Mr. Spedding evidently missed what seems to me the true significance of this double association—the combination of titles in the list of contents, and the mixture of the names Bacon with Shakespeare in the scribbles. But one or two of his observations on the subject of this singular find are interesting enough. He notes, for example, that the name “Shakespeare” in the scribbles is “spelt in every case as it was always printed in those days, and not as he himself in any known case wrote it.” Another of Spedding’s observations is that the contained manuscripts, list or lists of contents, and scribbles, all belong to a period “not later then the reign of Elizabeth.”
(p) Attentive readers of almost any biography of Francis Bacon will be surprised to learn that the record of his achievements begins so late. Singularly precocious, he has already reached the ripe age—so these biographies tell us—of 36, before anything worthy of mention can be placed to his credit except a small tract or booklet of confessedly unripe Essays, Religious Meditations, and Coulers of Good and Evil. That there must be something very wrong with the record is proved by the fact that already in 1597, the date of the booklet, everything that came, or was suspected of coming, from the pen of Bacon, was in such request that he was compelled, as he tells his brother, to publish these crudities lest they should be stolen or mutilated by piratical printers. His first really notable work, according to the conventional record, is the Advancement of Learning, which was not published until two-thirds of his life was behind him. By far the greater part of the remaining third was so absorbed by public affairs, and, after his fall, so harassed by ill-health and private worries, that no literary fruit could have been looked for. Yet its closing years were marked by an unparalleled outburst of literary activity—an outburst which, like the fear of piratical printers expressed in his letter of 1597, means, I take it, that his youth and early manhood had been devoted to the art and practice of literature. Shelley’s emphatic assertion that Bacon was a poet leaves the puzzle still unsolved. So, perhaps, does the discovery of harmony after harmony between Bacon and Shakespeare.
But the tension will begin to relax so soon as we shall have taken time to grasp the significance on these two facts: first, that the dramas attributed to Shakespeare (spelt as it was always printed in those days[72]) cannot be fitted into the life of the man Shakspere who ended his life, and was evidently content to end it, in what was then a small and rather squalid country town: and second, that the evidence—Ben Jonson’s—which is commonly supposed to establish the Stratford case, turns out to be in itself an enigma rather than a solution.
The riddle is almost read when we shall have satisfied ourselves that Bacon was not only a poet but a “concealed” poet, and that by his own confession. And by the time we have been shown Sir T. Mathew’s remark, in his letter to Viscount St. Alban: “The most prodigious ... wit I know ... is of your Lordship’s name though he be known by another,” the true and only solution stands revealed.
This letter was written, I imagine, just at the time when the First Folio (of Shakespeare) was the talk of literary London. It was excluded from Sir Tobie Mathew’s own Collection of Letters (published 1660), but seems to have lived on, in seclusion no doubt, till 1762, by which time all thought about the “concealed poet’s” potent art had long been buried with his bones. Basil Montagu gives a copy of it, but Spedding, if I mistake not, ignores it.
This is by no means all the evidence that a better advocate than I could bring to bear on the question in dispute. But no stronger guarantee for the truth of the Bacon hypothesis can be demanded than that it should harmonise a large number of otherwise inexplicable data; and this demand I hope I may have done something to meet.
For the rival hypothesis, of course, there is much to be said. Never was Golden Bough the child or offspring of an ilex oak. Yet Vergil’s beautiful tale for ever adorns the lovely Avernian lake. Stratford-on-Avon was even more to the Shakespeare legend, and thereby may likewise be immortalised. “Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”