Baconian Essays

BACONIAN ESSAYS
BY E. W. SMITHSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND TWO ESSAYS BY SIR GEORGE GREENWOOD LONDON CECIL PALMER OAKLEY HOUSE, 14-18 BLOOMSBURY ST., W.C. 1 F i r s t Edition C o p y- r i g h t 1 9 2 2

Page 17 line 12 for “hat” read “that.” ” 19 line 13 from bottom for “Spain” read “Spa in.” ” 38 line 7 ” ” for “Magwell” read “Mugwell.” ” 169 line 13 ” ” for “swet” read “sweet.” ” 193 line 10 from bottom for “tilt-hard” read “tilt-yard.”
Now I do not for a moment suppose that in so writing the late Mr. Henry James had any intention of affixing the stigma of personal fraud upon William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Doubtless he used the term “fraud” in a semi-jocular vein as we so often hear it made use of in the colloquial language of the present day, and his meaning is nothing more, and nothing less, than this, viz., that the belief that the plays and poems of “Shakespeare” were, in truth and in fact, the work of “the man from Stratford,” (as he subsequently, in the same letter, styles “the divine William”) is one of the greatest of all the many delusions which have, from time to time, afflicted a credulous and “a patient world.” He believed that when, in the year 1593, the dedication of Venus and Adonis to the Young Earl of Southampton was signed “William Shakespeare,” that signature did not, in truth and in fact, stand for the Stratford player who never so signed himself, but for a very different person, in quite another sphere of life, who desired to preserve his anonymity. He believed that when plays were published in the name of “Shake-speare” that name did not, in truth and in fact, stand for “the man from Stratford,” but again for that same person—or it might be, and in certain cases certainly was, for some other—who desired to publish plays under the mask of a convenient pen-name. And if the authorship of these poems and plays came, in course of time, to be attributed to William Shakspere, the player from Stratford-upon-Avon, who himself never uttered a word, or wrote a syllable, or took any steps whatever to claim the authorship of those poems and plays for himself, but was content merely to play the part of “William the Silent” from first to last, there is, surely, no reason to brand him as a cheat and a “fraud” upon that account, and we may be quite sure that that highly-gifted and distinguished man of literature, Henry James—one of the intellectuals of our day—had no intention of so branding him.