Forgeries promulgated by Collier and others, 1835-1849.
But Ireland’s and Jordan’s frauds are clumsy compared with those that belong to the present century. Most of the works relating to the biography of Shakespeare or the history of the Elizabethan stage produced by John Payne Collier, or under his supervision, between 1835 and 1849 are honeycombed with forged references to Shakespeare, and many of the forgeries have been admitted unsuspectingly into literary history. The chief of these forged papers I arrange below in the order of the dates that have been allotted to them by their manufacturers. [367a]
| 1589 (November). | Appeal from the Blackfriars players (16 in number) to the Privy Council for favour. Shakespeare’s name stands twelfth. From the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. First printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare,’ 1835. |
| 1596 (July). | List of inhabitants of the Liberty of Southwark, Shakespeare’s name appearing in the sixth place. First printed in Collier’s ‘Life of Shakespeare,’ 1858, p. 126. |
| 1596. | Petition of the owners and players of the Blackfriars Theatre to the Privy Council in reply to an alleged petition of the inhabitants requesting the closing of the playhouse. Shakespeare’s name is fifth on the list of petitioners. This forged paper is in the Public Record Office, and was first printed in Collier’s ‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’ (1831), vol. i. p. 297, and has been constantly reprinted as if it were genuine. [367b] |
| 1596 (circa). | A letter signed H. S.(i.e. Henry, Earl of Southampton), addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, praying protection for the players of the Blackfriars Theatre, and mentioning Burbage and Shakespeare by name. First printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts.’ |
| 1596 (circa). | A list of sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre, with the valuation of their property, in which Shakespeare is credited with four shares, worth £933 6s. 8d. This was first printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts,’ 1835, p. 6, from the Egerton MSS. at Bridgewater House. |
| 1602 (August 6). | Notice of the performance of ‘Othello’ by Burbage’s ‘players’ before Queen Elizabeth when on a visit to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord-keeper, at Harefield, in a forged account of disbursements by Egerton’s steward, Arthur Mainwaringe, from the manuscripts at Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. Printed in Collier’s ‘New Particulars regarding the Works of Shakespeare,’ 1836, and again in Collier’s edition of the ‘Egerton Papers,’ 1840 (Camden Society)) pp. 342-3. |
| 1603 (October 3). | Mention of ‘Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe’ in a letter at Dulwich from Mrs. Alleyn to her husband; part of the letter is genuine. First published in Collier’s Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,’ 1841, p. 63. |
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1604 (April 9). | List of the names of eleven players of the King’s Company fraudulently appended to a genuine letter at Dulwich College from the Privy Council bidding the Lord Mayor permit performances by the King’s players. Printed in Collier’s ‘Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,’ 1841, p. 68. [368b] |
| 1605 (November-December). | Forged entries in Master of the Revels’ account-books (now at the Public Record Office) of performances at Whitehall by the King’s players of the ‘Moor of Venice’—i.e. ‘Othello’—on November 1, and of ‘Measure for Measure’ on December 26. Printed in Peter Cunningham’s ‘Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court’ (pp. 203-4), published by the Shakespeare Society in 1842. Doubtless based on Malone’s trustworthy memoranda (now in the Bodleian Library) of researches among genuine papers formerly at the Audit Office at Somerset House. [369a] |
| 1607. | Notes of performances of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Richard II’ by the crews of the vessels of the East India Company’s fleet off Sierra Leone. First printed in ‘Narratives of Voyages towards the North-West, 1496-1631,’ edited by Thomas Rundall for the Hakluyt Society, 1849, p. 231, from what purported to be an exact transcript ‘in the India Office’ of the ‘Journal of William Keeling,’ captain of one of the vessels in the expedition. Keeling’s manuscript journal is still at the India Office, but the leaves that should contain these entries are now, and have long been, missing from it. |
| 1609 (January 4). | A warrant appointing Robert Daborne, William Shakespeare, and others instructors of the Children of the Revels. From the Bridgewater House MSS. first printed in Collier’s ‘New Facts,’ 1835. |
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1609 (April 6). | List of persons assessed for poor rate in Southwark, April 6, 1609, in which Shakespeare’s name appears. First printed in Collier’s ‘Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,’ 1841, p. 91. The forged paper is at Dulwich. [369b] |
| 1611 (November). | Forged entries in Master of the Revels’ account-books (now at the Public Record Office) of performances at Whitehall by the King’s Players of the ‘Tempest’ on November 1, and of the ‘Winter’s Tale’ on November 5. Printed in Peter Cunningham’s ‘Extracts from the Revels Accounts,’ p. 210. Doubtless based on Malone’s trustworthy memoranda of researches among genuine papers formerly at the Audit Office at Somerset House. [369c] |
II.—THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY.
Its source. Toby Matthew’s letter.
The apparent contrast between the homeliness of Shakespeare’s Stratford career and the breadth of observation and knowledge displayed in his literary work has evoked the fantastic theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the literature that passes under his name, and perverse attempts have been made to assign his works to his great contemporary, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the great contemporary prose-writer, philosopher, and lawyer. It is argued that Shakespeare’s plays embody a general omniscience (especially a knowledge of law) which was possessed by no contemporary except Bacon; that there are many close parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare’s and passages in Bacon’s works, [370] and that Bacon makes
enigmatic references in his correspondence to secret ‘recreations’ and ‘alphabets’ and concealed poems for which his alleged employment as a concealed dramatist can alone account. Toby Matthew wrote to Bacon (as Viscount St. Albans) at an uncertain date after January 1621: ‘The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.’ [371] This unpretending sentence is distorted into conclusive evidence that Bacon wrote works of commanding excellence under another’s name, and among them probably Shakespeare’s plays. According to the only sane interpretation of Matthew’s words, his ‘most prodigious wit’ was some Englishman named Bacon whom he met abroad—probably a pseudonymous Jesuit like most of Matthew’s friends. (The real surname of Father Thomas Southwell, who was a learned Jesuit domiciled chiefly in the Low Countries, was Bacon. He was born in 1592 at Sculthorpe, near Walsingham, Norfolk, being son of Thomas Bacon of that place, and he died at Watten in 1637.)
Chief exponents. Its vogue in America.
Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, d. 1855), in his ‘Romance of Yachting’ (1848), first raised doubts of Shakespeare’s authorship. There followed in a like temper ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’ in ‘Chambers’s Journal,’ August 7, 1852, and an article by Miss Delia Bacon in ‘Putnams’ Monthly,’ January, 1856. On the latter was based ‘The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon,’ with a neutral preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
London and Boston, 1857. Miss Delia Bacon, who was the first to spread abroad a spirit of scepticism respecting the established facts of Shakespeare’s career, died insane on September 2, 1859. [372] Mr. William Henry Smith, a resident in London, seems first to have suggested the Baconian hypothesis in ‘Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare’s plays?—a letter to Lord Ellesmere’ (1856), which was republished as ‘Bacon and Shakespeare’ (1857). The most learned exponent of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an American lawyer, who published at New York in 1866 ‘The Authorship of the Plays attributed to Shakespeare,’ a monument of misapplied ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2 vols.) Bacon’s ‘Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,’ a commonplace book in Bacon’s handwriting in the British Museum (London, 1883), was first edited by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian theory; it contained many words and phrases common to the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the argument from parallelisms of expression to its extremest limits. The Baconian theory has found its widest acceptance in America. There it achieved its wildest manifestation in the book called ‘The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cypher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays’ (Chicago and London, 1887, 2 vols.), which was the work of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly of Hastings, Minnesota. The author pretended to have discovered among Bacon’s papers a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters appearing at certain intervals in the pages of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays. Many refutations have been published of Mr. Donnelly’s arbitrary and baseless contention.