In order to demonstrate that this shallow objection, as Mr. Theobald calls it, is a well-founded and irrefutable statement of fact, we have only to refer to Lord Bacon’s life and to his letters. From 1579, when he returned from France, until the end of his life he was distracted between politics and science; he put forward as his reason for seeking office that he might thereby be able to help on his philosophic projects which with him were paramount, and the poignant regret of his last years was that he had allowed himself to be diverted from philosophy into politics. He found “no work so meritorious,” so serviceable to mankind, “as the discovery and development of the arts and inventions that tend to civilise the life of men.” In his letter to Lord Burghley in 1592, he expressed the hope that in the service of the State he could “bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries—the best state of that province”—the province embracing all nature which he had made his own. But office was denied him, and he returned to “business” and to his constant bewailings of the fact that he had no time for literature. In 1607 he settled the plan of the Instauratio Magna; which had been foreshadowed in his Advancement of Learning, published two years previously. In 1609 he wrote to Toby Mathew, “My Instauratio sleeps not,” and again, in the same year, “My great work goeth forward; and after my manner I alter ever when I add; so that nothing is finished till all is finished.” From 1609 to 1620 Bacon spent such leisure as he could snatch from his other work in revising the Novum Organum (the second part of his Magna Instauratio), of which his chaplain, Rawley, says that he had seen “at least twelve copies revised year by year, one after another, and amended in the frame thereof.” In 1620, when the Novum Organum was published, the author sent it into the world uncompleted, because he had begun to number his days, and “would have it saved.” This was the book he alluded to as “my great work”—the work of his life, and he issued it as a fragment because he had not been able to find time to finish it. The belief that he had “very little spare time for authorship” is no shallow objection brought against the Baconian theory—it is an irrefutable fact, proved not only out of the mouth, but in the life, of Lord Bacon.
In spite, however, of all positive evidence to the contrary, Mr. Theobald proceeds to bolster up his contention that Bacon had time, and to spare, for literary pursuits, by the following most amazing piece of logic. He contends, in the first place, that “an estimate of the entire literary output of Bacon, as a scientific and philosophical writer, proves the amount to be really somewhat small.” He takes the fourteen volumes of Spedding’s Life and Works, subtracts the prefaces, notes, editorial comments, and the biographical narrative, puts aside as of “no literary significance whatever,” all business letters, speeches, State papers, etc., and thus reduces the total amount of literature to Bacon’s credit in the seven volumes devoted to the Life to some 375 pages. “If we calculate the whole amount contained in the fourteen volumes, we shall find it may be reckoned at about six such volumes, each containing 520 pages. On this method of calculation and selection, all that Mr. Theobald can find, “for his whole life, amounts to about 70 pages per annum, less than six pages a month.” Turning from Bacon to Shakespeare, Mr. Theobald finds that here again is a man whose literary output has been greatly exaggerated, for “if the Shakespeare poetry was the only work of William Shakespeare, certainly he was not a voluminous writer. Thirty-one years may be taken as a moderate estimate of the duration of his literary life, i.e., from 1585 till his death in 1616. And the result is 37 plays and the minor poems—not two plays for each year.” Mr. Theobald, it will be seen, possesses the same weakness for statistics that Mr. Dick evinced for King Charles’ head; he drops in his little estimate in season and out of season, and his appraisements are as manifold as they are fallacious. The period of Shakespeare’s dramatic output was confined to twenty years, from 1591 to 1611—if he had continued writing plays till his death in 1616, Bacon’s alleged playwriting would not have ceased with such significant suddenness in 1611. But what conclusion does Mr. Theobald arrive at as the result of his estimates? No less than this, that if the whole of Shakespeare, and the whole of Bacon’s acknowledged works belong to the same author, “the writer was not a voluminous author—not by any means so voluminous as Miss Braddon or Sir Walter Scott.” That Mr. Theobald should not hesitate to class Miss Braddon’s novels with the plays of Shakespeare, which belong to the supreme rank of literature, or even with Bacon’s “royal mastery of language never surpassed, never perhaps equalled,” is the most astounding link in this astounding chain of so-called evidence. But Mr. Theobald advances it with the utmost confidence. “Therefore,” he sums up, “let this objection stand aside; it vanishes into invisibility as soon as it is accurately tested”—i.e., weighed up, like groceries, by the pound.
Mr. Theobald is scarcely complimentary to Shakespeare’s champions in this controversy, but his language is positively libellous when he refers to Shakespeare himself. His personality is “small and insignificant;”—he is a “shrunken, sordid soul, fattening on beer, and coin, and finding sweetness and content in the stercorarium of his Stratford homestead”—a “feeble, and funny, and most ridiculous mouse.” Mr. Theobald almost argues himself not a Baconian by his assertion that “no Baconian, so far as I know, seeks to help his cause by personal abuse, or intolerant and wrathful speech.”
Was Shakespeare the “Upstart Crow?”
All that we can allege with any certainty about Shakespeare, between 1586 and 1602, is that he must have obtained employment at one or other of the only two theatres existing in London at that time (The Theatre, and The Curtain)—perhaps, as Malone has recorded, in the capacity of call-boy—that he became an actor, was employed in polishing up the stock-plays presented by the Company, and that Love’s Labour’s Lost was produced in the Spring of 1591. Assuming that Shakespeare was the author of this play—assuming, that is to say, that Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell were neither arrant fools, nor wilful perjurers—it is evident that the “insignificant,” “shrunken, sordid soul,” “this ridiculous mouse” had education, application, a natural taste for the stage; and what is more—and more than Mr. Theobald can comprehend—he had genius. Mr. Theobald does not arrive at any such conclusion. Apart altogether from Mrs. Gallup’s cipher revelations, he is convinced by another “flash of intuition” that Ben Jonson was a fellow conspirator with Bacon in the ridiculous plot of foisting Bacon’s plays upon the world as the work of Shakespeare, and that Heming and Condell were but the tools of the disgraced Lord Chancellor.
But if Shakespeare was not advancing towards prosperity by the feasible methods I have conjectured, how can Mr. Theobald account for his ultimately emerging from the “depths of poverty” into a position of comparative affluence? The explanation is simplicity itself: “If a needy, and probably deserving vagabond” (page 11).—Why deserving? He was a “shrunken, sordid soul” on page 7!—“dives into the abyss of London life, lies perdu for a few years, and then emerges as a tolerably wealthy theatrical manager; you know that he must have gained some mastery of theatrical business.” So far the inference is legitimate and convincing; but how? Must he not have disclosed exceptional ability as an actor or playwright, or—? listen to Mr. Theobald!—“he must have made himself a useful man in the green room, a skilful organiser of players and stage effects—he must have found out how to govern a troop of actors, reconciling their rival egotisms, and utilising their special gifts; how to cater for a capricious public, and provide attractive entertainments. Anyhow, he would have little time for other pursuits—if a student at all, his studies would be very practical relating to matters of present or passing interest. During this dark period he has been carving his own fortune, filling his pockets, not his mind; working for the present, not for the future. But it was exactly then that the plays began to appear.”
Mr. Theobald’s argument can only be described as a reckless, illogical, and absurd distortion of possibilities, and it is the more inconsequential since it proceeds to defeat its primary object. In the first place it is supremely ridiculous to assume that the paltry services of Shakespeare in the green room and the carpenter’s shop, secured for him his pecuniary interest in the Globe Theatre, or the respect and friendship of the leading dramatists of his day, or even the enmity of jealous rivals in the craft. Yet Mr. Theobald attempts to substantiate his conclusions by distorting the obvious meaning of Robt. Greene’s reference to Shakespeare in A Groat’s Worth of Wit. Greene was not an actor, but a dramatist; he was a man of dissolute habits, a poet of rare charm, but a playwright of only moderate ability and repute. He was a gentleman by birth, and a scholar by training. He had the lowest opinion of actors—he envied them their success, and despised their avocation. In The Return from Parnassus he betrays his prejudice in the following lines, which are put into the mouth of a poor and envious student:—
“England affords these glorious vagabonds,
That carried erst their fardels on their backs,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,
Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,
And pages to attend their masterships;
With mouthing words that better wits had framed,
They purchase lands, and now esquires are made.”