* It is nothing less than marvelous that this simple
explanation should not have occurred to the wise men who
have been knocking their heads against "the sea-coast of
Bohemia" for the last hundred years. That this error is a
part of the "business" and not of the play, is very evident
from a casual reading of Act III., Scene III. The stage
direction for that scene is simply, "Scene—a desert
country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage
direction of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be
sure that this was the proper stage setting of the piece.
And to fit it, Antigonus, the first speaker, says to the
mariner: "Art thou perfect, then? Our ship hath touched the
deserts of Bohemia." Bobert Green makes the same mistake in
his "Dorastus and Faunia." It was, if any thing, a vulgar
error of the time. There is no further allusion to the
troublesome geography in the play. So, too, the gunpowder
used at the seige of Troy is a part of the "business," and
should be assigned where it belongs—to the playwright and
not to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put it
in, but he took it out of Green's "Dorastus and Faunia."
The stagewright saw an opportunity for the introduction of a stage ship or shipwreck, hence he puts in the borrowed "sea-coast." He needs an alarum of guns to impress his audience on the coming evening with the fact that a tight is in progress. And even if it should occur to him to doubt if there were any guns at the siege of Ilium, he is pretty certain that it will not occur to the groundlings or the penny seats, from whose pocket all is grist that comes to his mill, if he makes the guns and the cannon a part of the "business." So, again, we have only to understand this, and the characters of Hym and Bardolph—supposed to have puzzled the critics since critics first began to busy themselves with these dramas—is explained. Bardolph is the walking comedian, inserted by the experienced manager to tickle the frieti ciceris et nucis emptor, with his fiery nose, and corporal Nym to break in with his "There's the humor of it," just as rip Van Winkle dwells upon his favorite toast, and Solon Shingle upon his ancestor who "fitted into the Revolution." And to many minds this accounts for the little dashes of obscene display, the lewd innuendo, which came never from the same pen as the masterstrokes, but which they prefer to conceive of an actor or manager interpolating to the delight of Monsieur Taine's audience, and for the stolen delectation of the maids of honor and city dames who went, in men's clothes, to mingle with them.
This, too, might account for the poems dedicated to Southampton. In the lax court and reign of the Virgin Queen, there was at least one man bold and reckless enough to stand patron to the "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece"—the noble young libertine of nineteen, Southampton. Similarly, there may have been but one man available upon whom to father them, and so the joint or several productions of certain young men about town, "curled darlings" who affected Shakespeare's green-room, were sworn upon the complacent manager, who doubtless saw his profit in it. We have rumor, indeed, that his profit was no less a sum than one thousand pounds. But, as we have seen, and shall see further, this thousand pounds story is not only without authority, but incredible: that Southampton's means did not justify him in giving away any such sum—that Shakespeare did not need it, and that none of Southampton's coterie ever heard of it.
Whether Bacon wrote these works or not (and we may say the same of Raleigh), and whether the audiences before whom these Shakespearean dramas were first presented could have estimated them as what we of this age recognize them to be or not; we may be sure that, had he chanced to light upon them, Lord Bacon could have appraised them, and the genius that created them, at their true worth. But while Lord Bacon's writings teem with mention of his own contemporaries (Mr. W. II. Smith points out the fact that we owe about all we know of Raleigh's skill in repartee to Bacon's "Apothegms"), he nowhere alludes to such a man as William Shakespeare!—to William Shakespeare—who, if popular belief is true, was his lordship's most immortal contemporary, the one mind mightier than Bacon's, and yet not a rival or a superior in his own particular sphere, of whom he could have been jealous. The truth which makes this strange riddle plain is, according to the Baconian theory, that (to use Sir Tobie Matthew's words in his famous letter to his patron) "the most prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by another," in other words, that Bacon was "Shakespeare." And, indeed, Sir Tobie was fonder of nothing than of indulging in sly allusions to Lord Bacon's secret, of which he had become possessed. In another letter than that just quoted, he says again to his lordship: "I will not promise to return you weight for weight, but measure for measure....and there is a certain judge in the world, who, in the midst of his popularity toward the meaner sort of men, would fain deprive the better sort of that happiness which was generally done in that time." * **
* Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," second edition, p.
175.
** "Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 96.
Such considerations as these, as they came one by one to light, began to suggest to thinking minds that perhaps William Shakespeare was enjoying, by default, estates belonging to somebody else. But it is curious to see how gradually. In 1783, Theobald, a competent and painstaking scholar of the text, declares that there were "portions of the plays which proved beyond a doubt that more than one hand had produced them." More than fifty years after came Dr. Richard Banner (who wrote his famous letter on "The Learning of Shakespeare," in or about 1789), and appears to have been the first actual anti-Shakespearean and unbeliever. Dr. Farmer sought—by demonstrating that much of the learning of the plays could have been, by sufficient research, procured at second-hand—to account for (what he could not overlook) the utter inadequacy of the historical man to the immortal work assigned him; just as if it were not, if any thing, an increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose a busy actor and manager rummaging England for forgotten manuscripts in the days when no public libraries existed, and when students lived in cloisters; or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum ever drawn from a classical source! And just as if the encyclopaedic learning required was lessened by the fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed or rewritten from an older drama of the same name!
For example of Farmer's argument, take the following. In the play of that name, Timon says:
"The sun's a thief, and with his great attention
Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.