This looks as if one writer might have copied from the other. If so, it is Bacon who is the thief, for the lines occur in the quarto "Hamlet" published in 1603, whereas the "Essay of Wisdom" was first published in 1612.
Again, where Bacon, in the "Essay of Gardens," says, "The breath of flowers comes and goes like the warbling of music," it reminds one strongly of the exquisite passage in "Twelfth Night" where the Duke exclaims:—
"That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."
I have little doubt that Bacon had this passage in mind when he wrote the "Essay of Gardens," which was first published in 1625, two years later than the complete folio of Shakespeare. This effectually disposes of the attempt to cite these correspondences in evidence that Bacon wrote the plays.
Another instance is from "Richard III.:"—
"By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust
Ensuing danger; as, by proof, we see
The waters swell before a boisterous storm."
Bacon, in the "Essay of Sedition," writes, "As there are ... secret swellings of seas before a tempest, so there are in states." But this essay was not published till 1625, so again we find him copying Shakespeare. Many such "parallelisms," cited to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works, do really prove that he read them with great care and remembered them well, or else took notes from them.
An interesting illustration of the helpless ignorance shown by Baconizers is furnished by a remark of Sir Toby Belch in "Twelfth Night." In his instructions to that dear old simpleton, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, about the challenge, Sir Toby observes, "If thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss." In Elizabethan English, to address a man as "thou" was to treat him as socially inferior; such familiarity was allowable only between members of the same family or in speaking to servants, just as you address your wife, and likewise the cook and housemaid, by their Christian names, while with the ladies of your acquaintance such familiarity would be rudeness. The same rule for the pronoun survives to-day in French and German, but has been forgotten in English. In the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1604, Justice Coke insulted the prisoner by calling out, "Thou viper! for I thou thee, thou traitor!" Now, one of our Baconizers thinks that his idol, in writing "Twelfth Night," introduced Sir Toby's suggestion in order to recall to the audience Coke's abusive remark. Once more, a little attention to dates would have prevented the making of a bad blunder. We know from Manningham's Diary that "Twelfth Night" had been on the stage nearly two years before Raleigh's trial. On the other hand, to say that the play might have suggested to Coke his coarse speech would be admissible, but idle, inasmuch as the expression "to thou a man" was an every-day phrase in that age.
Here it naturally occurs to me to mention the "Promus," about which as much fuss has been made as if it really furnished evidence in support of the Baconian folly. There is in the British Museum a manuscript, in Bacon's handwriting, entitled "Promus of Formularies and Elegancies." "Promus" means "storehouse" or "treasury." A date at the top of the first page shows that it was begun in December, 1594; there is nothing, I believe, to show over how many years it extended. It is a scrap-book in which Bacon jotted down such sentences, words, and phrases as struck his fancy, such as might be utilized in his writings. These neatly turned phrases, these "formularies and elegancies," are gathered from all quarters,—from the Bible, from Virgil and Horace, from Ovid and Seneca, from Erasmus, from collections of proverbs in various languages, etc. As there is apparently nothing original in this scrap-bag, Mr. Spedding did not think it worth while to include it in his edition of Bacon's works, but in the fourteenth volume he gives a sufficient description of it, with illustrative extracts. In 1883 Mrs. Henry Pott published the whole of this "Promus" manuscript, and swelled it by comments and dissertations into a volume of 600 octavo pages. She had found in it several hundred expressions which reminded her of passages in Shakespeare, and so it confirmed her in the opinion which she already entertained that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works. Thus, when the "Promus" has a verse from Ovid, which means, "And the forced tongue begins to lisp the sound commanded," it reminds Mrs. Pott of divers lines in which Shakespeare uses the word "lisp," as for example, in "As You Like It," "you lisp and wear strange suits;" and she jumps to the conclusion that when Bacon jotted down the verse from Ovid, it was as a preparatory study toward "As You Like It," and any other play that contains the word "lisp:" therefore Bacon wrote all those plays, Q. E. D.! On the next page we find Virgil's remark, "Thus was I wont to compare great things with small," made the father of Falstaff's "base comparisons," and Fluellen's "Macedon and Monmouth," as well as honest Dogberry's "comparisons are odorous." When one reads such things, evidently printed in all seriousness, one feels like asking Mrs. Pott, in the apt words of Shakespeare's friend Fletcher, "What mare's nest hast thou found?" ("Bonduca," V. ii.)
There are many phrases, however, in the "Promus" which undoubtedly agree with phrases in the plays. They show that Bacon heard or read the plays with great interest, and culled from them his "elegancies" with no stinted hand. As for Mrs. Pott's bulky volume, it brings us so near to the final reductio ad absurdum of the Bacon theory that we hardly need spend many words upon the gross improbabilities which that theory involves. The plays of Shakespeare were universally ascribed to him by his contemporaries; many of them were published during his lifetime with his name upon the title-page as the author; all were collected and published together by Hemminge and Condell, two of his fellow actors, seven years after his death; and for more than two centuries nobody ever dreamed of looking for a different authorship, or of associating the plays with Bacon. But this Chimborazo of prima facie evidence becomes a mere mole-hill in the hands of your valiant Baconizer. It is all clear to him. Bacon did not acknowledge the authorship of these works because such literature was deemed frivolous, and current prejudices against theatres and playwrights might injure his hopes of advancement at the bar and in political life. Therefore, by some sort of private understanding with the ignorant and sordid wretch Shakespeare,[42] at whose theatre they were brought out, their authorship was ascribed to him, the real author died without revealing the secret, and the whole world was deceived until the days of Delia Bacon.