We live in the Ages of Faith, of faith in fudge. Mr. Smith was certain, and Mr. Bucke is inclined to suspect, that when Bacon wanted a mask he chose, as a plausible author of the plays, a man who could not write. Mr. Smith was certain, and Mr. Bucke must deem it possible, that Shakespeare's enemy, Greene, that his friends, Jonson, Burbage, Heming, and the other actors, and that his critics and admirers, Francis Meres and others, accepted, as author of the pieces which they played in or applauded, a man who could write no more than his name. Such was the tool whom Bacon found eligible, and so easily gulled was the literary world of Eliza and our James.
And Bacon took all this trouble for what reason? To gain five or six pounds, or as much of that sum as Shakespeare would let him keep. Had Bacon been possessed by the ambition to write plays he would always have written original dramas, he would not have assumed the part of Nicholas Nickleby.
There is no human nature in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he publishes 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the actor's care all his sonnets to the Queen, to Gloriana, and for years these manuscript poems are handed about by Shakespeare, as his own, among the actors, hack scribblers, and gay young nobles of his acquaintance. They 'chaff' Shakespeare about his affection for his 'sovereign;' great Gloriana's praises are stained with sack in taverns, and perfumed with the Indian weed. And Bacon, careful toiler after Court favour, 'thinks it all wery capital,' in the words of Mr. Weller pere. Moreover, nobody who hears Shakespeare talk and sees him smile has any doubt that he is the author of the plays and amorous fancies of Bacon.
It is needless to dwell on the pother made about the missing manuscripts of Shakespeare. 'The original manuscripts, of course, Bacon would take care to destroy,' says Mr. Holmes, 'if determined that the secret should die with him.' If he was so determined, for what earthly reason did he pass his valuable time in vamping up old plays and writing new ones? 'There was no money in it,' and there was no reason. But, if he was not determined that the secret should die with him, why did not he, like Scott, preserve the manuscripts?
The manuscripts are where Marlowe's and where Moliere's are, by virtue of a like neglect. Where are the MSS. of any of the great Elizabethans? We really cannot waste time over Mr. Donnelly's theory of a Great Cryptogram, inserted by Bacon, as proof of his claim, in the multitudinous errors of the Folio. Mr. Bucke, too, has his Anagram, the deathless discovery of Dr. Platt, of Lakewood, New Jersey. By manipulating the scraps of Latin in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' he extracts 'Hi Ludi tuiti sibi Fr. Bacono nati': 'These plays, entrusted to themselves, proceeded from Fr. Bacon.' It is magnificent, but it is not Latin. Had Bacon sent in such Latin at school, he would never have survived to write the 'Novum Organon' and his sonnets to Queen Elizabeth. In that stern age they would have 'killed him--with wopping.' That Bacon should be a vamper and a playwright for no appreciable profit, that, having produced his deathless works, he should make no sign, has, in fact, staggered even the great credulity of Baconians. He MUST, they think, have made a sign in cipher. Out of the mass of the plays, anagrams and cryptograms can be fashioned a plaisir, and the world has heard too much of Mrs. Gallup, while the hunt for hints in contemporary frontispieces led to mistaking the porcupine of Sidney's crest for 'a hanged hog' (Bacon).
The theory of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays and poems has its most notable and recent British advocate in His Honour Judge Webb, sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Regius Professor of Laws, and Public Orator in the University of Dublin.
Judge Webb, as a scholar and a man used to weighing evidence, puts the case at its strongest. His work, 'The Mystery of William Shakespeare' (1902), rests much on the old argument about the supposed ignorance of Shakespeare, and the supposed learning of the author of the plays. Judge Webb, like his predecessors, does not take into account the wide diffusion of a kind of classical and pseudo-scientific knowledge among all Elizabethan writers, and bases theories on manifest misconceptions of Shakespearean and other texts. His book, however, has affected the opinions of some readers who do not verify his references and examine the mass of Elizabethan literature for themselves.
Judge Webb, in his 'Proem,' refers to Mr. Holmes and Mr. Donnelly as 'distinguished writers,' who 'have received but scant consideration from the accredited organs of opinion on this side of the Atlantic.'
Their theories have not been more favourably considered by Shakespearean scholars on the other side of the Atlantic, and how much consideration they deserve we have tried to show. The Irish Judge opens his case by noting an essential distinction between 'Shakspere,' the actor, and 'Shakespeare,' the playwright. The name, referring to the man who was both actor and author, is spelled both 'Shakspeare' and 'Shakespeare' in the 'Returne from Parnassus' (1602).* The 'school of critics' which divides the substance of Shakespeare on the strength of the spelling of a proper name, in the casual times of great Elizabeth, need not detain the inquirer.
*The Returne from Parnassus, pp. 56,57,138. Oxford, 1886.
As to Shakespeare's education, Judge Webb admits that 'there was a grammar school in the place.' As its registers of pupils have not survived, we cannot prove that Shakespeare went to the school. Mr.
