The Misfortunes of Arthur and Its Extensive Links to a Whole Range of His Other Shakespeare Plays

FRANCIS BACON AND HIS FIRST UNACKNOWLEDGED SHAKESPEARE PLAY THE MISFORTUNES OF ARTHUR AND ITS EXTENSIVE LINKS TO A WHOLE RANGE OF HIS OTHER SHAKESPEARE PLAYS By A Phoenix It is an immense ocean that surrounds the island of truth Francis Bacon If circumstances lead me I will find Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed Within the centre [Hamlet: 2:2: 159-61] Tempore Patet Occulta Veritas (In Time the Hidden Truth will be Revealed) Francis Bacon 1 CONTENTS 1. The Silence of the Bacon Editors and Biographers 4 2. The So-called Contributors of The Misfortunes of Arthur 7 3. The Background of The Misfortunes of Arthur 28 4. The Political Allegory of The Misfortunes of Arthur 41 5. Francis Bacon Sole Author of The Misfortunes of Arthur 47 6. The Misfortunes of Arthur and the Shakespeare Plays 57 References 102 2 FACSIMILES Fig. 1 The Title Page of The Misfortunes of Arthur 52 Fig. 2 The First Page of the Introduction 53 Fig. 3 The Last Page of the Introduction 54 Fig. 4 The Page naming Hughes as the Principal Author 55 Fig. 5 The Final Page of The Misfortunes of Arthur 56 [All Deciphered] 3 1. THE SILENCE OF THE BACON EDITORS AND BIOGRAPHERS In normal circumstances any drama with any kind of proximity to the Shakespeare plays however remote or tenuous would ordinarily attract the attention of biographers, editors and commentators in their battalions. Who would individually and collectively scrutinize it for all traces, echoes, parallels, mutual links, and any and all connections to the hallowed Shakespeare canon. One might expect to find note of it in Professor Geoffrey Bullough’s authoritative eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75) or Dr Stuart Gillespie’s Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (2001). Yet in neither of these standard works have I come across any mention of The Misfortunes of Arthur which is all the more surprising (as we shall see) because this long overlooked and relatively unknown drama serves as a direct source for at least half-a-dozen Shakespeare plays and has important links to about a dozen more. One suspects the main reason why this play has been suppressed or passed over by the standard Shakespeare source works is because the name of Francis Bacon is linked to its authorship and production, an historically important play, which pre-dates and has demonstrable links to a large number of Shakespeare plays. The untold importance of Bacon’s connection to The Misfortunes of Arthur makes it unique in the history of the authorship of the Shakespeare plays and it is the very reason why the play has languished in the forgotten hinterlands of orthodox scholarship for the last four centuries. Furthermore, where The Misfortunes of Arthur has attracted (outside of the orthodox Shakespeare canon) the kind of critical editorial attention its importance so obviously merits none of it editors or commentators have ever once questioned or discussed its true authorship, nor of course, its absolutely critical connection to the authorship of the Shakespeare works. The silence and systematic suppression is all the more telling when we consider after ‘William Shakespeare’ Bacon is the most scrutinized writer in English history. Surely, there is no need to state to any literary student that the first appearance of the name of an author in print is a biographical and bibliographical milestone in the canon of any great historical figure or man of letters. Thus one may reasonably expect that Bacon’s biographers and editors would have devoted an enormous amount of energy and space to the minute scrutiny of the first work to which his name is attached in print. Yet in the words of his recent biographer and editor Alan Stewart writing in 2012 ‘Bacon’s first appearance in print has received surprisingly little attention from scholars of his work.’1 Even the disingenuous and misleading phrase ‘surprisingly little attention’ is something of a colossal understatement. In the Bacon canon from the very beginning even notice of its existence has been consistently suppressed and the very title of the play studiously avoided, as part of a four hundred year silence surrounding it, never mind the complete absence of any serious analysis, discussion or commentary. There is no mention of the play by his first editor and biographer Dr Rawley (who lived with Bacon for the last ten years of his recorded life from 1616 to 1626) in the first English biography of Bacon, nor in any of the editions, or collected editions, of Bacon’s Works.2 On the death of Dr Rawley many of Bacon’s letters and manuscripts passed to his second editor Thomas Tenison (afterwards Archbishop of Cantebury), who published some but certainly not all in Baconiana. Or Certain Genuine Remains Of Sir Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, and Viscount of St. Albans; in Arguments Civil and Moral, Natural, Medical, Theological, and Bibliographical; now the first 4 time faithfully published in 1679.3 Like his predecessor Dr Rawley our second Bacon editor Tenison makes no reference to the work marking his first appearance in print. A new one hundred and ninety-seven page biography of Bacon entitled The Life Of Francis Bacon by the Scottish poet and dramatist David Mallet appeared in 1740. At the end of this new Life its author Mallet provided a thirty page ‘Catalogue Of All My Lord Bacon’s Writings, As they are printed in the Edition of 1740’.4 By this he meant his own four volume edition of The Works Of Francis Bacon...with Several Additional Pieces, Never Before printed in any Edition of his Works also published in 1740.5 The four volume edition contains more than thirty of Bacon’s major and minor works, as well as many of his occasional writings, letters and speeches, but its Bacon editor and biographer does not refer once to Bacon’s first appearance in print in The Misfortunes of Arthur. His Life of Bacon furnished the later eighteenth century editions of Bacon’s Works and informed other eighteenth century biographical accounts of Bacon, none of which mention is first appearance in print. In contrast to the silence of his forbears in the fourteen-volume The Letters and Life and Works of Francis Bacon his great standard editor and biographer James Spedding adopted a method of delivery his subject would have greatly admired. Instead of the previous crude but effective method of silence and suppression by Bacon’s earlier editors and biographers Spedding in that masterful way of his actually refers to the invisible play in passing without even mentioning its title (nor is there any trace of it in his detailed index) with such understatement and brevity that one can only stand back in quiet admiration and applaud: Parliament was dissolved on the 23rd of March, 1586-7: and from this time we have no more news of Bacon (unless it be worth while to mention that he assisted in getting up the masque which was presented to the Queen by the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn on the 28th of February following) till after the defeat of the Armada.6 The first twentieth-century single volume edition (a collection based on Spedding’s seven volume edition) The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon edited by J. M. Robertson published in 1905 also makes no mention of The Misfortunes of Arthur,7 nor so, in his bloated and tedious The Baconian Heresy a work marred by selective suppression and gross misrepresentation of the facts and the evidence.8 The first extensive one-volume anthology of Bacon’s writings since Robertson by the modern Bacon authority Brian Vickers is of much more interest. Under the title Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works it was first issued by Oxford University Press in 1996. The edition includes several of Bacon’s major works The Advancement of Learning, the Essays, and the utopian fable New Atlantis, and reprints sixteen other works which were not otherwise readily available. One of the important and valuable features of this inexpensive and accessible work is it reprints a series of dramatic devices and entertainments written by Bacon which Professor Vickers says ‘are little known outside the pages of Spedding’s seven-volume edition of The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon’.9 These dramatic devices were penned not long after The Misfortunes of Arthur beginning from the early 1590s: Of Tribute; or, giving which is due (c.1591-2), six speeches for A Device for the Gray’s Inn Revels (1594-5), (which saw the first performance The Comedy of Errors), and Of Love and Self-Love (1595), all of which were originally part of Bacon’s collection of manuscripts known as The Northumberland MSS which originally held copies of his Shakespeare plays Richard II and Richard III. In addition to printing these texts Vickers provides his scholarly readers with very extensive annotations explaining their background and context. One 5 would have thought considering the detailed attention Professor Vickers devotes to these Baconian dramatic devices and entertainments he might have assigned a similar proportionate amount of energy to the Baconian drama immediately preceding them, the one which witnessed Bacon’s first appearance in print. However, all that he had to say about The Misfortunes of Arthur is inappropriately relegated to a footnote in his introduction, which I here quote in full: Bacon’s first appearance in print was as one of a group of Gray’s Inn students who devised dumb-shows performed before each act of Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), a play which made a peculiar blend of Arthurian legend (Geoffrey Monmouth) and Senecan tragedy (Thyestes).

Load more