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Baconian Essays Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/baconianessaysOOsmit BACONIAN ESSAYS BACONIAN ESSAYS BY E. W. SMITHSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND TWO ESSAYS BY SIR GEORGE GREENWOOD LONDON CECIL PALMER OAKLEY HOUSE, 14-18 BLOOMSBURY ST., W.C. i First Edition Copy- right 1922 CONTENTS PAGE Introductory (by G. Greenwood) ... 7 Five Essays by E. W. Smithson The Masque of "Time Vindicated" . 41 Shakespeare—A Theory . .69 Ben Jonson and Shakespeare . .97 " " Bacon and Poesy . 123 " The Tempest" and Its Symbolism . 149 Two Essays by G. Greenwood The Common Knowledge of Shakespeare and Bacon 161 The Northumberland Manuscript . 187 Final Note (G. G.) . , . 223 J /',-S ^ a.^'1-^U- a BACONIAN ESSAYS INTRODUCTORY Henry James, in a letter to Miss Violet Hunt, thus delivers himself with regard to the authorship of " " — the plays and poems of Shakespeare * : " I am * a sort of ' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me." Now I do not for a moment suppose that in so writing the late Mr. Henry James had any intention of affixing the stigma of personal fraud upon William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Doubtless he used the term '* fraud " in a semi-jocular vein as we so often hear it made use of in the colloquial language of the present day, and his meaning is nothing more, and nothing less, than this, viz., that the beHef that the plays and poems of " Shake- speare " were, in truth and in fact, the work of " the man from Stratford," (as he subsequently, in the same letter, styles *' the divine William ") is one of the greatest of all the many delusions which have, * Letters of Henry James. Macmillan, 1920, Vol. I., p. 432. 7 — BACONIAN ESSAYS from time to time, afflicted a credulous and " a patient world." He believed that when, in the year 1593, the dedication of Venus and Adonis to the Young Earl of Southampton was signed " William Shakespeare," that signature did not, in truth and in fact, stand for the Stratford player who never so signed himself, but for a very different person, in quite another sphere of life, who desired to preserve his anonymity. He believed that when plays were published in the name of " Shake-speare " that name did not, in truth and in fact, stand for " the man from Stratford," but again for that same person —or it might be, and in certain cases certainly was, for some other—^who desired to publish plays under the mask of a convenient pen-name. And if the authorship of these poems and plays came, in course of time, to be attributed to William Shakspere, the player from Stratford-upon-Avon, who himself never uttered a word, or wrote a syllable, or took any steps whatever to claim the authorship of those poems and plays for himself, but was content " merely to play the part of *' William the Silent from first to last, there is, surely, no reason to brand him as a cheat and a '* fraud " upon that account, and we may be quite sure that that highly-gifted and distinguished man of literature, H^enry James one of the intellectuals of our day—had no intention of so branding him. A lady, a short time ago, wrote a book to explain the play of Hamlet in quite a new light, by making reference to the special political circumstances of the time when it appeared, such as the " Scottish succession," the character 8 INTRODUCTORY of James I, certain events in the lives of Mary Queen of Scots, Burleigh, Essex, Southampton, Elizabeth Vernon, and other historical figures, and producing " detailed analogies between episodes of contemporary history and the play,"* and, in reply to certain objections raised by a well-known critic, she essayed to justify herself by an appeal to the doctrine of " Relativity," which, as she declared with some warmth, had come to stay whether her captious critic wanted it or not ! This lofty invocation of Einstein's theory of Time, Space, and the Universe—a theory so difficult of comprehension that only a favoured few can even affect to understand it—in support of a new inter- pretation of one of Shakespeare's plays, was, certainly, somewhat ridiculous, but the lady was quite right in her contention—which would equally hold good though Einstein had never lived or taught —that in forming our judgments on men long gone, whether of their characters or their actions, or their sayings or their writings, we must ever bear in mind the views, the beliefs, the opinions, and the special circumstances of the time and the society in which they lived. Now, it is well known that in Elizabethan and Jacobean times opinion with regard to what I may call literary deception was very different from what it is at the present day when we at any rate affect much greater scrupulosity with regard to these matters. Such literary de- ceptions, which in these days would be condemned as " frauds," were, in those times, constantly * See Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 1921. Article headed " Hamlet and History." 9 — BACONIAN ESSAYS and habitually practised, and considered quite venial sins, if, indeed, they were looked upon as sins at all. That is a fact which should never be lost sight of when we are considering problems of authorship, or writings of dubious interpretation (such as some of Ben Jonson's, e.g.) in those long- gone and very different times. Now, I am one of those who agree with the late Mr. Henry James, and with the present highly- distinguished French scholar and historian, Professor Abel Lefranc—I refer here to his negative views only—with regard to the authorship of the plays and poems of '* Shakespeare." In my humble opinion (which, to be quite honest, I may say is not " " humble at all !), that the plays and poems of ** Shakespeare " were not written by William Shakspere, the player who came from Stratford, is as certain as anything can be which is not susceptible of actual mathematical proof. Who then wrote the plays ? (Let us leave the poems on one side for the present). Well, that the work of many pens appears in the Folio of 1623 i^ surely indisputable. Few if any, of the " orthodox " would be found to deny *' " it. There is little, if any, of Shakespeare whoever he was—in the first part of Henry VI, and, surely, not much more in the second and third parts. Very little, if any part, of The Taming of the Shrew is " Shakespearean." The great majority of critics exclude Titus altogether. The work of pens other than the Shakespearean pen is to be found in Pericles, and Timo7i, and T'roiliis and Cresssida, and even in Macbeth. Henry VHI, though published as by *' Shakespeare," was almost undoubtedly the 10 INTRODUCTORY work of Fletcher and Massinger in collaboration.* The list might be added to but it is unnecessary to do so. I repeat, the work of many pens is to be found in the Folio of 1623, but there is, of course, one man whose work eclipses that of all the rest, one man who stands pre-eminent and unrivalled, towering high above the others ; one man of whom it may be said, as of Marcellus of old, that insignis ingreditiir^ victorque vivos supereminet omnes. Find that man, find the author of Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello—to give but a few examples—and you will have found the true " Shakespeare." But set your hearts at rest you will never find him in the man ; whose vulgar and banal life (in the course of which not one— I do not say generous but—even respect- able action can be discovered by all the researches of his biographers) is to be read in the pages of Halliwell-Phillipps and Sir Sidney Lee—the life of which so little is known, and yet so much too much ! Meantime it is amusing, or would be so if it were not so lamentable, to see our solemn and entirely self-satisfied Pundits and Mandarins of " Shake- spearean " literature ever trying to see daylight through the millstone of the Stratfordian faith ; ever broaching some brand-new theory, and affecting to find something in this Shakespearean literature which nobody ever found before them, but which as they fondly imagine, somehow, and in some way, tends to support the old outworn Stratfordian tradition. Perhaps some *' prompt copy " of an * See Sidelights on Shakespeare by H. Dugdale Sykes. (The Shake- speare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1919.) 11 — BACONIAN ESSAYS old Elizabethan drama is discovered. It is hailed with exultation as affording proof that plays in those times were printed from *' prompt copies," and further cryptic arguments are adduced in support of the absurd theory that the Stratford player dashed off the plays of " Shakespeare," currente calamo^ and handed them over to his fellow ** deserving men," Heminge and Condell, and the rest, with " scarse a blot " upon them, and that the plays were printed from these precious " unblotted autographs." An old Manuscript Play is found. It is the work of several pens. In it are discovered three pages in " an unknown hand. See now ! Here is a hand of the same class " as the " Shakespeare " (i.e., ** Shakspere ") signatures ! Why, it is Shakspere's own handwriting ! Look at Shakspere's will—the will in which no book or manuscript is mentioned, but wherein are small bequests to Shakspere's fellow-players, those " deserving men " Burbage, and Heminge, and Condell, to buy them rings withal, and of the testator's sword, and parcel-gilt bowl, and " second-best bedstead "—and there you will find three words well
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