Chapter IX: Part 9

To explain this puzzle, some modern writers have denied that the ballad of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ is really old; they attribute it to the eighteenth century. The antiquary who launched this opinion was Scott’s not very loyal friend, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. According to him, a certain Miss Hambledon (no Christian name is given), being Maid of Honour to the Empress Catherine of Russia, had three children by an amour, and murdered all three. Peter the Great caused her to be, not hanged, but decapitated. Sharpe took his facts from ‘a German almanac,’ and says: ‘The Russian tragedy must be the original.’ The late Professor Child, from more authentic documents, dates Miss Hambledon’s or Hamilton’s execution on March 14, 1719. At that time, or nearly then, Charles Wogan was in Russia on a mission from the Chevalier de St. George (James III.), and through him the news might reach Scotland. Mr. Courthope, in his ‘History of English Poetry,’ followed Sharpe and Professor Child, and says: ‘It is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.’

The occurrence would not only be remarkable, but, as far as possibility goes in literature, would be impossible, for several reasons. One is that neither literary men nor mere garreteers and makers of street ballads appear, about 1719-1730, to have been capable of recapturing the simplicity and charm of the old ballad style, at its best, or anything near its best. There is no mistaking the literary touch in such ballads as Allan Ramsay handled, or in the imitation named ‘Hardyknute’ in Allan’s ‘Tea Table Miscellany,’ 1724. ‘It was the first poem I ever learned, the last I shall ever forget,’ said Scott, and, misled by boyish affection, he deemed it ‘just old enough,’ ‘a noble imitation.’* But the imitation can deceive nobody, and while literary imitators, as far as their efforts have reached us, were impotent to deceive, the popular Muse, of 1714-1730, was not attempting deception. Ballads of the eighteenth century were sarcastic, as in those on Sheriffmuir and in Skirving’s amusing ballad on Preston Pans, or were mere doggerel, or were brief songs to old tunes. They survive in print, whether in flying broadsides or in books, but, popular as is ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ in all its many variants (Child gives no less than eighteen), we do not know a single printed example before Scott’s made-up copy in the ‘Border Minstrelsy.’ The latest ballad really in the old popular manner known to me is that of ‘Rob Roy,’ namely, of Robin Oig and James More, sons of Rob Roy, and about their abduction of an heiress in 1752. This is a genuine popular poem, but in style and tone and versification it is wholly unlike ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ I scarcely hope that any one can produce, after 1680, a single popular piece which could be mistaken for a ballad of or near Queen Mary’s time.

*Lockhart, i. 114, x. 138.

The known person least unlike Mr. Courthope’s late ‘maker’ was ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie Leslie,’ ‘an old Aberdeenshire minstrel, the very last, probably, of the race,’ says Scott. Charlie died in 1782. He sang, and sold PRINTED ballads. ‘Why cannot you sing other songs than those rebellious ones?’ asked a Hanoverian Provost of Aberdeen. ‘Oh ay, but--THEY WINNA BUY THEM!’ said Charlie. ‘Where do you buy them?’ ‘Why, faur I get them cheapest.’ He carried his ballads in ‘a large harden bag, hung over his shoulder.’ Charlie had tholed prison for Prince Charles, and had seen Provost Morison drink the Prince’s health in wine and proclaim him Regent at the Cross of Aberdeen. If Charlie (who lived to be a hundred and two) composed the song, ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie’ [‘this sang Charlie made hissel’), then this maker could never have produced ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ nor could any maker like him. His ballads were printed, as any successful ballad of 1719 would probably have been, in broadsides.* Against Mr. Child and Mr. Courthope, then, we argue that, after 1600, a marked decadence of the old ballad style set in--that the old style (as far as is known) died soon after Bothwell Brig (1679), in the execrable ballads of both sides, such as ‘Philiphaugh,’ and that it soon was not only dead as a form in practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, about 1719-1730, compose ‘The Queen’s Marie’ in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed; but we ask for proof that new ballads were still composed in the ancient fashion.

*See, for example, Mr. Macquoid’s Jacobite Songs and Ballads, pp.
424, 510, with a picture of Charlie.

Secondly, WHY, and how tempted, would a popular poet of 1719 transfer a modern tragedy of Russia to the year 1563, or thereabouts? His public would naturally desire a ballad gazette of the mournful new tale, concerning a lass of Scottish extraction, betrayed, tortured, beheaded, at the far-off court of a Muscovite tyrant. The facts ‘palpitated with actuality,’ and, since Homer’s day, ‘men desire’ (as Homer says) ‘the new songs’ on the new events. What was gained by going back to Queen Mary? Would a popular ‘Musselmou’d Charlie’ even know, by 1719, the names of the Queen’s Maries? Mr. Courthope admits that ‘he may have been helped by some ballad,’ one of those spoken of, as we shall see, by Knox. If that ballad told the existing Marian story, what did the ‘maker’ add? If it did NOT, what did he borrow? No more than the names could he borrow, and no more than the name ‘Hamilton’ from the Russian tragedy could he add. One other thing he might be said to add, the verses in which Mary asks ‘the jolly sailors’ not to

‘Let on to my father and mother
But that I’m coming hame.’

This passage, according to Mr. Courthope, ‘was suggested partly by the fact of a Scotswoman being executed in Russia.’ C. K. Sharpe also says: ‘If Marie Hamilton was executed in Scotland, it is not likely’ (why not?) ‘that her relations resided beyond seas.’ They MAY have been in France, like many another Hamilton! Mr. Child says: ‘The appeal to the sailors shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land--not that of her ancestors.’ Yet the ballad makes her die in or near the Canongate! Moreover, the family of the Mary Hamilton of 1719 had been settled in Russia for generations, and were reckoned of the Russian noblesse. The verses, therefore, on either theory, are probably out of place, and are perhaps an interpolation suggested to some reciter (they only occur in some of the many versions) by a passage in ‘The Twa Brithers.’*

*Child, i. 439.

We now reach the most important argument for the antiquity of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ Mr. Courthope has theoretically introduced as existing in, or after, 1719, ‘makers’ who could imitate to deception the old ballad style. Now Maidment remarks that ‘this ballad was popular in Galloway, Selkirkshire, Lanarkshire, and Aberdeen, AND THE VERY STRIKING DISCREPANCIES GO FAR TO REMOVE EVERY SUSPICION OF FABRICATION.’ Chambers uses (1829) against Sharpe the same argument of ‘universal diffusion in Scotland.’ Neither Mr. Child nor Mr. Courthope draws the obvious inferences from the extraordinary discrepancies in the eighteen variants. Such essential discrepancies surely speak of a long period of oral recitation by men or women accustomed to interpolate, alter, and add, in the true old ballad manner. Did such rhapsodists exist after 1719? Old Charlie, for one, did not sing or sell the old ballads. Again, if the ballad (as it probably would be in 1719) was PRINTED, or even if it was not, could the variations have been evolved between 1719 and 1802?

These variations are numerous, striking, and fundamental. In many variants even the name of the heroine does not tally with that of the Russian maid of honour. That most important and telling coincidence wholly disappears. In a version of Motherwell’s, from Dumbartonshire, the heroine is Mary Myle. In a version known to Scott [‘Minstrelsy,’ 1810, iii. 89, note), the name is Mary Miles. Mr. Child also finds Mary Mild, Mary Moil, and Lady Maisry. This Maisry is daughter of the Duke of York! Now, the Duke of York whom alone the Scottish people knew was James Stuart, later James II. Once more the heroine is daughter of the Duke of Argyll, therefore a Campbell. Or she is without patronymic, and is daughter of a lord or knight of the North, or South, or East, and one of her sisters is a barber’s wife, and her father lives in England!--(Motherwell.) She, at least, might invoke ‘Ye mariners, mariners, mariners!’ (as in Scott’s first fragment) not to carry her story. Now we ask whether, after the ringing tragedy of Miss Hamilton in Russia, in the year of grace 1719, contemporaries who heard the woeful tale could, between 1719 and 1820, call the heroine--(1) Hamilton; (2) Mild, Moil, Myle, Miles; (3) make her a daughter of the Duke of York, or of the Duke of Argyll, or of lords and of knights from all quarters of the compass, and sister-in-law to an English barber, also one of the Queen’s ‘serving-maids.’ We at least cannot accept those numerous and glittering contradictions as corruptions which could be made soon after the Russian events, when the true old ballad style was dead.

We now produce more startling variations. The lover is not only ‘the King,’ ‘the Prince,’ Darnley, ‘the highest Stuart o’ a’,’ but he is also that old offender, ‘Sweet Willie,’ or he is Warrenston (Warriston?). Mary is certainly not hanged (the Russian woman was beheaded) away from her home; she dies in Edinburgh, near the Tolbooth, the Netherbow, the Canongate, and--

O what will my three brothers say
When they COME HAME frae sea,
When they see three locks o’ my yellow hair
Hinging under a gallows tree?

It is impossible here to give all the variations. Mary pulls, or does not pull, or her lover pulls, the leaf of the Abbey, or ‘savin,’ or other tree; the Queen is ‘auld,’ or not ‘auld;’ she kicks in Mary’s door and bursts the bolts, or does nothing so athletic and inconsistent with her advanced age. The heroine does, or does not, appeal vainly to her father. Her dress is of all varieties. She does, or does not, go to the Tolbooth and other places. She is, or is not, allured to Edinburgh, ‘a wedding for to see.’ Her infanticide is variously described, or its details are omitted, and the dead body of the child is found in various places, or not found at all. Though drowned in the sea, it is between the bolster and the wall, or under the blankets! She expects, or does not expect, to be avenged by her kin. The king is now angry, now clement--inviting Mary to dinner! Mary is hanged, or (Buchan’s MS.) is not hanged, but is ransomed by Warrenston, probably Johnston of Warriston! These are a few specimens of variations in point of fact: in language the variations are practically countless. How could they arise, if the ballad is later than 1719?

We now condescend to appeal to statistics. We have examined the number of variants published by Mr. Child in his first six volumes, on ballads which have, or may have, an historical basis. Of course, the older and more popular the ballads, the more variants do we expect to discover--time and taste producing frequent changes. Well, of ‘Otterburn’ Mr. Child has five versions; of the ‘Hunting of the Cheviot’ he has two, with minor modifications indicated by letters from the ‘lower case.’ Of ‘Gude Wallace’ he has eight. Of ‘Johnnie Armstrong’ he has three. Of ‘Kinmont Willie’ he has one. Of ‘The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray’ he has two. Of ‘Johnnie Cock’ he has thirteen. Of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ he has eighteen. And of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ (counting Burns’s solitary verse and other brief fragments) Mr. Child has eighteen versions or variants

Thus a ballad made, ex hypothesi Sharpiana, in or after 1719, has been as much altered in oral tradition as the most popular and perhaps the oldest historical ballad of all, ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and much more than any other of the confessedly ancient semi-historical popular poems. The historical event which may have suggested ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is ‘plausibly,’ says Mr. Child, fixed in 1281: it is the marriage of Margaret of Scotland to Eric, King of Norway. Others suggest so late a date as the wooing of Anne of Denmark by James VI. Nothing is known. No wonder, then, that in time an orally preserved ballad grows rich in variants. But that a ballad of 1719 should, in eighty modern non-balladising years, become as rich in extant variants, and far more discrepant in their details, as ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is a circumstance for which we invite explanation.

Will men say, ‘The later the ballad, the more it is altered in oral tradition’? If so, let them, by all means, produce examples! We should, on this theory, have about a dozen ‘Battles of Philiphaugh,’ and at least fifteen ‘Bothwell Brigs,’ a poem, by the way, much in the old manner, prosaically applied, and so recent that, in art at least, it was produced after the death of the Duke of Monmouth, slain, it avers, by the machinations of Claverhouse! Of course we are not asking for exact proportions, since many variants of ballads may be lost, but merely for proof that, the later a ballad is, the more variants of it occur. But this contention is probably impossible, and the numerous variations in ‘The Queen’s Marie’ are really a proof of long existence in oral tradition, and contradict the theory espoused by Mr. Child, who later saw the difficulty involved in his hypothesis.

This argument, though statistical, is, we think, conclusive, and the other considerations which we have produced in favour of the antiquity of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ add their cumulative weight.

We have been, in brief, invited to suppose that, about 1719, a Scot wrote a ballad on an event in contemporary Russian Court life; that (contrary to use and wont) he threw the story back a century and a half; that he was a master of an old style, in the practice of his age utterly obsolete and not successfully imitated; that his poem became universally popular, and underwent, in eighty years, even more vicissitudes than most other ballads encounter in three or five centuries. Meanwhile it is certain that there had been real ancient ballads, contemporary with the Marian events--ballads on the very Maries two or three of whom appear in the so-called poem of 1719; while exactly the same sort of scandal as the ballad records had actually occurred at Queen Mary’s Court in a lower social rank. The theory of Mr. Child is opposed to our whole knowledge of ballad literature, of its age, decadence (about 1620-1700), and decease (in the old kind) as a popular art.

To agree with Mr. Child, we must not only accept one great ballad-poet, born at least fifty years too late; we must not only admit that such a poet would throw back his facts for a century and a half; but we must also conceive that the balladising humour, with its ancient methods, was even more vivacious in Scotland for many years after 1719 than, as far as we know, it had ever been before. Yet there is no other trace known to us of the existence of the old balladising humour and of the old art in all that period. We have no such ballad about the English captain shot by the writer’s pretty wife, none about the bewitched son of Lord Torphichen, none about the Old Chevalier, or Lochiel, or Prince Charlie: we have merely Shenstone’s ‘Jemmy Dawson’ and the Glasgow bellman’s rhymed history of Prince Charles. In fact, ‘Jemmy Dawson’ is a fair instantia contradictoria as far as a ballad by a man of letters is to the point. Such a ballad that age could indeed produce: it is not very like ‘The Queen’s Marie’! No, we cannot take refuge in ‘Townley’s Ghost’ and his address to the Butcher Cumberland:--

Imbrued in bliss, imbathed in case,
Though now thou seem’st to lie,
My injured form shall gall thy peace,
And make thee wish to die!

THAT is a ballad of the eighteenth century, and it is not in the manner of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’

These considerations, now so obvious to a student of the art of old popular poetry, if he thinks of the matter, could not occur to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He was a great collector of ballads, but not versed in, or interested in, their ‘aesthetic’--in the history and evolution of ballad-making. Mr. Child, on the other hand, was the Grimm or Kohler of popular English and Scottish poetry. Our objections to his theory could scarcely have been collected in such numbers, without the aid of his own assortment of eighteen versions or fragments, with more lectiones variae. But he has not allowed for the possible, the constantly occurring, chance of coincidence between fancy and fact; nor, perhaps, has he reflected on the changed condition of ballad poetry in the eighteenth century, on the popular love of a new song about a new event, and on the entire lack of evidence (as far as I am aware) for the existence of ballad-poets in the old manner during the reign of George I. The ballad-reading public of 1719 would have revelled in a fresh ballad of a Scottish lass, recently betrayed, tortured, and slain far away by a Russian tyrant. A fresh ballad on Queen Mary’s Court, done in the early obsolete manner, would, on the other hand, have had comparatively little charm for the ballad-buying lieges in 1719. The ballad-poet had thus in 1719 no temptation to be ‘archaistic,’ like Mr. Rossetti, and to sing of old times. He had, on the contrary, every inducement to indite a ‘rare new ballad’ on the last tragic scandal, with its poignant details, as of Peter kissing the dead girl’s head.

The hypothesis of Mr. Child could only be DEMONSTRATED incorrect by proving that there was no Russian scandal at all, or by producing a printed or manuscript copy of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ older than 1719. We can do neither of these things; we can only give the reader his choice of two improbabilities--(a) that an historical event, in 1718-19, chanced to coincide with the topic of an old ballad; (b) that, contrary to all we know of the evolution of ballads and the state of taste, a new popular poem on a fresh theme was composed in a style long disused,* was offered most successfully to the public of 1719, and in not much more than half a century was more subjected to alterations and interpolations than ballads which for two or three hundred years had run the gauntlet of oral tradition.

*A learned Scots antiquary writes to me: ‘The real ballad manner hardly came down to 1600. It was killed by the Francis Roos version of the Psalms, after which the Scottish folk of the Lowlands cast everything into that mould.’ I think, however, that ‘Bothwell Brig’ is a true survival of the ancient style, and there are other examples, as in the case of the ballad on Lady Warriston’s husband murder.

As for our own explanation of the resemblance between the affair of Miss Hamilton, in 1719, and the ballad story of Mary Hamilton (alias Mild, Myle, Moil, Campbell, Miles, or Stuart, or anonymous, or Lady Maisry), we simply, with Scott, regard it as ‘a very curious coincidence.’ On the other theory, on Mr. Child’s, it is also a curious coincidence that a waiting-woman of Mary Stuart WAS hanged (not beheaded) for child-murder, and that there WERE written, simultaneously, ballads on the Queen’s Maries. Much odder coincidences than either have often, and indisputably, occurred, and it is not for want of instances, but for lack of space, that we do not give examples.

Turning, now, to a genuine historic scandal of Queen Mary’s reign, we find that it might have given rise to the many varying forms of the ballad of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ There is, practically, no such ballad; that is, among the many variants, we cannot say which comes nearest to the ‘original’ lay of the frail maid and her doom. All the variants are full of historical impossibilities, due to the lapses of memory and the wandering fancy of reciters, altering and interpolating, through more than two centuries, an original of which nothing can now be known. The fancy, if not of the first ballad poet who dealt with a real tragic event, at least of his successors in many corners of Scotland, raised the actors and sufferers in a sad story, elevating a French waiting-maid to the rank of a Queen’s Marie, and her lover, a French apothecary, to the place of a queen’s consort, or, at lowest, of a Scottish laird.

At the time of the General Assembly which met on Christmas Day 1563, a French waiting-maid of Mary Stuart, ‘ane Frenche woman that servit in the Queenis chalmer,’ fell into sin ‘with the Queenis awin hipoticary.’ The father and mother slew the child, and were ‘dampned to be hangit upoun the publict streit of Edinburgh.’ No official report exists: ‘the records of the Court of Justiciary at this time are defective,’ says Maidment, and he conjectures that the accused may have been hanged without trial, ‘redhand.’ Now the Queen’s apothecary must have left traces in the royal account-books. No writer on the subject has mentioned them. I myself have had the Records of Privy Council and the MS. Treasurer’s Accounts examined, with their statement of the expenses of the royal household. The Rev. John Anderson was kind enough to undertake this task, though with less leisure than he could have desired. There is, unluckily, a gap of some months in 1563. In June 1560, Mr. Anderson finds mention of a ‘medicinar,’ ‘apoticarre,’ ‘apotigar,’ but no name is given, and the Queen was then in France. One Nicholas Wardlaw of the royal household was engaged, in 1562, to a Miss Seton of Parbroath, but it needed a special royal messenger to bring the swain to the altar. ‘Ane appotigar’ of 1562 is mentioned, but not named, and we hear of Robert Henderson, chirurgeon, who supplied powders and odours to embalm Huntley. There is no trace of the hanging of any ‘appotigar,’ or of any one of the Queen’s women, ‘the maidans,’ spoken of collectively. So far, the search for the apothecary has been a failure. More can be learned from Randolph’s letter to Cecil (December 31, 1563), here copied from the MS. in the Public Record Office. The austerity of Mary’s Court, under Mr. Knox, is amusingly revealed:--‘For newes yt maye please your honour to knowe that the Lord Treasurer of Scotlande for gettinge of a woman with chylde muste vpon Sondaye nexte do open penance before the whole congregation and mr knox mayke the sermonde. Thys my Lord of murraye wylled me to wryte vnto you for a note of our greate severitie in punyshynge of offenders. THE FRENCHE POTTICARIE AND THE WOMAN HE GOTTE WITH CHYLDE WERE BOTHE HANGED THYS PRESENT FRIDAYE. Thys hathe made myche sorrowe in our Courte. Maynie evle fortunes we have had by our Frenche fowlkes, and yet I feare we love them over well.’

After recording the condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about ‘shame hastening the marriage’ of Mary Livingstone. Dr. Robertson, in his ‘Inventories of Queen Mary,’ refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox’s own continence. Knox adds: ‘What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit.’ Unlucky omission, unfortunate ‘modestei’! From Randolph’s Letters it is known that Knox, at this date, was thundering against ‘danseris.’ Here, then, is a tale of the Queen’s French waiting-woman hanged for murder, and here is proof that there actually were ballads about the Queen’s Maries. These ladies, as we know from Keith, were, from the first, in the Queen’s childhood, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seatoun, Mary Beatoun, and Mary Fleming.

We have, then, a child-murder, by a woman of the Queen, we have ballads about her Maries, and, as Scott says, ‘the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition, the French waiting-woman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the Queen’s apothecary into Henry Darnley,’ who, as Mr. Child shows, was not even in Scotland in 1563. But gross perversion of contemporary facts does not prove a ballad to be late or apocryphal. Mr. Child even says that accuracy in a ballad would be very ‘suspicious.’ Thus, for example, we know, from contemporary evidence, that the murder of the Bonny Earl Murray, in 1592, by Huntley, was at once made the topic of ballads. Of these, Aytoun and Mr. Child print two widely different in details: in the first, Huntley has married Murray’s sister; in the second, Murray is the lover of the Queen of James VI. Both statements are picturesque; but the former is certainly, and the latter is probably, untrue. Again, ‘King James and Brown,’ in the Percy MS., is accepted as a genuine contemporary ballad of the youth of gentle King Jamie. James is herein made to say to his nobles,--

‘My grandfather you have slaine,
And my own mother you hanged on a tree.’

Even if we read ‘father’ (against the manuscript) this is absurd. James V. was not ‘slaine,’ neither Darnley nor Mary was ‘hanged on a tree.’ Ballads are always inaccurate; they do not report events, so much as throw into verse the popular impression of events, the magnified, distorted, dramatic rumours. That a ballad-writer should promote a Queen’s tirewoman into a Queen’s Marie, and substitute Darnley (where HE is the lover, which is not always) for the Queen’s apothecary, is a license quite in keeping with precedent. Mr. Child, obviously, would admit this. In producing a Marie who never existed, the ‘maker’ shows the same delicacy as Voltaire, when he brings into ‘Candide’ a Pope who never was born.

Finally, a fragment of a variant of the ballad among the Abbotsford MSS.* does mention an apothecary as the lover of the heroine, and, so far, is true to historical fact, whether the author was well informed, or merely, in the multitude of variations, deviated by chance into truth.

There can, on the whole, be no reasonable doubt that the ballad is on an event in Scotland of 1563, not of 1719, in Russia, and Mr. Child came to hold that this opinion was, at least, the more probable.**

*Child, vol. iv. p. 509.

**Ibid., vol. v. pp. 298, 299.

XII. THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON IMBROGLIO*

The hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon has now been before the world for more than forty years. It has been supported in hundreds of books and pamphlets, but, as a rule, it has been totally neglected by scholars. Perhaps their indifference may seem wise, for such an opinion may appear to need no confutation. ‘There are foolisher fellows than the Baconians,’ says a sage--‘those who argue against them.’ On the other hand, ignorance has often cherished beliefs which science has been obliged reluctantly to admit. The existence of meteorites, and the phenomena of hypnotism, were familiar to the ancient world, and to modern peasants, while philosophy disdained to investigate them. In fact, it is never really prudent to overlook a widely spread opinion. If we gain nothing else by examining its grounds, at least we learn something about the psychology of its advocates. In this case we can estimate the learning, the logic, and the general intellect of people who form themselves into Baconian Societies, to prove that the poems and plays of Shakespeare were written by Bacon. Thus a light is thrown on the nature and origin of popular delusions.

*(1) ‘Bacon and Shakespeare,’ by William Henry Smith (1857); (2) ‘The Authorship of Shakespeare,’ by Nathaniel Holmes (1875); (3) ‘The Great Cryptogram,’ by Ignatius Donnelly (1888); (4) ‘The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies of Francis Bacon,’ by Mrs. Henry Pott (1883); (5) ‘William Shakespeare,’ by Georg Brandes (1898); (6) ‘Shakespeare,’ by Sidney Lee (in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1897); (7) ‘Shakespeare Dethroned’ (in Pearson’s Magazine, December 1897); (8) ‘The Hidden Lives of Shakespeare and Bacon,’ by W. G. Thorpe, F.S.A. (1897). (9) ‘The Mystery of William Shakespeare,’ by Judge Webb (1902).

The Baconian creed, of course, is scouted equally by special students of Bacon, special students of Shakespeare, and by almost all persons who devote themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the ‘Variorum Shakespeare;’ by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare’s latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian hypothesis is that its devotees are nobly careless of authority. We do not dream of converting them, but it may be amusing to examine the kind of logic and the sort of erudition which go to support an hypothesis not freely welcomed even in Germany.

The mother of the Baconian theory (though others had touched a guess at it) was undeniably Miss Delia Bacon, born at Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1811. Miss Bacon used to lecture on Roman history, illustrating her theme by recitations from Macaulay’s ‘Lays.’ ‘Her very heart was lacerated,’ says Mr. Donnelly, ‘and her womanly pride wounded, by a creature in the shape of a man--a Reverend (!) Alexander MacWhorter.’ This Celtic divine was twenty-five, Miss Bacon was thirty-five; there arose a misunderstanding; but Miss Bacon had developed her Baconian theory before she knew Mr. MacWhorter. ‘She became a monomaniac on the subject,’ writes Mr. Wyman, and ‘after the publication and non-success of her book she lost her reason WHOLLY AND ENTIRELY.’ But great wits jump, and, just as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace simultaneously evolved the idea of Natural Selection, so, unconscious of Miss Delia, Mr. William Henry Smith developed the Baconian verity.

From the days of Mr. William Henry Smith, in 1856, the great Baconian argument has been that Shakespeare could not conceivably have had the vast learning, classical, scientific, legal, medical, and so forth, of the author of the plays. Bacon, on the other hand, and nobody else, had this learning, and had, though he concealed them, the poetic powers of the unknown author. Therefore, prima facie, Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Mr. Smith, as we said, had been partly anticipated, here, by the unlucky Miss Delia Bacon, to whose vast and wandering book Mr. Hawthorne wrote a preface. Mr. Hawthorne accused Mr. Smith of plagiarism from Miss Delia Bacon; Mr. Smith replied that, when he wrote his first essay (1856), he had never even heard the lady’s name. Mr. Hawthorne expressed his regret, and withdrew his imputation. Mr. Smith is the second founder of Baconomania.

Like his followers, down to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke, and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in ‘The Spiritualist,’ and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested, first, on Shakespeare’s lack of education, and on the wide learning of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore, to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek. Here Mr. John Churton Collins suggests that Ben meant no more than that Shakespeare was not, in the strict sense, a scholar. Yet he might read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, with ease and pleasure, and might pick out the sense of Greek books by the aid of Latin translations. To this view we return later.

Meanwhile we shall compare the assertions of the laborious Mr. Holmes, the American author of ‘The Authorship of Shakespeare’ (third edition, 1875), and of the ingenious Mr. Donnelly, the American author of ‘The Great Cryptogram.’ Both, alas! derive in part from the ignorance of Pope. Pope had said: ‘Shakespeare follows the Greek authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius.’ Mr. Smith cites this nonsense; so do Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Holmes. Now the so-called Dares Phrygius is not a Greek author. No Greek version of his early mediaeval romance, ‘De Bello Trojano,’ exists. The matter of the book found its way into Chaucer, Boccaccio, Lydgate, Guido de Colonna, and other authors accessible to one who had no Greek at all, while no Greek version of Dares was accessible to anybody.* Some recent authors, English and American, have gone on, with the credulity of ‘the less than half educated,’ taking a Greek Dares for granted, on the authority of Pope, whose Greek was ‘small.’ They have clearly never looked at a copy of Dares, never known that the story attributed to Dares was familiar, in English and French, to everybody. Mr. Holmes quotes Pope, Mr. Donnelly quotes Mr. Holmes, for this Greek Dares Phrygius. Probably Shakespeare had Latin enough to read the pseudo-Dares, but probably he did not take the trouble.

*See Brandes, William Shakespeare, ii. 198-202.

This example alone proves that men who are not scholars venture to pronounce on Shakespeare’s scholarship, and that men who take absurd statements at second hand dare to constitute themselves judges of a question of evidence and of erudition.

The worthy Mr. Donnelly then quotes Mr. Holmes for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Greek drama. Turning to Mr. Holmes (who takes his motto, if you please, from Parmenides), we find that the author of ‘Richard II.’ borrowed from a Greek play by Euripides, called ‘Hellene,’ as did the author of the sonnets. There is, we need not say, no Greek play of the name of ‘Hellene.’ As Mr. Holmes may conceivably mean the ‘Helena’ of Euripides, we compare Sonnet cxxi. with ‘Helena,’ line 270. The parallel, the imitation of Euripides, appears to be--

By their dark thoughts my deeds must not be shown,

with--

Prooton men ouk ons adikoz eimi duskleez,

which means, ‘I have lost my reputation though I have done no harm.’ Shakespeare, then, could not complain of calumny without borrowing from ‘Hellene,’ a name which only exists in the fancy of Mr. Nathaniel Holmes. This critic assigns ‘Richard II.,’ act ii., scene 1, to ‘Hellene’ 512-514. We can find no resemblance whatever between the three Greek lines cited, from the ‘Helena,’ and the scene in Shakespeare. Mr. Holmes appears to have reposed on Malone, and Malone may have remarked on fugitive resemblances, such as inevitably occur by coincidence of thought. Thus the similarity of the situations of Hamlet and of Orestes in the ‘Eumenides’ is given by similarity of legend, Danish and Greek. Authors of genius, Greek or English, must come across analogous ideas in treating analogous topics. It does not follow that the poet of ‘Hamlet’ was able to read AEschylus, least of all that he could read him in Greek.

Anglicised version of the author’s original Greek text.

The ‘Comedy of Errors’ is based on the ‘Menaechmi’ of Plautus. It does not follow that the author of the ‘Comedy of Errors’ could read the ‘Menaechmi’ or the ‘Amphitryon,’ though Shakespeare had probably Latin enough for the purpose. The ‘Comedy of Errors’ was acted in December 1594. A translation of the Latin play bears date 1595, but this may be an example of the common practice of post-dating a book by a month or two, and Shakespeare may have seen the English translation in the work itself, in proof, or in manuscript. In those days MSS. often circulated long before they were published, like Shakespeare’s own ‘sugared sonnets.’ However, it is highly probable that Shakespeare was equal to reading the Latin of Plautus.

In ‘Twelfth Night’ occurs--

Like the Egyptian thief, at point of death, kill what I love.

Mr. Donnelly writes: ‘This is an allusion to a story from Heliodorus’s “AEthiopica.” I do not know of any English translation of it in the time of Shakespeare.’ The allusion is, we conceive, to Herodotus, ii. 121, the story of Rhampsinitus, translated by ‘B. R.’ and published in 1584. In ‘Macbeth’ we find--

All our yesterdays have LIGHTED fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, BRIEF CANDLE.

This is ‘traced,’ says Mr. Donnelly, ‘to Catullus.’ He quotes:--

Soles occidere et redire possunt;
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetuo una dormienda.

Where is the parallel? It is got by translating Catullus thus:--

The LIGHTS of heaven go out and return;
When once our BRIEF CANDLE goes out,
One night is to be perpetually slept.

But soles are not ‘lights,’ and brevis lux is not ‘brief candle.’ If they were, the passages have no resemblance. ‘To be, or not to be,’ is ‘taken almost verbatim from Plato.’ Mr. Donnelly says that Mr. Follett says that the Messrs. Langhorne say so. But, where is the passage in Plato?

Such are the proofs by which men ignorant of the classics prove that the author of the poems attributed to Shakespeare was a classical scholar. In fact, he probably had a ‘practicable’ knowledge of Latin, such as a person of his ability might pick up at school, and increase by casual study: points to which we return. For the rest, classical lore had filtered into contemporary literature and translations, such as North’s Plutarch.

As to modern languages, Mr. Donnelly decides that Shakespeare knew Danish, because he must have read Saxo Grammaticus ‘in the original tongue’--which, of course, is NOT Danish! Saxo was done out of the Latin into French. Thus Shakespeare is not exactly proved to have been a Danish scholar. There is no difficulty in supposing that ‘a clayver man,’ living among wits, could pick up French and Italian sufficient for his uses. But extremely stupid people are naturally amazed by even such commonplace acquirements. When the step is made from cleverness to genius, then the dull disbelieve, or cry out of a miracle. Now, as ‘miracles do not happen,’ a man of Shakespeare’s education could not have written the plays attributed to him by his critics, companions, friends, and acquaintances. Shakespeare, ex hypothesi, was a rude unlettered fellow. Such a man, the Baconians assume, would naturally be chosen by Bacon as his mask, and put forward as the author of Bacon’s pieces. Bacon would select a notorious ignoramus as a plausible author of pieces which, by the theory, are rich in knowledge of the classics, and nobody would be surprised. Nobody would say: ‘Shakespeare is as ignorant as a butcher’s boy, and cannot possibly be the person who translated Hamlet’s soliloquy out of Plato, “Hamlet” at large out of the Danish; who imitated the “Hellene” of Euripides, and borrowed “Troilus and Cressida” from the Greek of Dares Phrygius’--which happens not to exist. Ignorance can go no further than in these arguments. Such are the logic and learning of American amateurs, who sometimes do not even know the names of the books they talk about, or the languages in which they are written. Such learning and such logic are passed off by ‘the less than half educated’ on the absolutely untaught, who decline to listen to scholars.

We cannot of course furnish a complete summary of all that the Baconians have said in their myriad pages. All those pages, almost, really flow from the little volume of Mr. Smith. We are obliged to take the points which the Baconians regard as their strong cards. We have dealt with the point of classical scholarship, and shown that the American partisans of Bacon are not scholars, and have no locus standi. We shall take next in order the contention that Bacon was a poet; that his works contain parallel passages to Shakespeare, which can only be the result of common authorship; that Bacon’s notes, called ‘Promus,’ are notes for Shakespeare’s plays; that, in style, Bacon and Shakespeare are identical. Then we shall glance at Bacon’s motives for writing plays by stealth, and blushing to find it fame. We shall expose the frank folly of averring that he chose as his mask a man who (some assert) could not even write; and we shall conclude by citing, once more, the irrefragable personal testimony to the genius and character of Shakespeare.

To render the Baconian theory plausible it is necessary to show that Bacon had not only the learning needed for ‘the authorship of Shakespeare,’ but that he gives some proof of Shakespeare’s poetic qualities; that he had reasons for writing plays, and reasons for concealing his pen, and for omitting to make any claim to his own literary triumphs after Shakespeare was dead. Now, as to scholarship, the knowledge shown in the plays is not that of a scholar, does not exceed that of a man of genius equipped with what, to Ben Jonson, seemed ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ and with abundance of translations, and books like ‘Euphues,’ packed with classical lore, to help him. With the futile attempts to prove scholarship we have dealt. The legal and medical lore is in no way beyond the ‘general information’ which genius inevitably amasses from reading, conversation, reflection, and experience.

A writer of to-day, Mr. Kipling, is fond of showing how easily a man of his rare ability picks up the terminology of many recondite trades and professions. Again, evidence taken on oath proves that Jeanne d’Arc, a girl of seventeen, developed great military skill, especially in artillery and tactics, that she displayed political clairvoyance, and that she held her own, and more, among the subtlest and most hostile theologians. On the ordinary hypothesis, that Shakespeare was a man of genius, there is, then, nothing impossible in his knowledge, while his wildly daring anachronisms could have presented no temptation to a well-regulated scientific intellect like that of Bacon. The Baconian hypothesis rests on the incredulity with which dulness regards genius. We see the phenomenon every day when stupid people talk about people of ordinary cleverness, and ‘wonder with a foolish face of praise.’ As Dr. Brandes remarks, when the Archbishop of Canterbury praises Henry V. and his universal accomplishments, he says:

Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,
His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports
AND NEVER NOTED IN HIM ANY STUDY,
Any retirement, any sequestration,
From open haunts and popularity.

Yet, as the Archbishop remarks (with doubtful orthodoxy), ‘miracles are ceased.’

Shakespeare in these lines describes, as only he could describe it, the world’s wonder which he himself was. Or, if Bacon wrote the lines, then Bacon, unlike his advocates, was prepared to recognise the possible existence of such a thing as genius. Incredulity on this head could only arise in an age and in peoples where mediocrity is almost universal. It is a democratic form of disbelief.

For the hypothesis, as we said, it is necessary to show that Bacon possessed poetic genius. The proof cannot possibly be found in his prose works. In the prose of Mr. Ruskin there are abundant examples of what many respectable minds regard as poetic qualities. But, if the question arose, ‘Was Mr. Ruskin the author of Tennyson’s poems?’ the answer could be settled, for once, by internal evidence. We have only to look at Mr. Ruskin’s published verses. These prove that a great writer of ‘poetical prose’ may be at the opposite pole from a poet. In the same way, we ask, what are Bacon’s acknowledged compositions in verse? Mr. Holmes is their admirer. In 1599 Bacon wrote in a letter, ‘Though I profess not to be a poet, I prepared a sonnet,’ to Queen Elizabeth. He PREPARED a sonnet! ‘Prepared’ is good. He also translated some of the Psalms into verse, a field in which success is not to be won. Mr. Holmes notes, in Psalm xc., a Shakespearean parallel. ‘We spend our years as a tale that is told.’ Bacon renders:

As a tale told, which sometimes men attend,
And sometimes not, our life steals to an end.

In ‘King John,’ iii. 4, we read:--

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read ‘King John’ in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has--

The greater navies look like walking woods.

They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself. One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon’s Psalms or compare navies to ‘walking woods’! Mr. Holmes adds: ‘Many of the sonnets [of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.’ That is, Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pass from hand to hand, among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends,’ as Shakespeare’s (1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave offspring--rather late in life. Shakespeare’s apparent allusions to his profession--

I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,

and

The public means which public manners breeds,

refer, no doubt, to Bacon’s versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has hitherto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare’s friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is intended. Is it not obvious?

I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.

Bacon clearly had an assignation with Her Majesty--so here is ‘scandal about Queen Elizabeth.’ Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is ‘within sight of Her Majesty’s Palace of White Hall.’ She gave Bacon the reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen; he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested himself in a masque at Gray’s Inn, while he and his friends ‘partly devised dumb shows and additional speeches,’ in 1588.

Nothing follows as to Bacon’s power of composing Shakespeare’s plays. A fragmentary masque, which may or may not be by Bacon, is put forward as the germ of what Bacon wrote about Elizabeth in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ An Indian WANDERER from the West Indies, near the fountain of the AMAZON, is brought to Elizabeth to be cured of blindness. Now the fairy, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ says, capitalised by Mr. Holmes:

I DO WANDER EVERYWHERE.

Here then are two wanderers--and there is a river in Monmouth and a river in Macedon. Puck, also, is ‘that merry WANDERER of the night.’ Then ‘A BOUNCING AMAZON’ is mentioned in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘the fountain of the great river of the Amazons’ is alluded to in the fragment of the masque. Cupid too occurs in the play, and in the masque the wanderer is BLIND; now Cupid is blind, sometimes, but hardly when ‘a certain aim he took.’ The Indian, in the masque, presents Elizabeth with ‘his gift AND PROPERTY TO BE EVER YOUNG,’ and the herb, in the play, has a ‘VIRTUOUS PROPERTY.’

For such exquisite reasons as these the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ are by one hand, and the masque is by Bacon. For some unknown cause the play is full of poetry, which is entirely absent from the masque. Mr. Holmes was a Judge; sat on the bench of American Themis--and these are his notions of proof and evidence. The parallel passages which he selects are on a level with the other parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare. One thing is certain: the writer of the masque shows no signs of being a poet, and a poet Bacon explicitly ‘did not profess to be.’ One piece of verse attributed to Bacon, a loose paraphrase of a Greek epigram, has won its way into ‘The Golden Treasury.’ Apart from that solitary composition, the verses which Bacon ‘prepared’ were within the powers of almost any educated Elizabethan. They are on a level with the rhymes of Mr. Ruskin. It was only when he wrote as Shakespeare that Bacon wrote as a poet.

We have spoken somewhat harshly of Mr. Holmes as a classical scholar, and as a judge of what, in literary matters, makes evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon’s as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote ‘Richard II.,’ ‘which, though it grew from me, went after about in others’ names.’ Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes’s opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But ‘nothing less than a miracle’ could shake Mr. Holmes’s belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon’s) and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’--so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the visitation of God in the shape of idiocy, could bring the conviction that the person who wrote the masque could have written the play. The reader may compare the whole passage in Mr. Holmes’s work (pp. 228-238). We have already set forth some of those bases of his belief which only a miracle could shake. The weak wind that scarcely bids the aspen shiver might blow them all away.

Vast space is allotted by Baconians to ‘parallel passages’ in Bacon and Shakespeare. We have given a few in the case of the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The others are of equal weight. They are on a level with ‘Punch’s’ proofs that Alexander Smith was a plagiarist. Thus Smith:

No CHARACTER that servant WOMAN asked;

Pope writes:

Most WOMEN have no CHARACTER at all.

It is tedious to copy out the puerilities of such parallelisms. Thus Bacon:

If we simply looked to the fabric of the world;

Shakespeare:

And, like the baseless fabric of a vision.

Bacon:

The intellectual light in the top and consummation of thy
workmanship;

Shakespeare:

Like eyasses that cry out on the top of the question.

Myriads of pages of such matter would carry no proof. Probably the hugest collection of such ‘parallels’ is that preserved by Mrs. Pott in Bacon’s ‘Promus,’ a book of 628 pages. Mrs. Pott’s ‘sole object’ in publishing ‘was to confirm the growing belief in Bacon’s authorship of the plays.’ Having acquired the opinion, she laboured to strengthen herself and others in the faith. The so-called ‘Promus’ is a manuscript set of notes, quotations, formulae, and proverbs. As Mr. Spedding says, there are ‘forms of compliment, application, excuse, repartee, etc.’ ‘The collection is from books which were then in every scholar’s hands.’ ‘The proverbs may all, or nearly all, be found in the common collections.’ Mrs. Pott remarks that in ‘Promus’ are ‘several hundreds of notes of which no trace has been discovered in the acknowledged writings of Bacon, or of any other contemporary writer but Shakespeare.’ She adds that the theory of ‘close intercourse’ between the two men is ‘contrary to all evidence.’ She then infers that ‘Bacon alone wrote all the plays and sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare.’ So Bacon entrusted his plays, and the dread secret of his authorship, to a boorish cabotin with whom he had no ‘close intercourse’! This is lady’s logic, a contradiction in terms. The theory that Bacon wrote the plays and sonnets inevitably implies the closest intercourse between him and Shakespeare. They must have been in constant connection. But, as Mrs. Pott truly says, this is ‘contrary to all evidence.’

Perhaps the best way to deal with Mrs. Pott is to cite the author of her preface, Dr. Abbott. He is not convinced, but he is much struck by a very exquisite argument of the lady’s. Bacon in ‘Promus’ is writing down ‘Formularies and Elegancies,’ modes of salutation. He begins with ‘Good morrow!’ This original remark, Mrs. Pott reckons, ‘occurs in the plays nearly a hundred times. In the list of upwards of six thousand words in Appendix E, “Good morrow” has been noted thirty-one times.... “Good morrow” may have become familiar merely by means of “Romeo and Juliet.”’ Dr. Abbott is so struck by this valuable statement that he writes: ‘There remains the question, Why did Bacon think it worth while to write down in a notebook the phrase “Good morrow” if it was at that time in common use?’