Yet, as M. Lefranc truly says, “L’hétérodoxie dans ce domaine [the “Shakespearean” authorship to wit] a paru jusqu’à présent aux maïtres des universités et aux érudits, une opinion de mauvais goût, temeraire et malséante, dont la science patentée n’avait pas à s’occuper, sauf pour la condamner.”[14] But he continues—I will now translate—“I am convinced that every one who has preserved an independent opinion concerning the Shakespeare problem will recognise that the old positions of the traditional doctrine can no longer be maintained.... The laws of psychology, and, what is more, of simple common sense, ought to banish for ever the absurd theory which would have us believe in an incomparable writer whose life was absolutely out of harmony with the marvellous works which appeared in his name. It is time to take decisive action against that immense error, and against the incredible naiveté upon which it rests.”
“Simple common sense.” Aye, but when I spoke not long ago to a well-known writer, who is a Stratfordian enragé, of “common sense” in this matter, what was his reply? “Oh, damn common sense!”—a characteristic interjection which might well be adopted as the motto of all the “Stratfordian” highbrows of the present day.
But, adds Professor Lefranc, “If many still refuse to admit the existence of a Shakespeare problem, yet the time is at hand when nobody will any longer venture to deny it, unless he is prepared at the same time to deny all the evidence in the case. It is clear that a new era of Shakespearean study has recently presented itself. Scepticism with regard to the Stratford man is spreading in spite of the resistance of the multifarious defenders of the old tradition. A number of beliefs, accepted for many years as dogmas, are disappearing every day. The rock of credulity is crumbling away. The Stratfordians will, sooner or later, be reduced, under the pressure of a more enlightened public opinion, to change their tactics and modify the assumptions of their creed. In truth, speaking generally, the best-established reproach to which the learned men who have concerned themselves with Shakespeare, according to the rules of Stratfordian orthodoxy, have laid themselves open, is not so much that they have maintained the traditional doctrine with regard to the poet-actor, but rather that in the face of the innumerable enigmas which are involved in the history of his life, and his [supposed] works, and even of the text of those works, they have never had the candour to admit even the existence of all these obscure problems. At every step in Shakespearean study these difficulties and incoherences are encountered, but these learned men affect not to see them.... Truly, in view of such superb assurance, the lay reader could never imagine the existence of all the gratuitous assumptions, the naïve assertions, the inadmissible interpretations that are to be found in the works of these gentlemen, which the public have been accustomed to accept as infallible authorities. Yet, even the most famous and the most admired amongst them would have to yield to an investigation conducted according to the simple rules of the art of reasoning, that is to say of sound common sense. The hour has come when the representatives of the ‘Shakespearean’ dogma will have to change their attitude. They will have to renounce both their silence and their credulity. Above all, they will have to admit the necessity of inquiries, and discussions hostile to their creed, to make a tabula rasa of many points, and to take in hand once more the investigation thereof ab imis fundamentis, resolutely putting away those prejudices which have so long blinded them to the truth.”
So writes Professor Abel Lefranc, with much more to the same purport and effect, and, in my judgment, he writes both wisely and well. But if he really believes that our hidebound Pundits and Mandarins of the Stratfordian faith will ever “put away those prejudices which have so long blinded them to the truth,” and give impartial consideration to the facts of the Shakespeare Problem in the light of reason and “commonsense,” I fear me he reckons without his host and is destined to be very sadly undeceived.[15]]
We are brought back, however, to the question: Who, then, is the real “Shakespeare”? That is a question which I have never attempted to answer. It has been quite sufficient for me to confine my arguments to the negative side of the Shakespeare Problem. The positive, or constructive side I have hitherto been content to leave to others.
Now, there is a large number of persons, many of them rational and intelligent men and women, of quite sound mind and understanding, who believe that the real “Shakespeare” is to be found in the person of Francis Bacon. But there are “Baconians and Baconians.” There are the wild Baconians who find Bacon everywhere, but especially in ciphers, cryptograms, anagrams, acrostics, and in all sorts of occult figures and emblems[16]—those who believe amongst other things, that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth, that he lived in philosophic concealment many years after the date usually assigned as that of his death, that he wrote practically all the English literature worthy of that name of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, and that he hid his “Shakespearean” manuscripts in the mud of the River Wye or some other equally inappropriate and ridiculous place, where no sane man would ever dream of looking for them.
The wild and unrestrained “Baconians” have, undoubtedly, done great injury to the cause which they desire to advocate; and not only have they injured that cause, but they have greatly prejudiced the discussion of the Shakespeare Problem as a whole. For in such cases we are all liable to be “tarred by the same brush,” and the sanest of “Anti-Stratfordian” reasoners has, unfortunately, not escaped the back-wash of the ridicule which these eccentrics have brought upon themselves.
There are, however, “Baconians” of another class—the sane “Baconians” who are content to argue the matter—and some of them have argued it with great knowledge and ability—in the calm light of reason and common sense. Of these one of the sanest and ablest was my friend the late Edward Walter Smithson, whose little book Shakespeare—Bacon. An Essay,[17] published anonymously some three and twenty years ago, attracted no little attention, and did much to help the cause in support of which it was written. He published, however, nothing more on the subject till 1913, in November of which year there appeared in The Nineteenth Century an article from his pen entitled “Ben Jonson’s Pious Fraud.” The greater part of this article I have quoted by way of preface to his essay now published on Jonson’s Masque of Time Vindicated,[18] and it may be as well to cite the commencement of it at this place:
The writer is one of those persons who consider it highly probable that Shakespeare was at first a mere pen-name of Bacon’s, and regard Shakspere, Shaxper, or Shayksper—easily mistaken for Shakespeare—as the usual patronymic from birth to death of an illiterate actor: he thinks, moreover, that there must have been some sort of understanding between the poet and the actor (resembling perhaps that between Aristophanes and the actor Callistratus), and conjectures that it may have covered proprietary rights or shares in theatrical ventures.
When and how I came by such views can be of little or no interest to anyone but myself. To prevent misconception, however, it may be well to explain that my conversion dates from 1884-5. An essay of mine (Shakespeare-Bacon, Sonnenschein, 1900)[19] belonging in substance to 1885, would have been published long before the date of actual publication but for the appearance of a portent called the Great Cryptogram, which put me out of love with the subject. My earliest suspicions were suggested not by heretics—Mr. W. H. Smith, Lord Campbell, Lord Penzance, and the rest—whose opinions were absolutely unknown to me, but, if memory serve, by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps and the New Shakspere Society (of which I must have been an early member). Since 1885, I have tried to keep in touch with what orthodoxy has had to say for itself, and against us. Some of our opponents regard Ben Jonson as their prophet. To him they fly for counsel and comfort. They throw his sayings at our heads whenever they get a chance. In the index to Mr. Lang’s Shakespeare-Bacon and the Great Unknown (1912) Ben Jonson’s name takes up more space than even Shakespeare’s. According to Mr. Lang “it is easy to prove that Will (i.e. the Stratford man) was recognised as the author by Ben Jonson.” If this were true there would be no Shakespeare question at all, none at least so far as I am concerned. But it is not true. Ben Jonson—whose Works ought to be familiar to all students of Shakespeare—is in fact what lawyers would call a difficult witness, and to assert that he is on the side of orthodoxy is simply to beg the question.[20]] Some of Mr. Lang’s admirers will have it that he has crushed Mr. G. G. Greenwood much as a motor-car might crumple up a bicycle. But a reading of Mr. Lang’s book leaves me in doubt whether Mr. Greenwood’s main contentions (The Shakespeare Problem Restated) are anywhere shaken, and I am not likely to be very strongly biassed in Mr. Greenwood’s favour, seeing that he ostentatiously disclaims being a Baconian. Mr. Greenwood indeed may be said to have quitted Stratford for good and travelled a great many miles. Where he pulls up it is not easy to say, but he does pull up somewhere—perhaps where the rainbow ends. Mr. Lang, though he refrains from imputing imbecility to Mr. Greenwood, is apparently unable to be quite so lenient to Baconians. He explains, or would like to explain, the Baconian views of Lord Penzance and Judge Webb as partly due to senile decay. How he accounts for the views of Lord Campbell,[21] Mr. George Bidder, Q.C., and others of less note does not appear. When an unfamiliar theory happens to be at grips with a popular one, the habit of thinking and calling an opponent infatuated or not more than half mad is easily caught. Bacon did not escape it, but he took care to give it a turn which saved it from mere brutalité. In his day two notable theories were at loggerheads, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, with Galileo for the Copernican Achilles. Convinced that the Sun moved round the Earth, Bacon smiled at his opponents for doubting the immovability of our planet and dubbed them “car-men,” “terrae aurigas,” chauffeurs, in other words. No other student of The Advancement of Learning (1605), written be it remembered when Bacon was fully mature, will be surprised at this. Bacon avowedly took “all knowledge for his province,” and The Advancement is a comprehensible survey of that province—as Bacon understood it. Of mathematics he probably knew little or nothing. It is an open question whether Induction owes anything to the Novum Organum. His acquaintance with the phenomena of nature (as distinct from human nature) was derived for the most part from poets and men of letters. More significant still, his splendid natural gifts were not adapted to scientific research. His true province in short was literature, above all, poetry. And here it may not be amiss to note (1) that John Dryden’s appreciation of Shakespeare—in whom, says J. D., are to be found “all arts and sciences, all moral and natural philosophy”—coincides as closely as may be with the traditional estimate of Bacon, and (2) that Shakespeare seems to have been of one mind with Bacon upon the motion of the Sun round the Earth.