Shakespeare's environment

by C. C. Stopes

And honesty thou sow’st which they do reape.

The praises of his “works” are emphasized by Professor Meres and many others; and the testimony of the love and appreciation of “his fellows” is unstinted. It must never be forgotten that perhaps the most undoubted praise was that which an admirer fixed upon his tombstone, a shelter to which surely Bacon cannot enter.

I must also protest against the assumption that Shakespeare “returned to Stratford to lead an illiterate life.” He returned there to live in the best house in the town, bearing arms (then a much greater distinction than now), as all his friends and relatives did, to associate on intimate terms with the Combes, Collins, Walkers, Shaws, Nashes, and probably all the county families, as tradition says, especially that of William Somerville, of Edreston. He returned there, and continued to write his plays in the bosom of his family, with one son-in-law, the most distinguished physician of his time, the possessor of a good library, and his other prospective son-in-law, cultured up to the level, at least, of affixing a suggestive French proverb to his accounts, the year that he was Chamberlain.

It is not a fact that he did not teach his favourite daughter to read and write. It is probably because she responded more rapidly to culture than her sister did that she became his favourite, as his will proves. She is recorded to have been “witty above her sex,” and like her father. Her signature can still be seen in Stratford.

I now come to a stock statement of the Baconians that might seem to a careless student founded on fact, that he spent his time as a maltster and moneylender. They never have taken the trouble to find out (as I have) the number of contemporary Warwickshire Shakespeares. There was a second John in Stratford-on-Avon, and a third in a neighbouring village. There were several of the name of William in the immediate neighbourhood, There was even one at Hatton, who had a daughter Susanna in 1596; there was another who was a malt-dealer and a money-lender. His transactions commence during the poet’s life, but, alas for the Baconian argument, they continue for ten years after the poet’s death. The receipts can still be seen at Warwick Castle. Of course, “selling malt” or not, is quite irrelevant to the question in hand. There is only one point, however, that may be noted in connection with it. In all the plays there is no allusion to the processes of malt-making, beyond the one proverb, or to the technique of brewing or wine-making, as there is, for instance, of printing. Shakespeare only treats the finished article, as sold in the taverns, or drunk in the halls. He only notes philosophically the effect that stimulants have on the hearts, brains, and characters of men. This question never troubles Bacon, but he knows all about the manufacture, the keeping, storing, curing of ale, wine, mead, and metheglin.

A similar powerful contrast may be seen regarding the differing treatments of the horse and the chase. The poems and plays are full of reference to the delights of the chase and the sympathy subsisting between a rider and his noble steed. The whole works of Bacon supply only three prosy references to the existence of “the horse.”

The great stronghold of the Baconians is “The Promus.” But the notes there are not proved to be original. Some of them can be shown to be borrowed echoes of what the writer heard and read. Bacon was a great borrower, as Shakespeare also undoubtedly was. Only a poet is not expected to acknowledge “sources” in his dramas; which a prose writer, in leisurely detail, is expected to do (Robert Burton in his “Anatomy of Melancholy” did so). Only last month I came across one of Chamberlain’s letters, which records a witty saying of the Duchess of Richmond. The writer adds, it might have got into Bacon’s Apophthegms, which he had just published, “not much to his credit.” Whole passages and facts are borrowed by Bacon without acknowledgement from the ancients, trusting to the general ignorance of his readers. The very cipher he claimed as his own was published by Jean Baptist Porta in 1568, and by Blaise de Vigenère in 1587.

I do not attempt to deal with the absurd notion that any real poet could weight the wings of his muse with a cipher. Dr. Nicholson of Leamington gave the reductio ad absurdum to Mr. Donnelly’s, and other writers have let in light upon later attempts at cipher mysteries.

The author of “The great Stratford Superstition” says there are no improbabilities in supposing Bacon to have written the plays. What? Bacon write “Romeo and Juliet”? He did not know what love was! In his Essay on Love he calmly asserts that the stage had been more beholden to love than the life of man. In his life without love, the “marriages” he sought, and the one he secured, were all mercantile transactions. He did not deserve to be happy in matrimony. Bacon write the humours of the fat knight? Bacon was full of wisdom and abounded in wit, but of humour he was absolutely destitute.

Unfortunately, once only have we a story of Bacon crossing Shakespeare’s path, a crucial illustration of the impossibility of his having written one play at least. “The Comedy of Errors” was based on the Menoechmi of Plautus, a translation of which was registered in the books of the Stationers’ Company on 10th June 1594. Books at that time were nearly always handed about in MS. before printing, seeking patrons. Very probably this one was shown to the Earl of Southampton, or Shakespeare may have seen it in MS. It was more than six months after the registration of the Menoechmi that the “Comedy of Errors” appeared in peculiar circumstances, which I have treated fully elsewhere. It was acted as a new play by Shakespeare’s company, amid the uproars in Gray’s Inn Hall, 28th December 1594, when the Prince of Purpoole’s plans came to grief. The Benchers felt it an intolerable disgrace, and appointed Bacon to write a proper play to retrieve the lost honour of Gray’s Inn. He wrote them the “Masque of the Councillors,” which pleased his fellows, and the company that they had re-invited to make amends for the “Night of Errors.” This masque may yet be read, and is exactly the measure of the dramatic capability of Francis Bacon. It is quite a mistake to imagine that a good play would have discredited him. On the contrary, the having written the first English blank verse tragedy was, even at the time, considered the highest distinction of a more aristocratic man than Bacon, a diplomatist too, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.