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 devoted friends of the concealed poet, would naturally destroy all they could lay hands on.
The external evidence that Bacon was essentially a poet is a theme so large that only a portion of it can be given here. In 1626, the year of Bacon’s death, John Haviland printed for Sir William Rawley thirty-two monumenta insignia expressive of adoration and grief for the great man who had just passed away.[65] Rawley, the editor, would take care that no published offering to the Manes Verulamiani should impart his Master’s secret to persons who were not in it already; and this may help to explain why all the thirty-two offerings are in Latin, not in the vulgar tongue. In his preface to the collection, Rawley informs his readers that the monumenta were a selection merely from the numbers which had been entrusted to him—“very many, and those of the very best having been kept back by him” (plurimos, enim, eosque optimos versus apud me contineo). How tantalising! He does not even hint at his reason for such wholesale suppression of masterpieces. One of the thirty mourners declares that Bacon was a Muse more choice than any of the famous Nine. Another considers him “the hinge of the literary world.” Another bids the fountain of Hippocrene weep black mud, and warns the Muses that their bay-trees would go out of cultivation now that the laurel-crowned Verulam had left this planet. Others call upon Apollo and the Muses to weep for the loss of the great Bacon. Another laments the disaster that has befallen “us nurselings of the Muses,” and calls Bacon “the Apollo of our choir.” Another exclaims that “the morning-star of the Muses, the favourite of Apollo, has fallen,” and supposes that Melpomene in particular is inconsolable for the loss of him. Another declares that Bacon had placed all the Muses under obligations impossible to estimate. Another laments him as “the Tenth Muse ... ornament of the choir,” and imagines that Apollo can never have been so unhappy before. Another regards Bacon as the delicium of his country. Another calls him the choir leader of the Pierides. Another, No. 24, will have it that Ovid, had he lived, would have been better qualified than any other poet to lay an acceptable offering on the tomb of Bacon. Why Ovid should have been pitched upon is not obvious. Perhaps the opinion of Francis Meres, that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his Sugred Sonnets, among his private friends,” may have determined his choice. Here it should be mentioned that a previous contributor had hinted not obscurely at Bacon’s authorship of “some elegant love pieces or poems”—quicquid venerum politiorum.[66] Another contributor exclaims: “Couldst thou thyself, O Bacon, suffer death, thou who wert able to confer immortality on the Muses themselves?” The last of the thirty-two selected contributors is Thomas Randolph, a notable member of the group of wits known as the tribe of Ben. After having expatiated on the grief of himself and his fellow-poets for the irreparable loss they had just sustained, and borne his testimony to Bacon’s intimacy with the melodious goddesses (Camænæ), Randolph in the manner affected by contemporary poets and men of letters, proceeds to eulogise Bacon as the inventor of new scientific methods, of keys to Nature’s labyrinth, etc., and finishes: “But we poets can add nothing to thy fame. Thou thyself art a singer, and therefore singest thine own praises.” (At nostræ tibi nulla ferent encomia musæ, Ipse canis, laudes et canis inde tuas).
To sum up, the outstanding impression left on the mind by Randolph and his friends is that they regarded Bacon, not merely as a poet, but as the foremost poet of the age; and this impression is confirmed by the reflection that few if any of the contributors knew enough of science to be capable of appreciating the work of really scientific pioneers such as Harriot, Gilbert, Harvey, and others whose names are conspicuously absent from the roll of Bacon’s admirers.
(iii) The remaining difficulty—that of establishing a relation between Bacon and Shakespeare—has now to be dealt with. It may be well to begin by directing attention to the significant omission of the name of Jonson, head of the tribe of Ben, from the collection of eulogies we have just been considering. Adequate explanation of this conspicuous omission is almost impossible without the aid of the Bacon hypothesis. If any contribution of Jonson’s had appeared in the publication, the secret would have been out. Even as it was, his executors almost disclosed it when, in 1640-1, they sanctioned publication of those tell-tale notebooks in which Jonson records that Bacon “had performed that in our tongue which might be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” an appreciation almost identical with that contained in his famous Ode to Shakespeare. It is well to remember in this connection that Jonson on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday had apostrophised him as an enchanter or “mystery” worker.
Among other arguments which tend to identify the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, the following seem worthy of mention: (a) Poesy, as we know, constituted one of the three continents into which Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, mapped out the whole “globe” of the knowable. To ignore dramatic poetry altogether would have given rise to inconvenient curiosity. Compelled, therefore, to give it a name, Bacon rejects the natural word “dramatic” and adopts instead the out-of-the-way word “representative.” What he says, moreover, about dramatic poetry—in the proper place for saying it—is apparently intended to carry on the suggestion that he was almost a stranger to dramatic performances, a suggestion contradicted by passages in other sections of the same work. For instance, on handling what he calls the “Georgics of the mind,” he describes dramatic poetry in terms so appropriate to the best dramatic poetry of the period, that one is almost forced to say to oneself: Here surely, Bacon must have been thinking of Shakespeare! The passage will bear quoting at length. “In poetry,” it runs, “no less than in history, we may find painted forth with great life how affections are kindled and excited; how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they do fight and encounter one with another ... how to set affection against affection, and to master one by another, even as we use to hunt beast with beast.” His leave-taking, it may be added, of the whole theme or subject of poetry is effected by an ironical: “But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre,” which could only be fully appreciated I suppose, by his personal friends.
(b) Nowhere, I believe, in any extant writing of Bacon’s, whether letter, essay, or notebook, is there any mention of Shakespeare, and a like reticence is observed in the Rawley collection just cited. Assume for the moment that Shakespeare was the proper name of the man of Stratford, not the pseudonym of Bacon, or, to put it in another way, that Shakespeare and Bacon were two separate persons, and what is the result? We should have to concede that of two poets, both interested in things dramatic, both supreme judges and keen observers of human nature, its affections, passions, corruptions, and customs—that of two such poets, one, and that one Bacon, must have forbidden the very mention of the other, and this, too, for no discoverable reason.
(c) Bacon (in 1605) held that the chief function of poetry was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it.” He ranked poets among the very best of ethical teachers in virtue of their insight into human character as modifiable “by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity” and the like; and again ... “by sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising per saltum, per gradus and the like.” Here again many an open-minded reader must have felt moved to reflect that he was on the track, if not in the presence, of Shakespeare.
(d) It is clear that Bacon as he grew older, came to think less and less highly of imaginative work. The mere fact that Shakespeare ultimately abandoned his poetical offspring to chance, points, it surely would seem, to a similar change of view.
(e) Though many of the coincidences between Bacon and Shakespeare may be explained as manifestations of the Time Spirit, some of them strongly suggest direct contact even when taken singly. Take for example, the misquotation of Aristotle by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, and by Bacon in the Advancement of Learning.[67] Take, again, the curious resemblance between the Winter’s Tale and the Essay of Gardens. Spedding’s comment on this passage in the Essay runs: “The scene in Winter’s Tale where Perdita presents the guests with flowers ... has some expressions which, if the Essay had been printed somewhat earlier, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it.”[68]
(f) Again, certain views to which Bacon gave expression in the Essay of Deformity, seem implicit in Shakespeare’s Richard the Third. Richard has his “revenge of nature” for the ill turn she did him in making him deformed. He is also “extreme bold,” ever on the watch to “observe the weakness” of others. His deformity, moreover, must, it would seem, be supposed to have “quenched jealousy” in those personages who, if he had been comely, would have foreseen and thwarted his ambitious designs.