[Original]

HE English Renaissance Drama seems naturally to group itself into two grand divisions: the Elizabethan drama and—Shakespeare. There is nothing in the first which surprises: which impresses us as too abrupt a departure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the middle age mummeries—"miracle plays" and "mysteries"—or as being too refined or elaborate for the groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the contemporary barns called "play-houses" in the days of Elizabeth. But that the proprietor of one of these barns should have found it to his profit to have overshot the intelligence of his audience by creating a Hamlet, a Lear, Brutus, and Macbeth—the action of whose roles are intellectual rather than scenic—for his players, or an Ophelia, Isabella, or Catharine for the small boys employed to render his female parts, is an incongruity—to put it mildly—which arrests our credulity at once.

The utmost that the Shakespeareans propose to do—the utmost they attempt—is to make out William Shakespeare to have been an Elizabethan Dramatist. But the Elizabethan Dramatist was a man who catered to the Elizabethan play-goer. Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and the rest, were Elizabethan Dramatists. But their names are only a catalogue to-day. If we happen to buy a set of their works at a bargain, at some old book sale, we may put them on our shelves; but we are not equal to the laborious task of reading them. The Shakespearean Drama is a thing apart. Its Dramatic form seems only an Incident; perfect as that Incident is, there is so much more in it that we find appealing to our hearts and intellects to-day, that we hesitate to ascribe it even to an Elizabethan Dramatist. The Baconian theory, as elaborated by Holmes, we understand to be that this element apart from the Dramatic, in these days is the key-note and explanation of the whole Shakespeare mystery, and leads to the discovery that "Shakespeare" was only a convenient name under which the popular ear was sought to be arrested by a Philosopher, who wrote in cipher, as it were, for a great purpose of his own.

The philosophical system contemplated by Francis Bacon—say the Baconians—was divided into two grand Divisions, the Didactic and the Historical. The first—its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernacular) locked up in the universal language of scholars, and left it by his testament to "the next ages." The other he chose to put into Dramatic form. The spirit, motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena of English letters, synchronizing in date (the philosophical canon of Bacon and the dramatic canon of "Shakespeare,") are identical, and form together essentially one great body of philosophy and inductive science, and, therefore, must have had the one author. "It is a thing, indeed, if practiced professionally, of low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it is of excellent use—I mean stage playing." he says himself. And again: "Dramatic poetry is as history made visible." This Historical or preliminary division of the Philosophy did not need a dead, but a living language—the language of his race. This he left in English: and when, at the end, a broken, weak, despised old man—knowing himself only too well to be the meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious of having, in a large sense, worked for the good of his fellow-men—he made no excuse or palliation, but only bespoke for himself and his life "men's charitable speeches."

But, if there was but one author for these two contemporary works, why not William Shakespeare as well as Francis Bacon? Why not ask the question, "Did William Shakespeare write Lord Bacon's works?" * as well as, "Did Lord Bacon write William Shakespeare's work?" While not within our scope to demonstrate the identical philosophy of the Novum Organum and the Shakespearean Drama—(a work to which Miss Bacon devoted her life—and whose demonstration has been followed by Judge Holmes)—it is property within that scope to examine, from the outside, the question whether, as matter of fact, William Shakespeare could have written either; or whether, from circumstantial evidence merely, Lord Bacon was thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually the author of the Dramatic canon of "Shakespeare."

* See this question asked and answered affirmatively in
"North American Review." February, 1881. New York. D.
Appleton & Co.

How, aside from any opinion as to their value, beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of the Shakespearean works which, under the calmest and most sternly judicial treatment to which they could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be beyond gainsay or neglect. These two characteristics are—1. The encyclopaedic universality of their information as to matters of fact; and, 2. The scholarly refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peoples—as, for example, the Zulus or the Ashantees—impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean plays on that account. But this familiarity with what, at their date, was the Past of history, and—up to that date—the closed book of past human discovery and research which we call Learning; is an open and indisputable fact; and the New-Zealander who shall sit on a broken arch of London Bridge and muse over the ruins of British civilization, if he carry his researches back to the Shakespearean literature, will be obliged to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the accumulated learning of the world down to his own actual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be compelled to this decision only by a careful examination of the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the most, of any given group of single plays. Let him open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "Julius Cæsar." *

* See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare
illustrated in a Philological commentary on his 'Julius
Cæsar.' By G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857.