PART IV. EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES: THE DELIA BACON THEORY.

[Original]

HERE is a legal maxim to the effect that he who destroys should be able to build up. The anti-Shakespeareans have not neglected to observe it. The days when William Shakespeare first appeared in London, happened to be the days when the Renaissance had reached England, and the drama which began then for the first time to be produced, was the English Renaissant Drama—just throwing off the crudities of the old miracle and mystery plays borrowed from the continent, and beginning to be English and original. Moreover, letters and learning, so long exclusively confined to the rich and gentle, began to find expressions in other ranks. "The mob of gentlemen who write with ease" were, one and all, beginning to use their pens. There were no village newspapers with their "Poet's Corners," and these writers sent their manuscripts through the only channel at hand—the green-room door.

As these scores of manuscripts came in, William Shakespeare, of Stratford, now Mr. Manager Shakespeare of the Blackfriars, read them over; took out a scene here and an act there; scissored them as he pleased; made this "heavy" for the low comedian, and that for the "first old man;" adjusted the "love business," made "practical" for his boards all the nature and humor, and cut out all that came flat, stale, and unprofitable from the amateur's hand; even took a little of each to make a new one, if necessary, (thus retaining the indicia that this was written by a lawyer, that by a physician, this by a soldier, that by a chemist, etc., etc.). He did what Dumas, Boucicault and Daly do to-day; he was, in other words, the stage editor, not the author, of the Shakespearean drama; though, that it should be called by his name, is, perhaps, the least unusual thing about it.

Besides the gentlemen who used their pens, the very recent dissolution of the monasteries had thrown multitudes of "learned clerks," (the "clerical" profession then including lawyers and physicians, and indeed all book-learned men) upon their own resources for daily bread, and there was only one depot for their work. Not three, but three thousand men there were, other things being equal, more competent by education at least, than William Shakespeare to write the Shakespearean drama. But other things, as we shall see, were not equal. It is suggested, on the one hand, that William Shakespeare wrote the plays; on the other hand, that Francis Bacon wrote them; and, again, that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote them. So far as mere dates go, any one of the three might have written them. They were all three in London, and on the ground when the plays appeared. The truth is perhaps somewhere among the three. Francis Bacon was the most learned man of his time. He could and did read Greek in the original, and he did have access to untranslated manuscripts, such as the "Menæclnni" of Plautus. He was a philosopher, and he did come nearer to a prescience of the philosophy of ages to be, than any man who ever lived—as witness his own acknowledged works. Sir Walter Raleigh was a wit and a poet, a gentleman, a man of elegant nonchalance, a very Mercutio, to the day of his execution. He was liberally educated, cultured, and would have been all this in a more cultivated day than his own; moreover, he was idle and a scribbler of belles-lettres. Perhaps he killed time by writing speeches for the obsequious manager to put into plays for his stage. Anonymous or pseudonymic authorship has ever been a penchant of the gentle and idle. Shakespeare, let us say, was a shrewd man of business, who kept up with his times, as do managers of theaters to-day; he was quick to perceive where a point might be made in his plays, and moreover he employed—or perhaps was fortunate enough to secure by way of friendship—a poet to turn his ideas into speech for the mouths of his players. That he used his pen to prepare the prompter's manuscript of the pieces performed at his theater, we have already seen there is reason to believe. That he ever composed, on his own account, we have only a sort of innuendo of certain of his brother actors and playwrights, and a Stratford tradition, which we can trace to no other source than the source of the belief outside—that is to say, to the fact that the plays were produced under his management in London. The innuendo dubs him a poet; the Stratford tradition makes him to have written doggerel verses. But some have ventured to disbelieve both the innuendo and the tradition.

Still, writing his life, as we do, from imagination, it is much easier to imagine the three men—Bacon, Raleigh, and Shakespeare—producing between them "Hamlet,"

"Othello," or the "Comedy of Errors," than to imagine William Shakespeare alone doing it. Especially since, apart from the internal evidence of the plays, he "had his hands full" of work besides—the work in which he earned his competency. It can not be too clearly borne in mind that Shakespeare, in a space of ten or twelve years, actually made what is a fair fortune to-day. That Bacon and Raleigh, whose ambitions did not lead them to seek renown as playwrights, should have contributed their share to the plays—the first for gold which he needed, and the second for pastime which he craved—is not remarkable; we can see hundreds of young lawyers scribbling for gold while waiting for practice, or young "swells" trying their hand at comedies for the sport of the thing, by opening our eyes to-day. That the shrewd and successful manager should carefully pick into presentable and playable shape for his stage, these productions of his young friends, is, likewise, the easiest thing in the world to conceive of, or to see managers doing to-day. Possibly, William Shakespeare, or some other skilled playwright, took the dialogues—let us say, for example—of Bacon and Raleigh, put them into the form of plays, introduced a clown here or a jade there, interpolated saws and localisms, gave the characters their names, looked out for the "business," arranged the tableaux—in short, did what Mr. Wal-lack, or Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault would have to do to-day to fit a play for the stage. It is thought that Shakespeare himself did it, because the plays are said to have been seen in his handwriting, and because, from that fact or otherwise, they went by his name in the days when they were first produced in London.

This sort of joint authorship would not only explain away the antagonism which grew up between the evidence of the man Shakespeare and the evidence of the Shakespearean plays, but account for the difficulties of accepting any anti-Shakespearean theory. This would explain the parallel passages in Bacon's writings and in the plays which Judge Holmes has so painstakingly sorted out; the little inaccuracies of law and of grammar, of geography and of history, in the plays themselves; Mr. Greene's "sea-coast of Bohemia," or the introduction of gunpowder at the seige of Troy—absurdities which it is morally impossible to suppose of the portrayer of antiquity who wrote "Julius Cæsar," or the knowledge that framed the historical plays. If, however, we consider them as the interpolations of a stage-wright * aiming at stage effect, they are easily enough accounted for.