LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS:
SHAKSPEARE'S WOMEN:
LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE.
LORD BACON AND THE PLAYS.
A consideration of the theory that Lord Bacon wrote the plays which are attributed to Shakspeare comes in here more conveniently, because it will appear that Bacon's knowledge of women and his experience of the passion of Love, as expressed in his works, are so meagre and so colorless when contrasted with the plays that the fact might stand alone, with scarce a comment, to refute the theory which is so elaborately defended. In its proper place this will appear. In the mean time, some notice may be taken of a few points of the theory which seem to have gained a recognition so far as to produce scepticism in many intelligent minds.
Books enough are published in various languages filled with preternaturally far-fetched conjectures concerning Shakspeare. Many of them are devoted to proving that he must have been brought up to this or that profession. Lord Campbell has shown the extent of the poet's knowledge of legal terms, and his aptness in placing them. A surgeon claims him on the ground of his knowledge of the technical terms used in medical art. Bucknill and others, on the same ground of technical knowledge, prove that he must have been trained as a mad-doctor. A musician refers to his love of music, botanists to his accuracy in grouping flowers according to their seasons, and Hastings is convinced that he was bred a bird-fancier. Each investigator discovers his own specialty in the teeming pages, and insists upon apprenticing the poet. The doctor points to the line in "Hamlet,"—
"And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,"—
and asks, with an air of conviction, how any one at that period, who had not been bred to the profession, could have understood the ginglymoid structure of the knee! The Worshipful Master of the Bard-of-Avon Lodge claims masonic fraternity with him, thinking that allusions to masonic terms and customs are scattered through the plays, but chiefly on the strength of Hubert's words in "King John,"—
"They shake their heads,
And whisper one another in the ear,
And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist;"