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.

Shakespeare Plays the Language Used

Latin: The Comedy of Errors was founded upon the Menæchmi of Plautus, a comic poet, who wrote about 200 B.C. The first translation of the Latin work into English, was made in 1595, subsequently to the appearance of the Shakespeare play, and without any resemblance to it “in any peculiarity of language, of names, or of any other matter, however slight.” (Verplanck). “His frequent use of Latin derivatives in their radical sense shows a somewhat thoughtful and observant study of that language.” (White).

Greek: Timon of Athens was drawn partly from Plutarch and partly from Lucian, the latter author not having been translated into English earlier than 1638, fifteen years after the publication of the play. Helena’s pathetic lament over a lost friendship in Midsummer Night’s Dream (III., 2) had its prototype in an un-translated Greek poem by St. Gregory of Nazianzus, published at Venice (1504.) 1

Italian: An Italian novel, written by Giraldi Cinthio and first printed in 1565, furnished the incidents for the story of Othello. The author of the play “read it probably in the original, for no English translation of his time is known.” (Gervinus). “He was, without doubt, quite able to read Italian.” (White).

French: One entire scene and parts of others in Henry V., are in French. Plowden’s French Commentaries, containing the celebrated case of Hales vs. Petit, which was satirized by the grave-diggers, were translated into English for the first time more than half a century after Hamlet was written.

Spanish: The poet drew some of his materials for the Two Gentlemen of Verona from the Spanish romance of Montemayor, entitled The Diana, which was translated into English in 1582, the translation, however, not being printed till 1598. “The resemblances are too minute to be accidental.” (Halliwell-Phillipps). As the play was produced previously to 1593, it follows that the author read either the translation in manuscript or the Spanish original. The latter supposition, particularly in view of his other linguistic acquirements, is more probable. An unknown play, based on the same story and played before the Queen in 1585, was doubtless the Two Gentlemen of Verona in an earlier form. The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline were also indebted, not only for much of their respective plots, but, in some instances, for identical passages, to works not then in English dress. Gervinus, one of the ablest of the Shakespearean critics, calls attention to two of the Comedies in which Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian words, and sentences abound, and ventures to suggest a desire, on the part of the author, to exhibit in them his knowledge of foreign languages. He had intimate acquaintance with ancient and modern literature, numerous authors, from the age of Plato down to his own, being drawn upon for illustration and imagery in the composition of these works.

The writer of the Shakespearean works was a classical scholar. Rowe found traces in him of the Electra of Sophocles; Colman, of Ovid; Pope, of Dares Phrygius and other Greek authors; Farmer, of Horace and Virgil; Malone, of Lucretius, Statius, Catullus, Seneca, Sophocles, and Euripides; Steevens, of Plautus; Knight, of the Antigone of Sophocles; White, of the Alcestis of Euripides. (Holmes). The early plays exhibit the poet not far removed from school and its pursuits; in none of his later dramas does he plunge so deeply into the remembrances of antiquity, his head overflowing with its images, legends, and characters. The Taming of the Shrew, especially, may be compared with the First Part of Henry VI., in the manifold ostentation of book-learning. (Gervinus). Stapfer, a distinguished French critic, intimates that in his judgment, some of the plays are “over-cumbered with learning, not to say pedantic.” It may be well to remark that Stapfer and White are unfriendly witnesses, and that Gervinus and Verplanck wrote before the authorship controversy began. More than this, Shakespeare was a jurist, with “a deep technical knowledge of the law,” and an easy familiarity with “some of the most abstruse proceedings in English jurisprudence. His fondness for legal phrases is remarkable, but it is still more remarkable that, “whenever he indulges this propensity, he uniformly lays down good law.” (Campbell). One of the Sonnets is so intensely technical in its phraseology “and imagery that without a considerable knowledge of English forensic procedure, it can’t be fully understood.”

Sonnet 46

Mine Eye and Heart are at a mortal war

How to divide the conquest 2 of thy sight.

Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar; 3

My heart, mine eye the freedom of that right. 4

My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie 5

(A closet 6 never pierced with crystal eyes),

But the defendant doth that plea deny,

And says in him thy fair appearance lies.

To ‘cide 7 this Title is impannelèd 8

A quest 9 of thoughts, all tenants 10 to the heart,

And by their verdict is determinèd

The clear eye’s moiety, 11 and the dear heart’s part,

   As thus: mine eye’s due is thy outward part,

   And my heart’s right thy inward love of heart.

Among these legal terms, there are some which few but a lawyer would, and some even which none but a lawyer could, have written. (Heard). In addition, Shakespeare was a philosopher. “In the constructing of Shakespeare’s Dramas, there is an understanding manifested equal to that in Bacon’s Novum Organum.” (Carlyle). “He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.” (Emerson). “From his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence.” (Dr. Johnson). “He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher.” (Coleridge). In a letter addressed to Francis Bacon by Tobie Matthews while abroad, in acknowledgment of some “great and noble token of favour,” is this sentence: “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” It has been suggested, not without reason, that the “token of favour” sent to Matthews was the folio edition of the Shakespeare Plays, published in 1623. It is certain that Matthew’s letter was written subsequently to January 27, 1621. Various attempts have been made to break the force of this testimony. It has been urged that, as Bacon had been raised to the peerage, he had acquired another name under which to publish his works. This seems too frivolous for serious remark. It has also been conjectured that Matthews may have been in Madrid, where a certain Francisco de Quevedo was writing under a pseudonym. Unfortunately for this theory, the Spaniard (who has never become distinguished, so far as we know, for “prodigious wit”) retained the name of Francisco, the only part that suggested Bacon’s, in his pseudonym. There has been another assumption that the sentence was written for honouring the poet Davies of Hereford, but the truth is, Matthew’s description exactly fits the Shakespeare Plays and Bacon’s literary alias.

Theobald, past Secretary of the Bacon Society of London, wrote: “The real significance of the Promus consists in the enormous proportion of notes which Bacon could not possibly have used in his acknowledged writings; the colloquialisms, dramatic repartees, turns of expression, proverbs, etc. Any biographer of Bacon, whatever his notions as to the Shakespearean Authorship, may be reasonably expected to offer some explanation of this queer assortment of oddments, and to find out, if possible, what use Bacon made of them; and then our case becomes urgent.” [Also see Part IV: Bacon’s Works.] Ben Jonson was Bacon’s private secretary, and presumably in the secret, if there were any, of his employer’s literary undertakings. In this fact we find the key to the exquisite satire of the inscription, composed by him and printed opposite Shakespeare’s portrait in the First Folio of 1623, of which the following, in reference to the engraver’s art, is an extract:

O, could he but have drawn his wit

As well in brasse as he hath hit

His face, the print would then surpass

All that was ever writ in brasse.

It is a straw, but one carrying with it, perhaps, “the wisdom of the fathers,” that in this invocation Jonson speaks of the plays as superior to “All that insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth;” while in a subsequent book of his own, he uses exactly the same language in describing Bacon’s genius: “He performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome”. Jonson and Matthew made lists of the great wits of their time and of the preceding century; both placed Bacon at the head; neither of them mentioned Shakespeare. The reasonable explanation is that they were in the secret. Jonson pronounced Bacon “the mark and acme of our age.” It is certainly remarkable that Bacon was able to preserve his incognito as well as he did, considering that in Sonnet 76 we find the following lines: [Also see Appendices Minerva Britanna, 1612.]

Why write I still all one, ever the same, 12

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell [fell13] my name,

Showing their birth and where they do proceed?

Here is a plain statement that the author of this Sonnet was writing under a disguise. The same remarkable admission appears in Bacon’s prayer: “The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes; I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart; I have, though in a despised weed, sought the good of all men”. In the Sonnets, he had assumed a popular literary dress; but here, on his knees before God, he confesses to a higher kind of composition that was “despised.” Bacon was continually hiding his personality under disguises. One of the first acts of his public career was to invent a cipher for letter-writing. He even invented a cipher within a cipher, so that, if the first should by any chance be disclosed, the other, imbedded in it, would escape detection. At one time, he carried on a fictitious correspondence, intended for the eye of the Queen, between his brother Anthony and the Earl of Essex, composing the letters on both sides and referring to himself in the third person. He published one of his philosophical works under a pseudonym, Valerius Terminus, and another, as though it were the wisdom of the ancients stored in fables, Hermes Stella. (Reed). 14