[55] Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Reminiscences, 1918, are, if memory fail not, my authority here. [See Mrs. H. Ward’s Recollections, pp. 255-258, and an interesting letter, headed “Shakespeare Folios,” and signed “A. R. Watson,” in The Times of April 13, 1922. Ed.]
[56] It cannot be proved that Shakspere ever spelt his name Shakespeare. Shakspere seems to be the form he preferred. Probably however, both he and his illiterate father Shaxper, Shaksper, Shakspear, or what not, were anything but fastidious about spellings. Persons who happen to be interested in the Shakspere family’s fifty or sixty ways of spelling their name will thank me for referring them to Sir George Greenwood’s Shakespeare Problem where they will find it stated that “the form Shakespeare seems never to have been employed by them.” Among examples of destructive criticism of the Stratford theory, I know not one so exhaustive and deadly as this of Sir G. Greenwood’s. In my Shakespeare-Bacon Essay, Shakspere, his irredeemably vulgar Will, and other doings, are relegated to an appendix.
[57] Whitgift to wit. [Ed.]
[58] The allusion is to Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598. [Ed.]
[59] See Bacon’s Essay Of Simulation and Dissimulation, where he will have it that dissimulation is a necessary consequence of “secrecy,” its “skirts or traine, as it were.” Simulation he holds to be “more culpable ... except it be in great and rare matters” where there is “no Remedy.” Jonson would be able to maintain that his Ode told no lies direct—its attribution of “small Latin” being merely conditional, and its “Swan of Avon” a purely imaginary bird.
[60] As to Jonson and Shakespeare, see further the extract from an article contributed by Mr. Smithson to The Nineteenth Century, prefixed to his Essay on the Masque of Time Vindicated. I may be allowed also to refer to my booklet Ben Jonson and Shakespeare (Cecil Palmer, 1921).
[61] In this place the order of the words is slightly altered, but the quoted words are Bacon’s. Here also it may be well to observe that Francis Bacon was not a pioneer in the revolt against what is called the Aristotelian, but should be called the Scholastic Philosophy. Destructive criticism of that philosophy began at least as early as the 13th century and had already done its work so far as natural science was concerned long before Francis Bacon took up the cry.
[62] This always reminds me of The Tempest and its projected match between Ferdinand, the unsophisticated mind of man, and Miranda, symbol of the new method of nature study. Naples, the New City of the Tempest, would thus stand for the model city or state expected to spring up as a result of the New Method. The New Atlantis of Bacon was another state of this kind.
[63] In a letter to his uncle, 1592, Bacon wrote: “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” May this explain the “universality” with which James I is here credited?
[64] These same goodly fields had been so diligently cultivated by Bacon that his insight into human nature was probably unequalled by any of his contemporaries, whilst his mastery of all arts of expression enabled him to portray it as it has never been portrayed before or since.