Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.
(“The Maniac,” Orthodoxy)
The great Transatlantic theory that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but someone else with a different name, is one of those intellectual pestilences which break out recurrently in countries that do not pay sufficient attention to intellectual sanitation. In America, we may imagine, there are great cities with more than the material civilization of Paris and less than the mental civilization of Upper Tooting. In these a literary refuse accumulates, unchecked by any critical scavenger, and the result is some burst of literary disease, confounding all standards and probabilities. Two works lie before us devoted to the grotesque Bacon—Shakespeare cryptogram. The sole interest of these works lies in the opportunity they give of pointing out how little mere accumulations of detail have to do with the historic instinct. The authors of these books grab in libraries, they have dates, citations, “singular coincidences,” “astonishing parallels,” everything except the most glimmering conception of the nature of the Elizabethan era.
It need hardly be said that anyone who has any knowledge of the spirit and nature of that era would no more believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare than that Lord Rosebery wrote the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats. If all that was required were coincidences and cryptograms, we would cheerfully undertake to prove that Mr. Yeats was Lord Rosebery. The title of Mr. Yeats’ chief prose work, The Secret Rose, is an almost clumsily transparent disguise; it indicates at once “the sky or modest rose”—hence “Prim-Rose,” and again, the “Rose which is Buried”—hence Rosebery; and the word “secret” itself suggests that there is a mystery in the matter. When once we had so clear a nucleus as this, the rest might legitimately be more indirect. The Wind Among the Reeds would be held to mean the perturbation which Lord Rosebery’s Imperialism would produce in the mind of Sir Robert Reid, while the remarkable selection of the rank in the peerage for “the Countess Kathleen” deserves serious attention. The only lesson to be drawn from the Baconian craze lies here. If any man of education were confronted with this theory about Lord Rosebery he would not trouble his head about this class of proofs. The parallels might be most ingenious, the dates consistent, the cryptogram lucid and sustained. The only objection to it would be that nobody who knows anything about Lord Rosebery, Mr. Yeats, or the life of the nineteenth century would ever think of believing it. It would be clear to anyone with any vital grasp of the literary sects and movements of our time that Mr. Yeats is the man to have written the poems, and that Lord Rosebery is not.
So it is with the American Baconians. They show their complete inability to deal with the whole question by starting with the idea that Bacon, being a learned man, is more likely to have been the great dramatist than Shakespeare, a more or less rowdy play-actor. Nay, even their opponents in the controversy take this view, and Mr. Francis P. Gervais, the author of a large book now under our consideration, called Shakespeare Not Bacon, appears to admit this as a difficulty. “We Shakespearians,” he says, “join in the wonder that a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage should have been so learned.” Neither seem to realise that there are other kinds of learning besides book learning, that there are other limitations besides the limitations of ignorance, and that Much Ado About Nothing was quite as much above the head of a man in Bacon’s position as the Novum Organum was above the head of a man in Shakespeare’s. Of course everyone with a literary instinct can see that if Bacon had written plays they would have been exceedingly unlike those under discussion. It was precisely because Shakespeare was one of the wild theatrical group which produced a whole cycle of great plays in the same style that he had the chance of surpassing all of them.
But the real triumph of methodical madness is the work of Mr. Parker Woodward, which is called The Strange Case of Francis Tidir. From this we learn that Bacon not only wrote Shakespeare’s plays, but those of Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, the poems of Spenser, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Finally, and by way of a detail, he was the son of Queen Elizabeth. We have really nothing to say to this, except that, by some curious negligence Mr. Woodward has neglected to notice that Bacon (under the transparent pseudonym of Sir Francis Drake) sailed round the world, and under the nickname of Admiral Coligny was supposed to have been murdered in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. With these trifling exceptions, there is hardly any eminent man of the period apparently who was not Bacon. In fact, the boasted brilliance of the Elizabethan period is seriously contracted: the Queen had, after all, only one clever man in her dominions, but he was certainly versatile and energetic.
As a specimen of the proofs offered by Mr. Parker Woodward for these we may notice that in which he points out with dark significance that, including the hyphen, there are the same number of letters in Shakespeare as in Francis Bacon. Here, again, we need only point out to Mr. Woodward, as a similarly stunning coincidence, that if he eliminates the unnecessary first R in Rosebery, he will have the same number of letters as in W. B. Yeats. Another is that in both authors the phrase “quiet conscience” occurs somewhere. When a lady declines to retire to rest “until the sun be set,” it means that the truth about the plays will not be told until the author is dead. If this is the standard of argument, we ought to have as easy task in our forthcoming work on the W. B. Yeats Cryptogram. Only, in order to bring that work up to the level, it will be necessary to show that Lord Rosebery wrote not only the works of Mr. Yeats, but those of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. W. S. Gilbert, and Mr. George R. Sims, as well as Professor Drommond’s Ascent of Man.
Shakespeare himself was one of the most voluminous authors in the English language. Peile, Green, and Marlowe between them probably wrote as many plays as Shakespeare. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is a very long poem. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a very large book. Add to this, Bacon wrote two huge works of philosophic research, innumerable essays, and lived a particularly active professional and political life all the time, and his industry, according to Mr. Woodward’s hypothesis, is certainly creditable if credible. We think it quite possible that the whole tomfoolery might be disproved by physical and chronological possibility, but we certainly are not going to take the trouble. The whole matter belongs to that vulgar wax-work view of history which makes a certain class of spiritualists always summon the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots. Writers of this order think that all Elizabethans lived in the same street, just as persons in London sometimes think that Bombay is a little way from Calcutta. They do not realise that in the complexity of a great crisis men live side by side who are not only of different types, but almost of different centuries. There are hardly two men who had so little in common as Bacon and Shakespeare.
(Daily News, May 6, 1901)
I remember a riotous argument about Bacon and Shakespeare in which I offered quite at random to show that Lord Rosebery had written the works of Mr. W. B. Yeats. No sooner had I said the words than a torrent of coincidences rushed upon my mind. I pointed out, for instance, that Mr. Yeats’s chief work was The Secret Rose. This may easily be paraphrased as “The Quiet or Modest Rose”; and so, of course, as the Primrose, a second after I saw the same suggestion in the combination of “rose” and “bury.” If I had pursued the matter, who knows but I might have been a raving maniac by this time.
(Daily News, Jan. 22, 1910)
For some reason not very easy to discover, books on the Bacon—Shakespeare controversy continue to be produced in great numbers and voluminous form, although the case for the Baconian cypher has been irremediably damaged by Mr. Sidney Lee’s critique of Mrs. Gallup, and finally shattered to pieces by Mrs. Gallup’s reply. I have read the mass of these works as they appeared down to the latest, The Problem of the Shakespeare Plays, by Mr. George C. Bompas, and the general impression produced upon my mind takes the form of an impassioned hope that I may never be tried for my life before a jury of Baconians. If the average judge or jury treated evidence as the Baconians treat it there is not one of us who might not be in hourly peril of being sent to prison for bigamy or embezzlement or piracy on the high seas. In order to show that any one of us was identical with some celebrated criminal nothing would be necessary except to show that we had once or twice used the same popular turns of expression. The most harmless householder in London might on the Baconian method be suddenly convicted of having committed the Whitechapel murders, and the evidence might be that one of the cousins was in the habit of calling him “Jack” and that some slangy friend of his had in an authenticated letter described him as “a ripper.” Some people may fancy that this is an exaggerated parallel. Let me merely quote in answer one of the actual arguments of Mr. G. C. Bompas:
“The moon so constant in inconstancy.”
—Bacon: Trans. Psalm civ
“Oh, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon.”
—Romeo and Juliet
It is seriously argued that two men must be the same man because they both employ the expression “the inconstant moon.” I suppose that all the poems in all the ages which contain the expression “rosy dawn” were all secretly written by the same man.
If education is to be seriously remodeled and set upon larger foundations in our age, surely one branch of them into which more attention should be given is the power of valuing evidence. Almost every one of the books which have passed before me in this matter display an absolute inability to realise what is significant and what is insignificant in a human problem. There ought to be a series of text-books on evidence and arguments as to probability, in all the Schools. In the simpler text-books would be found the general principles of which the Baconians stand in need. For instance, children would be made to learn by heart the following rules:
I. To establish a connection between two persons, the points of resemblance must be not only common to the two individuals but must not be common to any large number of persons outside. Example: Thus it is no evidence of connection between Jones and Brown that they both put money on the Derby, or that they both at one particular period of London life said “There’s ’air.”
II. Similarly it is no proof of the connection between two persons that they both do something which, though it may actually be done by many people, might at any moment be done by anybody. Example: Thus it is no proof of connection between Jones and Brown that they both sneezed twice on Thursday morning, or that they both had a door-knocker carved with the head of a lion.
III. In order to establish a connection between two men it is necessary that the points of resemblance should be (a) characteristics, having something of the actual colour of an individual’s character, (b) things in themselves unusual or difficult or dependent on a particular conjunction of events, (c) things, generally speaking, which it is easier to imagine one man only at a particular time doing, or two men conspiring to do, than to imagine two or more men at that time independently and simultaneously doing. Example: Thus a connection would be established between Jones and Brown, though only to a limited extent, if Brown were the only Cabinet Minister in the same social circle with Jones, and Jones had learnt a Cabinet secret.
These rules of evidence are so simple and obvious that at first sight it may seem a waste of time to summarise them even briefly. But if a reader will apply them steadily through the whole of one of the Baconian books such as that of Mr. Bompas, he will find it may be said without the least exaggeration that by the end of the process every vestige of the book has vanished.
To quote examples of this in full would be to quote the whole book. I may, however, give the following instances in order to show that I do not overstate the case:
“His purpose was to break the knot of the conspiracy.”
—History of Henry V.
This sentence from Bacon is gravely paralleled with the line from The Merry Wives of Windsor:
“There’s a knot, a gin, a conspiracy against me.”
Again, we have:
“Wretches have been able to stir up earthquakes by the murdering of princes.”
—Bacon’s charge against Owen
“Wherefore this ghastly looking. What’s the matter?
Oh! ’twas a din to fright a monster ear
To make an earthquake.”
—Tempest
“‘Ordinatis belli et pacis est absoluti imperii,’ a principal flower of the crown. For if those flowers should wither and fall, the garland will not be worth the wearing.”
—Report 606. Bacon.
Catesby: “Till Richard wear the garland of the realm.”
—Richard III
And it is solemnly proposed that we should believe in a story more sensational than that of a fifth-rate historical novel upon such evidence as this, that Bacon and Shakespeare both called a conspiracy “a knot,” that they both made an allusion to an earthquake and both made an allusion to a garland. If anyone will bring me two books taken at random from a bookcase, I will undertake to find in them better internal evidence than this that they were both written by one man.
The remainder of Mr. Bompas’s parallels may chiefly be grouped into two classes. The first class shows that Bacon and Shakespeare both alluded to old stories that they must both have read. The second class shows that Bacon and Shakespeare both alluded to theories and superstitions that everybody in that time must have known. Will it be seriously credited as an example of the first class that Mr. Bompas makes capital out of the fact that both Bacon and Shakespeare refer to so old and banal of a story as that of Tarquin slashing off the heads of the poppies? Will it be believed as an example of the second class that he makes an argument out of the facts that Bacon refers to a toad having a jewel in its head? It does not seem to occur to him that Shakespeare’s lines would be perfectly pointless if they did not allude to a commonly received story. Mr. Bompas might as well endeavour to establish a connection between all the people who ever said that it was unlucky to sit down thirteen to table. Most incredible of all is the fact that a man professing to write seriously about a problem of the sixteenth century points it out as a coincidence that Bacon and Shakespeare both compared seditions to “evil humours” in the body, the veriest catch-word of contemporary physiology. He might as well identify all the people who talk about “social decadence.”
I have given a list of these quibbles because it is supremely necessary to realise with what kind of matter these immense volumes are padded; and it is not difficult to realise that where such arguments are used there is likely to be a dearth of better ones. Wherever Mr. Bompas uses a more general or vital argument it is vitiated with the same underlying evil, an absolute refusal to realise the spirit of the Elizabethan era. Let me take a single example. Mr. Bompas argues that if Shakespeare was in reality the author, it is extraordinary that all the natural history in the plays is taken from old books and stories, and none of it from the actual details of the country round Stratford. But does Mr. Bompas really know so little of the age about which he writes as to suppose that any poet in that time would have taken any notice of nature, in the modern sense, even if he had been surrounded by miles of pigs and primroses? To notice, in the Tennysonian manner, what colour a certain leaf turns in September, what a note a certain bird utters in spring, would have been as impossible either to Shakespeare or Bacon as to write The Origin of Species. All their natural history was traditional; and if Shakespeare had been ten times a rustic, and had never been near London, he would have got his natural history from tradition: he would no more have written about the habits of the squirrel than Spenser wrote about the streets and shop-windows of London, where he was born. Not to realise this is to be incapable at the outset of understanding the problem of the Renascence.
Lastly, the general argument drawn from the historic personality of Shakespeare shows a failure to understand not only the time but the eternal conditions of the problem. Mr. Bompas cannot believe that Shakespeare, a common practical man who worked hard to better his position, who had several perfectly solid and temporal ambitions, who retired a rich man to Stratford and enjoyed the good things of this life, was really the author of so many miracles of thought and language. The author must have been, according to Mr. Bompas, a man like Bacon, a man who had travelled, who had seen strange countries, who had dealt with great matters, who had known violent reverses and terrible secrets of State. With this view I venture most profoundly to disagree. There is no clearer mark of the second-rate philanthropist than that he goes out to look for humanity, as if it were a race of blue apes in Central Africa. To the true philanthropist, like Shakespeare, one village is enough to show the whole drama of creation and judgment. There is no clearer mark of the second-rate poet than that he despises business. The true poet, like Shakespeare, despises nothing. Buying and selling and building a house in Stratford seem very derogatory to Mr. Bompas; they did not seem so to Shakespeare; he knew that all points on the eternal circle are equidistant from the centre.
(The Speaker, March 15, 1902)
The revival of the whole astonishing Bacon—Shakespeare business is chiefly interesting to the philosophical mind as an example of the power of the letter which killeth, and of how finally and murderously it kills. Baconianism is, indeed, the last wild monstrosity of literalism; it is a sort of delirium of detail. A handful of printers’ types, a few alphabetical comparisons are sufficient to convince the Baconians of a proposition which is fully as fantastic historically as the proposition that the Battle of Waterloo was won by Leigh Hunt disguised as Wellington, or that the place of Queen Victoria for the last forty years of her reign was taken by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. Both these hypotheses are logically quite possible. The dates agree; the physical similarity is practically sufficient. Briefly, in fact, there is nothing to be said against the propositions except that every sane man is convinced that they are untrue.
Let us consider for a moment the Baconian conception from the outside. A sensational theory about the position of Shakespeare was certain in the nature of things to arise. Men of small imagination have sought in every age to find a cipher in the indecipherable masterpieces of the great. Throughout the Middle Ages the whole of the Aeneid, full of the sad and splendid eloquence of Virgil, was used as a conjuring book. Men opened it at random, and from a few disconnected Latin words took a motto and an omen for their daily work. In the same way men in more modern times have turned to the Book of Revelation full of the terrible judgment, and yet more terrible consolation of a final moral arbitration, and found in it nothing but predictions about Napoleon Bonaparte and attacks on the English Ritualists. Everywhere, in short, we find the same general truth—the truth that facts can prove anything, and that there is nothing so misleading as that which is printed in black and white. Almost everywhere and almost invariably the man who has sought a cryptogram in a great masterpiece has been highly exhilarated, logically justified, morally excited, and entirely wrong.
If, therefore, we continue to study Baconianism from the outside—a process which cannot do it or any other thesis any injustice—we shall come more and more to the conclusion that it is in itself an inevitable outcome of the circumstances of the case and the tendencies of human nature. Shakespeare was by the consent of all human beings a portent. If he had lived some thousand years earlier, people would have turned him into a god. As it is, people can apparently do nothing but attempt to turn him into a Lord Chancellor. But their great need must be served. Shakespeare must have his legend, his whisper of something more than common origin. They must at least make of him a mystery, which is as near as our century can come to a miracle. Something sensational about Shakespeare was bound ultimately to be said, for we are still the children of the ancient earth, and have myth and idolatry in our blood. But in this age of a convention of scepticism we cannot rise to an apotheosis. The nearest we can come to it is a dethronement.
So much for the a priori probability of a Baconian theory coming into existence. What is to be said of the a priori probability of the theory itself; or, rather, to take the matter in its most lucid order, what is the theory? In the time roughly covered by the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the earlier part of the reign of James I, there arose a school of dramatists who covered their country with glory and filled libraries with their wild and wonderful plays. They differed in type and station to a certain extent: some were scholars, a few were gentlemen, most were actors and many were vagabonds. But they had a common society, common meeting places, a common social tone. They differed in literary aim and spirit: to a certain extent some were great philosophic dramatists, some were quaint humorists, some mere scribblers of a sort of half-witted and half-inspired melodrama. But they all had a common style, a common form and vehicle, a common splendour, and a common error in their methods. Now, the Baconian theory is that one of these well-known historical figures—a man who lived their life and shared their spirit, and who happened to be the most brilliant in the cultivation of their particular form of art—was, as a matter of fact, an impostor, and that the works which his colleagues thought he had written in the same spirit and the same circumstances in which they had written theirs, were not written by him, but by a very celebrated judge and politician of that time, whom they may sometimes have seen when his coachwheels splashed them as he went by.
Now, what is to be said about the a priori probability of this view, which I stated, quite plainly and impartially, above? The first thing to be said, I think, is that a man’s answer to the question would be a very good test to whether he had the rudiments of a historical instinct, which is simply an instinct which is capable of realising the way in which things happen. To many this will appear a vague and unscientific way of approaching the question. But the method I now adopt is the method which every reasonable being adopts in distinguishing between fact and fiction in real life. What would any man say if he were informed that in the private writings of Lord Rosebery that statesman claimed to have written the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats? Certainly, he could not deny that there were very singular coincidences in detail. How remarkable, for instance, is the name Primrose, which is obviously akin to modest rose, and thus to “Secret Rose.” On the top of this comes the crushing endorsement of the same idea indicated in the two words “rose” and “bury.” The remarks of the Ploughman in the “Countess Cathleen” (note the rank in the peerage selected) would be anxiously scanned for some not improbable allusion to a furrow; and everything else, the statesman’s abandonment of Home Rule, the poet’s aversion to Imperialism, would be all parts of Lord Rosebery’s cunning. But what, I repeat, would a man say if he were asked if the theory was probable? He would reply, “The theory is as near to being impossible as a natural phenomenon can be. I know Mr. W. B. Yeats, I know how he talks, I know what sort of a man he is, what sort of people he lives among, and know that he is the man to have written those poems. I know Lord Rosebery, too, and what sort of a life his is, and I know that he is not.”
Now, we know, almost as thoroughly as we should know the facts of this hypothetical case, the facts about Bacon and Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare was a particular kind of man who lived with a particular kind of men, all of whom thought much as he thought and wrote much as he wrote. We know that Bacon was a man who lived in another world, who thought other thoughts, who talked with other men, who wrote another style, one might almost say another language. That Bacon wrote Shakespeare is certainly possible; but almost every other hypothesis, that Bacon never said so, that he lied when he said it, that the printers played tricks with the documents, that the Baconians played tricks with the evidence, is in its nature a hundred times more probable. Of the cipher itself, I shall speak in another article. For the moment it is sufficient to point out that the Baconian hypothesis has against it the whole weight of historical circumstance and the whole of that supra-logical realisation which some of us call transcendentalism, and most of us common sense.
(The Speaker, January 11, 1902)
Sensationalism and a Cipher (Again)
In a previous article I drew attention to the general spirit in which the Baconian question must be approached. That spirit involves the possession of a thing which is scarcely comprehended in America, the instinct of culture which does not consist merely in knowing the facts but in being able to imagine the truth. The Baconians imagine a vain thing, because they believe in facts. Their historical faculty is a rule of three; the real historical faculty is a great deal more like an ear for music. One of the matters, for example, which is most powerfully concerned in the Bacon—Shakespeare question, is that question of literary style, a thing as illogical as the bouquet of a bottle of wine. It is the thing, in short, which makes us quite certain that the sentence quoted in The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon from his secret narrative, “The Queen looked pale from want of rest, but was calm and compos’d,” was never written by an Elizabethan. Having explained the essentials of the method as they appear to me, I now come to the study of the mass of the Baconian details. They are set forth in a kind of résumé of various Baconian theories in The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon, by Harold Bayley. The work is an astonishing example of the faculty of putting out the fire of truth with the fuel of information. Mr. Bayley has collected with creditable industry an enormous number of fragmentary facts and rumours. He has looked at the water-marks in the paper used by Rosicrucians and Jacobean dramatists. He has examined the tail-pieces and ornamental borders of German and Belgian printers. He has gone through the works of Bacon and Shakespeare and a hundred others, picking out parallel words and allusions, but all the time he is completely incapable of realising the great and glaring truism which lies at the back of the whole question, the simple truism that a million times naught is naught. He does not see, that is, that though a million coincidences, each of which by itself has a slight value, may make up a probability, yet a million coincidences, each of which has no value in itself, make up nothing at all. What are the sort of coincidences upon which Mr. Bayley relies? The water-mark used in some book is the design of a bunch of grapes. Bacon says, in the Novum Organum: “I pledge mankind in liquor pressed from countless grapes.” Another water-mark represents a seal. Somebody said about Bacon that he became Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England and of the great seal of nature. The rose and the lily were symbols used by the Rosicrucians; there are a great many allusions to roses and lilies in Shakespeare. A common printer’s border consists of acorns. Bacon somewhere alluded to his fame growing like an oak tree. Does not Mr. Bayley see that no conceivable number of coincidences of this kind would make an account more probable or even more possible? Anyone in any age might talk about clusters of grapes or design clusters of grapes; anyone might make an ornament out of acorns; anyone might talk about growing like a tree. I look down at my own floor and see the Greek key pattern round the oilcloth, but it does not convince me that I am destined to open the doors of Hellenic mystery. Mr. Bayley undoubtably produced a vast number of these parallels, but they all amount to nothing. In my previous article I took for the sake of argument the imaginary case of Lord Rosebery and Mr. W. B. Yeats. Does not Mr. Bayley see that to point out one genuine coincidence, as that Lord Rosebery paid secret cheques to Mr. Yeats, might indicate something, but to say that they both walked down Piccadilly, that they both admired Burne-Jones, that they both alluded more than once to the Irish question, in short that they both did a million things that are done by a million other people, does not approach even to having the faintest value or significance. This, then, is the first thing to be said to the Baconian spirit, that it does not know how to add up a column of naughts.
The second thing to be said is rather more curious. If there is a cypher in the Shakespearean plays, it ought presumably to be a definite and unmistakable thing. It may be difficult to find, but when you have found it you have got it. But the extraordinary thing is that Mr. Bayley and most other Baconians talk about the Baconian cypher as they might talk about “a touch of pathos” in Hood’s poetry, or “a flavour of cynicism” in Thackeray’s novels, as if it were a thing one became faintly conscious of and suspected, without being able to point it out. If anyone thinks this unfair, let him notice the strange way in which Mr. Bayley talks about previous Baconian works. “In 1888 Mr. Ignatius Donelly claimed to have discovered a cypher story in the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. In his much abused but little read. The Great Cryptogram, he endeavored to convice the world of the truth of his theory. Partly by reason of the complexity of his system, the full details of which he did not reveal, and partly owing to the fact that he did not produce any definite assertion of authorship, but appeared to have stumbled into the midst of a lengthy narrative, the world was not convinced, and Mr. Donelly was greeted with Rabelaisian laughter. He has since gone to the grave unwept, unhonoured, and unsung, and his secret has presumably died with him. The work of this letter was marred by many extravagant inferences, but The Great Cryptogram is nevertheless a damning indictment which has not yet been answered.” Again on the second Baconian demonstration, “Dr. Owen gave scarcely more than a hint of how his alleged cypher worked.” The brain reels at all this. Why do none of the cypherists seem to be sure what the cypher is or where it is? A man publishes a huge book to prove that there is a cryptogram, and his secret dies with him. Another man devoted another huge book to giving “scarcely more than a hunt” of it. Are these works really so impenetrable that no one knows whether they all revealed the same cypher or different cyphers? If they pointed to the same cypher it seems odd that Mr. Bayley does not mention it. If their cyphers were different we can only conclude that the great heart of America is passionately bent on finding a cypher in Shakespeare—anyhow, anywhere, and of any kind.
Finally, there is one thing to be said about a more serious matter. In the chapter called “Mr. William Shakespeare” the author has an extraordinary theory that Shakespeare could not have been the author of the works under discussion because those works rise to the heights of mental purity, and the little we know of Shakespeare’s life would seem to indicate that it was a coarse and possibly a riotous one. “Public opinion,” he says solemnly, “asks us to believe that this divine stream of song, history, and philosophy sprang from so nasty and beastly a source.” There is not much to be said about an argument exhibiting so strange an ignorance of human nature. The argument could equally be used to prove that Leonardo do Vinci could not paint, that Mirabeau could not speak, and that Burns’s poems were written by the parson of his parish. But surely there is no need to say this to the Baconians. They should be the last people in the world to doubt the possibility of the conjunction of genius with depravity. They trace their sublime stream of song to a corrupt judge, a treacherous friend, a vulgar sycophant, a man of tawdry aims, of cowardly temper, of public and disgraceful end. He killed his benefactor for hire, and the Baconians would improve this and say that he killed his brother. We know little of Shakespeare’s vices, but he might have been a scarecrow of profligacy and remained a man worthier to create Portia than the Lord Verulam whom all history knows. The matter is a matter of evidence, and sentiment has little concern with it. But if we did cherish an emotion in the matter it would certainly be a hope that “the divine stream of song” might not be traced to “so nasty and beastly a source” as Francis Bacon.
(The Speaker, January 25, 1902)
It is very interesting to learn that they have found Shakespeare’s portrait in a tavern, especially as that is very much the place where they would have found Shakespeare. I have no knowledge, nor even any comprehension, of the subtle and minute method by which gentlemen who are art-experts are enabled to say apparently for certain what such a portrait is; but certainly there is nothing at all unreasonable in the idea of Shakespeare’s being painted by some early admirer of his on the panel of an inn, or in Shakespeare’s sitting still to have it painted, so long as they gave him beer enough. I see in one newspaper that a doubt has been raised about the probability of such an episode, and I gather from the context that this doubt was raised in the interests of the Bacon—Shakespeare School. I suppose that this particular Baconian thought that all portraits of Shakespeare ought to be portraits of Bacon; and if they weren’t, why then they weren’t portraits of Shakespeare. There seems to be something a little mixed in this line of thought; but I have no time to unravel it now. In any case, what the Baconian said about the new portrait was this; “Does it seem very likely that the raw country youth who, practically penniless and burdened with a wife and three children, joins a band of strolling players in 1587, and is heard of the year after as earning a precarious living outside the theatre doors, and who, not until four years later, takes his first essay to the publishers, has his portrait in oils done in 1588—the presumed date of the above picture?”
There may be in this school of thought swift and splendid connections of ideas which I am too dull to follow. But I do not quite understand why having a wife and three children should prevent a man’s having his portrait painted. Painters do not commonly insist on their models being celibate, as if they were a sacred and separate order of monks. There is nothing to show that Shakespeare paid for it, or if he did pay for it, that he paid much; and it does not seem, on the face of it, very likely that a man would pay much for a comparatively rude painting in a wayside inn. Suppose we were talking of some man whom we knew to have been a poor actor at one time, travelling from place to place like any other actor, but whom we also knew to be a man of arresting personality, perhaps of fascination. Would there be anything improbable about some friend or flatterer of his youth having sketched him in some small town in which he stayed? Suppose we were speaking of Henry Irving. Should we be surprised to find in any lodging-house at which he had stopped when a lad that the son of the house, who had a taste for photography, had photographed him for nothing? Should we be surprised if some sentimental old lady had “done” him in water-colours? There is nothing to prevent Irving’s having been quite as poor as Shakespeare; and certainly there is no reason to deny that Shakespeare was as attractive as Irving.
It may seem a trivial matter; but it is not trivial, because it is typical. The discussion touching whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare is only important because it happens to be the battle-ground of two historical methods, of two kinds of judgment. In itself it matters little whether Bacon was Shakespeare or whether Shakespeare was Bacon. Shakespeare, I fancy, would not much mind being robbed of his literary achievements; and I am sure that Bacon would be delighted to be relieved of his political history and reputation. Francis Lord Verulam would have been a happier man, certainly a better and more Christian man, if he also had gone down to drink ale at Stratford; if he had begun and ended his story in an inn. As far as the individual glory of the two men goes, the two men had this, and perhaps only this, in common: that they both at the end of their lives seem to have decided that all glory is vanity. But, as I say, the real interest of the matter lies in a certain historical and controversial method of which this paragraph that I have quoted is an excellent example.
The two arguments that often clash in history may be called the argument from detail and the argument from atmosphere. Suppose a man two hundred years hence were writing about London cabmen. He might know all the details that can be gathered from all the documents; he might know the numbers of all the cabs, the names of all the cabmen, the single and collective owners of all the vehicles in question, the fixed rate of pay and all the Acts of Parliament that in any way affected it. Yet he might not know the rich and subtle atmosphere of cabmen; their peculiar relations to the comfortable class who commonly employ them. He would not understand how paying the plain fare to a cabman is not the same as paying the plain fare to a tram-conductor. He would not understand how when a cabman overcharges it is not quite the same as if a butcher or a baker had overcharged. He would not grasp to what extent these men regard themselves as the temporary dependents, the temporary coachmen of the wealthy; he would not understand how even their bad language is an expression of that idea of dependence on the historic generosity of gentlemen. He would not comprehend how this strange class of man contrived to be insolent without being independent. It is just such atmospheres as this that history only exists in order to make real; and it is just such atmospheres as this that nearly all history neglects. But those who say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare are, so to speak, the maniacs of this method of detail against atmosphere which is the curse of so many learned men. As a matter of fact the Bacon—Shakespeare people really are learned; they do really know an enormous amount about the period with which they are concerned. But it is all detail; and detail by itself means madness. The very definition of a lunatic is a man who has taken details out of their real atmosphere.
Here is an example. I remember long ago debating with a Baconian, who said that Shakespeare could not have written the plays because Shakespeare was a countryman, and there was in the plays no close study of Nature in the modern sense—no details about how this bird builds its nest, or that flower shakes its pollen—as we get them in Wordsworth or in Tennyson. Now, the man who said this knew far more about Elizabethan literature than I do. In fact he knew everything about Elizabethan literature except what Elizabethan literature was. If he had had even the smallest glimpse of what Elizabethan literature was he would never have dreamed of expecting any Elizabethan to write about Nature because he was brought up in the middle of it. A Renascence poet brought up in a forest would not have written about trees any more than a Renascence poet brought up in a pigsty would have written about pigs; he would have written about gods or not written at all. It was not a Renascence idea to write about the homely natural history which was just outside the door. To say that Shakespeare, if he was really born at Stratford, would have written about birds and meadows, is like saying that Keats, if he was really born in London, would have written about omnibuses and drapers’ shops. I was bewildered by this incapacity in a more learned man than I to capture the obvious quality of a time. Then somebody made it worse by saying that Shakespeare could describe Nature in detail because he described in detail the appearance and paces of a horse—as if a horse were some shy bird that built its nest in dim English woodlands and which only a man born in Stratford could see. If there is one thing more certain about an Elizabethan gentleman than the fact that he would know nothing about Nature, it is the fact that he would know all about horses.
I merely quote this old example as an instance of the entire absence of a sense of historical atmosphere. That horse who built his nest in the high trees of Stratford is typical of all this unnatural criticism; the critic who found him did indeed find a mare’s nest. Of the same kind is the argument that Shakespeare must have been a learned man like Bacon, because he had heard so much about learning, about law and mythology and old literature. This is like saying that I must be as learned as the Master of Balliol because I have heard of most of the things that he talks about; because I have heard of the debate of Nominalists and Realists, or because I have heard of the Absolute and the Relative being discussed at Balliol. Again the man misses the whole mood and tone of the time. He does not realise that Shakespeare’s age was an age in which a fairly bright man could pick up the odds and ends of anything, just as I, by walking along Fleet Street, can pick up the odds and ends of anything. A man could no more live in London then and not hear about Pagan Mythology than he could live in London now and not hear about Socialism. The same solemn and inhuman incredulity which finds it incredible that a clever lad in London should pick up more than he really knew is the same that finds it incredible that he should have had his portrait painted for fun by some foolish painter in a public-house.
The truth is, I fear, that madness has a great advantage over sanity. Sanity is always careless. Madness is always careful. A lunatic might count all the railings along the front of Hyde Park; he might know the exact number of them, because he thought they were something else. A healthy man would not know the number of the railings, or perhaps even the shape of the railings; he would know nothing about them except the supreme, sublime, Platonic, and transcendental truth, that they were railings. There is a great deal of falsehood in the notion that truth must necessarily prevail. There is this falsehood to start with: that if a man has got the truth he is generally happy. And if he is happy he is generally lazy. The incessant activity, the exaggerated intelligence, generally belong to those who are a little wrong and just a little right. The whole advantage of those who think that Bacon wrote Shakespeare lies simply in the fact that they care whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The whole disadvantage of those who do not think it lies in the fact that (being folly) they do not care about it. The sane man who is sane enough to see that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is the man who is sane enough not to worry whether he did or not.
(Illustrated London News, March 9, 1907)
In the apparently senseless quarrel about Bacon and Shakespeare … I do not propose to go over the old ground of criticising or refuting the various contradictory Baconian theories. I am much more interested in this moral and almost mystical truth; that the two names have really come to stand for suitable ideas and suitable sets of people. There really is such a person as a Baconian. And it really is true that his chief character is that he is not in the least a Shakespearean.
To begin with, there is all that atmosphere of what is called the cryptogram. Baconians proudly boast of it as a strong argument for their case, that Bacon was profoundly interested in cryptograms. I have not the smallest difficulty in believing it; for Bacon was profoundly interested in a great many things of that kind. He was interested in conspiracies and plots and counter-plots and hidden motives of statecraft and in pretty stinking secrets of State. There was really, in a sense, such a thing as the secret of being Francis Bacon; or at least in the sense of the secret of becoming Lord Verulam or Lord St. Albans. But there was no particular secret about being William Shakespeare, beyond the great secret of why one man can say that the daffodils take the wind, when nine out of ten would merely say that the wind takes the daffodils. Now it will be noted that the two types of humanity are here divided by the sort of faults to which they are lenient. There is a kind of man who does really believe that public life ought not to be made public. He really does think that public men ought to have a special privilege; the privilege of treating their public affairs as private affairs. No doubt, in abstract theory, these people would condemn all imperfections; but men are divided by which imperfections they condemn first, and which they pardon first. When a gentleman takes bribes, in quite a gentlemanly way, it does seem to some people a sort of outrage that his little weaknesses should be dragged into the light of day. It has seemed to be like that to nearly all the apologists of Francis Bacon. But when a poacher, who happens also to be a poet, is fallen on by keepers or put in the stocks, or what not, all this half of humanity that I have called Baconian does really feel that he deserved all he got. They have a sort of cryptogrammic sympathy with anything that is naturally curtained from the common day; whether we describe the curtain as courtesy or conspiracy. On the other hand, they have no sympathy with the defiant and disreputable faults; with robbing on the king’s highway or getting drunk in the public-house. And from the legend that he began deer-stealing as a lad to the legend that he died of a debauch of drink in later middle age, those are the stories which these people always tell, in triumphant scorn, against William Shakespeare of Stratford.
Needless to say, the other portion of humanity moves instantly and instinctively the other way. It starts by suspecting politicians merely because they are politic. It has its doubts about secrets of State, merely because they are secret. It feels an abstract aversion from the cryptograms of court life and the ciphers of secret diplomacy. It has some tendency to treat a rascal better than he deserves when once it knows the worst, or when once he has got his deserts. This was apparent in the case of Wilkes; but it applies in its degree to so much more valuable a person as Will Shakespeare the deer-stealer. It is their principle, in extreme cases, to give a dog a bad name and not hang him.
This and other differences arise, like everything else, from deep spiritual divisions. It will be noted that the Baconian almost always boasts of being the Modern; and praises Bacon especially for his supposed proclamation of modern scientific methods. This is not inconsistent with conspiracy; and corruption is a thing that has very modern scientific methods. Indeed, modern civilisation, that has introduced so many refinements, has brought almost to perfection this old problem of the polite way of taking bribes. Essential secrecy has rather increased than decreased in the last few centuries. I know there is a general impression to the contrary, because of the wide spaces occupied by things like advertisement and publicity. But this is to misunderstand the very nature of these things. Publicity is not the opposite of secrecy. Publicity often means only the public praise of a secret process. It means the enlargement of trademarks, but not the diminishment of trade secrets. Whether machinery and multiple organizations be good things or no, it is obvious that in their very nature they intensify the isolation of the one man who presses a button or the one man who signs a cheque. If he does these things in an unscrupulous fashion, the kind of man who wishes to excuse his action or guard his secret is the same sort of man who would guard Lord Verulam from his accusers, on the ground of his great work for science.
It will be noted that in neither case am I saying that the defence is always logical. It is not conclusive to say of Bacon: “Never mind his bribery and corruption; think of his wonderful work for experimental philosophy.” It is not conclusive to say of Shakespeare: “Never mind his drunkenness or deer-stealing; think of his great work in imaginative poetry.” Poetry does not excuse robbery, anymore than science excuses bribery. I am only pointing out that the poet’s friends and the scientist’s friends are recognizable groups and generally ready to excuse one fault rather than the other. And I am especially pointing out that the more open and casual life of the poet was, if anything, more suited to old and simple societies; the smooth and diplomatic life of the politician very much more suited to our modern society. Shakespeare had in him very much of the Middle Ages, as well as the Renaissance, and held on by a hundred links to the religious and moral life of the past. Bacon seems to be entirely of his own period, when he does not seem to be of our period; and it is a matter of taste whether we think either of them a particularly nice period. But, anyhow, out of the wild pedantry and bewildered detective fever of the old Bacon controversy there does emerge a fact of more permanent popular importance: that far deeper instincts, that set god against god, or legend against legend, were at work to set those two great names so strangely against each other.
(Illustrated London News, December 29, 1929)
I cannot imagine that Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts upon me; for the first time I see … bacon did write Shakespeare.
(“The Riddle of the Ivy,” Tremendous Trifles)
Shakespeare and the Dark Lady (Again)
(“Madame de Chambrun on Shakespeare”)
I have recently read with very great interest a new book on what is not, perhaps, entirely a new subject. I refer to the subject of Shakespeare; not without reference to the subject of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, of the Dark Lady, and the poet’s relation to Southampton and Essex and Bacon and various eminent men of his time. The book is by the Comtesse de Chambrun, and is published by Appleton; and it seems to me both fascinating and convincing. I hasten to say that the lady is very learned and I am very ignorant. I do not profess to know much about Shakespeare, outside such superfluous trifling as the reading of his literary works. Mme. de Chambrun’s book is called Shakespeare, Actor-Poet; and I must humbly confess that I have known him only in his humbler capacity as a poet, and have never devoted myself to the more exhausting occupation of studying all the green-room gossip about him as an actor. But it is very right that more scholarly people should study the biographical problem, and even a poor literary critic may be allowed to judge their studies as literature. And this study seems to me to be one very valuable to literature, and not, like so many of the Baconian penny-dreadfuls, a mere insult to literature. Indeed, some Baconian books are quite as much of an insult to Bacon as to Shakespeare.
I have no authority to decide the controversies of fact raised here: about the relation of Southampton to the Sonnets or the discovery of the Dark Lady in the family of Davenant. I can only say that to a plain man the arguments seem at least to be of a plain sort. Thus, I have never had any reason to quarrel with Mr. Frank Harris or Mr. Bernard Shaw about the claims of Miss Mary Fitton, or to break a lance for or against that questionable queen of beauty. I have lances enough to break with them about more important things. But to my simplicity it does seem rather notable that next to nothing is known about the Dark Lady except that she was dark; and that precious little seems to be known about Mary Fitton except that she was fair. Or, again, I profess myself utterly incompetent to consider the question of what “T. T.” meant by “W. H.”; and I do not think the difficulty will interfere very much with my joy in saying to myself: “But thine immortal beauty shall not fade,” or “Give not a windy night a rainy morrow.” But if it be true, as it is here stated, that some of these sonnets were already written when William Herbert, Lord Pembroke, was only eleven years old, he certainly must have been a precocious child if what Shakespeare says about him is at all appropriate. There may be ingenious answers to these things that I do not know, but to guileless ignorance like my own the point seems rather a practical one. As a matter of fact, I have generally found in these cases that the ingenious explanations were a little too ingenious. But, as I have said, I have no intention of dogmatising on these problems.
Madame de Chambrun’s theory is that the young man for whom Shakespeare had such a hero-worship was his own patron and protector, the Earl of Southampton; for whom, indeed, she has some little hero-worship herself. But she gives very good and convincing grounds for regarding him as something of a hero. I am pretty sure she is quite right in saying that the rebellion of Essex and Southampton was essentially just and public-spirited. She says that, if it had succeeded, they would have been handed down to all history as patriots and reformers. I am also quite sure she is right in saying that it was rather a rebellion against Cecil than against Elizabeth. That alone would make it creditable. It is curious to note that, in this account, Bacon and Shakespeare, so far from being conspirators and collaborators, were two antagonistic figures in two opposite factions, one on each side of a serious civil war. Bacon was the bitter accuser of Essex; indeed, Bacon had probably become a sort of hack and servant of Cecil. Shakespeare was, of course, a friend and follower of Southampton, who was a friend and follower of Essex. According to this account, Shakespeare was presenting plays like Richard II as deliberate political demonstrations, designed to warn weak sovereigns of the need of greater wisdom, at the very time when Bacon was drawing up the heads of his detailed and virulent denunciation of the rebel. However this may be, it is practically certain that there was this chasm between the two great men, whom some have blended into one great man: we might say into one great monster. This theory would make an even stranger monster of the Baconian version of Bacon. Not only was he capable of leading two separate public lives, but even of figuring in two opposite political parties. He must have been plotting against himself all night and condemning himself to be hanged on the following day.
If I say that this fancy would turn Bacon and Shakespeare into Jekyll and Hyde, the partisans of the two parties will probably dispute rather eagerly about which was which. But I, for one, have very little doubt on that point. And I am glad to find that Madame de Chambrun thinks very much the same and knows very much more. If ever there was a base business in human history, it was the method of government which Burleigh and his son conducted in England in the name of Elizabeth; and, I am sorry to say, to some extent with the assistance of Bacon. The people whom Robert Cecil destroyed were all more honest than himself (not that that was saying much), and some of them were sufficiently honourable and spirited to dwarf his little hunchbacked figure even by their dignity in the hour of death. Whether it were Essex or Mary Stuart or even poor Guy Fawkes, they might have stood on the scaffold only in order to make him look small. And I am heartily glad to hear it, if it be true that this nest of nasty plutocrats, with Cecil in the midst of it, counted among its enemies the greatest of Englishmen. It gives me great pleasure to think that it was of those Tudor politicians that he was thinking when he talked of strength by limping away disabled, and art made tongue-tied by authority, and captive good attending captain ill. The last line must have described a good many scenes on the scaffold in the sixteenth century. It may be difficult to imagine Shakespeare greater than Shakespeare, but it is possible that if his friends had triumphed and his cause and faith revived, he might in some unthinkable transfiguration have been greater than himself.
I know much less of the other problem involved, which is entirely one of private life and not of public policy. I mean the question of that mysterious and sinister woman towards whom the sonneteer revives the ancient rage of inconsistencies; the odi et amo [“I hate and I love”] of Catullus. But even I, as a mere casual reader of things in general, had certainly heard of the joke or scandal which is said to have suggested that Sir William Davenant was a natural son of William Shakespeare. Whether this was so or not, Shakespeare certainly knew the Davenants, who kept an inn where he visited, and where (as the writer of this book explains) Southampton himself appeared on the scene at a later stage. Her theory is that Mrs. Davenant was what we should now call a vamp; that she had at one time vamped the poet, and went on later to vamp the peer. But the poet, though his feelings were mixed, could already see through the lady, and was furious at the duping of his friend; and out of this triple tangle of passions came the great tragic sequence of the Sonnets. Upon this I cannot pronounce, beyond repeating that it is set out in this book with great cogency, comprehension, and grip; and without a trace of that indefinable disproportion and lack of balance which makes many learned and ingenious works on such subjects smell faintly of the madhouse. The writer keeps control of the subject, and we feel that, though her conclusions are definite, she would not be seriously upset if they were definitely disproved. She appeals to facts and fairness throughout, and nobody can do more. The documentation and system of references seems to be very thorough, and, in a matter which I am better able to judge, there is nowhere that sense of strain in the argument, or of something altogether far-fetched in the explanation, which continually jars us in most reconstructions of this kind, especially in the dangerous era of Elizabeth. Perhaps, after all, that era really was the great spiritual battle, and Shakespeare and Bacon really were the spirits that met in conflict. But, anyhow, it is a queer paradox that Shakespeare was an obscure and almost unhistorical figure according to some nameless or worthless, according to others impersonal and self-effacing, but anyhow somewhat elusive and secret; and from him came a cataract of clear song and natural eloquence; while Bacon was a public man of wide renown and national and scientific philosophy; and out of him have come riddles and oracles and fantastic cryptograms and a lifelong hobby for lunatics.
(Illustrated London News, October 1, 1927)
A lady writer for whom I have otherwise a warm admiration recently proposed a treaty, or at least a truce, in the war of Bacon and Shakespeare. The compromise, or what she regarded as a compromise, consisted in agreeing that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare, without affirming that Bacon did. This rather reminds me, I confess, of some of the compromises proposed by Prussia in the later stages of the war; and especially her offer to internationalize all territories that obviously belonged to other nations. But the compromise is undoubtedly topical and in touch with the times, since there have lately appeared several rivals to Bacon as well as to Shakespeare. A procession of showy Elizabethan aristocrats now passes across the stage, each striking an attitude in turn and assuring us that he was the real author of Hamlet, but was too shy to say so. This is at least rather a relief after the omnipresence of the Bacon of the Baconians, who was not only Shakespeare, but everybody else too, sometimes even Cervantes and Montaigne. In fact, he was the only man of the Renaissance, and all other men were his masks. He disguised himself as a crowd. He concealed himself artfully in twenty places at once. He was certainly, as his followers say, a wonderful man; but there was something bewildering, and even bloodcurdling, about walking in that wax-work show of historical dummies, with only the one awful ventriloquistic voice calling to us on every side and out of every corner.
I only touch on this old matter as a text for some reflections on the rare art of reasoning. It does not much matter whether the man who wrote Bacon also wrote Shakespeare, but it does very much matter that the people who write English should also write sense. Now the initiators of the new attempt to eliminate William of Stratford continually fall into a strange and simple fallacy that ought to be exposed for its own sake. Even the critic already quoted fell into it, when she argued that the story of the Stratfordian actor and author is inconceivable, since he lived and died comparatively quietly as an actor, though he had produced admittedly amazing masterpieces as an author. Why, it is asked, was there not more excitement about such a sensational genius? To which the obvious answer is “Why indeed?” Why was there not such an excitement about him whoever he was, or whoever he was supposed to be? If some such explosion of ecstasy must have followed such work, why did it not follow the right man, or the wrong man, or any man? If Shakespeare had successfully stolen the glory of Bacon, why, on this argument, was there not more to steal? In that case, it is for the Baconians to answer their own question about why Shakespeare was not more admired. And it is obvious that the Baconians, on their own principle, cannot answer their own question. If, on the other hand people really knew that Shakespeare was but the mask and Bacon the master, why did they not give Bacon all the praise that is here assumed as due to the master? If it was known to be somebody else, like the Earl of Southampton, why did they not give it to the Earl of Southampton? If it was not known to anybody else, but supposed to be Shakespeare, why did they not give it to Shakespeare? This riddle remains exactly the same in whatever direction you twist it, or to whatever man you make it point. Granted that there should be a great fuss about the fame of such work, and then, if somebody did it, there should be a fuss about him; if somebody else, a fuss about him; if nobody knew who did it, a fuss about who did it. Indeed, if nobody knew, one would naturally suppose there would be the greatest fuss of all. I am only taking this as a typical current error in logic; and for that purpose I take the Baconian premises for granted. I merely point out that their own refutation can be deduced from their own premises. For the rest, I fancy it might throw some light on the mystery to throw some doubt on the data—e. g., to question (1) whether masterpieces must always be followed by this earthquake of public interest; (2) whether Shakespeare’s masterpieces were so much neglected as is here implied; (3) and even whether there was not something of a case for those who, in the complexity of all contemporary quarrels, preferred to admire him on this side of idolatry.
(Illustrated London News, Oct. 22, 1921)
Lord Southampton? The Earl of Leicester? Sir Walter Raleigh?
I am not sure who it is who holds the cup or shield for this season as being the historical character who really wrote Shakespeare. I mean in that world of learned disputants who only agree on the first principle that Shakespeare could not write Shakespeare. When last I heard of it, it was Lord Southampton, commonly known as the patron of the poet, who was really the poet as well as the patron. Lord Southampton evidently believed in keeping a dog and then barking himself. The proverb seems to fit very exactly a nobleman occupied in keeping a playwright when he would write Hamlet himself. It must be somebody else by this time—the Earl of Leicester (he was dead, but that is a trifle to the student of cryptograms and conspiracies), or Sir Walter Raleigh, or Sir Christopher Hatton, or anybody else who lived in the later days of Elizabeth and the earlier days of James I. Personally, I believe the plays were written by Guy Fawkes. …
(Illustrated London News, Dec. 13, 1924)
Go back another century, and we shall find the physiological doctrine of the Humours of the Body. You will also find a really learned intellectual like Ben Jonson, solemnly basing whole plays on a systematic application of the theory; while you will find a careless half-educated fellow named William Shakespeare alluding to it, but taking it much more lightly. In spite of which, somehow or other Shakespeare is Shakespeare; and Ben Jonson is only Ben Jonson.
(New York American, April 7, 1934)
How can we discuss how we should have written Shakespeare? Shakespeare has written us. And you and I (I am sure you will agree) are two of his best characters.
(Daily News, Jan. 2, 1907)