the writer knew that in England the daffodil blooms in February and March, while the swallow never appears until April. In none of the allusions to nature or natural phenomena in the plays, is there any such thing as guess work. * Now, what was the necessity for all this technical, geographical, botanical, and occult learning, in a simple drama thrown off by an Elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by catering to an Elizabethan audience? It was not only unnecessary, but almost fatal to his success. The Elizabethan audience did not want scientific treatises.
* And see further "The natural History of the Insects
mentioned in Shakespeare," by R. Paterson. London: A. K.
Newman & Co., Leadenhall street, "The natural
History of the Insects mentioned in Shakespeare," by R.
Paterson. London: A. K. Newman & Co., Leadenhall street,
1841.
But nothing—from governmental polity to the stuffing of a fowl—from processes of the human mind to the management of kitchen gardens—was too small or rude for a philosopher's (let us say for Francis Bacon's) vast purposes. How otherwise are they to be accounted for?
That Shakespeare borrowed Greene's famous "sea-coast" is a point either way. If he took it supposing that Bohemia had a sea-coast, the omnipotent knowledge assigned him by his worshipers failed him at least once. And if he knew (as is now claimed, though on what authority we know not), that Bohemia once possessed provinces on the Adriatic, he knew, as usual, what the acute research of three hundred years has only just developed. And was agriculture taught at this Stratford school, and politics and the art of war?1 And was there any thing that William Shakespeare did not know? We are entitled to ask these questions, for it must be remembered that, before the appearance of the Shakespearean dramas, there was practically no literature written in the English tongue. To use the words of Macauley, "A person who did not read Latin and Greek could read nothing, or next to nothing.... The Italian was the only modern language which possessed any thing that could be called a literature." ** One possessing, then, merely "small Latin and less Greek," could not have written "Shakespeare." Still less could he have written it out of Gower and Chaucer, and the shelf-full of English hooks that made up all there was in English letters.
* See "Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?" Three Notelets on
Shakespeare, by Wm. J. Thoms, London. John Russell Smith,
1865.
** Essays. Lord Bacon.
But if the Stratford grammar-school confined its teachings to the pages of the English bible alone, it worked wonders, for Bishop Wadsworth goes so far as to declare, that "take the entire range of English literature—put together our best authors, who have written on subjects not professedly religious, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all, printed so much evidence of the Bible being read and used, as in Shakespeare alone." * Yet William Shakespeare had little opportunity for self-education, except these two terms at Stratford school; he was a lad-of-all-work at the Bankside Theater, when a mere child. He was only fifty-two years old when he died. He was one of several partners in certain theatrical establishments in London, in the years when he must have put all this multitudinous learning, he had carried in his head so long, on paper. He was so active, industrious, and shrewd in those years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire with a fortune—to purchase lands and a grant of arms for his father (whence he himself might become an esquire by descent); and, in the years of leisure after his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs, which no other graduate of Stratford school would probably have cared to claim.
* Shakespeare's use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p.
345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880.
It has only been within the last few years that hardy spirits—like Nathaniel Holmes—whose education has led them to look judicially backward from effects to causes—and whose experience had impressed them with the idea that most effects come in natural procession from causes somewhere—were courageous enough to seek the solution of this mystery—not in what is called the "internal evidence" of the plays themselves, but in the circumstances and surroundings, that is to say, in the external evidence of their date and production.
The Baconian theory is simply that, so far as the records of the Elizabethan period are accessible, there was but one man in England, at the date at which this Shakespearean literature appeared, who could have produced it. * The history of Bacon's life, his massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambitious acquaintance with the court: and, joined to all, his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the dates of which, when collated, coincide with the dates at which the plays—tallying in matter with the circumstantial surroundings of Bacon's life as, for example, Shylock appeared at about the time when Bacon was most helplessly in the toils of what he calls "the Lombardo"):—all this need not be recapitulated here. He was born and bred in the atmosphere of libraries. While William Shakespeare was poaching on Avon banks, the little Francis was impressed with the utter inadequacy of Aristotle's method to grapple with modern needs, and meditating its superseding with labors of his own.
* Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor
of discovering the author been imposed upon after-
generations, I think we could have found no one of that day
but Bacon to whom to assign this crown. In this case it
would have been resting now on his head by almost common
consent."—(W. H. Furness to Judge Holmes, third edition of
"Authorship of Shakespeare," p. 628).