M. Porcius Cato was born B.C. 234: the play belongs to B.C. 490. And if anybody knew when Galen was born, A.D. 130, it was Bacon; yet Menenius, in the same play, ii. 1, line 128, says, "The most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic." But Shakspeare's main object was to write a play, and co-ordinate his groups. So he paired off his characteristics with each other to gratify the poetic exigency of the play, and not always to render strict tribute to the Muse of History.
Can anybody positively deny that Shakspeare stole away from the Mermaid more often then his fellow-actors and poets relished, to spend the evening with Essex at Gray's Inn, perhaps while Bacon was busy upon his "Characters of Julius and Augustus Cæsar" in 1607-8,—for not long after that the famous tragedy appeared; perhaps to urge him with the happy suggestions of friendship to write his Defence of Shakspeare's own dear Essex? There was, indeed, that "semblable coherence" between the spirits of the philosopher and the poet which qualified them to be mutual instructors; and the mobile and apprehensive intellect of the poet could absorb without books the thoughts that filled the air round Bacon's head. The structure of Shakspeare, open at every pore to every influence, was pervaded with the conversations of his age: the interchange made a thoroughfare of him; and, as it passed, he detained all the nutriment that his imagination craved, and let the rest escape. He lived amid this impromptu wit and knowledge of illustrious friends, saturated with their atmosphere, passing it through the deep-breathing lungs to redden, and transmitting it by magnificent pulses to the hearts of his spectators, purged of superfluity, sweetened by gentleness, drenched in grace. By every sense, with the nerves of every touch, he appropriated character, love, theory, and life. London was library and university; and poetic intuition was the tutor of his soul. So—whether jesting at the Mermaid, and growing forgetive upon the sack; visiting the haunts of travellers and mariners to pick up strange tales; listening to the multifarious comment of a Bacon, and turning over his rarities of books; or lounging by the river-side with Southampton, the centre of a group of the most advanced, curious, brilliant men of the Elizabethan age—he became, in person, the coincidence which pervades the dramas; and all inquisitions upon the amount of literary culture which he achieved, or surmises about his earlier employments, become impertinent, if they are not made ridiculous, as his great, receptive, broad-domed soul covered over London's world and drew up its variety.
There is a kindred gift in Robert Browning, which makes its confession thus:—
"If we have souls, know how to see and use,
One place performs, like any other place,
The proper service every place on earth
Was framed to furnish man with; serves alike
To give him note that, through the place he sees,
A place is signified he never saw,
But, if he lack not soul, may learn to know."
The soul of the true artist being cosmopolitan, any place can become the centre of his circumference; for he is already outside of the world which his neighborhood is too little to embrace. Perhaps his neighbors are penurious step-dames who make scanty provision for emotion, and detest passionate experiences of every kind. But his imagination cannot starve. It implies all "the pomp and circumstance of glorious" life, just as the genius of creation involved and anticipated ourselves, who dress for it a perpetual banquet though no man sees it feeding, and none offer it their alms. The artist's soul transmutes the refuse of factories, the sweepings of coal, bone-parings, and street-scraps into the brilliant colors which, like clarions, precede Beauty's procession and summon the spectators.
If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have conceived the female characters which invest them with such dignity and graciousness. To have done that required a comprehension of the varieties of the female disposition, such as could be derived only from personal contact and experience. To have seized some broad features of the plays, Bacon must have been acquainted with many degrees of social state beneath his own. We can trust Shakspeare in the tavern and its purlieus as frankly as we would the Persian poets, Saadi and Omer Khayam, who saw in the full cup a symbol of the divine afflatus. But we cannot imagine that Bacon was a frequenter of those London haunts where Dick the Butcher took his ale before Jack Cade decreed that the three-hooped pot should have ten hoops, and made it felony to drink small-beer; where Falstaff leered and tossed his ballast over in a sea of sack; where Parolles vapored, and Bardolph blushed, and Pistol's English grew tipsy; where Sir Andrew and Sir Toby roared catches, and Feste and the other clowns made excellent fooling into the small hours; where Bottom mildly exhaled at the head of the table at which Flute, Snout, and Starveling took their pots after the shop-shutters were up; where Dame Quickly maundered, and Mistress Overdone and Doll Tear-street made largess of their brassy smiles. A poet may convert the tavern-bench into a wool-sack: "This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown." But a Queen's Solicitor and future Lord Chancellor could not risk pawning the wool-sack for a tavern-bench. Even the gift of poetry would not have so badly endangered his prospects.
Bacon knew the wives and daughters of his friends and associates. He was at home in the families of the Pakingtons and Barnhams and Hattons. He doubtless noted the peculiarities of Lady Rich, Mistress Vernon, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the other women of that crowd upon the steps of the throne. So many of these were cast in the same mould, that he would have been meagrely provided with female types, leaving us unable to account for the great range of character which fills the scene, from awkward Audrey to queenly Hermione, from Mistress Overdone to Imogen, from the Pander's wife to Marina, from Phebe to Perdita.
Moreover, search Bacon's writings upon this matter of knowledge of woman to find, if you can, hints and passages which are parallel with the plays in temper or language. Look for traces of that fervor which devotes the plays to the great central passion, and consecrates them with so many moods and styles of womanhood. Ransack his letters in vain for any deep consciousness of sex like that which makes every play personal and vital with something that cannot be put aside. Read his Essay on Love, and contrast its dry, pragmatic tone with the pages which palpitate with Juliet, or those over which Viola tenderly broods and Helena frankly shines. Can we imagine that essay to have been a treasured favorite of Desdemona, or to have beguiled Ophelia during the absence of her prince, or to have served Cleopatra except to hang on Antony's hook for a sinker, as for jest she hung the salted cod? Isabella might have safely furnished a copy of it to every nun in her convent; but Imogen, for all her "pudency so rosy," would not have taken it to bed with her, to read three hours and fold down the leaf where she left off. The warmest expression which Bacon was ever overheard to make is preserved in a speech in praise of love, written probably for a masque. The speaker says: "In the melting of a horse-shoe, can a mighty dead fire do as much as a small fire blown? In shaping metals, can a mighty huge weight do as much as a blow? It is motion, therefore, that animateth all things: it is vain to think that any strength of Nature can countervail a violent motion. Now, affections are the motions of the soul. Let no man fear the yoke of fortune that's in the yoke of love."
But the details which defend the Baconian theory are too numerous to be met and properly treated unless one had a volume's space at disposal. Each one is trivial; and the total effect of the theory depends upon a nice and patient construction of a cumulative argument, such as lawyers know how to use. Probably the majority of adherents to the theory will come from the legal profession, or from the class of minds that is trained to appreciate the importance of all the little points of some routine. But so long as the court before which this case is argued must have for judge a quick perception of the exigencies of the imagination, which include the delicacy that tests differences of intellectual structure and the broadness that adopts all vices, passions, whims, and humors, the details need not be separately pursued: their refutation, if still possible, is anticipated and made useless by the comprehensive verdict of an imagination that is kindred to the plays.