Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56
57 58 59

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.

The Arte of Rhetoricke

The reference to Timon on p. 55 has been thought to have suggested Timon of Athens. It is possible that the panegyric of order on p. 157 may have suggested the speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Act. I. Sc. 3. There is little similarity between the two, save in idea, but the passage in Shakespeare looks as though it were based on a particular reminiscence of his reading. Professor Raleigh has pointed out in his Shakespeare, E.M.L., the similarity of some of Wilson’s speeches to those of Falstaff. 1

In Shakespeare’s Birthplace Catalogue (1910) there is reference to Thomas Wilson and his work The Arte of Rhetoricke, first published in 1553 and beautifully printed in black letter by Richard Grafton, the King’s printer. The Shakespeare Trustees, specifically state that they have “little doubt that the volume was in use in Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School in Shaksper’s youth.” Further, they say “Shakespeare seems to have drawn many ideas and phrases from Wilson’s pages” and offer a quotation from Othello with similarity to a section from the Rhetoricke. With the accession of Elizabeth I., security and prosperity had Wilson prepare a new edition of his successful textbook. Much was altered and much added; he prefaced it by a new prologue of much personal interest.

Towards the end of the year, the corrected and completed book was issued from the press. It was reprinted in 1562, 1563, and 1567, and indeed, frequently down to about the year of the Great Armada, when apparently, whether owing to the advent of newer textbooks or to the changing taste of a more fastidious and sophisticated period we cannot know, it fell out of demand and public esteem and gradually ceased to be reprinted.

The Arte of Rhetoricke then, was in its day a work of great popularity; it passed through numerous editions and was eagerly read by two generations of seekers after eloquence and literary skill, and then slipped gently back into the night, gathering the dust of unused bookshelves. Thomas Wilson, the author (dignified by many as Sir Thomas Wilson, though he was never knighted) was born about the year 1525. He was a Lincolnshire man, the son of another Thomas Wilson of Strubby in that county and Anne Cumberworth his wife. He himself disclaims any pride in his native shire, and when Lincoln folk are mentioned in his books it is generally for their stupidity. He had all the Elizabethan’s impatience of rusticity and dullness, all the contempt which London and the Court felt for the country. “It is better,” he says, “to be borne in London than in Lincoln.

For that the air is better, the people more civil, and the wealth much greater and the men for the most part more wise.” Yet he owed much to the neighbours of his early home. One of them, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, did much to promote Wilson to the honourable state employment of his later years. There are others who deserve no less mention: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, with whom his friendship was firm and lifelong and about whom we shall hear presently; and Sir Edward Dymock, who helped him both at the University and later, and at whose house The Arte of Rhetoricke was written during a holiday visit.

Thomas Wilson was educated first at Eton in 1541 he became a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge. The time and the circumstances were fortunate. During his residence there Sir John Cheke was chosen provost, and Wilson was thus thrown into contact with what was at once the most progressive and the most national side of English Humanism. Through Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith (himself a member of King’s and afterwards his predecessor in the Secretaryship of State) he gained the friendship of Roger Ascham through them, too, he became intimate with Walter Haddon, another member of the coterie and the most distinguished Latinist of his time. With him, Wilson collaborated in his earliest book. Before he left Cambridge, he had become one of a school of men who, by their scholarship and the individuality of their opinions, did much to mould the course of the Renaissance in England on its pedagogic side, and who had no inconsiderable influence on the development of English prose. From them he learned the lesson of simplicity and his horror of exaggerated Latinism. He fought side by side with them in the crusade against inkhorn terms, and he bore the brunt of the battle.

The trial for treason of the Duke of Norfolk in 1571 2 and the detention and examination of the prisoners (under torture) absorbed his attention as a Tower official and he dates his letters “from prison in the Bloody tower”. In the following year, 1572, he was sent along with Sir Ralph Sadler to expostulate by way of accusation with Mary, Queen of Scots. Two years later he was Ambassador to the Netherlands and in 1576 conducted the negotiations for the projected marriage of Elizabeth with Anjou. On November 12, 1579 he was sworn Secretary of State in place of Sir Thomas Smith. His career presents him as a man closely in touch with the three greatest forces in the England of his time: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the revival of the State under the Tudors. The last he served faithfully in many quarters. It is no mere accident that Wilson’s long translation of Erasmus’s epistle to persuade a young gentleman to marriage reminds one of the first part of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The same literary impulse dictated both. The order of his two treatises and the greater popularity of The Arte of Rhetoricke represent a fact in the development of literature and thought. Another work worth mentioning would be that of Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster that was printed in London, 1571. On this particular work The Schoolmaster and its Author see Part II: Ascham Roger.