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.

Poems: Written By Wil. Shakespeare. 1640

The earliest known reference to the Sonnets is in the Palladis Tamia [above] of Francis Meres, who speaks of them as “his sugared Sonnets among his private friends.” This was in 1598, and the next year two of them (138 and 144) were printed in The Passionate Pilgrim. We do not know that any of the others were published before 1609. (Rolfe). 1 However, in 1594 only four years prior to Meres’ mention, there is an edition entitled Willobie His Avisa, with a most valuable critical introduction to Shakespeare and his Lucrece. [Also see Part III., and Appendices entitled: Willobie His Avisa.] To the date of the Sonnets’ composition, George Wyndham in his Poems of Shakespeare, published in 1898, tells of “a clue, so far as I am aware, unnoted, which may assist in dating the Sonnets, occurs in Sonnet 98. 1–4:

From you have I been absent in the spring

When proud pide Aprill (drest in all his trim)

Hath put a spirit of youth in euery thing:

That heauie Satume laught and leapt with him.

Our Poet, describing an absence in the spring, here associates Saturn with the burst of new life in April. A visual apprehension of Nature, at once accurate and sensuous, is a marked feature of his style, and, specially, in the case of the luminaries and of all effects of light in the heavens. The sun, the moon, “that full star that ushers in the even,” “the grey cheeks of the East” before dawn, “the twilight, after sunset fadeth in the West,” are noted with a vivid appreciation in Venus, Lucrece, and the Sonnets. And, again, in accordance with the prevailing belief of his age, he attributes occult power to the stars. “Indeed, he derives the ascription of “heaviness” to Saturn in this passage from books on Astrology: a science which seems to have engaged his interest no less than the other sciences of his day. Knowing the astrological characteristics of Saturn, he finds it effective to contrast that “leaden” planet with the exhilarating outburst of April. But he would not, I am convinced, have done so had not Saturn been a visible feature in the sky during the month of April to which he refers. To have dragged Saturn, without reason or rhyme, into a description of a particular month of April would have been a freak without a parallel in his poems.” (Wyndham).

And for the above information, Wyndham remains “indebted to my friend, Dr. Dobie, for the information, derived by him from competent authorities, that, taking the years 1592–91, Saturn was in opposition, and, therefore, a somewhat conspicuous feature in the sky during the month of April in the years 1600, 1601. This is confirmed by Mr. Heath, of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, with whom Mr. Blaikie has kindly conferred on this question. Mr. Heath informs me that Leovitius in his Ephemeris 1556 gives the dates of the opposition of Saturn as follow: March 24, 1599; April 4, 1600; April 17, 1601; April 29, 1602; May 11, 1603. The planet would have been bright for some nights both before and after opposition, but, since it rose, according to Mr. Blaikie, about sunset in April 1600 and gradually later in the Aprils of succeeding years, my suggestion that Shakespeare had the real planet in his mind would still fit in with the years 1602 and 1608, when opposition fell respectively on April 29 and May 11, while it would hardly fit in with an earlier date than 1600. Saturn would have been a conspicuous figure in the evening sky, rising in the heavens to much the same height as Sirius. In confirmation of my theory, it should be remembered that Saturn goes through a series of changes according as his rings are tilted to wards us or presented edge on. During the early years of the century, the apparent opening of the rings would be steadily increasing until April 1, 1605 which Mr. Heath has calculated as the date of maximum opening, when the planet at opposition must have shown a very large bright disc. This calculation tallies with Galileo’s historical mystification at the disappearance of Saturn’s accessories (the rings were not then known) in 1612. 2 To sum up: if, as I hold, Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 118 with the real Saturn in his mind, then he cannot have written it before 1600 and may, with greater probability, have written it in 1601 or 1602, when Saturn was more conspicuous and gradually presenting a larger disc.” Alfred Dodd holds a different opinion as toward the date of composition to this particular Sonnet: “This canto was written after Francis Bacon’s fall in 1621. He returns to literature, to the passion of his youth, poesy, his dramatic creation. It is like the return, after long absence, of a father to his child. The Sonnets in the canto are in their original order as written and extend from the date of his return, during revision of the Great Folio, and after its publication.” 3 And Dodd gives the following numbering Sonnets for the canto: 97, 98, 99, 62, 102, 75, 64, 63, 126, 59, and 60.

The publisher of the Sonnets, was John Bensen (b.1667) who was a London publisher of the middle seventeenth century, best remembered for the above-mentioned publication of the Sonnets in 1640. His career began as a stationer in 1635; he maintained shops in Chancery Lane (from 1635 on) and St. Dunstan’s Churchyard in Fleet Street (1640 and after). In his publishing career, Bensen generally concentrated on the lower end of the market for printed matter in his era; he “specialized in the publication of ballads and broadsides.” Yet he published books too, like Joseph Rutter’s The Shepherds’ Holy-Day (1635); he issued Ben Jonson’s Execration Against Vulcan also in 1640. Bensen partnered with other stationers for some projects. He joined with fellow stationer John Waterson to publish the first quarto of Fletcher and Massinger’s The Elder Brother (1637). Bensen and John Saywell issued Francis Quarles’s Hosanna, or Divine poems on the Passion of Chirst (1647). In 1651 he formed a partnership to print music books with John Playford. Their edition of John Hilton’s Catch That Catch Can, a collection of “catches, rounds, and canons,” appeared in 1652. He then entered his edition of Shakespeare’s poems in the Stationers’ Register on November 4, 1639; since Thomas Thorpe, the original publisher of the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, had died c1635, his copyright to the material was likely considered lapsed. The volume was published in octavo the following year. The title of the publication reads:

POEMS: VVRITTEN BY WIL. SHAKESSPEARE. Gent. Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by John Bensen dwelling in St. Dunstans Church-yard. 1640.

The book opens with engraver William Marshall’s portrait of Shakespeare, a reduced and reversed version of Martin Droeshout’s engraving from the First Folio. [Also see Part III: Shaksper’s portraits.] This is followed by Benson’s preface “to the Reader,” commendatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, and then the poems themselves. The edition combined most of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (numbers 18, 19, 43, 56, 75, and 76 are omitted), mingled with poems from The Passionate Pilgrim (the corrupt 1612 edition), plus A Lover’s Complaint, The Phoenix and the Turtle, Milton’s poem to Shakespeare from the Second Folio, poems by Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Robert Herrick and others, and miscellaneous pieces.

Thomas Cotes, who was Benson’s printer for the publication, also printed the Shakespeare Second Folio (1632), and the first quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634). Bensen is notorious for rearranging the order of the Sonnets into groups, which he presented as complete poems, for which he invented titles. He also changed the pronouns in several of the Sonnets to create the impression that they were written to a woman. The “derivative and unauthoritative character” of Bensen’s edition was not recognized until Shakespeare scholar Edmund Malone re-directed critics’ attention to the original 1609 edition of the Sonnets; “for almost a century and a half Bensen’s mangled hodgepodge was an accepted repository of Shakespeare’s lyric verse.” The discussion which has raged about this “Dedication” is very difficult to condense, which concerns the identification of “Mr. W.H.” Malone does not discuss the general character or phrasing of the “Dedication” but in connection with his mention of Tyrwhitt’s suggestion that “H” was William Hughes he implies that “W.H.” was the “begetter” in the sense of the person to whom Sonnets 1–126 were addressed. Chalmers gives his opinion as “How he [Mr. W.H.] was the begetter of them it is not easy to tell, unless we presume, what is not improbable, that he begot a desire in Shakespeare to deliver a copy to the Bookseller, for publication: “W.H.” was the getter of the MS., imperfect as it was, from which the Sonnets were printed.” In a subsequent note (p. 90) he cites Skinner as deriving “beget” from A.S. begettan, obtinere: Johnson adopts this derivation and sense; so that “begetter,” in the quaint language of Thorpe the Bookseller, Pistol the ancient, and such affected persons, signified the obtainer; as “to get” and “getter” in the present day mean obtain and obtainer.

Coming to Drake’s opinion: On the first perusal of this address, the import would seem to be, that “Mr. W.H.” had been the sole object of Shakespeare’s poetry, and of the eternity promised by the bard. But a little attention to the language of the times in which it was written will induce us to correct this conclusion; for as a part of our author’s Sonnets is most certainly addressed to a female, it is evident that “W.H.” could not be the “only begetter” of them in the sense which primarily suggests itself. [Chalmers gives the true meaning.] We must infer, therefore, that “Mr. W.H.” had influence enough to obtain the MS., from the poet, and that he lodged it in Thorpe’s hands for the purpose of publication, a favour which the bookseller returned, by wishing him “all happiness and that eternity which had been” promised by the bard, in such glowing colours, to another, namely, to one of the immediate subjects of his Sonnets. That this is the only rational meaning which can be annexed to the word “promised” will appear, when we reflect that for Thorpe to have wished “W.H.” the eternity which had been promised for him by an ever-living poet, would have been not only superfluous, but ownright nonsense: the “eternity” of an “ever-living” poet must necessarily ensue, and was a proper subject of congratulation, but not of wishing or of hope.” Boswell’s words tell how “The “begetter” is merely the person who gets or procures a thing, with the common prefix “be” added to it. So in Decker’s Satiromastix: ‘I have some cousin-germans at Court shall beget you the reversion of the master of the King’s Revels.’” Knight pursues Drake’s argument that the fact that some of the Sonnets are addressed to a female disposes of the assertion that “Mr. W.H.” was the “only begetter” in the sense of only inspirer. Collier does the same, and agrees that the dedication was written in compliment of “W.H.” for “collecting Shakespeare’s scattered Sonnets from various parties.” 4

White says, “This dedication is not written in the common phraseology of its period; it is throughout a piece of affectation and elaborate quaintness, in which the then antiquated prefix be- might be expected to occur; beget being used for get, as Wiclif uses betook for took in Mark, XV., 1: ‘And ledden him and betoken him to Pilate.’ Practically no progress was made in this discussion, then, during the first half of the nineteenth century. But in 1862 M. Philarete Chasles, Director of the Mazarin Library, proposed an entirely new interpretation in a communication to the Atheneum of January 25 (p. 116), to the following effect: that we have here no dedication, properly so called, at all, but a kind of monumental inscription; that this inscription has not one continuous sense, but is broken up into two distinct sentences; that the former sentence contains the real inscription, which is addressed by and not to “W.H”; that the person to whom the inscription is addressed is, for some reasons, not directly named, but described by what the learned call an “Antonomasia” (the onlie begetter of these insuing Sonnets ); that the latter sentence is only an appendage to the real inscription; that the publisher, in the latter sentence, is allowed to express his own good wishes (not for an eternity of fame to the begetter of the Sonnets, which would be an impertinence on his part), but for the success of the undertaking in which he (the adventurer) has embarked his capital. Stripped of its lapidary form [i.e., a form modelled on ancient lapidary inscriptions], the inscription will then run thus: ‘M. W. H. wisheth to the only begetter of these insuing Sonnets all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet.’”

Thorpe, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, left the salutation to stand alone, and omitted the supplement of a dedicatory epistle; but this, too, was not unusual. 5 But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast, and his elementary appreciation of literature, recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high sounding embellishments of the accepted formula, suggested by his author’s writing. In his dedication of the Sonnets to “Mr. W.H.” he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare after the habit of contemporary Sonnetteers, promised the hero of his Sonnets in the pages that succeeded. It is obvious that he did not employ “begetter” in the ordinary sense. “Begetter,” when literally interpreted as applied to a literary work, means “father”, “author”, “producer”, and it cannot be seriously urged that Thorpe intended to describe “Mr. W.H.” as the author of the Sonnets. “Begetter” has been used in the figurative sense of inspirer, and it is often assumed that by “only begetter” Thorpe meant “sole inspirer,” and that by the use of those words he intended to hint at the close relations subsisting between “W.H.” and Shakespeare in the dramatist’s early life; but that interpretation presents numberless difficulties. It was contrary to Thorpe’s aims in business to invest a dedication with any cryptic significance and thus mystify his customers. Moreover, his career and the circumstances under which he became the publisher of the Sonnets confute the assumption that he was in such relations with Shakespeare or with Shakespeare’s associates as would give him any knowledge of Shakespeare’s early career that was not public property. When Thorpe had the luck to acquire surreptitiously an unprinted MS., by “our ever-living poet,” it was not in the great man’s circle of friends or patrons, to which hitherto he had had no access, that he was likely to seek his own patron. “Beget” was not infrequently employed in the attenuated sense of “get,” “procure,” or “obtain,” a sense which is easily deducible from the original one of “bring into being.” Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them “in the very whirlwind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”