It has scarcely ever been doubted, among critics, that the sonnets, smaller poems, and plays were the work of one and the same author; though many have experienced insurmountable difficulties in the attempt to reconcile the sonnets with the life of the man, William Shakespeare. The similitudes of thought, style, and diction, are such as to put at rest all question on that head. Mr. Boswell doubted whether any true intimations could be drawn from the Sonnets of Shakespeare, respecting the life and feelings of the author: certainly no such doubt could have arisen in his mind, if he had considered them as the work of Francis Bacon. In respect of ideas, opinions, modes of thinking and feeling, style, manner, and language, they bear the impress of Bacon's mind, especially in the first half of his life; and they exhibit states of mind and feeling, which will find an explanation nowhere better than in his personal history. Many of them show the strongest internal evidence of their having been addressed to the Queen, as they no doubt were. Bacon tells us, that "she was very willing to be courted, wooed, and to have sonnets made in her commendation"; 1 and, as we know, he was himself notoriously given to the writing of sonnets to this "mistress' eyebrow." Some of them may have been addressed to his young friend, Mr. William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke), and others may find a fitting interpretation in the circumstances and events of his own actual life, in his own inward thought and feeling, and in his own enterprises of love, which continued to a late day, though this Petrarch worshipped no particular Laura. The first small collection of sonnets and minor poems was published by Jaggard, in 1599, under the title ɔf the “Passionate Pilgrim," but the full edition of the 1 In Mem. Eliz., Works (Mont.), III. 477. Sonnets was dedicated to "Mr. W. H." in 1609, when Shakespeare was in his forty-sixth, and Bacon in the fortyninth year of his age. Even the difficulty of Mr. Boswell, however, that a man of forty-five should write such sonnets as the LXXIIId, may disappear, when it is considered that Bacon was married in his forty-sixth year, and that even in 1609, when so nearly fifty, thoughts of love and "yellow leaves" may very well have come together. In 1594, the Solicitor's place having become vacant, Bacon's suit for it was urgently pressed by Essex and others of his friends. Without preferment at the age of thirtythree, and still hesitating whether he should not devote himself wholly to studies and a private life, he felt this to be an important crisis in his fortunes; nearly all his hopes. looking to a public career were staked upon it. The Queen had been personally well-disposed towards him, but she had conceived a high displeasure at his course in Parliament on the subsidies, and he was now excluded from her presence; and the zeal of Essex in his behalf, insisting upon it as a special favor to himself, and as perhaps affording some countenance to his party, seems still further to have marred the whole business. She was determined not to yield her own will to the pride of Essex, and hesitated, perhaps, to raise to so high a place in the state the known adherent and friend of the great earl, who, although the grandson of her cousin, and a favorite thus far, was yet a descendant in the line of Edward III., whose ambitious head was capable of projects looking to her very throne. So, at last, when he had been "voiced with great expectation," and had had "the honorable testimony of so many counsellors,” and “the wishes of most men even for the higher place of AttorneyGeneral, the Queen "did fly the tilt," says Essex, and it was fixed, that Serjeant Fleming should be made Solicitor; and, as we learn from himself, "no man ever read a more exquisite disgrace" than Francis Bacon. No longer “able to endure the sun," he "fled into the shade" at Twicken ham Park, the lovely country-seat of his brother Edward, on the banks of the Thames, where he kept his "lodge," his papers, and his books, and whither he was accustomed to retire whenever he could escape from Gray's Inn, and the bustle of the city, or desired to find the most favored retreat of the Muses. He had resolved thus, if rejected: "I will by God's assistance, with this disgrace of my fortune, and yet with the comfort of the good opinion of so many honorable and worthy persons, retire myself with a couple of men to Cambridge, and there spend my life in studies and contemplations, without looking back.” 1 Something like this same voicing appears in the "Hamlet," thus: "Ros. Good my Lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do, surely, bar the door of your liberty, if you deny your griefs to your friend. Ham. Sir, I lack advancement. Ros. How can that be, when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark? - Ham. Ay, sir, but while the grass grows,' — the proverb is something musty." Act III. Sc. 2. Again, says the "Timon": "Is this the Athenian minion whom the world Voiced so regardfully?” — - Act IV. Sc. 3. The "Hamlet" continues: "King. How fares our cousin Hamlet? Ham. Excellent, i' faith; of the cameleon's dish: I eat the air, promisecramm'd. You cannot feed capons so." — Act III. Sc. 2. So, says Bacon, of the chameleon: "He feedeth not only upon air, (though that be his principal sustenance,) yet some that have kept cameleons a whole year together, would never perceive that ever they fed upon anything else but air"; 2 and this idea of the chameleon's feeding on air is found in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," thus: "Sic. What, angry, Sir Thurio? do you change colour? Val. Give me leave, madam; he is a kind of cameleon. 1 Letter, Works (Mont.), XII. 170; Spedding, I. 291. Thur. That hath more mind to feed on your blood, than live in your The "Hamlet" continues: "Ham. My lord, you play'd once in the University, you say? [TO POLONIUS. Pol. That I did, my lord; and was accounted a good actor. Pol. I did enact Julius Cæsar: I was kill'd i' the Capitol; Brutus kill'd me." · Act III. Sc. 2. And there is something like the sound of a reminiscence in this expression of Bacon: "Nay, even two or three days ago, Bernardinus Telesius mounted the stage, and enacted a new play." 1 Further, when Hamlet had instructed the players how to speak the speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which he would set down and insert in the play, and the speech had taken effect, according to his expectation, the first remark that pops into his head is this very curious one: — "Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers, (if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me,) with two Provincial roses on my raz'd shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?" — Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 2. Is it, then, so very wonderful, that these ideas of the University and a couple of men, and a fellowship with two Provincial roses in his shoes, and a forest of feathers, should be running in the same head, at times not far apart? When Buckingham is about to fleece him of his "forest" at Gorhambury, he replies, "I will not be stripped of my feathers." In the mean time, the usual tenor of his thoughts had been seriously interrupted, and his whole heart saddened. Deep in debt and Jews' bonds, with his prospect for promotion thus fatally darkened, he was on the point of giving up in despair: even his studies failed to afford relief. It seemed to him, that "the old anthem might never be more truly sung Totus mundus in maligno positus est";2 and : 1 Int. of Nat. Works (Mont.), XV. 100. again he writes: "But casting the worst of my fortune with an honorable friend that had long used me privately, I told his Lordship of this my purpose to travel, accompanying it with these very words, that upon her Majesty's rejecting me with such circumstance, though my heart might be good, yet mine eyes would be sore that I should take no pleasure to look upon my friends; for that I was not an impudent man, that could face out a disgrace; and yet I hoped her Majesty would not be offended, if not being able to endure the sun, I fled into the shade." 1 And thus sings the son net: "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, Sonnet xxix. After a short retirement at Essex's house, and within his own private lodge at Twickenham, where, as he says, he once again enjoyed the blessings of contemplation in that sweet solitariness, which collecteth the mind, as shutting the eyes doth the sight," he began to see and acknowledge "the providence of God" towards him, and concluded that he had taken "duty too exactly" and not "according to the dregs of this age," finding it on the whole most wise and expedient to bear the yoke in his youth "tolerare jugum in juventute"; so that at length being called to some service by the Queen, in which he was detained by sickness at Huntingdon, he writes to her Majesty thus: "This present arrest of mine by his Divine Majesty from your Majesty's service, is not the least affliction I have proved; and I hope your Majesty doth conceive, that nothing under mere impossibility could have detained me from earning so 1 Letter to Cecil (1594-5). Spedding's Let. and Life, I. 350. |