Baconian Essays

by active 19th century E. W. Smithson

With the tons of printed matter on the Baconian side, my acquaintance has always been of the smallest. In a recent pamphlet by Sir E. Durning Lawrence, that gentleman with the aid of a newspaper called The Tailor and Cutter labours the point, already sufficiently obvious, that the figure which does duty as frontispiece to the first folio of Shakespeare must have been meant for a caricature.

What the Shakespeare theory is needs no telling. It is developed in Biographies, Lives, and so forth, within the reach of every one.

The Bacon theory on the other hand is still in the rough. “You may well say that,” an opponent exclaims. “You, Baconians, differ among yourselves almost as widely as you differ from us. With some of you it is an article of faith that Bacon looked for fame (poetical) to after ages, and took unheard-of pains to secure it. Baconians who hunt for ciphers, key-numbers and so forth, not only in books, but even under the river Wye belong to this class. You on the contrary have convinced yourself, I know not how, that Bacon intended his secret to die with him. What are we to do? How can we help thinking that there is no such thing as a passably authentic Baconian theory?” My acquaintance with Baconians, I reply, is far too limited to justify any important attempt at sketching an authoritative theory. My object is less ambitious. It is to set down, as briefly and simply as possible, by way of introduction to Ben Jonson, certain probable constituents of a reasonable Baconian theory.

(a) Shakespeare was a pseudonym adopted by Bacon to mask his personality whenever he created or “made” for the stage.

(b) The date at which Bacon gave up writing for public theatres coincided pretty nearly with the beginning of his rise to high place in the State.

(c) By the year 1623 (if not earlier) Bacon’s friends and admirers must have become very uneasy about the fate of his still unpublished plays. These plays had long been hidden away from the public eye. What if the veil should never be lifted? Lest that should happen, publication, and the sooner the better, must have been eagerly desired by all lovers of literature. The conditions were not unpromising. Softened by misfortune, Bacon would be open to entreaty, and publication just then would put it in the power of influential friends to minister with perfect delicacy to the more urgent needs of the fallen man, “old, weak, ruined, in want, a very subject of pity.” Provided that his true name could be for ever kept from contact with the “family” of her who had once been his “mistress,”[22]] his consent or rather acquiescence might be hoped for. Values it is true, literary and poetical values especially, were no longer what they had been in the days of the late Queen. But a parent’s affection for the offspring of his brain is never perhaps wholly uprooted. Even so, the task was one for a master of literary craft. But the thing had to be done and that quickly, if it was to be of any use to the great man who, to quote Jonson’s Discoveries, had “filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compar’d or preferr’d either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” No considerable help was to be looked for from Bacon himself. The lie downright was to be avoided if possible; but the motive being perfectly clean, economy of truth and suggestion of untruth were neither of them barred. The pseudonym was ready to hand, and the players Heminge and Condell were not likely to deny their names to any prefatory matter whatever which the editor might think fit to invent.

(d) Among the notable persons who openly interested themselves in the publication of the First Folio were the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Montgomery, and Ben Jonson. But it is safe to say that they were not the only promoters of the undertaking, and in my opinion King James (himself a poet in days gone by), Prince Charles, and some alter ego of Bacon’s (possibly Sir T. Mathews) were of the number.

(e) A private printing press may have been among the tools habitually employed by the author. Heminge and Condell in the First Folio are made to say: “We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare) a blot in his papers.” As an allusion to the use of a press this statement would pass muster.[23] It occurs in the prefatory matter, thoroughly Jonsonian, which seems to have served as receptacle for what he preferred to put upon other shoulders than his own.

(f) As for Shakspere—the man who emerged from and returned to Stratford somehow and somewhen—he while he lived was a nobody outside Stratford, and by the year 1622 must have been almost forgotten even there, except as a good sort of fellow who, having made money in London, had invested it in Stratford with a view to enjoying the congenial society of its artless natives. His Apotheosis probably began with the publication of Jonson’s own Ode.

“Guesswork!” exclaims one. “Mere figments of the brain!” says another. Well, where is the theory which does not consist of such material? Take away from any orthodox life-story of Shakspere all figments of somebody’s brain, and what remains? According to Professor Saintsbury, “almost all the received stuff of his life-story is shreds and patches of tradition, if not positive dream-work.”