Part 38

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read ‘King John’ in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has--

The greater navies look like walking woods.

They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself. One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon’s Psalms or compare navies to ‘walking woods’! Mr. Holmes adds: ‘Many of the sonnets [of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.’ That is, Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pass from hand to hand, among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends,’ as Shakespeare’s (1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave offspring--rather late in life. Shakespeare’s apparent allusions to his profession--

I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view,

and

The public means which public manners breeds,

refer, no doubt, to Bacon’s versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has hitherto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare’s friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is intended. Is it not obvious?

I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.

Bacon clearly had an assignation with Her Majesty--so here is ‘scandal about Queen Elizabeth.’ Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is ‘within sight of Her Majesty’s Palace of White Hall.’ She gave Bacon the reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen; he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested himself in a masque at Gray’s Inn, while he and his friends ‘partly devised dumb shows and additional speeches,’ in 1588.

Nothing follows as to Bacon’s power of composing Shakespeare’s plays. A fragmentary masque, which may or may not be by Bacon, is put forward as the germ of what Bacon wrote about Elizabeth in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ An Indian WANDERER from the West Indies, near the fountain of the AMAZON, is brought to Elizabeth to be cured of blindness. Now the fairy, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ says, capitalised by Mr. Holmes:

I DO WANDER EVERYWHERE.

Here then are two wanderers--and there is a river in Monmouth and a river in Macedon. Puck, also, is ‘that merry WANDERER of the night.’ Then ‘A BOUNCING AMAZON’ is mentioned in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘the fountain of the great river of the Amazons’ is alluded to in the fragment of the masque. Cupid too occurs in the play, and in the masque the wanderer is BLIND; now Cupid is blind, sometimes, but hardly when ‘a certain aim he took.’ The Indian, in the masque, presents Elizabeth with ‘his gift AND PROPERTY TO BE EVER YOUNG,’ and the herb, in the play, has a ‘VIRTUOUS PROPERTY.’

For such exquisite reasons as these the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ are by one hand, and the masque is by Bacon. For some unknown cause the play is full of poetry, which is entirely absent from the masque. Mr. Holmes was a Judge; sat on the bench of American Themis--and these are his notions of proof and evidence. The parallel passages which he selects are on a level with the other parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare. One thing is certain: the writer of the masque shows no signs of being a poet, and a poet Bacon explicitly ‘did not profess to be.’ One piece of verse attributed to Bacon, a loose paraphrase of a Greek epigram, has won its way into ‘The Golden Treasury.’ Apart from that solitary composition, the verses which Bacon ‘prepared’ were within the powers of almost any educated Elizabethan. They are on a level with the rhymes of Mr. Ruskin. It was only when he wrote as Shakespeare that Bacon wrote as a poet.

We have spoken somewhat harshly of Mr. Holmes as a classical scholar, and as a judge of what, in literary matters, makes evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon’s as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote ‘Richard II.,’ ‘which, though it grew from me, went after about in others’ names.’ Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes’s opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But ‘nothing less than a miracle’ could shake Mr. Holmes’s belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon’s) and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’--so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the visitation of God in the shape of idiocy, could bring the conviction that the person who wrote the masque could have written the play. The reader may compare the whole passage in Mr. Holmes’s work (pp. 228-238). We have already set forth some of those bases of his belief which only a miracle could shake. The weak wind that scarcely bids the aspen shiver might blow them all away.

Vast space is allotted by Baconians to ‘parallel passages’ in Bacon and Shakespeare. We have given a few in the case of the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The others are of equal weight. They are on a level with ‘Punch’s’ proofs that Alexander Smith was a plagiarist. Thus Smith:

No CHARACTER that servant WOMAN asked;

Pope writes:

Most WOMEN have no CHARACTER at all.

It is tedious to copy out the puerilities of such parallelisms. Thus Bacon:

If we simply looked to the fabric of the world;

Shakespeare:

And, like the baseless fabric of a vision.

Bacon:

The intellectual light in the top and consummation of thy workmanship;

Shakespeare:

Like eyasses that cry out on the top of the question.

Myriads of pages of such matter would carry no proof. Probably the hugest collection of such ‘parallels’ is that preserved by Mrs. Pott in Bacon’s ‘Promus,’ a book of 628 pages. Mrs. Pott’s ‘sole object’ in publishing ‘was to confirm the growing belief in Bacon’s authorship of the plays.’ Having acquired the opinion, she laboured to strengthen herself and others in the faith. The so-called ‘Promus’ is a manuscript set of notes, quotations, formulae, and proverbs. As Mr. Spedding says, there are ‘forms of compliment, application, excuse, repartee, etc.’ ‘The collection is from books which were then in every scholar’s hands.’ ‘The proverbs may all, or nearly all, be found in the common collections.’ Mrs. Pott remarks that in ‘Promus’ are ‘several hundreds of notes of which no trace has been discovered in the acknowledged writings of Bacon, or of any other contemporary writer but Shakespeare.’ She adds that the theory of ‘close intercourse’ between the two men is ‘contrary to all evidence.’ She then infers that ‘Bacon alone wrote all the plays and sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare.’ So Bacon entrusted his plays, and the dread secret of his authorship, to a boorish cabotin with whom he had no ‘close intercourse’! This is lady’s logic, a contradiction in terms. The theory that Bacon wrote the plays and sonnets inevitably implies the closest intercourse between him and Shakespeare. They must have been in constant connection. But, as Mrs. Pott truly says, this is ‘contrary to all evidence.’