Chapter III: Part 3

The parting between Prospero and Ariel has been thought to adumbrate the farewell of Shakespeare, whoever he was, to Poetry--a view that is plausible enough. It would explain the position assigned to _The Tempest_ in the First Folio, and suggest an interesting answer to the question why Prospero, who “prized his books above his dukedom” threatened--only threatened--to drown a particular “book.” But no one knows within several years when _The Tempest_ was written. Nor is it at all certain that the poem was wholly Shakespeare’s.[41] For anything we know to the contrary, the editor of the First Folio may have interpolated the striking invocation--to mention one passage only--which begins: “Ye elves of hills.”{7} _The Tempest_ then, does not enable us to fix the date of Shakespeare’s practical renunciation of poetry. I say, _practical_ renunciation, because certain passages in _Henry the Eighth_ which feelingly represent the insecurity of greatness might _ex hypothesi_ have been contributed by Bacon just after his fall, though his practical renunciation could hardly have taken place later than 1612.[42] But whether the date were 1612 or somewhat earlier, the hypothetical Shakespeare was amply provided with other interests and pursuits. (a) Rhetoric had long held a high place in his affections. “Rhetoric and Logic,” says he, “these two, rightly taken, are the gravest of the sciences, being the arts of arts,”{8} and what excellence he attained in the former of these arts we know from Ben Jonson. (b) Though poesy, the recreation of his leisure--Bacon would never have allowed that it was anything but a recreation--were denied him, prose, splendid inimitable prose was his to command. (c) The delightful days and months and years which he had spent with poets both ancient and modern, particularly Ovid,{9} might be turned to philosophical account. (d) Historical projects allured him. In the _Advancement of Learning_, a history--a prose history no doubt--of England from the “Wars of the Roses” downwards is noted as a desideratum, and seems to have been begun. _The History of the Reign of King Henry VII_ (1622), however, is the only portion of the desiderated history which reached completeness. (e) Legislative projects also attracted him, less strongly no doubt than historical. (f) But at this time the _Great Instauration_ had possessed itself of the chief place in his affection: “Of this I can assure you that though many things of great hope decay with youth,{10} yet the proceeding in that work doth gain upon me, upon affection and desire,” he writes, about 1609, to his bosom friend Matthew. The instauration, say rather transfiguration, of human knowledge--that was the vision which now fascinated him. When the spell began to work it is difficult to determine. Early in the seventeenth century his conception of human “learning” or “knowledge” or “science”--three words to which he attached practically the same meaning--included Poetry, not as an appendix, but as one of three fundamental constituents. Perhaps the word “culture,” with “barbarism” for antithesis, would now come nearest to what he then meant by learning. The _Advancement of Learning_ is the work not of a scholar in the technical sense, but of an omnivorous apprehensive imaginative reader. It is the expression by an artist in words of the serried thoughts of a mind steeped in poetry, deep versed in human nature, but certainly not versed in natural philosophy as understood by his contemporaries--Galileo for example, Gilbert and others. A passage in the first of its two books runs: “No man that wadeth in learning or contemplation thoroughly but will find printed in his heart _nil novi super terram_.” It is incredible that Bacon can at this time have caught so much as a glimpse of the “New Logic,” “New Art,” or--to give its latest name--_Novum Organum_, which he afterwards declared was “quite new, totally new in every kind.”[11] But though the _Advancement_ was in fact a plea for culture, in Bacon’s intention it was a serious attempt to grapple with philosophy, an attempt so serious that he afterwards declared the _Novum Organum_ itself to be the “same argument sunk deeper.” Moreover, in my opinion, it was his first serious attempt in that direction, hence its importance to any right apprehension of his genius.{12}

About the year 1609, the philosophical enthusiasm reached a climax. _Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturæ_, _Redargutio Philosophiarum_, _Sapientia Veterum_, and other pieces, some of which Boswell, one of his executors, seems to have called _impetus philosophici_, were thrown off in rapid succession. As early as 1610, however, he solicits the King to employ him in writing a history of his Majesty’s “Time,” a hint surely that the philosophical impetus had begun to abate. The change, whether it began that year, or a year or two later, is intelligible enough. Science had not claimed him her deliverer. Harvey is reported to have sneered at his philosophy. Gilbert and Napier may have started the sneer; for Bacon obviously undervalued mathematics, and spoke almost contemptuously of Gilbert (whom Galileo fully appreciated). About this time, too, he probably began to suspect that somewhere in the _New Art_, there lurked a defect which would have to be cured before the apparatus would work. The truth is that in the philosophical work published or privately circulated by Bacon before 1610, though there was much to appeal to the æsthetic side of the human mind, much to stimulate the cultivated layman’s admiration for knowledge, for the devoted student of science there was very little help of a constructive kind, the only kind of help he really needed.{13}

The _Sapientia Veterum_, 1609, is based on a number of myths selected from the poets and fabulists of antiquity in virtue of a certain congruity with Bacon’s intuitions and predilections. _The Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History_, his latest work, is based on an assemblage of what by way of distinction might be called facts. The dissonance between the two works is amazing. The _Sapientia_, which was intended to bespeak a favourable hearing for the New Art, busies itself with venerable fictions. From the _Natural History_ on the other hand, poetry and fable were to have been rigorously excluded. Bacon’s biographer, Rawley, wrote for the first edition of the work (1627), an address “To the Reader,” which winds up: “I will conclude with an usual speech of his lordship’s; that this work of his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as man made it; for it hath nothing of imagination.”

Several years before the _Sylva_ was written, Galileo had censured as paper philosophers certain contemporaries of his, who set about the investigation of nature as if she were a “book like the Æneid or the Odyssey.” One at least of Bacon’s intimate friends, Sir Tobie Mathew, was no stranger to Padua and Florence, and it is quite possible that he may have informed Bacon of these strictures of Galileo’s not long after they were uttered. But, be this as it may, a momentous change must have taken place after 1609, not in Bacon’s aspiration to be the greatest of human benefactors to man, but in his conception of the means by which his vast expectations were to be realised. Had the change been less than “fundamental,” “a good and well ordered Natural History” would not have been described in the _Phenomena Universi_ (1622), as holding the “keys both of sciences and of operations.” After 1612 Bacon became for some eight or nine years so immersed in affairs, as Attorney-General, Privy Councillor--no sinecure then--Lord Chancellor, etc., that it must have been impossible for him to give to his New Logic a tithe of the attention it required. “At this period,” says Dr. Abbott: “there is a great gap in the series of Bacon’s philosophical works. In 1613 he was appointed Attorney-General, and from that time till 1620 no literary work of any kind published or unpublished is known to have issued from his pen. All that he did was apparently to rewrite repeatedly and revise the _Novum Organum_.{14} The _Organum_ made its appearance in 1620 with a dedication to the King by no means confident of either the worth or the use of his offering. But as he says in the _proemium_ that “all other ambition whatsoever was in his opinion lower than the work in hand,” one would infer that his zeal for philosophy had begun to revive even before the tragedy of 1621. The remaining five years of the great man’s life--“a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more,” he calls it--were more or less distracted with anxieties in no way connected with philosophy. He hoped, nevertheless, to present the old King with a “good history of England, and a better digest” of the laws, and the young King with a history of the “time and reign of King Henry the Eighth.”{15} But after the most distressful _sequelæ_ of his fall had been relieved, his grandiose, imposing scheme for the renovation or transfiguration of philosophy must have regained the position it had held some ten or a dozen years earlier. Without it, life for him would have been a mean and melancholy failure. “God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof ... and not delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out the ordinances which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.”{16} This capacity, this wonder-working exaltation of the mind had been neglected, and all but lost, by reason of the interference of Aristotle and other insolent dictators, and Bacon imagined himself destined to rehabilitate it, to usher in a new era, to endow the human race, not with knowledge alone, but with legions of beneficent arts,{17} and for reward to go down to the ages as pre-eminently the Friend of man.{18} Compared with a vision so magnificent, his youthful dream of a poet’s immortality would seem paltry, stale, and unprofitable. No wonder the old love, poetry, was forsaken. The wonder would have been if for the sake of the old love he had done or permitted or countenanced anything which he thought might possibly prejudice posterity against the new love, his “darling philosophy.”{19}

The more vulnerable points of this tentative theory{20} of Bacon’s relation to poetry seem to be three. First, Bacon’s final perseverence in ignoring his hypothetical offspring. Second, his _Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse_ which, according to Dr. Abbott, “so clearly betrays the cramping influence of rhyme and verse, that it could hardly have been the work of a true poet even of a low order.” Third, the detailed treatment of poetry in the _Advancement of Learning_ is essentially and flagrantly defective. Objection number one--Bacon’s persistent neglect of the plays--is easily answered.{21} The reasons for continuing to ignore them may in the aggregate have been even more cogent at the close, than at the opening of his career. For a Lord Chancellor, one who had been a “principal councillor and instrument of monarchy,” to publish not verses merely, but common plays, would have been a disgrace to the peerage, and ingratitude, if not disloyalty, to the sovereign to whom he owed his many promotions. Amongst the reasons for concealment, which did not exist at the opening of life, two more may be mentioned: one, the publication of the _Sonnets_, has been sufficiently discussed; the other, solicitude for the _Great Instauration_, has not. In casting about for an explanation of his frigid reception by contemporary science, Bacon must have hit upon a suspicion, shared maybe by King James,{22} that his true greatness after all lay rather in the domain of poetry than in that of philosophy.{23} Disappointed in his contemporaries, he would turn to the ages unborn, resolved that they at any rate should not start with a bias against his message. Any suggestion therefore, that he should allow his true name to be put to a volume of poetry, so distinguished from versified theology, would be unconditionally rejected.

To the objection founded on the _Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse_ several answers suggest themselves. No artist is always at his best, least of all in illness and old age, and the _Translation_ belongs to 1624 when Bacon was recovering from an attack of a painful disease. In the delightful preface to his select edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, Matthew Arnold writes: “Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him (Wordsworth) with evident unconsciousness of its defects and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.” Yet no competent judge of poetry would think of denying that Wordsworth was a “true poet” of a “high order.”[43] Again, conventional feeling may have been partly responsible for the dullness of this _Translation_. Dr. Abbott surely underrates the consequence of his admission that “theological verse like theological sculpture might seem to require something of the archaic, and a close adherence to the simplicity of the original prose.” Grant that Bacon was under the influence of some such feeling, and the objection we are considering is virtually answered, such was “Bacon’s versatility in adapting language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose.” Once more, the evidence that Bacon was a “concealed poet” is strong enough to hold its own against every argument that can fairly be urged against it, and to concealment dissimulation is apt to prove indispensable. It was so considered by Bacon, and Bacon’s experience of the device was extensive, if not unique. In a famous Essay he carefully distinguishes between Simulation and Dissimulation, and lets it be seen that he regarded the former as positively culpable, the latter as not only permissible but necessary.{24} A man dissimulates when he “lets fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is.... He that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage.... They will so beset a man with questions and draw him on and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence he must show inclination one way.... So that no man can be secret except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is as it were but the skirts or train of secrecy.” The application is obvious. Bacon’s _Translation of Certain Psalms_ is uninspired, lacks “choiceness of phrase ... the sweet falling of the clauses,” etc! Why? Possibly because the author “is letting fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is!” The fact that a thing so trivial as this _Translation_ should have been published, instead of being reserved for private circulation only--published too on the heels of the Shakespeare First Folio--lends additional probability to this explanation.{25}

Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for the essential inadequacy of the _Advancement of Learning_ in relation to poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In the _Advancement_, dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name, “dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilst lyric, elegiac, and several other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of the _Advancement_, however, the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, published some eighteen years after the _Advancement_, not only restores to “representative poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentions _elegias_, _odes_, _lyricos_, etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at the date of the _Advancement_, Bacon had still to learn what poetry essentially was, a defect which at the date of the _De Augmentis_ he had contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its absurdity, one has only to compare the _Advancement of Learning_ with the _Apologie for Poetry_ by the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with slight additions in 1596.{26} One of the many resemblances involved in the comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely. Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in the _Advancement_ than in the _Apologie_, inevitably, considering the scope of the _Advancement_, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In those days, however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an unusually large proportion of the same authors.{27} It may, therefore, be urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to the _Apologie for Poetrie_ geometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only constituents of the science of mathematics. The _Advancement of Learning_ appears to take the same view. (b) According to the _Apologie_ “knowledge of a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is “well doing and not well knowing only.” The _Advancement_ holds “the end and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to “active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to the _Apologie_ “metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. The _Advancement_ defines “metaphysic”--which includes mathematics--as the science of “that which is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) The _Apologie_ censures philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and “school art.” In the _Advancement_, Bacon condemns “the over early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into acts and methods.” It is a theme on which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, the _Novum Organum_, a congeries of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against premature systematisation. (e) The _Apologie_ contrasts the necessary limitations of other artists{28} with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is.” The _Advancement_, in a charming passage, instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) The _Apologie_ holds “that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” The _Advancement_ affirms that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of the _Apologie_ venerated learning--“the noble name of learning,” he calls it--as if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of the _Advancement_, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent identical, for the first book of the _Advancement_ was a vindication of the dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of “learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of the _Advancement_ that reading it one seems to be continually in touch with Sidney--assuming him to have been author of the _Apologie_. The effect in my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate--though that is quite possible--but that Bacon when writing the _Advancement_ was thoroughly familiar with the _Apologie_.

It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of the _Advancement_, to whatever cause they may have been due--and honest dissimulation is the most likely cause--were not due to ignorance of poetry. Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.

“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to find with the criticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even occurred to me.

For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to that fullness of joy which according to M. Poincaré (Le Science et l’Hypothèse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.

NOTES TO SHAKESPEARE--A THEORY

1: Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is to be understood in its modern sense.

2: From Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetrie_ (of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the secret of some “_Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan_, and who are better content to suppress the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in his _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without their names to it.” The _Arte of English Poesie_ was dedicated to Bacon’s uncle and _quasi_ guardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice: “Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their youth.”

3: From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two--without prejudice to the question whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form “Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or “Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.]

4: Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and elsewhere--agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays--negatives a mechanical explanation.

5: In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’s _Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex_. 1604.)

6: Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of the _Sonnets_. Even so they would be serious _impedimenta_ to a Solicitor-General on his way to the Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.

7: It is obviously borrowed, _mutatis mutandis_, from Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. “Deeper than did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’s _Medea_, but it seems to me from Act III, Sc. 3, of _The Tempest_ itself. Golding’s English version of the _Metamorphoses_ may well have been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.

8: _Advancement of Learning._ “Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”

9: The _idée mère_ of the _Sapientia Veterum_--allegorisation--is one which I think no notable man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it to _Orlando Furioso_ (1591), is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the fashion.

10: Poetry for example!

11: The second book of the _Advancement_--where “rational knowledges” or “arts intellectual” are being discussed--promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into two parts; whereof the one I term _experientia literata_, and the other _interpretatio naturæ_, the former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of conjecture. Possibly _Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella_, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former, _experientia literata_, we may learn from the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, the authorised Latin version of the _Advancement of Learning_, quite as much as any of us need wish to know.

It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, the _Advancement of Learning_ contains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work--_prudentia activa_--digested into aphorisms.

12: The nebulous _Temporis Partus Maximus_, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s “apparently unacknowledged” _Conference of Pleasure_, 1592, and _Gesta Graiorum_, 1594, though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.

13: According to Professor Fowler (_Francis Bacon_, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (_Francis Bacon_, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed experimental science under any obligation at all.

14: No student I suppose would willingly be without the volume here quoted, “_Francis Bacon_”, by Edwin A. Abbott.

15: Rawley’s dedication, 1627, of the _Natural History_ to Charles the First.

16: _Advancement of Learning._ Book I.

17: The art of prolonging life was, he thought, one of the most desirable.

18: He “bequeathed” his soul and body to God. “For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”

19: Rawley in the dedication of 1627 uses this expression as if it were Bacon’s rather than his own.

20: I am not aware that in its integrity it is shared by anyone.

21: More easily by far than Mr. Shakespeare’s neglect of his supposed poetical issue more especially after his retirement to Stratford. What was there, what would there be in the Stratford of those days with its Quineys, Harts, Sadlers, Walkers, and the rest, to interest a spirit so finely touched as Shakespeare’s? But this is too large a question to be discussed here.

22: James I is reported to have said of the _Novum Organum_: “It is like the peace of God which passeth all understanding.”

23: Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge--history with memory for its organ, poetry with imagination, and philosophy with reason--is well known. When he made this division the poetic use of the imagination was one which few may have known better than he. That he was equally well acquainted with the scientific use of the imagination is highly improbable.

24: Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest dissimulation.”

25: Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting something less than admiration of his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of the _Sapientia Veterum_, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.” His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother tongue.

26: It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to his _Apologie for Poetry_ (along with the _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’s _Apologie_--_odi profanum vulgus et arceo_--touches the motto to Shakespeare’s _Venus and Adonis_; that _King Lear_ touches the _Arcadia_; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.]

27: It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in both _Advancement_ and _Apologie_, that the _Apologie_ endorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one day.” Another of the _Apologie’s_ references to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason,” gives one to think. The _Advancement_ disapproves, it may be added, of tying modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances.”

28: Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered as _arts_, whilst poetry ranks as a _science_.

BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE[44]

_Another exasperating lucubration on the Shakespeare problem! We have the Plays themselves. Why disturb a venerable belief by hypotheses incapable of proof, and neither venerable nor even respectable?_ To answer offhand--Curiosity about the _How_ of remarkable events is not likely to die out so long as intelligent beings continue to exist: Without the aid of hypotheses, science were impossible: Astronomers would still be expounding the once venerated doctrine of a stable Earth and a revolving Sun, a doctrine daily corroborated by the testimony of our eyes. Moreover, the “venerable belief” that Shakspere and Shakespeare were one and the same is mainly founded on the hypothesis that Ben Jonson’s famous Ode to Shakespeare (1623) is all to be taken at face-value. Praise--splendid praise--is unquestionably its dominant constituent; but other ingredients--enigma, jest, _make-believe_--are commingled with the praise.

The exordium of this Ode consists of sixteen laborious lines:

To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy Booke and Fame;
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho’s right;
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise,
And thinke to ruine, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous Baud, or whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed
Above th’ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore, will begin, etc.

This emphatic disclaimer of any intention to draw envy, ill-will, discredit, on the august name Shakespeare, had a deep meaning, or Jonson would not have given it such prominence. It reads as if addressed to a living person, and the subsequent apostrophe, “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,” chimes with this suggestion. The root difficulty of the passage lies in the obviously genuine conviction of the author that Shakespeare was in danger of being hurt by praise, noble, sincere and universally allowed to be just. As for the assertion that Shakespeare was “indeed above” the reach of harm, it is only pretence. Having dispatched this tiresome business, the eulogist lets himself go:

I therefore will begin, Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome,
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe.

* * * * *

And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy buskin tread,
And shake a Stage; Or, when thy Sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warme
Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme.
Nature herselfe was proud of his designes,
And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines.

... Looke how the fathers face
Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which, he seems to shake a Lance,
As brandish’t at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James.
But stay. I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there.
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or Influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which since thy flight fro’ hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despaires day, but by thy Volumes Light.”

Passing by the half serious “Thou art a Moniment without a tombe”, we are pulled up by the line: “And though thou hadst small Latine,” etc. The internal evidence of his poems and plays proves that Shakespeare must have had a regular education, as distinguished from mere smatterings picked up in a village school of the sixteenth century. As to Latin in particular, the etymological intelligence shown in the handling of words derived from that language is almost conclusive. The evidence of contemporaries tells the same tale. “W.C.,” for instance, in _Polimanteia_ (c. 1595) intimates that Shakespeare was a “schollar,” and a member of one of our “Universities.”[45] But there is no need to labour the point of Shakespeare’s culture. Indeed the innuendo of “small Latin” as applied to Shakespeare is sufficiently refuted by other passages in the Ode itself. “All scenes of Europe,” classico-historical as well as modern, owe him “homage.” He was another “Apollo”; each of his “well turned and true-filed lines” was sufficient to enlighten “ignorance.” What then are we to make of a jibe, apparently levelled at Shakespeare, that he was a quite unlettered rustic? Some years after the date of the Ode, and in order, as he says, to justify his “owne candor,” Jonson told “posterity” (as we shall see) that Shakespeare wrote with a “facility” so unbridled that he often blundered.[46] But even then, though his mood in the interval had veered right round from eulogist to candid critic, Jonson dropped no hint that Shakespeare lacked Latin or Greek. The jibe therefore, did not fit Shakespeare, but must have been made to the measure of some one else.

To continue our examination of the Ode. What can Jonson have meant by interspersing it with trashy jests upon the two syllables of the name (no longer august) Shakespeare? “Shake a stage”; “shake a lance, as brandished at the eyes of ignorance.” Was there something irresistibly funny about the name? Again, what sort of ignorance was threatened by the beauty and finish of Shakespeare’s lines? The ignorance of persons who for Shakespeare mistook a man untinctured with literature? The “Sweet Swan of Avon” apostrophe suggests comparison with what, in his _Masque of Owles_ (1626), Jonson wrote about “Warwick Muses.” These charming creatures are there represented as inspired, not by “Pegasus,” but by a “Hoby-horse.”[47] Was this sarcasm reminiscent of the well-known lines which an Oxford graduate informs us were “ordered” by the Stratford man “to be cut upon his tombstone”? Certainly Pegasus was innocent of them. Here they are:

Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

To return to the Ode. The lines which follow the “Sweet Swan” apostrophe are deserving of notice, chiefly because they tell us that King James (as well as Queen Elizabeth) was under the spell of Shakespeare. Then comes the ejaculation: “But stay! I see thee in the hemisphere advanced, and made a constellation there.” Is it possible that Jonson expected his readers--such of them as were not in the secret--to follow him here? To behold Shakespeare, _à_ la Berenice’s hair, translated into the constellation Cygnus? Not he; that were an order too large for credulity itself to honour. What Jonson had in his mind’s eye was not the starry heaven, but the British House of Peers.[48] Such is this famous Ode. It suffers from manœuvres, the object of which had to be kept dark; and this I take to be the reason for its exclusion from the second volume (1640) of Jonson’s Works, where it would have been quite at home amongst the Odes, Sonnets, Elegies and so forth, which go to make up that volume.

Turn we now to Jonson’s _Timber_ or _Discoveries_, a work written years after the Ode and not printed till 1641, some three or four years after his death. These _Discoveries_ consist in the main of passages lifted from Latin writers, notably Seneca the father (_Controversiæ_), and entered promiscuously in Jonson’s Commonplace books. The borrowings are often mutilated and always treated without ceremony. For our purpose it is the application, not the accuracy of translation that matters. In quoting from them I shall give italics and capital letters as they appear in the slovenly print (1641), of which I have several copies, one of which by the way is inscribed “J. P. Collier” on the title page. A _Discovery_ concerning Poets, runs thus:

Nothing in our Age, I have observed, is more preposterous, than the
_running Judgments_ upon _Poetry_ and _Poets_; when we shall heare
those things ... cried up for the best writings, which a man would
scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never
light his _Tobacco_ with them.... There are never wanting, that
dare preferre the worst ... _Poets_:.... Nay, if it were put to the
question of the Water-rimers workes, against Spencer’s, I doubt not
but they [the Water-rimers’] would find more suffrages.

The next _Discovery_ is more to my purpose:

_Poetry_ in this latter Age, hath prov’d but a meane _Mistresse_ to
such as have wholly addicted themselves to her; or given their
names up to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by,
and now and then tendred their visits, shee hath done much for, and
advanced in the way of their owne professions (both the _Law_ and
the _Gospel_) beyond all they could have hoped or done for
themselves without her favour.

From this the reader will gather that under “Eliza and our James,” lawyer-poets who masked their poems--“in a players hide,” perhaps--were likely candidates for legal honours.

* * * * *

The next _Discovery_ but one runs thus:

_De Shakespeare nostrat._ I remember the players have often
mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in all his writing
(whatever he penned) hee never blotted out a line. My answer hath
beene, would he had blotted a thousand.... I had not told posterity
this, but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to
commend their friend by wherein he most faulted. And to justifie
mine owne candor, for I lov’d the man and doe honour his memory (on
this side idolatry) as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an
open and free nature; had excellent phantasie; brave notions and
gentle expressions; wherein he flow’d with that facility that
sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d.... His wit was in
his owne power, would the rule of it had beene so too.... But he
redeemed his vices with his vertues.

Another _Discovery_ (p. 99)[49] censures “all the Essayists, even their Master _Montaigne_.” The slur suggested by this censure upon Bacon is significant. We were wont to believe that Bacon’s fame as a master of English rested securely on his _Essays_, and perhaps among his _acknowledged_ works no better foundation is discoverable. Jonson’s estimate (to be quoted presently) of Bacon’s achievement “in our tongue,” is at least as high as ours. Yet Jonson does not appreciate Bacon’s _Essays_. The dilemma seems to be this: either Jonson was writing at random, or he knew of unacknowledged Baconian work which he was not free to disclose.

Another _Discovery_ treats _De claris Oratoribus_, and among them of _Dominus Verulamius_[50] in these words:

There hapn’d in my time one noble _Speaker_, who was full of
gravity in his speaking. His language (where hee could spare or
passe by a jest) was nobly _censorious_.... No member of his speech
but consisted of his owne graces. His hearers could not cough, or
looke aside from him, without losse.... No man had their affections
more in his power. The feare of every man that heard him was lest
hee should make an end.

On the next page after an appreciative notice of the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, which was published almost simultaneously with the Shakespeare Ode, Jonson over-praises and misreads the _Novum Organum_ in these words:

Which though by most of superficiall men, who cannot get beyond the
Title of _Nominals_, it is not penetrated, nor understood; it
really openeth all defects of Learning whatsoever and is a Booke;
_Qui longum noto scriptori porriget ævum_.

My object in giving these two quotations is only to show that there is nothing in them to lead up to the arresting praise of Bacon expressed in my next quotation, which comes after a list of English writers or wits, the elder _Wiat_, the _Earl of Surrey_, Sir _Philip Sidney_ (a “great Master of wit,”) _Lord Egerton_, the Chancellor, and runs thus:

But his [the _his_ refers to L. C. Egerton] learned and able,
though unfortunate _Successor_, is he, who hath fill’d up all
numbers, and perform’d that in our tongue, which may be compar’d,
or preferr’d, either to insolent _Greece_, or haughty _Rome_. In
short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits
borne, that could honour a language, or help study. Now things
daily fall; wits grow downe-ward, and _Eloquence_ growes back-ward:
So that hee may be nam’d, and stand as the _marke_ and _akme_ of
our language.[51]

In order to appreciate this passage, the reader should grasp (1) that Jonson’s mind at the time was full of memories of Bacon; (2) that in a subsequent Discovery--_De Poetica_--he distinguishes _Poetry_ from oratory as “the most prevailing,” “most exalted” “Eloquence,” and describes the Poet’s “skill or Craft of making” as the “Queene of Arts”; (3) that Jonson, proud of his own _métier_ as poet, would never have allowed, still less asserted, that Bacon had “filled up all numbers,” had he not known that Bacon was a great poet. Where is this wonderful poetry to be found? The answer is ready to hand. The famous writer who, according to the _Discovery_, had “perform’d that in our tongue” which neither Greece nor Rome could surpass, is the very man who, according to the Ode, had achieved that in _English_ which defied “comparison” with “all” that Greece or Rome, or the civilisations that succeeded Greece and Rome, had given to the World. Bacon is that Man, and Shakespeare was his pen-name.

This hypothesis--that Shakespeare was the pen-name of Bacon--will pilot us through our difficulties. The disclaimer (in the Ode) for example, of any intention to injure the august name need puzzle us no longer. Bacon’s reputation was imperilled by publication of the great Book; for if the Public once got wind that he had trafficked with “common players” his name, already smirched by the verdict of the House of Peers, would have been irreparably damaged. A passage from an anonymous Essay of mine (_Bacon-Shakespeare_; projected 1884-5: published 1899), may be tolerated here. The Essay, after having suggested that Greene’s allusion to Shakespeare as having a “tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide” pointed to concealment behind an actor, proceeds:

John Davies ... characterises poetry (contemporaneous) as “a worke
of darkness,” in the sense of a secret work, not in disparagement:
Davies loved poetry and poets too well for that. The anonymous
author of _Wit’s Recreations_, in a kindly epigram “To Mr. William
Shake-speare,” says: “Shake-speare we must be silent in thy praise,
cause our encomions will but blast thy bayes.” ... Edward Bolton in
the ... sketch (or draft) of his _Hypercritica_, ... after having
mentioned “Shakespeare, Beaumont, and other writers for the stage”
thinks it necessary to remind himself that their names required to
be “tenderly used in this argument.” (accordingly) He ... excluded
the name of Shakespeare ... from the published version of his
_Hypercritica_.

To return again to the Ode. Its jests about shaking a stage (compare Greene’s “Shakescene”), shaking a lance, and its ecstatic vision of Shakespeare enthroned among the stars were no doubt intended to amuse the two Earls, and other patrons of the famous Folio.

As for the sweeping accusation in the _Timber_ or _Discoveries_, that Poetry had been a mean Mistress to openly professed as distinguished from furtive or concealed poets, it would have been unpardonable had the Stratford man been a poet; for William Shakspere, Esq., of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, spent his last years in the odour of prosperity.

Other testimony, quite independent of Jonson’s, to the existence of an intimate relation between Bacon and the Muses, Apollo, Helicon, Parnassus, is abundant enough. Here are a few samples: Thomas Randolph shortly after Bacon’s death accuses Phœbus of being accessory to Bacon’s death, lest the God himself should be dethroned and Bacon be crowned king of the Muses.[52] George Herbert calls Bacon the colleague of Apollo. Thomas Campion, addressing Bacon says: “Whether ... the Law, or the Schools (in the sense of science or knowledge), or the sweet Muse allure thee,” etc. At a somewhat later date, Waller said that Bacon and Sidney were nightingales who sang only in the spring (the reference has escaped me, and memory may possibly deceive me).[53] Coming to comparatively recent times we find Shelley, an exceptional judge of poetry, was of opinion that Bacon “was a poet.” It may possibly be objected that Bacon’s versified Psalms (in English) are not poetical.[54] But these Psalms belong to about 1624, when Bacon--_ex hypothesi_--had turned his back on poetry for ever. What they prove, if they prove anything, is that Bacon was a literary Proteus who could take on any disguise that happened to suit his purpose, a faculty which no student of Bacon would ever think of disputing.

Inferences drawn from Bacon’s reticence or extracted from his works have yet to be weighed. In the nineties of the sixteenth century he can be shown to have devoted much time and thought to the writing and preparation of a species of dramatic entertainment known as _Devices_. Even after he became Lord Chancellor, he risked injuring his health rather than deny himself the pleasure of assisting at a dramatic performance given by Gray’s Inn. As a student of human nature, moreover, he had scarcely an equal (bar “Shakespeare.”) And yet he seems to have been ignorant of the existence of any such person as Shakespeare, although that name must have been bandied about and about in the London of his day, especially among members of the various Inns of Court, his own Gray’s in particular.

Neglecting Bacon’s poetical and interesting _Devices_, I confine my observations to the _Advancement of Learning_ (1605), which though not written in what Waller held to be the singing time of life, reveals (while trying to conceal) the true bent of his genius. The Work was expressly intended to embrace the totality of human knowledge then garnered. Yet with the air of one who had no misgivings about the propriety of his classification he divides his vast subject into three categories, three only, and one of these is _Poesie_. The other two are _History_ and _Philosophie_, the latter of which embraces “Natural Science,” divided into “Phisicke” and “Metaphisicke,” “Mathematicke” pure and mixt, anatomy, medicine, mental and moral science, and much besides. The work teems with poetical quotations, similies, allusions. Dealing with medicine the author gravely informs his readers that “the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body, and reduce it to harmony.” He cannot refrain from telling us that the pseudo-science of the alchemist was foretold and discredited by the fable of Ixion and the Cloud. With him, what we mean by endowment of research becomes provision for encouraging “experiments appertaining to Vulcan and Dædalus,” etc. No wonder the Harveys, Napiers, and other pioneers of 17th. century science did not join in that chorus of admiration for Bacon, which seems to have included all 17th century men of letters. Sir Henry Wotton (for example) will have it that Bacon had “done a great and ever living benefit to all the children of Nature; and to Nature herself in her uttermost extent ... who never before had so noble nor so true an interpreter, or so inward a secretary of her cabinet.” One can imagine the laughter with which Galileo would have greeted this preposterous assertion.

Out of sight of philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, etc., and in the presence of poetry, the author is in his element and speaks with authority. In handling the subject of mental culture--“Georgics of the mind” is his phrase--he takes for granted that poets (with whom he couples historians) are the best teachers of this science, for in them:

We may find painted forth, how affections are kindled and incited;
and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act
and further degree; how they disclose themselves; how they work;
how they vary; how they gather and fortify; how they are enwrapped
one within another; and how they do fight and encounter one with
another.

“Poesie,” he says elsewhere, is “for the most part restrained in measure of words,” but in “other points extreamely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination.” Its use, he goes on to say: