VI. SHARING IN THE PROFITS OF THE PLAY-HOUSE. But suppose behind all this there was another and a more ter...l consideration. Suppose this young nobleman had eked out his miserable income by writing plays to sell to the theaters. Suppose it was known that he had his "second" and "third nights;" that he put into his pocket the sweaty pennies of that stinking mob of hoodlums, sailors, 'prentices, thieves, rowdies and prostitutes; and that he had used the funds so obtained to enable him to keep up his standing with my Lord of Southampton, and my Earl of Essex, and their associates, as a gentleman among gentlemen. Think of it! And this in England, three hundred years ago, when the line of caste was almost as deep and black between the gentlemen and "the mutable, rank-scented many," as it is to-day in India between the Brahmin and the Pariah. Why, to this hour, I am told, there is an almost impassable gulf between the nobleman and the tradesman of great Britain. Then, as Burton says in The Anatomy of Melancholy, “idleness was the mark of nobility." To earn money in any kind of trade was despicable. To have earned it by sharing in the pennies and shillings taken in at the door, or on the stage of the play-house, would have been utterly damnable in any gentleman. It would have involved a loss of social position worse than death. One will have to read Thackeray's story of Miss Shum's Husband to find a parallel for it. VII. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS. 66 rase the city" and But we have seen that the hiring of actors of Shakspere's company to perform the play of Richard II., by the followers of the Earl of Essex, the day before the attempt to seize the person of the Queen (even as Monmouth seized the person of Richard II.), and compel a deposition by like means, was one of the counts in the indictment against Essex, which cost him his head. In other words, the intent of the play was treasonable, and was so understood at the time. "Know you not," said Queen Elizabeth, "that I am Richard II.?" And I have shown good reason to believe that all the historical Plays, to say nothing of Julius Casar, were written with intent to popularize rebellion against tyrants. -- "The poor player," Will Shakspere, might have written such plays solely for the pence and shillings there were in them, for he had nothing to do with politics: he was a legal vagabond, a "vassal actor," a social outcast; but if Francis Bacon, the able and ambitious Francis Bacon, the rival of Cecil, the friend of Southampton and Essex; the lawyer, politician, member of Parliament, courtier belonging to the party that desired to bring in the Scotch King and drive the aged Queen from the throne--if he had acknowledged the authorship of the Plays, the inference would have been irresistible in the mind of the court, that these horrible burlesques and travesties of royalty were written with malice and settled intent to bring monarchy into contempt and justify the aristocracy in revolution. VIII. ANOTHER REASON. But it must be further remembered that while Bacon lived the Shakespeare Plays were not esteemed as they are now. Then they were simply successful dramas; they drew great audiences; they filled the pockets of manager and actors. Leonard Digges, in the verses prefixed to the edition of 1640, says that when Jonson's "Fox and Subtle Alchymist" Have scarce defrayed the sea-coal fire And door-keepers: when, let but Falstaff come, And Benedick be seen, lo! in a trice The cock-pit, galleries, boxes, all are full, To hear Malvolio, that cross-gartered gull. There was no man in that age, except the author of them, who rated the Shakespeare Plays at their true value. They were admired for "the facetious grace of the writing," but the world had not yet advanced far enough in culture and civilization to recognize them as the great store-houses of the world's thought. Hence there was not then the same incentive to acknowledge them that there would be to-day. IX. STILL ANOTHER REASON. If Francis Bacon had died full of years and honors, I can conceive how, from the height of preeminent success, he might have fronted the prejudices of the age, and acknowledged these children of his brain. S But the last years of his life were years of dishonor. He had been cast down from the place of Lord Chancellor for bribery, for 'ling justice for money. He had been sentenced to prison; he held his liberty by the King's grace. He was denied access to the court. He was a ruined man, 66 a very subject of pity," as he says himself. For a man thus living under a cloud to have said, "In my youth I wrote plays for the stage; I wrote them for money; I used Shakspere as a mask; I divided with him the money taken in at the gate of the play-houses from the scum and refuse of London," would only have invited upon his head greater ignominy and disgrace. He had a wife; he had relatives, a proud and aristocratic breed. He sought to be the Aristotle of a new philosophy. Such an avowal would have smirched the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning; it would have blotted and blurred the bright and dancing light of that torch which he had kindled for posterity. He would have had to explain his, no doubt countless, denials made years before, that he had had anything to do with the Plays. And why should he acknowledge them? He left his fame and good name to his "own countrymen after some time be past;" he believed the cipher, which he had so laboriously inserted in the Plays, would be found out. He would obtain all the glory for his name in that distant future when he would not hear the reproaches of caste; when, as pure spirit, he might look down from space, and see the winged-goodness which he had created, passing, on pinions of persistent purpose, through all the world, from generation to generation. In that age, when his body was dust; when cousins and kin were ashes; when Shakspere had moldered into nothingness, beneath the protection of his own barbarous curse; when not a trace could be found of the bones of Elizabeth or James, or even of the stones of the Curtain or the Blackfriars: then, in a new world, a brighter world, a greater world, a better world, to which his own age would be but as a faint and perturbed remembrance,- he would be married anew to his immortal works. He would live again, triumphant, over Burleigh and Cecil, over Coke and Buckingham; over parasites and courtiers, over tricksters and panderers:-the magnificent victory of genius over power; of mind over time. And so living, he would live forever. WE CHAPTER VIII. CORROBORATING CIRCUMSTANCES. Lapped in proof, Confronted him with self-comparisons. Macbeth, i, 2. E sometimes call, in law, an instrument between two parties an indenture. Why? Because it was once the custom to write a deed or contract in duplicate, on a long sheet of paper or parchment, and then cut them apart upon an irregular or indented line. If, thereafter, any dispute arose as to whether one was the equivalent of the other, the edges, where they were divided, were put together to see if they precisely matched. If they did not, it followed that some fraud had somewhere been practiced. Truth, in like manner, is serrated, and its indentations fit into all other truth. If two alleged truths do not thus dovetail into each other, along the line where they approximate, then one of them is not the truth, but an error or a fraud. Let us see, therefore, if, upon a multitude of minor points, the allegation that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespeare Plays fits its indentations-its teeth-precisely into what we know of Bacon and Shakspere. In treating these questions, I shall necessarily have to be as brief as possible. I. THE QUESTION OF TIME. Does the biography of Bacon accord with the chronology of the Plays? Bacon was born in York House, or Palace, on the Strand, January 22, 1561. William Shakspere was born at Stratford-on-Avon, April 23, 1564. Bacon died in the spring of 1626. Shakspere in the spring of 1616. The lives of the two men were therefore parallel; but Bacon was three years the elder, and survived Shakspere ten years. Bacon's mental activity began at an early age. He was studying the nature of echoes at a time when other children are playing. At twelve he outstripped his home tutors and was sent to join his brother Anthony, two years his senior, at Trinity College, Cam idge. At eighteen Hilliard paints his portrait and inscribes upon it, "if one could but paint his mind." We will hereafter see reasons to believe that there is extant a whole body of compositions written before he was twenty-one years of age. At about twenty he summarizes the political condition of Europe with the hand of a statesman. II. PLAYS BEFORE SHAKSPERE COMES TO LONDON. The Plays antedate the time of the coming of Shakspere to London, which it is generally agreed was in 1587. That high authority, Richard Simpson, in his School of Shakespeare,' in his article, "The Early Authorship of Shakespeare"" and in Notes and Queries,' shows that the Shakespeare Plays commenced to appear in 1585! That is to say, while Shakspere was still living in Stratford-in the year the twins were born! We are therefore to believe that in that "bookless neighborhood" the butcher's apprentice was, between his whippings, writing plays for the stage! Here are miracles indeed. In 1585 Robert Greene both registered and published his Planetomachia, and in this work he denounces "some avaricious player, who, not content with his own province [of acting], should dare to intrude into the field of authorship, which ought to belong solely to the professed scholars"-like Greene himself. And from that time forward Greene continued to gibe at this same somebody, who was writing plays for the stage. He speaks of "gentlemen poets" in 1588, who set "the end of scholarism in an English blank verse; it is the humor of a novice that tickles them with self-love." ... Thomas Nash says, in an epistle prefixed to Greene's Arcadia, published, according to Mr. Dyce, in 1587: It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions, that run through every art and thrive at none, to leave the trade of noverint [lawyer], whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should have need. Yet English Seneca, read by candle-light, yields many good sentences, as "blood is a beggar," and so forth; and if you entreat him fair, in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. 1 Vol. ii, p. 343. North British Review, vol. lii. 4th series, vol. viii. |