PART IV. EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES: THE DELIA BACON THEORY.

HERE is a legal maxim to the effect that he who destroys should be able to build up. The anti-Shakespeareans have not neglected to observe it. The days when William Shakespeare first appeared in London, happened to be the days when the Renaissance had reached England, and the drama which began then for the first time to be produced, was the English Renaissant Drama—just throwing off the crudities of the old miracle and mystery plays borrowed from the continent, and beginning to be English and original. Moreover, letters and learning, so long exclusively confined to the rich and gentle, began to find expressions in other ranks. "The mob of gentlemen who write with ease" were, one and all, beginning to use their pens. There were no village newspapers with their "Poet's Corners," and these writers sent their manuscripts through the only channel at hand—the green-room door.

As these scores of manuscripts came in, William Shakespeare, of Stratford, now Mr. Manager Shakespeare of the Blackfriars, read them over; took out a scene here and an act there; scissored them as he pleased; made this "heavy" for the low comedian, and that for the "first old man;" adjusted the "love business," made "practical" for his boards all the nature and humor, and cut out all that came flat, stale, and unprofitable from the amateur's hand; even took a little of each to make a new one, if necessary, (thus retaining the indicia that this was written by a lawyer, that by a physician, this by a soldier, that by a chemist, etc., etc.). He did what Dumas, Boucicault and Daly do to-day; he was, in other words, the stage editor, not the author, of the Shakespearean drama; though, that it should be called by his name, is, perhaps, the least unusual thing about it.

Besides the gentlemen who used their pens, the very recent dissolution of the monasteries had thrown multitudes of "learned clerks," (the "clerical" profession then including lawyers and physicians, and indeed all book-learned men) upon their own resources for daily bread, and there was only one depot for their work. Not three, but three thousand men there were, other things being equal, more competent by education at least, than William Shakespeare to write the Shakespearean drama. But other things, as we shall see, were not equal. It is suggested, on the one hand, that William Shakespeare wrote the plays; on the other hand, that Francis Bacon wrote them; and, again, that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote them. So far as mere dates go, any one of the three might have written them. They were all three in London, and on the ground when the plays appeared. The truth is perhaps somewhere among the three. Francis Bacon was the most learned man of his time. He could and did read Greek in the original, and he did have access to untranslated manuscripts, such as the "Menæclnni" of Plautus. He was a philosopher, and he did come nearer to a prescience of the philosophy of ages to be, than any man who ever lived—as witness his own acknowledged works. Sir Walter Raleigh was a wit and a poet, a gentleman, a man of elegant nonchalance, a very Mercutio, to the day of his execution. He was liberally educated, cultured, and would have been all this in a more cultivated day than his own; moreover, he was idle and a scribbler of belles-lettres. Perhaps he killed time by writing speeches for the obsequious manager to put into plays for his stage. Anonymous or pseudonymic authorship has ever been a penchant of the gentle and idle. Shakespeare, let us say, was a shrewd man of business, who kept up with his times, as do managers of theaters to-day; he was quick to perceive where a point might be made in his plays, and moreover he employed—or perhaps was fortunate enough to secure by way of friendship—a poet to turn his ideas into speech for the mouths of his players. That he used his pen to prepare the prompter's manuscript of the pieces performed at his theater, we have already seen there is reason to believe. That he ever composed, on his own account, we have only a sort of innuendo of certain of his brother actors and playwrights, and a Stratford tradition, which we can trace to no other source than the source of the belief outside—that is to say, to the fact that the plays were produced under his management in London. The innuendo dubs him a poet; the Stratford tradition makes him to have written doggerel verses. But some have ventured to disbelieve both the innuendo and the tradition.

Still, writing his life, as we do, from imagination, it is much easier to imagine the three men—Bacon, Raleigh, and Shakespeare—producing between them "Hamlet,"

"Othello," or the "Comedy of Errors," than to imagine William Shakespeare alone doing it. Especially since, apart from the internal evidence of the plays, he "had his hands full" of work besides—the work in which he earned his competency. It can not be too clearly borne in mind that Shakespeare, in a space of ten or twelve years, actually made what is a fair fortune to-day. That Bacon and Raleigh, whose ambitions did not lead them to seek renown as playwrights, should have contributed their share to the plays—the first for gold which he needed, and the second for pastime which he craved—is not remarkable; we can see hundreds of young lawyers scribbling for gold while waiting for practice, or young "swells" trying their hand at comedies for the sport of the thing, by opening our eyes to-day. That the shrewd and successful manager should carefully pick into presentable and playable shape for his stage, these productions of his young friends, is, likewise, the easiest thing in the world to conceive of, or to see managers doing to-day. Possibly, William Shakespeare, or some other skilled playwright, took the dialogues—let us say, for example—of Bacon and Raleigh, put them into the form of plays, introduced a clown here or a jade there, interpolated saws and localisms, gave the characters their names, looked out for the "business," arranged the tableaux—in short, did what Mr. Wal-lack, or Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault would have to do to-day to fit a play for the stage. It is thought that Shakespeare himself did it, because the plays are said to have been seen in his handwriting, and because, from that fact or otherwise, they went by his name in the days when they were first produced in London.

This sort of joint authorship would not only explain away the antagonism which grew up between the evidence of the man Shakespeare and the evidence of the Shakespearean plays, but account for the difficulties of accepting any anti-Shakespearean theory. This would explain the parallel passages in Bacon's writings and in the plays which Judge Holmes has so painstakingly sorted out; the little inaccuracies of law and of grammar, of geography and of history, in the plays themselves; Mr. Greene's "sea-coast of Bohemia," or the introduction of gunpowder at the seige of Troy—absurdities which it is morally impossible to suppose of the portrayer of antiquity who wrote "Julius Cæsar," or the knowledge that framed the historical plays. If, however, we consider them as the interpolations of a stage-wright * aiming at stage effect, they are easily enough accounted for.

* It is nothing less than marvelous that this simple
explanation should not have occurred to the wise men who
have been knocking their heads against "the sea-coast of
Bohemia" for the last hundred years. That this error is a
part of the "business" and not of the play, is very evident
from a casual reading of Act III., Scene III. The stage
direction for that scene is simply, "Scene—a desert
country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage
direction of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be
sure that this was the proper stage setting of the piece.
And to fit it, Antigonus, the first speaker, says to the
mariner: "Art thou perfect, then? Our ship hath touched the
deserts of Bohemia." Bobert Green makes the same mistake in
his "Dorastus and Faunia." It was, if any thing, a vulgar
error of the time. There is no further allusion to the
troublesome geography in the play. So, too, the gunpowder
used at the seige of Troy is a part of the "business," and
should be assigned where it belongs—to the playwright and
not to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put it
in, but he took it out of Green's "Dorastus and Faunia."

The stagewright saw an opportunity for the introduction of a stage ship or shipwreck, hence he puts in the borrowed "sea-coast." He needs an alarum of guns to impress his audience on the coming evening with the fact that a tight is in progress. And even if it should occur to him to doubt if there were any guns at the siege of Ilium, he is pretty certain that it will not occur to the groundlings or the penny seats, from whose pocket all is grist that comes to his mill, if he makes the guns and the cannon a part of the "business." So, again, we have only to understand this, and the characters of Hym and Bardolph—supposed to have puzzled the critics since critics first began to busy themselves with these dramas—is explained. Bardolph is the walking comedian, inserted by the experienced manager to tickle the frieti ciceris et nucis emptor, with his fiery nose, and corporal Nym to break in with his "There's the humor of it," just as rip Van Winkle dwells upon his favorite toast, and Solon Shingle upon his ancestor who "fitted into the Revolution." And to many minds this accounts for the little dashes of obscene display, the lewd innuendo, which came never from the same pen as the masterstrokes, but which they prefer to conceive of an actor or manager interpolating to the delight of Monsieur Taine's audience, and for the stolen delectation of the maids of honor and city dames who went, in men's clothes, to mingle with them.

This, too, might account for the poems dedicated to Southampton. In the lax court and reign of the Virgin Queen, there was at least one man bold and reckless enough to stand patron to the "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece"—the noble young libertine of nineteen, Southampton. Similarly, there may have been but one man available upon whom to father them, and so the joint or several productions of certain young men about town, "curled darlings" who affected Shakespeare's green-room, were sworn upon the complacent manager, who doubtless saw his profit in it. We have rumor, indeed, that his profit was no less a sum than one thousand pounds. But, as we have seen, and shall see further, this thousand pounds story is not only without authority, but incredible: that Southampton's means did not justify him in giving away any such sum—that Shakespeare did not need it, and that none of Southampton's coterie ever heard of it.

Whether Bacon wrote these works or not (and we may say the same of Raleigh), and whether the audiences before whom these Shakespearean dramas were first presented could have estimated them as what we of this age recognize them to be or not; we may be sure that, had he chanced to light upon them, Lord Bacon could have appraised them, and the genius that created them, at their true worth. But while Lord Bacon's writings teem with mention of his own contemporaries (Mr. W. II. Smith points out the fact that we owe about all we know of Raleigh's skill in repartee to Bacon's "Apothegms"), he nowhere alludes to such a man as William Shakespeare!—to William Shakespeare—who, if popular belief is true, was his lordship's most immortal contemporary, the one mind mightier than Bacon's, and yet not a rival or a superior in his own particular sphere, of whom he could have been jealous. The truth which makes this strange riddle plain is, according to the Baconian theory, that (to use Sir Tobie Matthew's words in his famous letter to his patron) "the most prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another," in other words, that Bacon was "Shakespeare." And, indeed, Sir Tobie was fonder of nothing than of indulging in sly allusions to Lord Bacon's secret, of which he had become possessed. In another letter than that just quoted, he says again to his lordship: "I will not promise to return you weight for weight, but measure for measure....and there is a certain judge in the world, who, in the midst of his popularity toward the meaner sort of men, would fain deprive the better sort of that happiness which was generally done in that time." * **

* Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," second edition, p.
175.
** "Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 96.

Such considerations as these, as they came one by one to light, began to suggest to thinking minds that perhaps William Shakespeare was enjoying, by default, estates belonging to somebody else. But it is curious to see how gradually. In 1783, Theobald, a competent and painstaking scholar of the text, declares that there were "portions of the plays which proved beyond a doubt that more than one hand had produced them." More than fifty years after came Dr. Richard Banner (who wrote his famous letter on "The Learning of Shakespeare," in or about 1789), and appears to have been the first actual anti-Shakespearean and unbeliever. Dr. Farmer sought—by demonstrating that much of the learning of the plays could have been, by sufficient research, procured at second-hand—to account for (what he could not overlook) the utter inadequacy of the historical man to the immortal work assigned him; just as if it were not, if any thing, an increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose a busy actor and manager rummaging England for forgotten manuscripts in the days when no public libraries existed, and when students lived in cloisters; or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum ever drawn from a classical source! And just as if the encyclopaedic learning required was lessened by the fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed or rewritten from an older drama of the same name!

For example of Farmer's argument, take the following. In the play of that name, Timon says:

"The sun's a thief, and with his great attention

Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief

That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen

From general excrement: each thing's a thief."

Now, exclaim the men who upho'd the stage manager's ability to read Greek, the idea of this is from Anacreon, and they give the ode in which William Shakespeare found it. Not so fast, says Dr. Farmer. He might have taken it from the French of Ronsard, a French poet: because one Puttenham, in his "Arte of English Poesie," published in 1589, speaks of some one—of a "reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, finding certain of Anacreon's odes very well translated by Ronsard, the French poet—comes a minion and translates the same out of French into English," and "on looking into Ronsard I find this very ode of Anacreon among the rest!" Letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims to prove that William Shakespeare could not read Greek by showing that he could reach French—or the observation, that the sum of Dr. Farmer's arguments (for the above is a sample of each and all of them) amounts simply to this, that: though the manager knew no Greek—he knew where every thing contained in Greek was to be obtained in translation: the question for us is simply, Why should the stage-manager have recourse to either Anacreon or Ronsard for a meteorological episode? This, and a thousand like passages, are nothing but digressions, with nothing whatever to do with the action or by-play of the comedy or tragedy in which they occur, and not apposite to anything else in the part of the speakers who pronounced them. A scholar might be unable to keep them out; but why should a stage-manager—fitting a spectacle to the acting necessities of his boards or to the humor of his audience—put them in? Whereas, if a scholar did write the manuscript play and sell it to a stage-manager, it is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut out the digression or why he left it in, for that was a mere matter of whim or circumstance, not worth our while to speculate over. Dr. Farmer went just far enough to see that, if the William Shakespeare of history wrote the Book, something must be done to account for his access to the material he wrought with. If the Doctor had kept on a little further, the truth would have dawned upon him. But, as it was, he (without looking for them) observed traces of what he believed to be two hands in the Plays, and so followed Theobald. He says of Hamlet, that he considered it "extremely probable that the French ribaldry in the last scene of Hamlet was the work of another than the author of the body of the work"—but the hint was altogether lost on him. He looked no further, and so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth—namely, that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was William Shakespeare's. The "without blotting a line" of Ben Jonson—not a mere form of speech, but a fact, confirmed by Heminges and Condell, the editors of the "first folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, "we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers"—as we shall see further on, ought to have itself awakened suspicion. Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, who supplied his native stage with upward of two thousand original dramas—who is computed to have written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote so hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his intrigues, but cut them all open "with a knife" in the last act—probably did write "without blotting a line." At least so Mr. Hallam thinks, adding that, "nature would have overstepped her bounds, and have produced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity and invention, attained perfection in any department of literature." * But in the case of these marvelous Shakespeare plays, it was preferred to believe that nature had "produced the marvelous," rather than accept the simple truth that what Hem-inges and Condell and Ben Jonson saw, were the engrossed parts written out for each actor, and not the first drafts of the poet, improvising as he wrote.

* Literature of Europe, part ii., ch. vi., § 8.

Except that Mr. Spedding, in the "Gentleman's Magazine" for February, 1852, printed a paper "Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry VIII?"—in which he claimed to have found startling traces of two hands in that play, (and possibly some other floating papers which have escaped our search)—prior to the year 1852 it had occurred to nobody (except Kitty, in "High Life Below Stairs") to ask the question, "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" But, in August of that year an anonymous writer, in Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal," distinctly and for the first time discussed the question, "Who wrote Shakespeare?"—when, after going overmuch of the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his own "extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the conclusion), that William Shakespeare "kept a poet." It is curious to find this anonymous writer dealing, as airily as Lady Bab herself, with the question: and (while unconscious of the elaborate network of evidence he might have summoned, and suggesting no probable author by name) actually foreshadowing the laborious conviction which, four years later, Delia Bacon was to announce. He surmises, indeed, that William Shakespeare was a sort of showman, whose interest in the immortal plays was a purchased interest—precisely what the law at present understands by "proprietary copyright."

"The plays apparently arise... as the series goes on; all at once Shakespeare, with a fortune, leaves London, and the supply ceases. Is this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any other supposition than the death of the poet and the survival of the employer?" Of this supposititious hack-author, who dies, and leaves to William Shakespeare the halo of his genius as well as the profit of his toil, this anonymous writer draws a picture that has something familiar in its coloring. "May not William Shakespeare," he asks, "the cautious, calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret over-looking the 'silent highway of the Thames,' some pale, wasted student... who, with eyes of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some cheap and speedy means of death? What was to hinder William Shakespeare from reading, appreciating, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 'keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood?

With this view the disputed passages—those in which critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting—the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in—the occasional bad taste—in short, all the imperfections discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of Shakespeare himself on his poet's works. * Miss Delia Bacon, a remarkable lady, followed in a paper printed in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 1856, (and therefore must have written it in 1855), and was supposed therein to distinctly announce and maintain that Lord Bacon—her namesake by coincidence—was the "Shakespeare" wanted—a supposition which, as we shall see, was erroneous.

* Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal,"'August 7, 1852, p. 88.

The audacity of the assertion, by a young woman, a school-teacher, in no way distinguished or anywise eminent, that the idol of these centuries, and of the English-speaking race, was a mere effigy of straw—a mere dummy for an unknown immortal, was too tremendous! Men stood aghast. Was it a chimera of a mind diseased! Sneered at in her own country, she went to England, but found that—while at home she was treading only on adverse sentiment—there she was openly tampering with vested rights, almost with the unwritten constitution of England. She made a few personal friends, and found some sympathizers, but all England was arrayed against her. She came back, heart-broken, and died eight months later. Mr. William Henry Smith, of London, in September, 1856, appeared with his "Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere," in which the Baconian theory was very plainly and circumspectly laid down and admirably maintained. * The presumption once disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the well-worn track of the commentators, and the result has been, we think, a candid, rational, and patient attempt to study the Shakespearean writings by the aid of contemporary history rather than by mere conjecture, and by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work, and gossip.

* This "Letter," which was reprinted in "Littell's Living
Age," (No. 56), for November, 1856, was, the following year
(1857) elaborated into the valuable work on which we have so
unsparingly drawn in these pages, and to which we
acknowledge our exceeding obligation ("Bacon and
Shakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and
Play writers in the days of Elizabeth. By William Henry
Smith. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857"). In this work Mr.
Smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date of his
letter to Lord Ellesmere, he had never seen Miss Bacon's
article in "Putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no where
claims to have been the originator of the "Baconian Theory."

It is too early in the day—the time has been too short—for the reaction to have proved equal to the action, and verified the physical rule; but three well defined anti-Stratfordian theories have offered themselves already, as substitutes for the mossy and venerable fossil remains of the commentators. These theories are:

1. The Delia Bacon Theory;

2. The Baconian Theory; and

3. The New Theory (as we are compelled, for want of a better name, to call it).