Bacon and Shakespeare

by Albert Frederick Calvert

Baconian Fallacies Respecting Shakespeare.

It is only necessary to read the facts concerning Shakespeare’s ancestry and parentage to dissipate some of the absurd suggestions as to the obscurity and illiteracy of the family. The poet came of good yeoman stock, and his forebears to the fourth and fifth generation were fairly substantial landowners. John Shakespeare, his father, was at one period of his life a prosperous trader in Stratford-on-Avon. He played a prominent part in municipal affairs, and became successively Town Councillor, Alderman, one of the chamberlains of the borough, and auditor of the municipal accounts. The assertion that he could not write is a distinct perversion of fact, as “there is evidence in the Stratford archives that he could write with facility.”

On the subject of the education of William Shakespeare it is inevitable that there should be conflicting opinions. Those who would deck out the memory of Bacon with the literary robe, “the garment which,” according to Mr. R. M. Theobald, is “too big and costly” for the “small and insignificant personality” of Shakespeare, will not concede that he was better educated than his father, who—the error does not lose for want of repetition—“signed his name by a mark.” Supporters of the traditional theory, however, reply, “we do not require evidence to show that he was an educated man—we have his works, and the evidence of Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell to prove it.” Mr. Theobald argues that because there is no positive proof that he had any school education, it is logical to conclude that he had none. Mr. A. P. Sinnett, with the same reckless disregard for facts, says, “We know that he (William Shakespeare) was the son of a tradesman at Stratford, who could not read or write.” And in another place, “there is no rag of evidence that he (William Shakespeare) ever went to school.” Mr. W. H. Mallock describes him, still without “a rag of evidence” to support his assertion, as “a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems to have found some difficulty in signing his own name.” All evidence we have to guide us on this point of Shakespeare’s schooling is that he was entitled to free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford, which was re-constituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. As the son of a prominent and prosperous townsman, he would, for a moral certainty, have been sent by his father to school (Mr. Sidney Lee favours the probability that he entered the school in 1571), where he would receive the ordinary instruction of the time in the Latin language and literature. The fact that the French passages in Henry V. are grammatically correct, but are not idiomatic, makes it certain that they were written by a school-taught linguist, and not by a man like Bacon, who, from his lengthy residence on the Continent, must have been a master of colloquial, idiomatic French. Ben Jonson, in his profound, and somewhat self-conscious command of classical knowledge, spoke slightingly of Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek,” which is all that his plays would lead us to credit him with. His liberal use of translations, and his indebtedness to North’s translations of Plutarch’s Lives, also substantiates this theory.

We cannot regard, as a great scholar, an author who “gives Bohemia a coast line, makes Cleopatra play billiards, mixes his Latin, and mulls his Greek.” Mr. Reginald Haines, who has made a study of Shakespeare for the express purpose of testing his classical attainments, denies emphatically that he shows any acquaintance with Greek at all. His conclusions are worthy of consideration: “Of course there are common allusions to Greek history and mythology such as every poet would have at command, but no reference at first hand to any Greek writer.... As far as I know there are but four real Greek words to be found in Shakespeare’s works—threne, cacodemon, practic, and theoric. It is impossible to suppose that Bacon could have veiled his classical knowledge so successfully in so extensive a field for its display, or that he could, for instance, have perpetrated such a travesty of Homer as appears in Troilus and Cressida. With Latin, the case is somewhat different. Shakespeare certainly knew a little grammar-school Latin. He was familiar with Ovid, and even quotes him in the original; and he certainly knew Virgil, and Seneca, Cæsar, and something of Terence and Horace, and, as I myself believe, of Juvenal. But he very rarely quotes Latin, unless it be a proverb or some stock quotation from Mantuanus or a tag from a Latin grammar. When he uses conversational Latin, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the idiom is shaky. The quotations from Horace, &c., in Titus Andronicus are certainly not by Shakespeare. Nor are the Latinisms like “palliament” in that play. Still he has a very large vocabulary of Latin words such as renege, to gust (taste), and we may fairly say that Shakespeare knew Latin as well as many sixth form boys, but not as a scholar.” Two years ago a writer in the Quarterly Review, who had gone through all the alleged examples of erudition and evidences of wide and accurate classical scholarship in the Shakespearean plays, showed them to be entirely imaginary.

In 1582, before he was nineteen years of age, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, and three years afterwards he left Stratford for London. It was during this period, says Mr. Theobald, that “the true Shakespeare was studying diligently, and filling his mind with those vast stores of learning—classic, historic, legal, scientific—which bare such splendid fruit in his after life.” As Mr. Theobald’s contention is that Bacon was the “true Shakespeare,” let us consider for a moment how young Francis was employing his abilities at this particular time. In 1579 he returned to England after a two years’ residence in France. He had revealed an early disposition to extend his studies beyond the ordinary limits of literature, and to read the smallest print of the book of nature. He was already importuning his uncle, Lord Burghley, for some advancement which might enable him to dispense with the monotonous routine of legal studies. Failing in this endeavour, he was admitted as a barrister of Gray’s Inn, was elected to Parliament for Melcombe Regis, composed his first philosophical work, which he named “with great confidence, and a magnificent title,” The Greatest Birth of Time, and another treatise entitled, Advice to Queen Elizabeth. In the case of the poet we have no record; in that of the future Lord Chancellor we get the key of the nature which rendered the man as “incapable of writing Hamlet as of making this planet.”

ANNA LADY BACON, MOTHER OF FRANCIS BACON.

(From an original picture in the collection of Lord Verulam at Gorhambury).

William Beeston, a 17th century actor, has left it on record that, after leaving Stratford, Shakespeare was for a time a country schoolmaster. In 1586 he arrived in London. His only friend in the Metropolis was Richard Field, a fellow townsman, whom he sought out, and with whom, as publisher, he was shortly to be associated. It is uncertain when Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain’s company of actors, but documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it in 1594, and that in 1603, after the accession of James I., when they were called the King’s Players, he was one of its leaders. This company included among its chief members Shakespeare’s life-long friends, Richard Burbage, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips, and it was under their auspices that his plays first saw the light.