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.

Ship of Fools

The Ship of Fools was received with almost unexampled applause by high and low, learned and unlearned, in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and was made the common property of the greatest part of literary Europe, through Latin, French, English, and Dutch translations. For upwards of a century it was in Germany a book of the people in the noblest and widest sense of the word, alike appreciated by an Erasmus and a Reuchlin, and by the mechanics of Strassburg, Basel, and Augsburg; and it was assumed to be so familiar to all classes, that even during Brandt’s lifetime, the German preacher Gailer von Kaiserberg went so far as to deliver public lectures from the pulpit on his friend’s poem as if it had been a scriptural text. As to the poetical and humorous character of Brandt’s poem, its whole conception does not display any extraordinary power of imagination, nor does it present in its details any very striking sallies of wit and humour, even when compared with older German works of a similar kind, such as that of Renner. The fundamental idea of the poem consists in the shipping off of several shiploads of fools of all kinds for their native country, which, however, is visible at a distance only; and one would have expected the poet to have given poetical consistency to his work by fully carrying out this idea of a ship’s crew, and sailing to the Land of Fools. It is, however, at intervals only that Brandt reminds us of the allegory; the fools who are carefully divided into classes and introduced to us in succession, instead of being ridiculed or derided, are reproved in a liberal spirit, with noble earnestness, true moral feeling, and practical common sense. It was the straightforward, the bold and liberal spirit of the poet which so powerfully addressed his contemporaries from The Ship of the Fools; and to us it is valuable as a product of the piety and morality of the century which paved the way for the Reformation. Brandt’s fools are represented as contemptible and loathsome rather than foolish, and what he calls follies might be more correctly described as sins and vices.

The Ship of Fools is written in the dialect of Swabia, and consists of vigorous, resonant, and rhyming iambic quadrameters. It is divided into 113 sections, each of which, with the exception of a short introduction and two concluding pieces, treats independently of a certain class of fools or vicious persons; and we are only occasionally reminded of the fundamental idea by an allusion to the ship. No folly of the century is left uncensored. The poet attacks with noble zeal the failings and extravagances of his age, and applies his lash unsparingly even to the dreaded Hydra of popery and monasticism, to combat which the Hercules of Wittenberg had not yet kindled his firebrands. But the poet’s object was not merely to reprove and to animadvert; he instructs also, and shows the fools the way to the land of wisdom; and so far is he from assuming the arrogant air of the commonplace moralist, that he reckons himself among the number of fools. The style of the poem is lively, bold, and simple, and often remarkably terse, especially in his moral sayings, and renders it apparent that the author was a classical scholar, without however losing anything of his German character. 1 The precise amount of Brandt’s workmanship in them has not been ascertained, but it is agreed that “most of them, if not actually drawn, were at least suggested by him.” Zarncke remarks regarding their artistic worth, “not all of the cuts are of equal value. One can easily distinguish five different workers, and more practised eyes would probably be able to increase the number. In some one can see how the outlines, heads, hands, and other principal parts are cut with the fine stroke of the master, and the details and shading left to the scholars. The woodcuts of the most superior master, which can be recognized at once, and are about a third of the whole, belong to the finest, if they are not, indeed, the finest, which were executed in the fifteenth century, a worthy school of Holbein. According to the opinion of Herr Rudolph Weigel, they might possibly be the work of Martin Schon of Colmar. The composition in the better ones is genuinely Hogarth-like, and the longer one looks at these little pictures, the more is one astonished at the fullness of the humour, the fineness of the characterisation and the almost dramatic talent of the grouping.” Green, in his recent work on Emblems, characterizes them as marking an epoch in that kind of literature.

Whether it were the racy cleverness of the pictures or the unprecedented boldness of the text, the book stirred Europe of the fifteenth century in a way and with a rapidity it had never been stirred before. In the German actual acquaintance with it could then be but limited, though it ran through seventeen editions within a century; the Latin version brought it to the knowledge of the educated class throughout Europe but expressing as it did mainly, the feelings of the common people, to have it in the learned language was not enough. Translations into various vernaculars were immediately called for, and the Latin edition having lightened the translator’s labours, they were speedily supplied. England, however, was all but last in the field but when she did appear, it was in force, with a version in each hand, the one in prose and the other in verse. Brandt’s Ship of Fools, is not only important as a picture of the English life and popular feeling of his time, it is, both in style and vocabulary, a most valuable and remarkable monument of the English language. Written midway between Chaucer and Spenser, it is infinitely more easy to read than either. Page after page, even in the antique spelling of Pynson’s edition, may be read by the ordinary reader of today without reference to a dictionary, and when reference is required it will be found in nine cases out of ten that the archaism is Saxon, not Latin. A clear precendent for the physical format of the Emblematum libellous is found in Sebastian Brandt’s Das Narrenschiff, [The Ship of Fools.] And from Furnivall 2 we are told that “ofthe Ship of Fools there are two old versions, one in prose and another in verse. The prose version was translated by H. Watson, and printed by Wynkyn de Warde in 1517; and of this a copy is among Douce’s books in the Bodleian.” From Herbert, in Ames I. 158, we find that Watson says: “this book hath been made in Almayne language and out of Almayne it was translated in to Latin by master Jacques Locher and out of Latin in to retboryke Frensshe. I have considered that the one deliteth him in Latin the other in Frensshe some in rhyme and the other in prose for the which cause I have done this in prose.” The poetical version of the work is the chief work of Alexander Barklay, who was probably a Scotchman, was “educated at Oriel College, Oxford, accomplished his academical studies by travelling, and was appointed one of the priests or prebendaries of the college of saint Mary Ottery in Devonshire. Afterwards he became a Benedictine monk of Ely monastery; and at length took the habit of the Franciscans at Canterbury. He finished his Ship of Fools, translated in the College of Saint Mary Ottery, in the Count of Devonshire, out of Latin, French, and Dutch, into English tongue, by Alexander Barclay, Priest and Chaplin in the said college.” 3

Skelton himself in his Book of three fools has pointed out that this composition is a simple paraphrase of three chapters of the Ship of Fools of Alexander Barclay. The three fools in question are those who wed old women for wealth, the envious and the voluptuous. Skelton only puts in verse the first stanza of each of the three corresponding chapters in Barclay. The rest is turned into prose. The contents in both authors are essentially, if not literally, the same. That Skelton used Barclay’s Ship of Fools and not the German Das Narrenschiff may be inferred from the circumstance that Skelton has copied a mistake or a misprint in Barclay by quoting the name of Theseus or Thesius (of Enuyous folys). Brant has the correct reading Thyestes, and does not mention his brother Atreus, whose name, on the contrary, occurs in Barclay as well as in Skelton. The artistical value of the Book of three fools does not stand high, nor does it remind us of the pith and vigour of the author of Colyn Cloute or Why come ye nat to Courte. John Cawood printed a second edition of the book in 1570. “About the year 1494,” says Warton, 4 “Sebastian Brandt, a learned civilian of Basil, and an eminent philologist, published a satire in German with this title Navis Stultifera Mortalium. The design was, to ridicule the reigning vices and follies of every rank and profession, under the allegory of a Ship freighted with Fools of all kinds, but without any variety of incident or artificiality of fable; yet although the poem is destitute of plot, and the voyage, of adventures, a composition of such a nature became extremely popular. It was translated into French; and, in the year 1488, into tolerable Latin verse by James Locher, a German, and a scholar of the inventor Brandt.” From the original, and the two translations, Barklay formed a large English poem, in the ballad or octave stanza, with considerable additions gleaned from the follies of his countrymen. It was printed in 1509 by Pynson, whose name occurs in the poem. 5