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.

Setting of the Stage

As the pageant in imagination sweeps on before our eyes amid the moil and murk of the streets, riding high on the tumultuous waves of applause from the mob, in whose shadowy minds it seemed a realization of the visions of old romance, of which they had glimpses in filthy Inn-yards, and the low theatres in the purlieus of Shoreditch and Moorfields, we wonder if this tinsel can be transmuted into gold, this rude speech transformed into the expression of a divine ideal. Outside of these hopeless conditions, rumours of wars, of Jesuit plots, of Scotch intrigues, filled the public mind with apprehension of evil; for there was no time when the black shadow of Spain’s mailed hand did not dim the glow of English firesides; no time in which the suspicion of French dissimulation did not give edge to the fears of an entente with the ogre of the Escorial. Yet this epoch had its heroes: Drake, who through fire and blood, encompassed the world; Gilbert, who sang his swan song amid tempest and gloom, triumphant in the thought that heaven was as near him as in his beloved Devonshire; Frobisher, who drove his frail keel through the ice-locked portals of Boreal seas; and scores of others, who, on sea and land, proved the invincible courage of the English heart. Those in power, however, paid them scant heed, and they played their great roles, and made their exits, leaving no deep impress upon the minds of their contemporaries, except, perhaps, Drake, who struck Spain such a staggering blow that it stirred the enthusiasm of his phlegmatic countrymen, though his stingy sovereign haggled over its cost. However imperfect and inadequate this outline of a remark able epoch, it seems beyond credence that it held a capability of reformation; yet it is true that during its existence a remarkable transformation took place in the thought and expression of the English mind. The language of Tudor England, defiled by the barbarisms of a rude age, began to purge itself of its crudities, and to enrich its vocabulary with new vehicles of thought, giving it flexibility, and enlarging its scope of expression.

To realize what was accomplished within the brief period we have named, it will be suggestive to compare the King James Bible of one of the psalms, or Bacon’s New Atlantis, with this excerpt from the dedication of a poem to Lord Wilton in 1576, by George Gascoigne, one of the foremost literary men of his day: “I have loitered (my Lord) I confess, I have lien streaking me (like a lubber) when the sun did shine, and now strive all in vain to load the carte when it raineth. I regarded not my comeliness in the May-moon of my youth, and yet now I stand prinking me in the glass when the crow’s feet is grown under mine eye.” Or this from a letter of Queen Elizabeth I., in 1594: “What danger it breeds a King to glorify to hide and to suddenly a boy of years and conduit, whose untimely age for discretion breeds rash consent to indecent actions. Such speak or the way, and attempt or the consider. The weight of a Kingly state is of more poix than the shallowness of a rash young man’s head can weigh, therefore I trust that the causeless zeal that you have borne the head of this presumption shall rather carry you to extirpate so ungracious a root, in finding so sour fruit to spring of your many favours evil-acquitted, rather than to suffer your goodness to be abused with his many excuses for colours of his good meanings.” (Bruce). 1 We may well inquire how this change was inaugurated and carried to a successful issue. It could not have sprung up and come to fruition by dissociated individual effort. A presiding genius was required to foster and direct its growth. Across the Channel it was Ronsard, who, designing to regenerate the language of France, and perpetuate it in his own literary productions, associated with himself others whom he encouraged to like effort. Who in England could have undertaken this great work? What was its beginning? If we attune our ear to distinguish amid the prevailing dissonance its primal note, we shall unmistakably trace it to the oaten pipe of the gentle Colin, whose haunting melody holds our attention, and, following these strains with awakening sense, we shall hear them re-echoed until they culminate in that symphony of the greatest master of poetic numbers, the author of Lucrece, of Hamlet, and of the Sonnets.

When, however, we seek the inspired mortals, whom we are told caught the sweet strains of the artless Shepherd, and came singing down the shining steeps of Olympus with a divine message to ennoble their fellowmen, we find them in dens of infamy, the tippling-shop, the gambling-hell, the brothel, and are moved to exclaim, such a paradox is monstrous; God does not ordain the vilest among men to be his messengers of peace and enlightenment to mankind: and, certainly, the men to whom our pretentious guides have introduced us were among the vilest of their kind. No wonder the world is awakening to the necessity of a higher criticism than that with which it has hitherto been cloyed, and turning to one incomparable genius, who, voicing the primal strains of the Renaissance in Tudor England, bore them on with ever swelling Majesty to the close of the grand symphony which ended with his life. This great genius was Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans. It will be objected at the outset that Bacon could not have written that great body of philosophy, the Shakespeare Works, and others to which we have alluded in this volume, and have had any time left to perform his political duties, to say nothing of the common affairs of life. Those intimately associated with him witness to Time. Says Rawley: “He would ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies, as walking or taking the air abroad in his coach, or some other befitting recreation.” 2 Boener and Bushell, both his amanuenses, give like testimony. His great philosophical works were written in an incomparably short space of time, while he was in great mental distress, says Rawley: “The last five years of his life he employed wholly in contemplation and study in which time he composed the greatest part of his books and writings, both in English and Latin.” 3 His public duties, apparently uncongenial, occupied but a small portion of his time, so that the much longer time which this man of ceaseless activity had to devote to more congenial pursuits becomes an argument in favour of his occupation in other than philosophical fields of labour. Any one who will carefully study his various biographies will be convinced that he had ample time to produce all the works, which have been ascribed to him, not excepting the poems and plays known as the Shakespeare Works. If it were necessary, many examples could be cited of voluminous authorship. For a single instance, Thomas Heywood, a contemporary, claimed to be the author of two hundred plays besides much other literary work. There are thirty-six in the Folio. That it was a common custom for authors to use the names or initials of others on their productions cannot be questioned. Books, too, were often falsely dated, or registered years before printing. The author of The Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, says: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it, as if it were a discredit for a Gentleman to seem learned, and to shew himself amorous of any learned Art.” [Also see The Arte of English Poesie.] Henry Cuffe, a scholar of distinction, not wishing to use his own name on a manuscript, sent it to a correspondent to ask Greville to permit him to publish it with his initials, and told his correspondent in case of refusal to print it with the initials “R.B” which, he said, “some no doubt will interpret to be Beale”. The Historic of the Life and Death of Mary Stuart Queene of Scotland was published in 1624, and the dedication bore the name of the supposed author, Wil Stranguage. In 1636, in a second edition, the same dedication bore the name W. Udall.

Among the books, which once masqueraded under assumed names, many still survive, and their ghostly authors grin at us behind their false masks so nicely adjusted to them by the editors of biographical dictionaries. Said the German critic, Schlegel, in 1808, “Generally speaking I consider all that has been said about him [Shaksper] personally to be a mere fable, a blind extravagant error.” And Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1811, “What! are we to have miracles in sport? Does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?” Benjamin D’Israeli wrote, in 1837: “And who is Shakespeare?’ said Cadurcis. Did he write half the plays attributed to him? Did he ever write a single whole play? I doubt it.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1838, that he could not “marry” him “to his verse,” characterizing his life as “obscure and profane.” 4 Said Joseph Hart, in 1848: “He was not the mate of the literary characters of his day, and none knew it better than himself. It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us. The inquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him?” And William H. Furness, 5 in 1866: “I am one of the many who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space of each other; are there any two things in the world more incongruous? Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labour of discovering the author been imposed upon after generations, I think we could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent?” Said Edwin P. Whipple, in 1869: “To this individuality we tack on a universal genius, which is about as reasonable as it would be to take the controlling power of gravity from the sun and attach it to one of the asteroids.” And Cardinal Newman, in 1870: “What do we know of Shakespeare? Is he much more than a name, vox et praterea nihil?” The same year James Russell Lowell wrote: “Nobody believes any longer that immediate inspiration is possible in modern times; and yet everybody seems to take it for granted of this one man Shakespeare”; and so on; Gervinus, Hawthorne, Ruggles, Dickens, Holmes, Walt Whitman, Professor Winchell, Whittier, Parkman; it would require a large volume to record all the testimony of this nature; a future scheme of the current authors.

This feeling extended until the question was pressed, in 1848, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him? It was evident to most critics that in spite of some differences of style they were the product of one mind. Who, then, was this great literary genius? A new interest was awakened in Elizabethan literature. Naturally the search began with dramatists and poets; Marlowe for a time was discussed and dropped; so were others. Deeper students, realizing that the poetic gems in the works which charmed so many were strung on a precious thread of philosophy, sought a poet among the philosophers, having taken a hint from Sydney who said: “The philosophers of Greece durst not a long time appear to the world but under the mask of poets. So Thales, Empedocles, and Parmenides sang their national philosophy in verse. So did Pythagoras and Phocylides their moral counsels.” At this juncture Spedding’s work on Bacon was published, in which it was seen that the great philosopher applied to himself the now famous phrase, “A concealed poet”; and from this time attention was focused upon him, and the sentiment of thousands outside the influence of the Stratford cult, that there was but one man in England to whom the authorship of the Shakespeare works could be assigned, became conviction. Spedding’s work was published in 1857, and it was in this year that Delia Bacon in America, and William Henry Smith in England, simultaneously published the two pioneer works which opened the case of Bacon vs. Shaksper. 6 “The process by which Shakespeare is reduced to nothing is certainly startling. Take away all the evidences of the poet’s supreme intellect refuse him the witness of his works and it is, of course, very easy to say the poor player was unequal to his mighty task. But the same process could reduce Bacon from a great law-giver in the empire of thought, to a corrupt lawyer and base flatterer in the Court of King James. Take the facts which stand apart from his intellectual action erect the idea of man upon them and it will be as easy to raise a theory that not Bacon but Shakespeare wrote the Essays and Novum Organum.” 7

Doubtless many had long entertained the opinions then made public, but withheld them, unwilling to face the storm of ridicule and abuse which threatened their announcement. Smith says that he formed his opinions twenty years before publishing them, and no doubt Miss Delia Bacon had matured her views long before giving them to the world. She was a woman of remarkable intellect, a profound scholar, and merits a high place among the literary women of America; yet she and Smith, as well as Holmes, Mrs. Pott, Reed, and other faithful and conscientious students who have followed them, have been viciously assailed by those interested in Shakespearian books as authors, owners of copyright, their friends, and would-be friends; in fact, they have suffered the usual martyrdom of advocates of new truth by our modern Ephesians. Lee: “Why should Baconian theorists have any following outside lunatic asylums?” Dana: “The Mattoid flourishes in America because we have so large a proportion of half-educated minds.” Churton Collins: “And so this epidemic spreads till it has now assumed the proportions, and many of the characteristics of the Middle Ages.” A writer in the Literary World calls Mr. Reed’s scholarly books, “A positive disgrace to literature.” Brandes: “A troop of less than half-educated people have put forth the doctrine that Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him. Here it has fallen into the hands of raw Americans and fanatical women.” Elze: “The so-called Bacon Theory is a disease of the same species as table-turning.” Townsend: “Dirty work requires its peculiar instruments.” The Athenaeum: “Mr. Smith denies the appropriation of Miss Delia Bacon’s theory. The question may be of slight importance which of two individuals first conceived a crazy notion.” Furnivall wrote to Reed: “Providence is merciful, and the US folk are tolerant; you’d have been strung up on the nearest lamp-post else”; and Stapfer sneeringly alluded to it as “The famous paradox brought forward from time to time by some lunatic.” Engel stigmatized Baconians as “Orthodox minded lunatics, distinguished from such as tenant asylums in that they are still at large. People of this brain-sick habit, maniacs, are as hard to convince of their error as they who imagine themselves God Almighty, or the Emperor of China, or the Pope”; and said White, “When symptoms of the Bacon-Shakespeare craze manifest themselves, the patient should be immediately carried off to an asylum.”; and Robertson, is nearly as vitriolic, yet his book, The Baconian Heresy, is but an apology for a defense of his thesis. A number of quotes could be given as vulgar as the following from a writer in the New York Herald, who signs his name, BJ.A.: “The idea of robbing the world of Shakespeare for such a stiff, legal-headed old jackass as Bacon, is a modern invention of fools.”

There is no hope for men who treat fellow students in any field of literary labour in this manner. The charge they make against them is lunacy, and, especially, lack of scholarship; both words are favourites with them; yet D’Israeli, Gervinus, Hawthorne, Judge Nathaniel Holmes, 8 Lowell, Dickens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Massey, Gladstone, Winchell, Whittier, Professor Cantor, Judge Wilde, and many others who have expressed opinions adverse to these monopolists of scholarship, occupy quite as high rank in the world of letters as they; indeed, when we examine the work of the Stratfordian revilers, we are astounded at its character and lack of accuracy or forgery, as Collier, founder of the Shakespeare Society. Probably in all literature there is no more faulty work to be found than in their treatment of the Shakespeare works, from Rowe to Lee. In sketching the life and character of a man, especially if he has been fortunate enough to be both praised and blamed, one cannot be too vigilant in avoiding bias, an infection from which biographers rarely escape. Several biographies and sketches, more or less complete of the life of Francis Bacon, have been written: the first by Rawley, his private chaplain; then, by Boener, his physician; Campbell, Montagu, Fowler, Abbott, Garnett, and notably by Spedding, who has also given us many of his letters. The best test of a man’s character and worth should be found in the testimony of contemporaries, and of these we have a cloud of unimpeachable witnesses to Francis Bacon’s transcendent genius, righteousness, and altruism: Rawley, Boener, Matthew, Fuller, Aubrey, and many others, Aubrey making the sweeping declaration that “All who were good and great loved him.” Some modern writers, however, have seen in Bacon nothing, and others everything, to commend. To understand this we must recognize the fact that the human mind, with rare exceptions, is subconsciously or by transmission from some other mind that has adventured into the same field which it is exploring, sensitively alive to suggestion, which is readily transformed into theory unless restrained. Such a mind when it undertakes to delineate a dead man’s character, with little beside his correspondence with various people, with some of whom he can be familiar, while with others he must be reserved or evasive, complaisant or aggressive, is sure to produce a portrait which would be unrecognizable to a contemporary. Mix up a quantity of matters relevant and irrelevant, and those minds will eliminate from the instrument of reasoning every point on which the reasoning ought to turn, and then proceed to exercise their constitutional perversity on the residue.

Dr. Jamieson, the anonymous writer in Chambers’ Journal was the first to create a reasoned doubt of Shaksper the actor having written these plays, and suggested, “he kept a poet.” In the time of Shaksper were seven theatres; three private houses; viz., Blackfriars, Whitefriars, the Cockpit or Phoenix in Drury Lane; and four public theatres. The Globe on the Bank Side; the Curtain in Shoreditch; the Red Bull at the upper end of St. John Street; and the Fortune in Whitecross Street. In 1635, a collection of papers relating to shares and sharers in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, preserved among the official manuscripts of the Lord Chamberlain at St. James’s Palace, demonstrate how Eenefield, Swanstown, and Pollard appealed to be allowed to buy a share in these: Cuthbert Burbage, and Winifred, his brother’s wife, and William, his son, petitioned “not to be disabled of our livelihoods by men so soon shot up, since it hath been the custom that they should come to it by far more antiquity and desert than these can justly attribute to themselves. The father of us, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, was the first builder of playhouses, and was himself in his younger years a player. The Theatre he built with many hundred pounds taken up at interest, and at like expense built the Globe, with more sums taken up at interest; and to ourselves we joined those gentlemen, Shaksper, Hemings Condell, Philipps, and others, partners in the profit of that they call The House. Now for the Blackfriars, that is our inheritance; our father purchased it at extreme rates, and made it into a playhouse with great charge and trouble, and placed men players, which were, Hemmings, Condell, Shaksper, etc.” 9