Bacon and Shakespeare

by Albert Frederick Calvert

The three signatures to the Will, 25^th. March, 1616.

Dr. N. H. Hudson, in his Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Character, has on the Baconian theory four things to say:—1. Bacon’s requital of the Earl’s bounty (the Earl of Essex) was such a piece of ingratitude as I can hardly conceive the author of King Lear to have been guilty of. 2. The author of Shakespeare’s plays, whatever he may have been, certainly was not a scholar. He had certainly something far better than learning, but he had not that. 3. Shakespeare never philosophises. Bacon never does anything else. 4. Bacon’s mind, great as it was, might have been cut out of Shakespeare’s without being missed.

But if, in the absence of anything bearing an even remote resemblance to proof, we find ourselves compelled to make a synopsis of expert opinion on the subject, we shall find no man’s conclusions more deserving of respect and acceptance than those of the late James Spedding. Without intending to cast any reflection upon the critics and others who have plunged with ebullient enthusiasm into this controversy, it may not be out of place to point out that Spedding is head and shoulders above all disputants in knowledge, and second to none in critical ability. His knowledge of Shakespeare was intimate and profound, and he knew his Bacon more thoroughly than it has been the lot of any other man of letters to be known by his fellow man. He gave up his position in the Colonial Office, and declined the position of Under-Secretary of State, with £2,000 a year, in order to devote his whole time to the study of the life and works of Lord Bacon—a task which occupied him for nearly thirty years. Sir Henry Taylor, in a letter to a friend in 1861, wrote as follows:—“I have been reading Spedding’s Life and Letters of Lord Bacon with profound interest and admiration—admiration not of the perfect style and penetrating judgment only, but also of the extraordinary labours bestowed upon the works by a lazy man; the labour of some twenty years, I believe, spent in rummaging among old records in all places they were to be found, and collating different copies of manuscripts written in the handwriting of the 16th century, and noting the minutest variations of one from another—an inexpressibly tedious kind of drudgery, and, what was, perhaps, still worse, searching far and wide, waiting, watching, peering, prying through long years for records which no industry could recover. I doubt whether there be any other example in literary history of so large an intellect as Spedding’s devoting itself, with so much self-sacrifice, to the illustration of one which was larger still, and doing so out of reverence, not so much for that largest intellect, as for the truth concerning it.” Sir Henry Taylor, in this passage, not only does justice to the diligence and genius of the author, but recognises the spirit in which the work was undertaken. Spedding spent thirty years in quest of the truth concerning this remarkable man, and having discovered it, he was prepared to maintain his conclusions with all the power of his knowledge and commanding intelligence. These qualities he exercised with paralysing effect against Lord Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon. It has been claimed by one champion of Shakespeare’s cause that Macaulay’s “well-known depth of research, comprehensive grasp of facts and details, and his calm method of presenting honest conclusions, renders him pre-eminent as a safe authority.” The exact opposite is, of course, the case, but the possession of these very qualities are revealed by Spedding in his Evenings with a Reviewer, to the utter spoliation of a great number of Macaulay’s cherished calculations and conclusions. “No more conscientious, no more sagacious critic,” according to G. S. Venables, “has employed in a not unworthy task the labour of his life,” and the same writer has also declared that “the historical and biographical conclusions which he (Spedding) established depend on an exhaustive accumulation of evidence arranged and interpreted by the clearest of intellects, with an honesty which is rarely known in controversial discussion.” Spedding is, in brief, universally acknowledged to be not only the greatest authority on Bacon, but also of the times in which he lived. His acquaintance with Elizabethan literature, its history, and its manuscripts was unique—he was, it may be said without fear of contradiction, a master of his period. “His knowledge of Shakespeare,” says Venables, in the prefatory notice to Evenings with a Reviewer, “was extensive and profound, and his laborious and subtle criticism derived additional value from his love of the stage.” The opinion of such an authority on such a subject as the authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare is, in default of proof to the contrary, of the highest possible value—to a close student of Spedding it must appear incontrovertible.

Spedding’s article on the question, which is included in the volume of Reviews and Discussions (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1879) was written in reply to Professor Nathaniel Holmes’ treatise on The Authorship of Shakespeare. In his opening sentence, he says, “I have read your book ... faithfully to the end, and if my report of the result is to be equally faithful, I must declare myself not only unconvinced, but undisturbed.”

He is instant and decisive with his reasons. “To ask me,” he continues, “to believe that a man who was famous for a variety of other accomplishments, whose life was divided between public business, the practice of a laborious profession, and private study of the art of investigating the material laws of nature—a man of large acquaintance, of note from early manhood, and one of the busiest men of his time, but who was never suspected of wasting his time in writing poetry, and is not known to have written a single blank verse in all his life—that this man was the author of fourteen comedies, ten historical plays, and eleven tragedies, exhibiting the greatest, and the greatest variety, of excellence that has been attained in that kind of composition, is like asking me to believe that Lord Brougham was the author, not only of Dickens’s novels, but of Thackeray’s also, and of Tennyson’s poems besides.”

Spedding, himself a genius, finds no difficulty in appreciating the quality of genius in Shakespeare. It was not scholarship, or environment, or training that enabled William Shakespeare to become the author of the most wonderful series of dramas in the world. Of Shakespeare’s gifts, he frankly states the wonder is that any man should have possessed them, not that the man to whose lot they fell was the son of a poor man called John Shakespeare, and that he was christened William. If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar, or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education. Given the faculties (which nature bestows as fully on the poor as on the rich) you will find that the required knowledge, art and dexterity which the Shakespearean plays imply, were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation, and had nothing else to do.”

ANN HATHAWAY’S COTTAGE AT SHOTTERY.

What Spedding failed to grasp was the difficulty which the Baconians find in believing that Shakespeare was as likely to be the author of the plays as any other man of his generation. In endeavouring to solve the extraordinary difficulty of the old theory of the authorship of the plays by substituting a new one, they have only made confusion worse confounded. “That which is extraordinary in the case,” Spedding maintains, “is that any man should possess such a combination of faculties as must have met in the author of these plays. But that is a difficulty which cannot be avoided. There must have been somebody in whom the requisite combination of faculties did meet, for there the plays are; and by supposing that this somebody was a man who, at the same time possessed a combination of other faculties, themselves sufficient to make him an extraordinary man too, you do not diminish the wonder, but increase it.... That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should exist, is extraordinary. That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Bacon should exist, is extraordinary. That two such human beings should have been living in London at the same time was more extraordinary still. But that one man should have existed possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary to make both, would have been the most extraordinary thing of all.”

It may be contended, and with justice, that in the foregoing we have arguments that did not require the special knowledge and experience of a Spedding to prefer. It may not be, it probably is not, regarded by Baconians as serious argument, and, as Mr. R. M. Theobald would say, it would be simply a waste of time and words to discuss it. Certain is it that none of the pro-Bacon writers realise the necessity of answering, and, if possible, contravening these simple arguments. It is difficult to find any satisfactory reason for their reticence. But whether it is that they question the value of the views of the greatest student of Bacon on this subject, or are ignorant of his essay, or—what is more likely—are unable to combat so plausible a view coming from so eminent an authority, the fact remains that Spedding’s opinion is consistently disregarded.