When young Shakespeare went to London, there is proof that he renewed his acquaintanceship with his Stratford friend, Richard Field, the apprentice, son-in-law, and successor of Vautrollier, the great printer, who had two printing presses, and was allowed to keep six foreign journeymen. For some years, at least, it is evident that he took time to read Field’s books. Webster, his contemporary dramatist, calls him “industrious Shakespeare.” I say it is evident, because with the exception of a few books referred to, such as Wilson’s “Art of Rhetoric,” “The Paradise of Dainty Devices,” “Seneca,” “Plautus,” “Holinshed’s History of England and Scotland,” and others, this one firm alone printed all the books that were necessary for the poet’s culture, and all classics that he refers to directly.
The limitation in authorities is a strong argument against Bacon’s authorship, as well as the plentiful crop of unscholarly blunders to be found in the plays.
Besides Field’s library, another opportunity of education and culture was found for the poet in the romantic and faithful friendship of the young Earl of Southampton, a law-student and patron of literature. How can Baconians gravely assert that Bacon could have written these two dedications of 1593 and 1594 to Shakespeare’s poems? How could he speak of the one poem as the “first heir of his invention,” when he already had written much and designed more? How could he say to Southampton in print, “What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours,” while he was at that time a sworn follower of the Earl of Essex? Shakespeare had no position in society or literature sufficient to induce Bacon to use his name as a mantle, by the time that Shakespeare’s two poems were brought out by Shakespeare’s friend, Dick Field. The sonnets resemble the poems too much in phrases, feelings, and situations to doubt that the author is the same, and all the three are claimed by Shakespeare in print.
Now, can the Baconians explain how they can believe that Bacon, who at the age of thirty-one had already planned “The Greatest Birth of Time,” and, filled with the sublime self-conceit of conscious power, had written to Lord Burghley in that year that he “had taken all knowledge to be his province,” should have addressed the half-trained young lad, Southampton (among many other similar phrases), in the modest lines:
Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing,
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine and born of thee,