The Editor[104] has courteously allowed me to reply to his article, “The Great Stratford Superstition,” as I have studied all the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, most of the writings concerning the Baconian Heresy, and have answered the chief of them. The first recorded student of Shakespeare was a woman, Mrs. Ann Merrick, who, on 21st January 1638, wrote from the country to a friend in London, that she could not come to town that year, but must content herself “with the study of Shakespeare and the History of Women” (State Papers, Dom. Ser., Charles I, 409 (167).) In these two interests, thus early and specially combined, I follow the lady’s lead.
One short magazine article cannot possibly deal with the subject exhaustively, therefore I only attempt to make a general protest against the Editor’s paper, and to illustrate a few of its weaknesses.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law”; from which proverb it would seem that the arguments for Bacon’s authorship would require to be ten times as strong as Shakespeare’s, before they can have a reasonable chance of ousting the present possessor from his dramatic name and fame. On the contrary, there is no real argument for putting Bacon out of the great sphere which he designed for himself, into one designed by his admirers, but utterly incongruous to his nature and powers. All his own contemporaries, all his immediate successors, and all their descendants for 250 years, attributed the plays to their author, Shakespeare. Guess-work began about the middle of the nineteenth century, and like a snowball rolling, gradually increased by external accretion, but not by vital energy. I do not deny that there are some apparent difficulties and some strange coincidences, or Baconianism, as a cult, could not have been possible. But these difficulties depend upon our temporary ignorance, these coincidences may be explained in a different way from that on which the Baconians insist.
Francis Bacon was a genius, and a well-trained one. He early saw the deficiencies of the science and philosophy of his day. His devotees to-day do not follow his prime advice for conducting investigations enunciated in his great “Novum Organum,” “to search after negatives” to any hypothesis they may start. On the contrary, they greedily accept everything, however unfounded, that tells in the favour of their new theory, and ignore whatever contradicts their points. No amount of repetition will make a hazy and unfounded tradition into a fact, and inferences from unsound premises give no worthy conclusion. I can only bring forward a few of my facts here, and still fewer of my inferences.
Echoing the cry of old, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” the Baconians commence by crying, “Can any good come out of Stratford and Warwickshire?” and to give weight to the cry, strive to belittle the place.
It may be remembered that a fine German writer, Jean Paul Richter, insisted that a “poet should always have himself born in a small city.” There are many reasons that made the “small city” of Stratford eminently suitable for the birthplace of a poet. It was at the very heart of England, the centre of the converging influences of descent and of legend from British and Saxon and Danish ancestors. The great Roman roads crossed not far off, and Stratford, with her substantial bridge, was on the line of traffic. Stratford was a thriving town, “emporiolum non inelegans,” says Camden. Its gentle, undulating scenery lay just on the borders of a great forest,
Where nightingales in Arden sit and sing.
(Drayton.)
It had had an aristocratic semi-religious guild from ancient times, centre of the county families, an old college, now also passed away, and a noble church, still existing. Becon, a great scholar, in 1549 speaks of Warwickshire as the most intellectual of all the English counties, and Stratford, in Shakespeare’s time at least, had a town-council intelligent enough to know the value of a good schoolmaster, and to seek to secure him in the practical way by offering double the amount of salary enjoyed by the head-master of Eton and others. The books used in the grammar schools of the day can be found in the writings of Mulcaster and Brinsley, and by reference to the Stationers’ Registers. The status of the schoolmaster determined the character of the study and of the books. Those who say that Stratford was then a “bookless neighbourhood” speak without book. It is easy for a particular instance to destroy so universal an affirmative. There was, at least, one suit at law because a man had not returned a book he had borrowed; and from my own knowledge of their names, I can state that one curate alone had 170 books of the best selections in philosophy, divinity, history, literature, and legend. I know that Mr. Shakespeare bought at least one.
After decrying Stratford, the Baconians attempt to defame young Stratford Shakespeare. Fortunately, when he was young, his father was one of the most important men in the place, and as the grammar-school was free to all the sons of burgesses, it is more than reasonable to suppose that he had his full opportunities given him. Of course, he may have neglected them, which is an occasional way with a genius. There is no authority for the statement that Shakespeare was apprenticed to a butcher. Even if he had been so, that circumstance would not have quenched a native genius that rebelled against it. Wolsey was the son of a butcher, so was Akenside. Keats was the son of a livery stable keeper. There is authority for his early marriage, imprudent because his father was in pecuniary difficulties at the time, but just the kind of marriage one would have expected from his poetic, impulsive tendencies. His relations to life, property, and literature were more like those of Sir Walter Scott than any other man. When he found himself in difficulties, he bravely set himself to the task of attempting to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the family, and set off to London. The Baconians firmly believe that he had to fly to escape the consequences of his poaching affair, but has it never struck them how humorous it is to think that Bacon showed spite at Sir Thomas Lucy, for the whipping that Shakespeare received? Bacon in reality was a very good friend of the Lucy family. I exposed the whole falsity of this tradition two years ago in the “Fortnightly Review,” in an article entitled “Justice Shallow not a Satire on Sir Thomas Lucy.”