Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Bacon’s Reasons for Concealment

In Bacon’s dedication of the Colours of Good and Evil to Lord Mountjoy, in 1595–97, he expressly tells us that it was his “manner and rule to keep state in contemplative matters.” Sir Edward Coke was not alone among those in high places, at that day, whose opinion was, that play writers and stage players were fit subjects for the grand jury as “vagrants,” and that “the fatal end of these five is beggary, the alchemyst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer, and the poetaster”; and as it was, Coke and the like of him took “the liberty to disgrace and disable his law,” and constantly sneered at his “book-learning.” Even the Queen herself seized upon it as an excuse for refusing him promotion, that “Bacon,” as she said, “had a great wit, and much learning, but that in law he could show to the uttermost of his knowledge, and was not deep;” as if inferring the one thing from the other, or as if a man could not know law, and, at the same time, know anything else.

In general, it may be admitted that Bacon was in some degree unsuited for a life of executive activity in the administration of affairs. At a later day, he confessed as among the errors of his life “this great one which led the rest, that knowing myself by inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than play a part I have led my life in civil causes, for which I was not very fit by nature, and more unfit by preoccupation of mind.” In the state of things that existed in the reigns of Elizabeth and James (to be illustrated in the particular history of the play of Richard II.,) it will not be difficult to see, that an open avowal of this authorship might have been fatal to all his prospects of elevation in the State, on which he considered the success of his efforts for the advancement of science and the benefit of mankind in a great measure to depend. “But power to do good,” he says, “is the true and lawful end of aspiring; for good thoughts (though God accept them), yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that cannot be, without power and place as the vantage and commanding ground.”

The Novum Organum, magnificently dedicated to the King, (having passed “the file of his Majesty’s judgment,” and been found to be “like the wisdom of God that passeth all understanding,”) would attract the attention of Europe; but these plays, the “wanton burthen of the prime,” which could never pass the royal file, must be thrown upon the stage as “But hope of orphans, and unfather’d fruit.” They had to take their place, and stand trial upon their own merits, in the open theatre; and this Bacon knew they would do, safely enough, and work out their own salvation, at least for the present. Towards the close of his life, the scene would be changed, and the matter is to be considered as it would then stand in his view.

He is now working in good earnest for the next ages. He will first revise, finish, and republish his former works, and then devote the remainder of life to his greater philosophical labours. He renounces all worldly honours, and mere fame with his contemporaries loses nearly all attraction for him. He seeks a full pardon of his sentence, and a restoration to his seat in the House of Lords, that “a cloud” may be lifted from his name; but when, finally, the summons comes, his answer is: “I have done with such vanities.” We have a very distinct intimation in his own words as to what his opinion then was, in respect to fame of this kind; for in his dedicatory epistle to Bishop Andrews, his “ancient and private acquaintance,” whom he held “in special reverence,” prefixed to that Shakespearean Dialogue Touching an Holy War, written in 1622, he gives an explicit account of his writings and purposes. He compares his fortunes to those of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Seneca, and chooses for himself the example of Seneca, like himself, a learned poet, moralist, statesman and philosopher, who, being banished into a solitary island, “spent his time in writing books of excellent argument and use for all ages,” having determined, as he says, “(whereunto I was otherwise inclined) to spend my time wholly in writing; and to put forth that poor talent, or half talent, or what it is, that God hath given me, not as heretofore to particular exchanges, but to banks and mounts of perpetuity, which will not break. Therefore, having not long since set forth a part of my Instauration, which is the work, that in mine own judgment (si nunquam fattit imago) I do most esteem, I think to proceed in some new parts thereof. I have a purpose therefore (though I break the order of time) to draw it down to the sense, by some patterns of a Natural Story or Inquisition.”

But besides these natural stories, which were probably to be something like his New Atlantis, and some other works particularly named, there was still another class, for which the world might “scramble” and “set up a new English inquisition” and upon which he continues in these words: “As for my Essays and some other particulars of that nature, I count them but as the recreations of my other studies, and in that sort purpose to continue them; though I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would with less pains and embracement (perhaps) yield more lustre and reputation to my name than those other which I have in hand. But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.” Again, speaking of his philosophy in general, he says: “For myself, nothing which is external to the establishment of its principles is of any interest to me. For neither am I a hungerer after fame, nor have I, after the manner of heresiarchs, any ambition to originate a sect; and, as for deriving any private emolument from such labours, I should hold the thought as base as it is ridiculous. Enough for me the consciousness of desert, and that coming accomplishment of real effects which fortune itself shall not be able to intercept.”

He cares little now for any mere lustre of reputation. It is very possible, of course, that all these expressions had reference only to some other prose compositions of a popular character. They do not necessarily amount to any positive allusion to the Shakespearean plays; but when considered with reference to the entire mass of evidence, to prove the fact that he was the author of them, it must strike the mind of any reader with the force of a very pregnant suggestion, that he intended (in his own mind, at least,) to include them in the same category with the Essays as among those other unnamed particulars. The work of revising the Essays was continued, and the new and enlarged edition appeared in 1625. If the Folio of 1623 were printed under his supervision, his part of the work must have been still in progress, if not entirely completed, at the date of this epistle to Bishop Andrews stated above. [Also see Part IV: Bacon’s Works]. Bacon’s poetical works were in the possession of the world as “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies,” and as “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems;” and so he would let them remain. They had had their trial already and stood out all appeals, and the wit that was in them could no more be hid than it could be lost. These “feigned histories or speaking pictures,” which had for one object, perhaps, “to draw down to the sense” of the theatre and the popular mind things which “flew too high over men’s heads” in general, in other forms of delivery, would effectually do their own proper work; and they might be left to take care of themselves. “And there we hope,” gives the Folio Preface, “to your divers capacities, you will find enough, both to draw, and hold you.” For him, not to be understood would be all the same as not to be known: “Read him, therefore, and again and again: And, if then, you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.” It is certainly conceivable, that a mind like his should care but little for any lustre that might be added to his name, or his memory, by these writings; or, at least, that he should be willing to wait until it should shine forth with an illumination sufficiently brilliant and clear to reveal by its own light the soul and genius of himself. In the meantime, he would take care to keep “the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive,” as this “our Shakespeare” had come to be. The following Sonnet, perhaps, may represent the true state of his mind and feeling, near the close of his life:

Sonnet 146

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Fool’d by these rebel powers that thee array, 1

Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,

Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?

Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross:

Within be fed, without be rich no more,

   So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,

   And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Dodd’s comments on this Sonnet is of interest: 2 “Is it not ludicrous to think that this Canto could possibly have been written by Shaksper of Stratford as a personal utterance to his mother? As “her neglected child”? “her poor infant’s discontent”; “I, thy babe”; “Play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind” are the heart cries of a son who is cut to the quick by an intolerable position. Francis Bacon, in a letter to a friend thus complains bitterly of his non-success with the Queen: ‘To be like a child following a bird which, when it is nearest flyeth away and lighteth a little before, and then the child after it again. I am weary of it.’” [Also see Sonnet 19]. The Shakespeare works have been the admiration of lovers of literature for centuries. No other works have attracted to themselves so much conflicting criticism, and so much senseless exaggeration. So widely have commentators differed with regard to them that, if their countervailing opinions were eliminated, the residuum would be inconsiderable, and were the ravings of delirious devotees gathered into a single volume, it would be a curious addition to the library of the alienist. We are told that the works were “the Greatest Birth of Time”; 3 that their author was “the only Exemplar of his Species”; that “there is but one Christ, there has been but one Shakespeare”; that “Shakespeare’s service, if not worship, is now acknowledged over the World”; and a quarto of bulky proportions has been published echoing the praises of devotees during the first century of the world’s knowledge of him, which, if continued to our time, would form a library by itself of forbidding magnitude. (Ingleby). 4 Moreover, an immense body of literature has grown up treating of every phase of the works in question, which, with numerous re-emendated editions, was estimated in 1885 to comprise at least ten thousand volumes. Since that time the number has largely increased. Some of these works possess elements of real value, but all are more or less misleading. Let us briefly quote from several.