(g) In the course of some interesting observations on the writing of history considered as an art, Bacon confesses to a liking for ready-made outlines or plots, so that the artist might be free to concentrate his powers on the more congenial work of enrichment “with counsels, speeches, and notable particularities.” The faulty plots of many of Shakespeare’s plays imply that he also grudged the labour of construction and delighted in decoration and enrichment.
(h) Several editions of Bacon’s Essays seem to have been published without their author’s consent. Shakespeare also seems to have been preyed upon by piratical publishers. Wherever concealment of authorship is a desideratum, prosecution by law must needs be difficult if not impossible.
(i) Whenever Shakespeare, as we know him in quartos and folios, stands in need of an interpreter, no contemporary author is so often consulted by orthodox critics as Francis Bacon.
(k) Compare the Merchant of Venice, which the editor of the First Folio rather enigmatically calls comedy, with Bacon’s Essay of Usury. The primary intention of the play was to amuse or delight; that of the Essay being of course to instruct. But the play appears to me to have combined utile with dulce, instruction with pleasure; and the lesson as I understand it was this:—usury instead of being forbidden by the State, should be recognised and regulated, on the ground that unconditional forfeiture of pawns or pledges—the usual alternative to usury—is apt to bear more harshly on the borrower. The crisis of the play arrives near the end of Act IV, Sc. 1, where the Doge pronounces judgment. The instant and immediate effect upon Shylock is positively crushing; he would rather die than submit. But the accent of despair is quickly succeeded by the words: “I am content,” although one of the conditions just introduced by Antonio is that the wretched man Shylock should “presently become a Christian.” The change of mood is so amazing that we can hardly believe our senses. What can be the explanation? we ask ourselves. Between the judgment pronounced by the Doge and Shylock’s accent of despair, Antonio has thrown in these words: “So please my lord the Duke and all the Court to quit the fine for one half of his goods, I am content; so he [Shylock] will let me have the other half in use, to render it upon his death unto the gentleman that lately stole his daughter.” To us the words may seem insignificant. But Shylock was a sort of personification of usury, and to him they meant nothing less than victory—victory over his arch-enemy Antonio, the head and front of the anti-usury party in Venice.
Students of Bacon will remember that his Essay of Usury is a plea for State recognition and regulation of interest or “use,” on utilitarian grounds similar to those suggested in the comedy.
But may not this harmony between the Merchant of Venice and the Essay have been accidental, especially as there was an interval of some twenty-five years between the appearance of the Essay in its present form and our Merchant of Venice? My answer is that the Essay was based, as we know from one of Bacon’s own letters, on “some short papers of mine touching usury, how to grind the teeth of it,” etc., and these short papers may well have been written as early as 1598, when Bacon himself was in the clutches of the money-lender.[69]]
(l) The relation between the play of Hamlet and the Essay of Revenge is quite as close as that between the Essay of Usury and the Merchant of Venice. A reader who should consider the tragedy of Hamlet with a single eye to conduct, will hardly escape the reflection that its lesson or moral is summed up to perfection in one of Bacon’s Essays, viz., the one which treats of revenge: “They doe but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s sake; but thereby to purchase himselfe Profit, or Pleasure, or Honour, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a Man, for loving himselfe better than mee?... Vindicative persons live the Life of Witches: who, as they are Mischievous, so end they Infortunate.” Such in the end was the noble Hamlet’s fate. Once possessed by the devil of revenge, he becomes a sort of upas or plague-centre, and perishes in a sorry and most unlucky broil.
(m) The existence of striking harmonies between Shakespeare and Bacon was detected by foreign students fifty years ago and more. Professor Kuno Fischer, for example, wrote: “To the parallels between them [i.e. Bacon and Shakespeare] belong the similar relation of both to Antiquity, their affinity to the Roman mind, and their divergence from the Greek.... Bacon would have man studied in his individual capacity as a product of nature and history, in every respect determined by ... external and internal conditions. And exactly in the same spirit has Shakespeare understood man and his destiny.” Gervinus in his Commentaries observes: “In Bacon’s works we find a number of moral sayings and maxims of experience from which the most striking mottoes might be drawn for every Shakespearean play, aye, for all his principal characters, testifying to a remarkable harmony in their comprehension of human nature.” One more quotation, of like import and from an author with no partiality for Baconian views, may not be superfluous. Professor J. Nichol, after having ruled out the Baconian heresy by recording his opinion that Bacon did not write Shakespeare, proceeds: “But there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they [Bacon and Shakespeare] find voice for sentiments often as nearly identical when they anticipate as when they contravene the manners of thought and standards of action that prevail in our age.” (Francis Bacon, Vol. I, 1888).
(n) Only a lawyer by education would have hit upon the technicality which is the nucleus of the 87th Sonnet of Shakespeare. The technicality is not one which an amateur interested in common law proceedings would be likely to pick up, for it belongs to the art of conveyancing. Part of my time, fifty years ago, was spent in the chambers of a conveyancer. But for that early training I might still have been able to see intellectual beauty in the well-known bust of Shakespeare at Stratford; for my suspicion of the popular legend originated in the conviction that the Shakespeare who matters must have been bred up a lawyer.[70]]
(o) In the year 1867, Mr. John Bruce discovered in Northumberland House, which then stood in the Strand, a bundle of Elizabethan manuscripts, the outermost sheet of which contains a miscellaneous list of Elizabethan writings, the majority of which are unquestionably identified with work previously known to have been due to Bacon. The minority consists of five pieces, three of which may, for anything we know to the contrary, have been enriched if not entirely written by him. The two remaining pieces figure in the list as “Rychard the Second” and “Rychard the Third.” The significance of this association with work of which there can be no doubt that Bacon was the author, is greatly increased by the fact that the cover or sheet which bears the list of contents is bescribbled at random with the names “ffrancis Bacon” and “William Shakespeare.”[71]