PART V. THE BACONIAN THEORY.
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HE English Renaissance Drama seems naturally to group itself into two grand divisions: the Elizabethan drama and—Shakespeare. There is nothing in the first which surprises: which impresses us as too abrupt a departure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the middle age mummeries—"miracle plays" and "mysteries"—or as being too refined or elaborate for the groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the contemporary barns called "play-houses" in the days of Elizabeth. But that the proprietor of one of these barns should have found it to his profit to have overshot the intelligence of his audience by creating a Hamlet, a Lear, Brutus, and Macbeth—the action of whose roles are intellectual rather than scenic—for his players, or an Ophelia, Isabella, or Catharine for the small boys employed to render his female parts, is an incongruity—to put it mildly—which arrests our credulity at once.
The utmost that the Shakespeareans propose to do—the utmost they attempt—is to make out William Shakespeare to have been an Elizabethan Dramatist. But the Elizabethan Dramatist was a man who catered to the Elizabethan play-goer. Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and the rest, were Elizabethan Dramatists. But their names are only a catalogue to-day. If we happen to buy a set of their works at a bargain, at some old book sale, we may put them on our shelves; but we are not equal to the laborious task of reading them. The Shakespearean Drama is a thing apart. Its Dramatic form seems only an Incident; perfect as that Incident is, there is so much more in it that we find appealing to our hearts and intellects to-day, that we hesitate to ascribe it even to an Elizabethan Dramatist. The Baconian theory, as elaborated by Holmes, we understand to be that this element apart from the Dramatic, in these days is the key-note and explanation of the whole Shakespeare mystery, and leads to the discovery that "Shakespeare" was only a convenient name under which the popular ear was sought to be arrested by a Philosopher, who wrote in cipher, as it were, for a great purpose of his own.
The philosophical system contemplated by Francis Bacon—say the Baconians—was divided into two grand Divisions, the Didactic and the Historical. The first—its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernacular) locked up in the universal language of scholars, and left it by his testament to "the next ages." The other he chose to put into Dramatic form. The spirit, motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena of English letters, synchronizing in date (the philosophical canon of Bacon and the dramatic canon of "Shakespeare,") are identical, and form together essentially one great body of philosophy and inductive science, and, therefore, must have had the one author. "It is a thing, indeed, if practiced professionally, of low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it is of excellent use—I mean stage playing." he says himself. And again: "Dramatic poetry is as history made visible." This Historical or preliminary division of the Philosophy did not need a dead, but a living language—the language of his race. This he left in English: and when, at the end, a broken, weak, despised old man—knowing himself only too well to be the meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious of having, in a large sense, worked for the good of his fellow-men—he made no excuse or palliation, but only bespoke for himself and his life "men's charitable speeches."
But, if there was but one author for these two contemporary works, why not William Shakespeare as well as Francis Bacon? Why not ask the question, "Did William Shakespeare write Lord Bacon's works?" * as well as, "Did Lord Bacon write William Shakespeare's work?" While not within our scope to demonstrate the identical philosophy of the Novum Organum and the Shakespearean Drama—(a work to which Miss Bacon devoted her life—and whose demonstration has been followed by Judge Holmes)—it is property within that scope to examine, from the outside, the question whether, as matter of fact, William Shakespeare could have written either; or whether, from circumstantial evidence merely, Lord Bacon was thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually the author of the Dramatic canon of "Shakespeare."
* See this question asked and answered affirmatively in
"North American Review." February, 1881. New York. D.
Appleton & Co.
How, aside from any opinion as to their value, beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of the Shakespearean works which, under the calmest and most sternly judicial treatment to which they could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be beyond gainsay or neglect. These two characteristics are—1. The encyclopaedic universality of their information as to matters of fact; and, 2. The scholarly refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peoples—as, for example, the Zulus or the Ashantees—impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean plays on that account. But this familiarity with what, at their date, was the Past of history, and—up to that date—the closed book of past human discovery and research which we call Learning; is an open and indisputable fact; and the New-Zealander who shall sit on a broken arch of London Bridge and muse over the ruins of British civilization, if he carry his researches back to the Shakespearean literature, will be obliged to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the accumulated learning of the world down to his own actual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be compelled to this decision only by a careful examination of the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the most, of any given group of single plays. Let him open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "Julius Cæsar." *
* See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare
illustrated in a Philological commentary on his 'Julius
Cæsar.' By G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857.
Even the artificial Alexander Pope (who, so far from being an over-estimator of the Shakespearean works, only, from the heights of his superior plane, admits them very grudgingly to a rank beside the works of Waller) was obliged to confess as much. "This Shakespeare," says Mr. Pope, "must have been very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of antiquity. In 'Coriolanus' and 'Julius Cæsar,' not only the spirit, but the manner of the Romans is exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former and of the latter. No one is more a master of the poetical story, or has more frequent allusions to the various parts of it. Mr. Waller (who has been celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more learning in this way than Shakespeare," * But, if the New-Zealander be a philologist, he will scarcely need perusal of more than a Shakespearean page to arrive at this judgment. Wherever else the verdict of scholarship may err, the microscope of the philologist cannot err. Like the skill of the chirographical expert, it is infallible, because, just as the hand of a writer, however cramped, affected, or disguised, will unconsciously make its native character of curve or inclination, so the speech of a man will be molded by his familiarity, be it greater or less, with the studies, learning, tastes, and conceits of his own day, and by the models before him. He cannot unconsciously follow models that are unknown to him, or speak in a language he has never learned.
corroboration of history, that they were only the forgeries of a precocious boy. To just as moral a certainty are the handiwork of the Elohist and the Jehovist discernible in the Hebrew Scriptures, and just as absolutely incapable of an alternative explanation are the ear-marks of the Shakespearean text. Hallam, whose eyes were never opened to the truth, and who lived and died innocent of any anti-Shakespearean theory (though he sighed for a "Shakespeare of heaven," turning in disgust from the "Shakespeare of earth," of whom only he could read in history), noticing the phases, unintelligible and improper except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in the plays, proceeds to say: "In the 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' these are much less frequent than in his later dramas; but here we find several instances. Thus, 'Things base and vile, holding no quantity' (for value) rivers that 'have overborne their continents' (the continenti riva of-Horace); 'compact of imagination;' 'something of great constancy' (for consistency); 'sweet Pyramus translated there;' 'the law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate,' etc. I have considerable doubts," continues Mr. Hallam, "whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less overrun with pedantry than that of her successor. Could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one who did not understand their proper meaning would have introduced them into poetry." *
* "Literature of Europe," Part II, ch. vi, sec. 81. "To be
told that he played a trick to a brother player in a
licentious amour, or that he died in a drunken frolic.. does
not exactly inform us of the man who wrote "Lear." If there
was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one
of heaven, and it is of him that we desire to know
something." Id. Part II, ch. vi, sec. 35, note.
Young Chatterton deceived the most profound scholars of his day, and his manuscripts stood every test but this; but under it they revealed the fact, so soon to receive the mournful social speech in those days, even in the highest walks of life—we happen to have very graphic accounts of Queen Elizabeth's sayings and retorts courteous (as, e. g., when she boxed Essex's ears and told him to go and be hanged)—it requires considerable credulity to assign this classic diction to a rustic apprentice from Stratford, who, at "about eighteen," begins his dramatic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no hiatus for a college course between.
Add to this the patent fact that the antique allusions in the plays "have not regard to what we may call 'school classics,' but to authors seldom perused but by profound scholars" * even to-day: and technical exploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the Shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumulative as to the result already obtained. But, if we pass from the technical structure to the material of the plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing discovery that, not only the lore of the past was at the service of their author, but that he had no less an access to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet distant future, were to immortalize their first sponsors.
* Smith, p. 85.
** Though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. The late
John Elliotson declared that the circulation through the
lungs had certainly been taught seventy years previously by
Servetus, who was burned at the stake in 1553. Dr. Robert
Willis asserts, in his "Life of Harvey," that the facts he
used were familiarly known to most of his predecessors for a
century previous. Izaak Walton states that Harvey got the
idea of circulation from Walter Warner, the mathematician;
and that eminent physician, John Hunter, remarks that
Servetus first, and Realdus Columbus afterward, clearly
announced the circulation of the blood through the lungs;
and Cisalpinus, many years before Harvey, published, in
three different works, all that was wanting in Servetus to
make the circulation complete. Wotton says that Servetus was
the first, as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea
of this matter. Even the Chinese were impressed with this
truth some four thousand years before Europeans dreamed of
it. Plato affirmed—"the heart being the knot of the veins,
and the fountain from whence the blood arises and briskly
circulates through all the members." This, however, rather
adds to than lessens the strength of the argument drawn from
finding the "discovery" in the plays.
For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce—what is credited to him *—his discovery of the circulation of the blood in the human system—until 1619 (his book was not published until 1628), three years after William Shakespeare's death. But why need Dr. Harvey have resorted to vivisection to make his "discovery"? He need only have taken down his "Shakespeare." Is there any thing in Dr. Harvey any more exactly definite than the following?
"I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain,
And, through the cranks and offices of man:
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins,
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live."
— Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1.
"... had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick
(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins").
—King John, Act III, Scene 3.=
... As dear to me as are tlie ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart."
—Julius Caesar, Act IT, Scene 1.
Harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been the theory of Galen, Paracelsus, and Hippocrates (who substituted the liter for the heart), and to have been held also by Rabelais. Neither Galen, Paracelsus, Hippocrates, nor Rabelais was a text-book at Stratford grammar-school during the two terms Mr. De Quincy placed William Shakespeare as a pupil there—but William has them at his fingers' ends. There are said to be no less than seventy-eight passages in the plays wherein this fact of the circulation of the blood is distinctly alluded to; and, as to Galen and Paracelsus, they intrude themselves unrestrictedly all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or excuse:
"Parolles. So I say; both of Galen and Paracelsus.
Lafeu. Of all the learned and authentic fellows."
—All's Well that Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3.
"Host of the Garter Inn. What says my Æsculapius? my Galen?"
—Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II., Scene 3.
In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the erudite Bardolph and Falstaff's classical page make a learned blunder about Althea, whom the page confounds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe that this sometime butcher's boy and later stage manager has his head so brimming full of his old Greeks and philosophers that he can not for a moment miss their company, and makes his very panders and public-cans prate of them? Even if it were the commonest thing in the world, nowadays, in 1881, for our Mr. Boucicault or Mr. Daly to write a play expressly to catch the taste of the canaille of the Old Bowery (or, for that matter, of the urbane and critical audiences of Wallack's or the Union Square), and stuff all the low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion (for this is precisely what William Shakespeare is said to have done for the unroofed play-house in the mud of the Bankside in London, some three hundred years ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at)—even, we say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to imagine this sort of play writing to-day, would it be a wilder flight of fancy to suggest a pale student in London in the days of Queen Elizabeth, somewhere among the garrets of Gray's Inn, writing dialogues into which Galen and Paracelsus would intrude unbidden—and a stage manager letting them stay there as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names, of dogs or wenches—at any rate, as good, mouth-filling words, to be paid for at the lowest market price): * than to conceive a twelfth manager and proprietor of this home of the Muses, and whilom sticker of calves, after the day's labor, shunning his cups and the ribald mirth-making of those sad dogs, his fellow managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same Galen and Paracelsus?
* Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why-should
he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or
record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity?
See Midsummer-Night's Dream," Act I, Scene 1—"O, spite, too
old to be engaged to young!" etc. Again—"Too old, by
Heaven! Let still the woman take an elder than herself."
Again—"Then let thy love be younger than thyself," etc.,
etc. ("Twelfth Night," Act II., Scene 4.)
It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have
wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might
snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his
passing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried
perusal in the green-room."—Chambers's Journal, August 7,
1852,p. 89.
Newton, who was only born in 1642—twenty years after Shakespeare was laid away in his tomb—surely need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal the immutable truth of gravitation. He had but to take down his copy of "Troilus and Cressida" (printed in 1606) to open to the law itself, as literally stated as he himself could have formulated it:
"Cressida.... But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very center of the earth,
Drawing all things to it."
—Troilus and Cressida, Act IV., Scene 2.
Are we called upon to tax our common sense to fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, after the play at the Globe was over, snugly in his library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the circulation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing them "without blotting out a line," and sending the "copy" to the actors so that they could commit it to memory for the stage on the following evening?
What a library it was—that library up among the flies (if they had such things) of the old Globe Theater! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must have been, to have snatched from his overworked life—from the interval between the night's performance and the morning's routine—the hours to labor over Galen and Paracelsus and Plato in the original Greek! It was miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his forge, in the nineteenth century—surrounded with libraries, and when books could be had for the purchasing—could have mastered all the known languages. But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms at Stratford school, (or, let us say, twenty years at Stratford School, or at the University of Oxford—for there is as much evidence that he was at Oxford as that he was at Stratford school) without books, since there were no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was written in books! Surely there never was such a miracle as this!
"He was the prophet of geology," says Fullom, "before it found an exponent in Werner;"
"O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate;
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent
(Weary of solid firmness) melt itself
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beechy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune's hips." **
And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms of Hunt, Jenkins and Stratford school! And, Mr. Malone believed, had never even gone so far into the classics as to have read Tacitus! ***
* "History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with New
Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullom, London: Saunders,
Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864.
** "King Henry IV.," Part II., Act 3, Scene i.
*** See ante, p. 88.
What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous Stratford school, "two terms," of which—between his poaching and his beer-bouting—were all the schooling William Shakespeare ever had, according to all bis biographies. (We say, all he ever had, because his father was so illiterate that he signed every thing with a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of William's family; and the boy William was too busy at skylarking—according to those who knew him—to have had much opportunity of private instruction at the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements been adequate.) Were the theory and practice of the common law taught there? "Legal phrases flow from his pen," says Mr. Grant White, "as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.... This conveyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been picked up by hanging around the courts in London, two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare. And, besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early plays, written in his first Loudon years, as in those produced at a later period." * And not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of that mighty and abstruse science, the law of England," is he perfect. A chief justice of England has declared that "while novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." **
* Memoir," p. 47. And see "Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" By H.
T———-. London: Longmans, Green, Reader A Dyer, 1871.
** "Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p.
108. And see "Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Rushton.
London, 1858.
Were medicine and surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill * asserted in 1860 that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare's knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the present day. And not only in the general knowledge of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in these days "medical jurisprudence," the man that wrote the historical play of Henry IV. seems to have been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown ** says that in "Frost's case" (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had committed suicide. A celebrated physician being on the stand as an expert on this question, was examined as follows:
Q. What are the general indications of death from violence?
A. My knowledge will not enable me to answer so broad a question.
And yet Mr. Brown points out that "William Shakespeare's knowledge had enabled him" to answer so "broad a question:"
"Warwick. See how the blood is settled in his face!
Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless.