* Bacon was in the habit of sending certain of his lighter
manuscripts to Sir Tobie, and this postscript was appended
to a letter acknowledging the receipt of Bacon's "great and
esteemed favor of the 9th of April."
** "Wit, Humor and—Shakespeare." By John Weiss. Boston.
Roberts Brothers, 1876. Matthew writes this in a letter
acknowledging receipt of a volume sent him by Bacon. If that
volume was a copy of the "First Folio," the postscript would
be intelligible.
himself, to Sir John Davies, who is going to meet the new king James (with whom Bacon is striving for favor, looking to his own preferment), in which he commits to Sir John's "faithful care and discretion" his interests at court, and adds, "So, asking you to be good to concealed poets, I continue," etc., etc.; * II. Evidence by way of Innuendo, including another of Matthew's postscripts (the one in which he writes to Bacon, "I will not return you weight for weight, but measure for measure," etc.); also, perhaps, the injunctions of secrecy in Bacon's own letters to Matthew, to "be careful of the writings submitted to you, that no one see them." There is, besides, in many of Bacon's preserved letters something suggestive of a "curious undermeaning, impressing the reader with an idea of more than appears on the surface." The idea of the stage, as a figure of speech, occurs in a letter to the Queen: "Far be it from me to stage myself," etc.; and in one to lady Buckingham, "I do not desire to stage myself but for the comfort of a private life," etc. "Dramatic poesy," he declares, "is as history made visible." Writing to Matthew, he refers to a "little work of my recreation;" and Matthew, in return, banters him on writing many things "under another name." This is in 1609, and no more "Shakespeare" plays appear until Othello, in 1621. The Jonson obituary verse—in which occur the encomiums so rung in our ears by the Shakespeareans (and which we have—earlier in these pages—seen was all they really had behind them), which we have thought could be most easily explained on the "nil mortuis nisi bonum" theory—are also
* Holmes, "Authorship of Shakespeare,"
regarded, we believe, by the Baconians, as Innuendo. *
III. The Parallelisms. That is to say, an almost identity of phraseology, found in both the Baconian and Shakespearean writings. The best list of these is to be found in Judge Holmes' book, covering some twenty-five closely-printed pages. ** Of the value of this latter class of evidence, it is for every reader to judge for himself; but that a writer of exact science and moral philosophy should plagiarize from the theater, or the theater from the writer of exact science and moral philosophy; or (still more improbable) that two contemporary authors, in the full glare of the public eye, should select each other's works to habitually and regularly plagiarize upon, are altogether, it seems to the Baconians, out of the question.
* It is curious to find the Baconians appealing to this
"best evidence" for the other side. But they read it as an
Innuendo. For example, the verses—
"Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage Or
influence, cheer the crooping stage!
Which—since thy flight from hence, hath-mourned like night
And despaired day—but for thy volume's light—"
they say, do not and can not, refer to William Shakespeare
at all. For this was published in 1623, and William
Shakespeare had been dead seven years. He could not "shine
forth" again, except figuratively, in his volume, and this
he already does by the publication of his works, and is
admitted to do in the next line, where it is said that but
for "thy volume's light" the stage would "mourn in night."
The Baconians, who believe that Ben Jonson himself was the
"Heminges and Condell" who edited the first folio, regarded
this whole poem as a sop to Bacon, on Ben Jonson's part.
** Pp. 306-326.
But even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as a political philosopher and playwright contracting together to mutually plagiarize from each other's writings would hardly account for the coincidence between the cottage scene (Act IV, Scene 3) in "A Winter's Tale," and Bacon's "Essay on Gardens," in which he maintained that "there ought to be gardens for all the months of the year; in which severally things of beauty may be in their season," which he proceeds to suggest:
[Original]
Were we assured that the prose in the left-hand column was the poet's first rough notes for the exquisite poetry in the second, would there be any internal evidence for doubting it? And when it appears that "The Essay on Gardens" was not printed until 1625, nine years after William Shakespeare's death and burial, and two years after an edition of his alleged plays, rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so deliberate a "steal" would hardly be profitable), the exoteric evidence seems at least to command attention.