate
(to be quoted presently) of Bacon’s achievement “in our tongue,” is at least
as high as ours. Yet Jonson does not appreciate Bacon’s Essays. The
dilemma seems to be this: either Jonson was writing at random, or he knew
of unacknowledged Baconian work which he was not free to disclose.
 Another Discovery treats De claris Oratoribus, and among them of
Dominus Verulamius[50] in these words:
There hapn’d in my time one noble Speaker, who was full of gravity in
his speaking. His language (where hee could spare or passe by a jest) was
nobly censorious.... No member of his speech but consisted of his owne
graces. His hearers could not cough, or looke aside from him, without
losse.... No man had their affections more in his power. The feare of every
man that heard him was lest hee should make an end.

On the next page after an appreciative notice of the De Augmentis

Scientiarum, which was published almost simultaneously with the
Shakespeare Ode, Jonson over-praises and misreads the Novum Organum in
these words:
Which though by most of superficiall men, who cannot get beyond the
Title of Nominals, it is not penetrated, nor understood; it really openeth all
defects of Learning whatsoever and is a Booke; Qui longum noto scriptori
porriget ævum.

My object in giving these two quotations is only to show that there is

nothing in them to lead up to the arresting praise of Bacon expressed in my
next quotation, which comes after a list of English writers or wits, the elder
Wiat, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney (a “great Master of wit,”) Lord
Egerton, the Chancellor, and runs thus:
But his [the his refers to L. C. Egerton] learned and able, though
unfortunate Successor, is he, who hath fill’d up all numbers, and
perform’d that in our tongue, which may be compar’d, or preferr’d, either
to insolent Greece, or haughty Rome. In short, within his view, and about
his times, were all the wits borne, that could honour a language, or help
study. Now things daily fall; wits grow downe-ward, and Eloquence
growes back-ward: So that hee may be nam’d, and stand as the marke and
akme of our language.[51]

In order to appreciate this passage, the reader should grasp (1) that
Jonson’s mind at the time was full of memories of Bacon; (2) that in a
subsequent Discovery—De Poetica—he distinguishes Poetry from oratory
as “the most prevailing,” “most exalted” “Eloquence,” and describes the
Poet’s “skill or Craft of making” as the “Queene of Arts”; (3) that Jonson,
proud of his own métier as poet, would never have allowed, still less
asserted, that Bacon had “filled up all numbers,” had he not known that
Bacon was a great poet. Where is this wonderful poetry to be found? The
answer is ready to hand. The famous writer who, according to the
Discovery, had “perform’d that in our tongue” which neither Greece nor
Rome could surpass, is the very man who, according to the Ode, had
achieved that in English which defied “comparison” with “all” that Greece
or Rome, or the civilisations that succeeded Greece and Rome, had given to
the World. Bacon is that Man, and Shakespeare was his pen-name.
This hypothesis—that Shakespeare was the pen-name of Bacon—will
pilot us through our difficulties. The disclaimer (in the Ode) for example, of
any intention to injure the august name need puzzle us no longer. Bacon’s
reputation was imperilled by publication of the great Book; for if the Public
once got wind that he had trafficked with “common players” his name,
already smirched by the verdict of the House of Peers, would have been
irreparably damaged. A passage from an anonymous Essay of mine (Bacon-
Shakespeare; projected 1884-5: published 1899), may be tolerated here. The
Essay, after having suggested that Greene’s allusion to Shakespeare as
having a “tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide” pointed to concealment
behind an actor, proceeds:
John Davies ... characterises poetry (contemporaneous) as “a worke of
darkness,” in the sense of a secret work, not in disparagement: Davies
loved poetry and poets too well for that. The anonymous author of Wit’s
Recreations, in a kindly epigram “To Mr. William Shake-speare,” says:
“Shake-speare we must be silent in thy praise, cause our encomions will
but blast thy bayes.” ... Edward Bolton in the ... sketch (or draft) of his
Hypercritica, ... after having mentioned “Shakespeare, Beaumont, and
other writers for the stage” thinks it necessary to remind himself that their
names required to be “tenderly used in this argument.” (accordingly) He ...
excluded the name of Shakespeare ... from the published version of his
Hypercritica.

To return again to the Ode. Its jests about shaking a stage (compare
Greene’s “Shakescene”), shaking a lance, and its ecstatic vision of
Shakespeare enthroned among the stars were no doubt intended to amuse
the two Earls, and other patrons of the famous Folio.
As for the sweeping accusation in the Timber or Discoveries, that Poetry
had been a mean Mistress to openly professed as distinguished from furtive
or concealed poets, it would have been unpardonable had the Stratford man
been a poet; for William Shakspere, Esq., of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon,
spent his last years in the odour of prosperity.
Other testimony, quite independent of Jonson’s, to the existence of an
intimate relation between Bacon and the Muses, Apollo, Helicon,
Parnassus, is abundant enough. Here are a few samples: Thomas Randolph
shortly after Bacon’s death accuses Phœbus of being accessory to Bacon’s
death, lest the God himself should be dethroned and Bacon be crowned king
of the Muses.[52] George Herbert calls Bacon the colleague of Apollo.
Thomas Campion, addressing Bacon says: “Whether ... the Law, or the
Schools (in the sense of science or knowledge), or the sweet Muse allure
thee,” etc. At a somewhat later date, Waller said that Bacon and Sidney
were nightingales who sang only in the spring (the reference has escaped
me, and memory may possibly deceive me).[53] Coming to comparatively
recent times we find Shelley, an exceptional judge of poetry, was of opinion
that Bacon “was a poet.” It may possibly be objected that Bacon’s versified
Psalms (in English) are not poetical.[54] But these Psalms belong to about
1624, when Bacon—ex hypothesi—had turned his back on poetry for ever.
What they prove, if they prove anything, is that Bacon was a literary
Proteus who could take on any disguise that happened to suit his purpose, a
faculty which no student of Bacon would ever think of disputing.
Inferences drawn from Bacon’s reticence or extracted from his works
have yet to be weighed. In the nineties of the sixteenth century he can be
shown to have devoted much time and thought to the writing and
preparation of a species of dramatic entertainment known as Devices. Even
after he became Lord Chancellor, he risked injuring his health rather than
deny himself the pleasure of assisting at a dramatic performance given by
Gray’s Inn. As a student of human nature, moreover, he had scarcely an
equal (bar “Shakespeare.”) And yet he seems to have been ignorant of the
existence of any such person as Shakespeare, although that name must have
been bandied about and about in the London of his day, especially among
members of the various Inns of Court, his own Gray’s in particular.
Neglecting Bacon’s poetical and interesting Devices, I confine my
observations to the Advancement of Learning (1605), which though not
written in what Waller held to be the singing time of life, reveals (while
trying to conceal) the true bent of his genius. The Work was expressly
intended to embrace the totality of human knowledge then garnered. Yet
with the air of one who had no misgivings about the propriety of his
classification he divides his vast subject into three categories, three only,
and one of these is Poesie. The other two are History and Philosophie, the
latter of which embraces “Natural Science,” divided into “Phisicke” and
“Metaphisicke,” “Mathematicke” pure and mixt, anatomy, medicine, mental
and moral science, and much besides. The work teems with poetical
quotations, similies, allusions. Dealing with medicine the author gravely
informs his readers that “the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine
in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of
man’s body, and reduce it to harmony.” He cannot refrain from telling us
that the pseudo-science of the alchemist was foretold and discredited by the
fable of Ixion and the Cloud. With him, what we mean by endowment of
research becomes provision for encouraging “experiments appertaining to
Vulcan and Dædalus,” etc. No wonder the Harveys, Napiers, and other
pioneers of 17th. century science did not join in that chorus of admiration
for Bacon, which seems to have included all 17th century men of letters. Sir
Henry Wotton (for example) will have it that Bacon had “done a great and
ever living benefit to all the children of Nature; and to Nature herself in her
uttermost extent ... who never before had so noble nor so true an interpreter,
or so inward a secretary of her cabinet.” One can imagine the laughter with
which Galileo would have greeted this preposterous assertion.
Out of sight of philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, etc., and in the
presence of poetry, the author is in his element and speaks with authority. In
handling the subject of mental culture—“Georgics of the mind” is his
phrase—he takes for granted that poets (with whom he couples historians)
are the best teachers of this science, for in them:
We may find painted forth, how affections are kindled and incited; and
how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further
degree; how they disclose themselves; how they work; how they vary;
how they gather and fortify; how they are enwrapped one within another;
and how they do fight and encounter one with another.

“Poesie,” he says elsewhere, is “for the most part restrained in measure

of words,” but in “other points extreamely licensed, and doth truly refer to
the imagination.” Its use, he goes on to say:
Hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in
those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in
 proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the
spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more
absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things ... and therefore
it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it
doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the
desires of the mind.... In this third part of learning (or knowledge) which is
poesie, I can report no deficience. For being as a plant that cometh of the
lust of the earth, without formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad
more than any other kind. But to ascribe unto it that which is due; for the
expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are
beholding to poets more than to the philosophers’ works; and for wit and
eloquence, not much less than to orators’ harangues. But it is not good to
stay too long in the theatre.

Why, when he was enumerating the various kinds of poesie, did he

eschew the apt word dramatic, and choose the vague word representative
instead? Why hurry away from his subject (poetry) by reason of its intimate
connection with the theatre? The answer leaps to the eye. For him, poetry,
especially dramatic poetry, was like (the name) Shakespeare, under taboo.
The Bacon hypothesis, it may be urged, solves a few riddles. But what of
the difficulties it involves? For example, it seems incredible that Bacon
should ever have resolved to disown his wonderful offspring; except indeed
on the impossible assumption that he, with his unrivalled knowledge of
human nature and command of all the arts of expression—that he of all men
was incapable of appreciating the children of his brain. Here, once more,
my anonymous Essay suggests pertinent considerations:
The emotional chill, which rarely fails to accompany that creeping
illness, old age, was one of these considerations. Another was the growth
of a widespread feeling ... that English books would never be “citizens of
the world,” that Latin was the “universal language” and Latin books the
only books that “would live.” But there must have been a “strain of
rareness” about Shakespeare’s affection for poetry, which nothing but a
new and incompatible emotion could ever have subdued.... With Bacon,
affection for literature, especially poetry, came (in time) long before
affection for anything like science. Among the various indications of this,
not the least interesting is a passage in the De Augmentis Scientiarum (the
latinised version, 1623, of the more noteworthy Advancement of Learning,
1605, already quoted):—“Poesy is at it were a dream of learning; a thing
sweet and varied and fain to be thought partly divine, a quality which
dreams also sometimes affect. But now it is time for me to become fully
 awake, to lift myself up from the earth, and to wing my way through the
liquid ether of philosophy and the sciences.” Of a certainty this beautiful
passage was no mere flourish.... It was a pathetic renunciation—the last
possibly of a series of more or less ineffectual renunciations—of poetry
and an ... aspiration after something else, neither poetry, nor science, nor
philosophy, which Bacon towards the close of life was wont to regard, so
Rawley informs us, as “his darling philosophy.”

In other words, the Novum Organum, the potent New Instrument that
was to enlarge man’s dominion over every province of Nature, was Bacon’s
chief solace for an unparalleled renunciation. Posterity, he was determined,
should never know that the inventor of that Instrument had once revelled in
the play of the imagination, lest men of science should have it in their
power to pooh-pooh it as the fabric of a brain that had invented A
Midsummer-night’s Dream, and The Tempest.
Bacon and his friends (moved by the fascination of the man, and pity for
his fall) would naturally destroy all tell-tale correspondence they could lay
hands on. Two private letters, and so far as we know, two only, escaped the
flames. One from a bosom friend, Sir T. Mathew to Bacon (“Viscount St.
Alban”), bears the following postscript: “The most prodigious wit that ever
I knew of my nation ... is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by
another.” This letter is given in Dr. Birch’s Letters, etc., of Francis Bacon,
1763. Mathew himself made a Collection of Letters which included many
of his own to Bacon, but excluded the one just quoted, an exclusion
dictated, I imagine, by loyalty to his friend. Montague gives the letter in his
Bacon, but I have not found it in Spedding’s Work. The other escape was a
letter of Bacon’s to another of his friends, the poet Davies, written some
twenty years earlier than Mathew’s letter. In this letter (to Davies), after
commending himself to Davies’s “love,” and “the well using of my name ...
if there be any biting or nibling at it, in that place” (the Royal Court), Bacon
concludes: “So desiring you to be good to concealed poets, I continue,” etc.
My quotation is from a copy dated 1657 (bound up with Rawley’s
Resuscitatio), in which “concealed poets” is in italics. Spedding gives the
words without the italics, and contents himself with saying that he cannot
explain them. For another letting out of the secret we have to thank
Aubrey’s notebooks, which inform us that Bacon was “a good poet but
concealed, as appears by his letters.” Lastly there are the “Shakespeare” and
“Bacon” scribbles on the half-burnt MS. of Bacon’s “Device,” A
Conference of Pleasure. Possibly the “letters” referred to by Aubrey, or
evidence more important, may yet be discovered in libraries unexplored, or
explored only by orthodox searchers intent on proving their own case. A
library in so unlikely a place as Valladolid seems, about eighty years ago, to
have possessed a First Folio of Shakespeare which belonged to and was
perhaps annotated by Count Gondomar, a friend of Bacon’s last years.[55] If
Spain held such a treasure so recently what may not Great Britain still hold?
Florence, for whose Duke Sir T. Mathew had Bacon’s Essays translated into
Italian, contained a copy of this translation not long ago. But my searches
there, and in Venice, Milan, Padua, were far too hurried to justify any
conclusion as to possible finds in Italy.
It is probably safe to take for granted that Bacon was acquainted with
Shakspere; that the relation between them began maybe as early as 1588,
and was concerned with playhouse property; that this property was held by
Shakspere on trust for Bacon; and that it was sold, perhaps to the trustees,
by Bacon’s orders some time before 1613.
The name of “Shakespeare” seems to have made its first public
appearance in print with Venus and Adonis,[56] a poem which was dedicated
in perfectly well-bred terms to an earl; licensed by an archbishop who had
once been Bacon’s tutor;[57] and expressed on its title page patrician
contempt for all things vulgar. By whose order was the name Shakespeare
printed at foot of its Dedication to the Earl of Southampton? In the dearth of
evidence the following guesses may pass muster. They are put into an
unhistorical present in order to show at a glance that they, or most of them,
are mere guess-work:—About 1592, Bacon makes up his mind to publish
Venus and Adonis. Publication in his own name is vetoed by fear of
offending powerful friends, his uncle Burghley in particular; and he prefers
pseudonymity to anonymity. What he wants is a temporary mask which he
fully expects to be able to throw off before long. In this mood, he calls on
Richard Field, a London printer hailing originally from Stratford, and
recommended to him by Sir John Harington, whose Orlando Furioso Field
has just printed. Field happens to mention Shakspere which he pronounces
Shaxper. Bacon, already acquainted with the young fellow of that name,
decides that a fictitious person, whose name he pronounces Shakespeare,
shall be the putative father of his Poem. Little dreams he, poet though he be,
that he is thereby preparing a human grave for that immortality of Fame (as
poet) which he has begun to anticipate for himself. The Poem appears in
1593; and is followed next year by Lucrece, fathered by the same
Shakespeare, and dedicated to the same young Earl. Some years later, the
name is stereotyped by Meres’s Commonwealth of Wits, where Shakespeare
is mentioned seven or eight times—as the English Ovid; as one of our best
tragic and best comic poets; as one of our most “wittie” and accomplished
writers, and so forth.[58] A few years later still, Bacon begins to be
perplexed what to do with his Shakespeare copyright, and his perplexity
rises with every advance in his profession. Before succeeding to the
Attorney-Generalship he realises once for all that complications,
professional, social, and various, have made it impossible for him to think
of fathering even a selection of his poetical offspring. In despair to escape
from the impasse, he even talks of burning MSS. But the threat is not
carried out. Soon after his melancholy downfall sympathetic and admiring
friends, notably the two Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery—
Southampton probably stood aloof, memories of the Essex affair still
rankling in his mind—take counsel together, expostulate with him, entreat
him to let them bear all expenses and responsibilities connected with
publication, and to clinch their argument tell him that they have sounded the
literary dictator of the day, Ben Jonson, and got his promise to undertake
the work of editing, collecting, writing the necessary prefatory matter, and
so forth. Bacon yields consent on certain conditions, the most embarrassing
of which is that the true authorship of the plays be for ever kept dark—by
means of “dissimulation,” if dissimulation will serve; if not, then by
“simulation,” i.e., the lie direct.[59] The conditions are accepted with
misgivings on Jonson’s part. He is aware that he will have no trouble with
Mr. Shakspere’s executors, their interest in the copyrights involved being as
negligible as their testator’s had been. And he knows Heminge and Condell
well enough to feel certain that they will not have the smallest objection,
either to being assigned prominent places in the forthcoming Book, or to his
putting into their mouths statements, etc., concerning Shakespeare, which
he himself would shrink from uttering. But even so, the task is no sinecure.
Here guess-work ends.
The famous Folio, with its apparatus of Dedication, prefatory Address,
Ode, to “my beloved the author,” etc., made its appearance in 1623. The
Dedication intimates (with ironical emphasis on the word “trifles”) that the
author of these “trifles” was dead, “he not having the fate common with
some to be exequutor to his owne writings.... We have but collected them,
and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians: without
ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so
worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare.”
The Address expresses a wish that the Author had lived to set forth “his
owne writings. But since it hath bin ordain’d otherwise, and he by death
departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends the office” of
collection, etc. This is followed by a statement, probably half jest, half
irony, that the Author uttered his thoughts with such “easinesse, that wee
have scarse received from him a blot on his papers.” That Heminge and
Condell had no hand in either Dedication or Address is sufficiently proved
by turns and phrases characteristically Jonsonian. They, I suppose, had
given Jonson carte blanche, and he made use of the gift, in the interest of
literature which might otherwise have suffered irreparable loss. In this way
the fiction of Shakespeare’s identity with Shakspere was so plausibly
documented, that Jonson might have spared himself any further trouble on
that score. But either to make assurance doubly sure, or to show his
dexterity, he set about the writing of his Ode as if the fiction had not been
planted already. Some of the Ode’s features need no further comment than
they have received. But the “small Latin” and “Swan of Avon” allusions
deserve a word or two more. Both passages point at Shakspere and away
from Shakespeare. What was their raison d’être? They were exceptionally
significant touches to an elaborate system of camouflage, by which
posterity, including ourselves, was to be deluded.
Hitherto the accent has been too much on the unessentials of the Ode,
and far too little on its beauties. No nobler contemporary appreciation of
Shakespeare has reached our ears, and that is a cogent reason for gratitude
to its author. Before taking leave of him, I venture to make free with one of
his apostrophes. The lines would then run thus:

Soule of the Age!

The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Bacon rise!

In order to correct misapprehensions which may have arisen through my

having slipped into positive statements, where ex hypothesi or conditional
ones might have been desired, I wish expressly to disclaim any intention to
dogmatise. Scientific certainty is out of the question. High probability we
may reach, perhaps have reached. But that is the limit. That Bacon was
Shakespeare, the only Shakespeare that matters, is merely a working
hypothesis. Of other hypothetical Shakespeares who have been put forward,
a certain Earl of Rutland would have deserved serious consideration, had he
been as able a writer as was his father-in-law, Sidney. The only formidable
competing hypothesis might seem to be that of a Great Unknown. But this
essentially is a confession of ignorance, and some of its supporters are
sceptics who amuse themselves by falling upon every hypothesis in turn.[60]
 BACON AND “POESY”
Baconians hold that Francis Bacon concealed his identity under an alias,
and this perhaps is why they are sometimes accused of slandering him, as if
the use of a pen-name were a crime and not the perfectly legitimate ruse it
actually is. Calumniators of Bacon there exist no doubt, and some of them
are disposed to give Macaulay as an instance. Such calumniation, however,
is less likely to be found among Baconians than among our orthodox
opponents, whose creed effectually bars the way to any true appreciation of
the great man. As for Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford, his character was,
or should be, above suspicion. The Burbages, exceptionally well-informed
and credible witnesses, testify that he was a “deserving” man, and
Baconians accept that valuation of the man all the more readily because
there is no proof that he himself ever laid claim to anything published or
known as Shakespeare’s.
The serious criticism that Baconians have to face may be considered
under three heads: (i) The testimony of Ben Jonson; (ii) The popular notion
that Bacon was essentially a man of science; (iii) The absence of
conspicuous and unmistakable evidence of identity between Bacon and
Shakespeare.
(i) In spite of the obvious inconsistency and perversity of Ben Jonson’s
various utterances on the subject, and the difficulty of believing that his
famous Ode of 1623 could refer except in part to a death which had
occurred in 1616, Ben Jonson is commonly regarded as an absolutely
conclusive witness against us. An article of mine entitled Ben Jonson’s
Pious Fraud, which appeared in the Nineteenth Century and After of
November 1913, was an attempt at justification, and the attempt shall not be
repeated here. Some of my readers, however, may care to know that in the
December (1913) number of the same review an angry opponent charged
me with having libelled Ben Jonson, about the last thing of which I, a
lifelong admirer of Ben Jonson’s, could really be guilty.
(ii) The second criticism we have to meet is founded on the assumption
that Science—Natural Science—set her mark upon Bacon almost as soon as
he entered his teens. The main business of this section will be to set forth
arguments tending to show that the mark which Bacon actually bore from
early youth to mature age, was the sign manual of Poetry. In the nineties of
the 16th century, Bacon had serious thoughts of abandoning the legal
profession into which he had been thrust, and devoting himself to literature
in some form or other. Towards the close of his life, when reviewing his
life’s work, he regretfully confesses to having wronged his “genius” in not
devoting himself to letters for which he was “born.” In another letter of
about the same date, he expresses the same conviction: that in deserting
literature for civil affairs, he had done “scant justice” to his “genius.” These
are not the words, nor this the attitude of a man who thought and felt that he
was born for Natural Science. Possibly so, says an opponent, but if Bacon
were really born for literature, how came it that his literary output, until he
had passed the mature age of 40, was so small? If you, Baconians, were not
blinded by prejudice, you would recognise in Bacon’s literary inactivity
during youth and early manhood, something very like proof of a
preoccupation with Science. In replying to this argument, I should begin by
pointing out that the words “literary inactivity” beg the important question
of concealment of identity. Waiving this point for the moment, the
presumption of an early preoccupation with Science will be seen at a glance
to be incompatible with what we know of Bacon’s attainments in that
direction. A speech of his about 1592 in praise of “Knowledge”—a word
which covered everything knowable—contains some of his finest and most
characteristic thoughts. The praise of knowledge, he declares, is the praise
of mind, since “knowledge is mind.... The minde itself is but an accident to
knowledge, for knowledge is a double of that which is. The truth of being
and the truth of knowing is all one.” Then comes a rhetorical question
reminiscent of Lucretius’s suave mari, i.e.: “Is there any such happiness as
for a man’s mind to be raised above ... the clowdes of error that turn into
stormes of perturbations.... Where he may have a respect of the order of
Nature”? “Knowledge,” the speaker continues, should enable us “to
produce effects and endow the life of man with infinite commodities.” At
this point he interrupts himself with the reflection that he “is putting the
garland on the wrong head,” and then proceeds to inveigh against the
“knowledge that is now in use: All the philosophie of nature now receaved
is eyther the philosophie of the Gretians or of the Alchemist.” Aristotle’s
admiration of the changelessness of the heavens is derided on the naïve
assumption that there is a “like invariableness in the boweles of the earth,
much spiritt in the upper part of the earth which cannot be brought into
masse, and much massie body in the lower part of the heavens which
cannot be refined into spiritt.”[61] Ancient astronomers are next taken to
task for failing to see “how evident it is that what they call a contrarie
mocion is but an abatement of mocion. The fixed starres overgoe Saturne
and Saturne leaveth behind him Jupiter, and so in them and the rest all is
one mocion, and the nearer the earth the slower.” As for modern
astronomers, Copernicus for instance, and Galileo, he dismisses them with
contumely as “new men who drive the earth about.” Then he chides himself
for having forgotten that “knowledge itself is more beautiful than any
apparel of wordes that can be put upon it”—a romantic sentiment
reminiscent of Biron’s “angel knowledge” in Love’s Labour’s Lost; and a
subsequent passage is reminiscent of Montaigne. The conclusion of the
Speech is too fine to be abridged and must be given in full:
“But indeede facilitie to beleeve, impatience to doubte, temeritie to assever, glorie to
knowe, end to gaine, sloth to search, resting in a part of nature, these and the like have been
the things which have forbidden the happy match between the minde of man and the nature
of things, and in place thereof have married it to vaine nocions and blynde experiments.
And what the posteritie of so honorable a match may be it is not hard to consider.[62]
Therefore no doubte the sovereigntie of man lieth hid in knowledge, wherein many things
are reserved which Kings with their treasures cannot buy, nor with their force command:
their spies and intelligencies can give no news of them: their seamen and discoverers
cannot saile where they grow. Now we governe nature in opinions but are thrall to her in
necessities, but if we would be led by her in invention we should command her in action.”

These are not the views nor is this the accent of one who has been
devoting himself to natural science. The utterance is that of a genius for
letters whose preoccupation has been the apparelling of beautiful thoughts
in beautiful words.

The above Speech, which is part of an entertainment called a Conference

of Pleasure, expresses intuitions that come from the very soul of the poet-
speaker. Ample confirmation of this is to be found in the Advancement of
Learning—Learning here being the synonym of Knowledge in the Speech
—published in 1605. That work aimed at promoting “natural science” with
a view above all to scientific discovery and the increase of man’s power
over nature. It teems with practical allusions to and quotations from the
classical poets, particularly Ovid and Vergil. It was dedicated to James the
First, a prince—to quote the words of its author—“invested with the
learning and universality[63] of a philosopher.” In a passage dealing with
the art of medicine the author deems it very much “to the purpose” to note
that poets were wont “to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the
office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body and reduce
it to harmony.” Another passage asserts that the wild fancies of quacks or
empirics were anticipated and discredited by the poets in the fable of Ixion.
What we call endowment of research, he, student of belles lettres that he is,
regards as provision for the making of experiments appertaining to Vulcan
and Dædalus. Students of Natural Science will search the book in vain for
evidence of direct familiarity with any branch of the subject. In the opinion
of its author, natural history—the natural history of 1605—left little to be
desired so far as normal phenomena were concerned. He ruled that the
“opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth” was repugnant to
“natural philosophy.” The notion that air had or could have weight is
dismissed as preposterous. Among his observations on history there is no
suggestion of the circulation of the blood. He sums up Gilbert in terms of
contempt, his own contribution to the subject of magnetism being: “There is
formed in everything a double nature of good, the one as everything is a
total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a part or member of a greater
or more general form. Therefore we see the iron in particular sympathy
moveth to the loadstone, but yet if it exceed a certain quantity, it forsaketh
the affection to the loadstone and like a good patriot moveth to the earth
which is the region or country of massy bodies.”
One of the most telling arguments against the presumption that Bacon
had interested himself in natural science to the exclusion of almost
everything else, is the staggering value he put upon “poesy” as compared
with “philosophy” or science at large. Fascinated by the wonderful
discoveries of explorers in the material globe, he pictures knowledge, all
knowledge, as an intellectual globe, which he then divides into three great
parts or continents, History, Poesy, and Philosophy. Only a poet could have
made such a distribution as that. For the continent allotted to Philosophy, as
he understands it, embraced not only all the natural sciences, but also ethics,
politics, mathematics, metaphysics, and many another subject besides. It
would be easy, out of the Advancement alone, to multiply refutations of the
theory that Bacon’s early and middle life were devoted to natural science.
The only difficulty is to select.
 Before changing the subject it may be well to give the substance of a
foot-note to the present writer’s Shakespeare-Bacon, 1899 (Swan
Sonnenschein): “When Bacon came to review his early estimate of the
importance of poetry to science or knowledge, he was evidently
dissatisfied. In the Advancement (1605) he had claimed that ‘for the
expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are
beholding to poets more than to philosophers.’ In the corresponding place of
the revised edition (1623) he drops this claim. In the Advancement again
Poesy is stated to be one of the three ‘goodly fields’[64] (history and
experience being the other two), ‘where grow observations concerning the
several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions.’ ” In the
corresponding place of the revised version this commendation is materially
lowered, on the ground that poets are so apt to exceed the truth. The revised
version, in short, goes so far towards cheapening Poesy and Imagination as
to suggest that if the author had not been hampered by his earlier utterances,
he would have deposed both from the high places they still were permitted
to occupy in his system.
That Bacon’s relations with “Poesy” were extremely intimate and at the
same time anxiously concealed from the public, his letters afford
convincing evidence. Writing to the Earl of Essex in 1594-5, when his
affairs were in evil plight, he assures that generous friend that “the waters of
Parnassus” are the best of consolation. In a letter to Lord H. Howard he
writes: “We both have tasted of the best waters to knit minds together”—the
allusion being of course to the same Parnassian waters. In an open letter
(1604) to the Earl of Devonshire, he confesses to having written a sonnet
addressed to the Queen herself on a memorable occasion, and then, by way
of proving his generosity when the welfare of Essex was at stake, directs
special attention to the fact that this sonnet (affair) involved a publishing
and declaring of himself—in other words a dropping of the mask that
screened him as poet from the eyes of the public. That such was his
meaning is explained by a confidential letter to a poetical friend in which he
ranks himself among “concealed” poets. Moreover, this was evidently only
one of several letters in which Bacon confessed himself a concealed poet,
for John Aubrey tells us that Bacon “was a good poet, but concealed as
appears by his letters.” Whether any of these other letters still exist is to be
doubted, for the piety of Sir Tobie Mathew, Sir Thomas Meautys, and other
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