From his early years he manifested that vastly active intellect "which knew no rest save in motion." He studied, as a child, the nature of echoes in a tunnel. At fifteen years of age (so his chaplain Rawley and his biographer Spedding assure us), he had realized the shallowness of the Aristotelian philosophy and had thought out those principles which have since revolutionized human society. There are reasons to believe that he was the child of fifteen, referred to by the Rosicrucians, who planned the foundation of their society, and, at that early age, wrote the "Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz," first published in 1616.
At about twelve years of age he went to Cambridge—to Trinity College—rooming with his brother Anthony, who was two years his senior. In June, 1576, he left the university and became an ancient of the Gray's Inn law-society. On September 25, 1576, he accompanied Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador, to France. Here he witnessed the sixth civil war of the French people. He followed the court through several of the French provinces; he resided for three months at Poitiers. About February 17, 1579, he dreamed that his father's house in the country was all covered over with black mortar. At the same time his father was taken sick and died in three days thereafter. He returned home on March 20, 1579, to find himself poor. As he said, he could not "live to study," but had "to study to live." He became a practising lawyer, but he did not like the profession. He feared "the bar would be his bier;" it absorbed time which he thought should be dedicated to better ends. We think we find the expression of his heart in the lines of the so-called Shakespeare Sonnet:
"O, for my sake, do thou with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means, which public manners breeds."
His pecuniary embarrassments were numerous, and continuous. Falstaff doubtless expresses a thought which often recurred to him: "I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable." More than once he was thrown into a "sponging-house" for debt. His brother Anthony loaned him money repeatedly. In 1592 a "hard Jew or Lombard" put him in confinement for a debt on a bond. Anthony mortgaged his property to pay his debts. In 1594 Malone believes the play of "The Merchant of Venice" was in existence, in which Bassanio, being in debt to a hard Jew, his friend, Antonius, mortgages his own flesh to help him out of his troubles; and the Jew money-lender is sent down through all the ages the terrible type and exemplar of the merciless usurer. Bacon continues a "briefless barrister," with much time at his disposal. He helps in the composition of the play called "The Misfortunes of Arthur." He writes a Sonnet to the Queen. About this time, 1592, the Shakespeare plays begin to appear. Bacon assists in the preparation of several "masks" and "revels," gotten up by Gray's Inn. "The Comedy of Errors" first appears in the hall of that society, which still stands in London. The "Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece" appear, dedicated to Bacon's intimate friend, Lord Southampton; and that nobleman in 1594 contributes a large sum to the construction of the Globe play-house, Bacon having observed that the stage is a powerful instrumentality to "play on the minds" of the people; and on this stage a series of historical plays are put forth, everyone of which represents kings as monsters or imbeciles.
The Shakespeare plays continue to be poured forth, and Bacon suffers from a siege of "Jews and duns." He describes himself "as poor and sick, working for bread." "I am purposed," he says, "not to follow the practice of the law." "It is easier," says Mr. Spedding, Bacon's biographer, "to understand why Bacon was resolved not to devote his life to the ordinary practice of a lawyer, than what plan he had to clear himself of the difficulties which were now accumulating upon him, and to obtain the means of living and working. What course he betook himself to at the crisis at which we have now arrived, I cannot possibly say." We have here the time, the opportunity, the incentive, and the necessity for the composition of the Shakespeare plays; part of the fruits of the representation of which made Shakespeare very wealthy.
In January, 1597, the first acknowledged work of Bacon—his "Essays"—was published. They were ten in number. Bacon said of them he hoped they would be "like the late new half-pence, which, though the pieces are small, the silver is good."
Until he was forty-four years of age, Bacon was kept poor and out of office by his uncle Burleigh, and his cousin Cecil; during the life-time of Queen Elizabeth he was steadily passed over and suppressed; and even during the first years of the reign of King James I., the influence of Cecil, then the Earl of Salisbury, was sufficient to keep him out of office. In 1605, Bacon published his first great philosophical work, "The Advancement of Learning;" in 1607, he became Solicitor-General; and in 1612, Attorney-General, and member of the Privy Council. He was then fifty-one years of age, and Shakespeare forty-eight. After the appointment of Bacon as Attorney-General, no more of the Shakespeare plays appeared; the "Tempest," which is evidently the last of the series, for in it Prospero declares—
"I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book;"
is set down by the commentators, as written between 1609 and 1611. At that time Shakespeare was forty-five or forty-seven years of age, and lived for five or seven years thereafter in utter intellectual idleness, in Stratford.
In 1609 Bacon published "The Wisdom of the Ancients," a prose work of great poetical beauty. His professional practice was large and his income princely. In 1617 he succeeded Ellesmere, the Lord Chancellor, with the title of lord-keeper. In January, 1618, he was created lord high chancellor, and the same year was raised to the peerage as Baron of Verulam; and in 1621 he was made Viscount St. Albans. The "Novum Organum," his great life-work, was printed in October, 1620. His extraordinary industry is revealed in the fact that it had been copied and revised twelve times before it took its present shape. The new philosophy meant the study of nature and the acquisition of the knowledge of things. In this search the "most common," "base, illiberal and filthy matters," are not to be overlooked. We find in the plays the same novel philosophy: