It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon’s life. But, if you pursue the context of what Bacon says concerning Essex, you find that he does not speak openly of a tenderly passionate attachment to that young man; not more than this, “I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself, to the best of my understanding, propositions and memorials of anything that might concern his Lordship’s honour, fortune, or service.” [279a] As Bacon did nothing but these things (1591–2), he had no great leisure for writing poetry and plays. Moreover, speaking as a poet, in the Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his intense amatory devotion to Essex into the symbolism of his passionate verse. Was Essex then a married man? If so, the Sonneteer’s insistence on his marrying must be symbolical of—anything else you please.
We know that Bacon, at this period, “did nothing” but “ruminate” about Essex. The words are his own! (1604). No plays, no Venus and Adonis, nothing but enthusiastic service of Essex and the Sonnets. Mr. Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn some pageant of Essex (November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed such matter as “Mr. Bacon in Praise of Knowledge” (containing his usual views about regenerating science), and “Mr. Bacon’s Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.” [279b] Both are excellent, though, for a Court festival, not very gay.
He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson’s (?) famous indictment of Elizabeth’s Government, in Observations on a Libel. [280a] What with ruminating on Essex, and this essay, he was not solely devoted to Venus and Adonis and to furbishing-up old plays, though, no doubt, he may have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and indulged his luscious imaginations in Venus and Adonis. I would not limit the potentialities of his genius. But, certainly, this amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention his severe “study and meditation” on science.
All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis, do not exhaust his exercises. Bacon, living laborious days, plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth’s disgrace, and vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship, and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex’s affairs, to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of “Formularies and Elegancies” (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed Essex (1600–1), while always “labouring in secret” at that vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied him, he says, and distracted his attention from his practice and from affairs of State. [281a] Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the most onerous. He was also writing The Advancement of Learning (1605). “I do confess,” he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, “since I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from that I have done.” [281b] His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning: this came between him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and his private schemes and suits. To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare’s company, and the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets. Even without this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but with it—he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept him and his plot—to write plays under the pseudonym of “William Shakespeare.”
Talk of miracles as things which do not happen! The activities of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man’s mind and heart,—especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older. No wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and saw life en noir: man delighted him not, nor woman either.
The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon, do not make his authorship of the plays a physical impossibility. But they make it an intellectual miracle. Perhaps I may be allowed to set off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere’s knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. [282a] I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip of his pen. Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and his legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious productions. (But why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)
By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of the Folio. [282b] “If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays, he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the Folio, and the style of it” (stuffed with terms of law) “would be accounted for.” Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote the Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature. “Legal terms abounded in all plays and poems of the period,” says Sir Sidney Lee, and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word “all.” [283a] However he says, “We must admit that this use of legal jargon is frequently found in lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan period—in sonnets for example, where it seems to us intolerable.” Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes. [283b] The lawyers all agree, however, that Shakespeare does the legal style “more natural,” and more accurately than the rest. And yet I cannot even argue that, if he did use legal terms at all, he would be sure to do it pretty well.
For on this point of Will’s use of legal phraseology I frankly profess myself entirely at a loss. To use it in poetry was part of the worse side of taste at that period. The lawyers with one voice declare that Will’s use of it is copious and correct, and that their “mystery” is difficult, their jargon hard to master; “there is nothing so dangerous,” wrote Lord Campbell, “as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry.” I have not tampered with it. Perhaps a man of genius who found it interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily than lawyers deem possible. But Will, so accurate in his legal terms, is so inaccurate on many other points; for example, in civil and natural history, and in classic lore. Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally at sea as a naturalist. On the habits of bees, for example, “his natural history of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.” [284a] Virgil, though not a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared with Will. About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed. His Natural History was folklore, or was taken from that great mediæval storehouse of absurdities, the popular work of Pliny. “He went to contemporary error or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to nature,” says a critic quoted by Mr. Greenwood. [284b] Was that worthy of Bacon?
All these charges against le vieux Williams (as Théophile Gautier calls our Will) I admit. But Will was no Bacon; Will had not “taken all knowledge for his province.” Bacon, I hope, had not neglected Bees! Thus the problem, why is Will accurate in his legal terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quantity, in history, in classic matters, is not by me to be solved. I can only surmise that from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason, he had read law-books, or drawn information from Templars about the meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was technically accurate.
We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian arguments against Will Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and poems. Their chief argument for Bacon is aut Diabolus, aut Franciscus, which, freely interpreted, means, “If Bacon is not the author, who the devil is?”