DID FRANCIS BACON WRITE SHAKSPERE?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 7800, 20 November 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

DID FRANCIS BACON WRITE SHAKSPERE?

[BY THE EDITOR OF BACON'S " PROM US OF TORMDLARIES AMD ELEGANCIES. "J

London: Guest and Co,, Paternoster Row.

From what little is known of William Shakspere, there has been always more or less of wonder that he could have been the author of the works which bear hia name, with their sublime poetry and philosophy, their profound learning and knowledge of the world. As Hallam said, " All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligenoe hare detected about Shakspere serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character." In the present day a host of writers have rushed into the field to prove that Bacon was the author of those works; and, when a subject has become almost a oraz?, the multitude of writers often prejudice it in the public eye. People will not wade through a dissertation encumbered with rhapsody and irrelevanciea, and when the writer cannot make satisfactorily plain what he means. The publication before us, however, is of a different cast, for the author is terse aud lucid. He takes up strong ground, and does not struggle from it and get bogged. • Bacon was indisputably the greatest of philosophers since the old Greeks, and his poetical power crops out in the works bearing his own name. He was a man of profound and varied learning, and, a travelled man, who had resided abroad, and knew human nature in other countries besides his own. These are potent arguments indeed ; but what has seemed the most potent of the objections to them was the difficulty of believing that, if Bacon were really the producer of the works called Shakspere'a, he would have suffered that vast aud grand body of literature, coating him so much labour and time, to remain unclaimed. Upon this point the writer before us says —

" There are good and sufficient reasons why neither Bacon nor his friends should wish that, during his life or immediately alter his death,, he should be recognised as the author. The stage had been at the very lowest ebb. Players, play-writers, and poetasters were ranked among the most disreputable characters, ' vagabonds, sowers of sedition, and disordered persons.' Henry VIII. and Elizabeth had uttered proclamations against stage-plays, as tending to immorality, disorder in the State and depravity in religion. It would have been ruin to Bacon's position as a gentleman, to his prospects as a statesman, to his reputation as a grave and learned philosopher, had it been known, or at least acknowledged, that he allied himself to the class against whom Coke was legislating; that ho was applying his studies and his genius to the stage, which was regarded by his mother and his powerful Puritan friends and relatives with the utmost abhorrence. Besides ouch personal motives for remaining 'a concealed poet,' there war, no doubt, a stronger motive still, in those days, when neither daily papers nor " periodicals" exihtad, the stage was the readiest means of publishing opinions on any subject. Bacon was intending to utter many advanced opinions, and proposals for reform in law, statecraft, manners, natural philosophy, religion, and what not. The days were dangerous. Men were liable to be imprisoned, tortured, slain even, for their opinions and beliefs. Bacon, then, adopted the method of the ancients [which he himself expounds and commends), and, clothing him«elf m a ' humble weed'— the weed of a pour player—he poured out to ears, which, hearing, heard not, the thoughts and the aspirations of his myriad mind. Hie aim, declared in the Sonnets (but there also in an allegory, as if behind a mask), was to wed beauty' to truth, art to nature, poetry to philosophy. How could he better achieve this than by means of the immortal plays which we claim for him ?'

Shakspere might be a colossal genius, but how did he get the learning and varied knowledge that the plays exhibit That is the puzzle. The theory is that he was employed to figure as their author, and the available evidence is quoted as to what he was doing from year to year while the immortal works were coming out. He appears to have taken kindly to the farming of tithes and other very commonplace pursuits, in whioh he was very successful. As for Bacon, his health was delicate, nor does his character seem to have been a strong one. He was ambitious of offices of State, but was long left waiting for them. He had little taste, for hia profession of the law, but a passion for literature. His mother was a Puritan of the strictest type, ruled her sons in the severe old style, essaying to do: so even when they were men of forty. She regarded theatricals as the work of the devil. Nevertheless, her sod, the philosopher, wag so well known to have a critical discernment and invention in that way that he was often asked by his friends to contrive and set forth some of the light . masques which were performed in the houses of the great or in Gray's Inn, and, were, then a fashionable amusement, containing matter too slight for political alarm. But some of his correspondence is cited, in whioh he refers to himself as ""a concealed po«t," and makes mysterious references to hie unacknowledged writings. • On the whole, the editor of the " Promua" (Bacon's Note-book) makes out in hia present publication an exceedingly strong > oaae for the belief that the mighty genius we call Shakspere and the other whom we know aB Francis Bacon were one and the same per* sonages.