Reviews And Discussions Literary, Political, And Historical,
Not Relating To Bacon

By James Spedding
1879

Chapter 14
On The Authorship Of The Plays Attributed To Shakespeare

From a letter to Professor Nathaniel Holmes, 15th February, 1867.

I have read your book on the authorship of Shakespeare faithfully to the end, and if my report of the result is to be equally faithful, I must declare myself not only unconvinced, but undisturbed.
To ask me to believe that the man who was accepted by all the people of his own time, to many of whom he was personally known, as the undoubted author of the best plays then going, was not the author of them is like asking me to believe that Charles Dickens was not the author of Pickwick.

To ask me to believe that a man who was famous for a variety of other accomplishments, whose life was divided between public business, the practice of a laborious profession, and private study of the art of investigating the material laws of nature, a man of large acquaintance, of note from early manhood, and one of the busiest men of his time but who was never suspected of wasting time in writing poetry, and is not known to have written a single blank verse in all his life, that this man was the author of fourteen comedies, ten historical plays, and eleven tragedies, exhibiting the greatest and the greatest variety of excellence that has been attained in that kind of composition, is like asking me to believe that Lord Brougham was the author not only of Dickens’ novels, but of Thackeray’s also, and of Tennyson’s poems besides.

That the author of Pickwick was a man called Charles Dickens I know upon no better authority than that upon which I know that the author of Hamlet was a man called William Shakespeare. And in what respect is the one more difficult to believe than the other? A boy born and bred like Charles Dickens was as unlikely a priori to become famous over Europe and America for a never-ending series of original stories, as a boy born and bred like William Shakespeare to become the author of the most wonderful series of dramas in the world.

It is true that Shakespeare’s gifts were higher and rarer; but the wonder is that any man should have possessed them, not that the man to whose lot they fell was the son of a poor man called John Shakespeare, and that he was christened William. That he was not a man otherwise known to the world is not strange at all. Nature’s great lottery being open to everybody, the chances that the supreme prize will be drawn by an unknown man are as the numbers of the unknown to the known millions to hundreds.

It is not the famous man that becomes a great inventor; the great inventor becomes a famous man. Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice, who in binding a copy of Mrs. Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry, was attracted to the study, got employed as an assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy an assistant in so humble a capacity that wishing to make the acquaintance of some of the scientific men on the continent, he actually went with him to Geneva as his servant and by his own genius, virtue, and industry, made himself the most famous man (probably) now living in England.

Burns was a ploughman. Keats was a surgeon’s apprentice. George Stephenson a lad employed in a colliery. Newton did not become Newton because he was sent to Cambridge; he was sent to Cambridge because he was Newton because he had been endowed by nature with the singular gifts which made him Newton. But for the genius which nature gave them without any consideration of position or advantages, what would have been known of any one of these? [And I believe that Shaksper, the actor, was a law clerk to Bacon.]

If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar or a man of science, neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained scholarship or scientific education. Given the faculties (which nature bestows as freely on the poor as on the rich), you will find that all the acquired knowledge, art, and dexterity which the Shakespearian plays imply, were easily attainable by a man who was labouring in his vocation and had nothing else to do. Or if you find this difficult to believe of such a man as you assume Shakespeare to have been, try Bacon. Suppose Francis Bacon, instead of being trained as a scholar, a statesman, and I lawyer, and seeking his fortune from the patronage of the great, had been turned loose into the world without means or friends, and joined a company of players as the readiest resource for a livelihood. Do you doubt that he would soon have tried his hand at writing a play? that he would have found out how to write better plays than were then the fashion? that he would have cultivated an art which he found profitable and prosperous, and sought about for such knowledge as would help him in it, reading his Plutarch, and his Seneca, and his Hollinshed, and all the novels and play-books that came in his way; studying life and conversation by all the opportunities which his position permitted; and generally seeking to enrich his thought with observation? Do not you think that Francis Bacon would have been capable of learning in that way everything which there is any reason to think the writer of the Shakespearian plays knew? And if Francis Bacon could, why could not William Shakespeare?

If therefore your theory involved no difficulties of its own if you merely proposed the substitution of one man for another I should still have asked why I should doubt the tradition; where was the difficulty which made the old story hard to believe. I see none. That which is extraordinary in the case, and against which therefore there lies prima facie some presumption, is that any man should possess such a combination of faculties as must have met in the author of these plays. But that is a difficulty which cannot be avoided.

There must have been somebody in whom the requisite combination of faculties did meet: for there the plays are: and by supposing that this somebody was a man who at the same time possessed a combination of other faculties, themselves sufficient to make him an extraordinary man too, you do not diminish the wonder but increase it.

Aristotle was an extraordinary man. Plato was an extraordinary man. That two men each severally so extraordinary should have been living at the same time in the same country, was a very extraordinary thing. But would it diminish the wonder to suppose the two to be one? So I say of Bacon and Shakespeare. That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should exist, is extraordinary. That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Bacon should exist, is extraordinary. That two such human beings should have been living in London at the same time was more extraordinary still. But that one man should have existed possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary to make both, would have been the most extraordinary thing of all.

You will not deny that tradition goes for something: that in the absence of any reason for doubting it, the concurrent and undisputed testimony to a fact of all who had the best means of knowing it, is a reason for believing it: or at least for thinking it more probable than any other given fact, not compatible with it, which is not so supported.

On this ground alone, without inquiring further, I believe that the author of the plays published in 1623 was a man called William Shakespeare. It was believed by those who had the best means of knowing: and I know no reason for doubting it. The reasons for doubting which you suggest seem all to rest upon a latent assumption that William Shakespeare could not have possessed any remarkable faculties: a fact which would no doubt settle the question if it were established. But what should make me think so? It was not the opinion of anybody who was acquainted with him, so far as we know; and why was a man of that name less likely than another to possess remarkable faculties? With one to whom the simple story as it comes presents no difficulty, you will not expect that the other considerations which you urge should have much weight.

Resemblances both in thought and language are inevitable between writers nourished upon a common literature, addressing popular audiences in a common language, and surrounded by a common atmosphere of knowledge and opinion. But to me, I confess, the resemblances between Shakespeare and Bacon are not so striking as the differences. Strange as it seems that two such minds, both so vocal, should have existed within each other’s hearing without mutually affecting each other, I find so few traces of any influence exercised by Shakespeare upon Bacon, that I have doubt whether Bacon knew any more about him than Glad (probably) knows about Tom Taylor (in his dramatic capacity).

Shakespeare may have derived a good deal from Bacon. He had no doubt read the Advancement of Learning and the Latin edition of the Essays, and most likely had frequently heard him speak in the Courts and the Star Chamber. But among all the parallelisms which you have collected with such industry to illustrate the identity of the writer, I have not observed one in which I should not have inferred from the difference of style a difference of hand.

Great writers, especially being contemporary, have many features in common; but if they are really great writers they write naturally, and nature is always individual. I doubt whether there are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several styles and practised in such observations.

I was myself well read in Shakespeare before I began with Bacon; and I have been forced to cultivate what skill I have in distinguishing Bacon’s style to a high degree; because in sifting the genuine from the spurious I had commonly nothing but the style to guide me. And to me, if it were proved that any one of the plays attributed to Shakespeare was really written by Bacon, not the least extraordinary thing about it would be the power which it would show in him of laying aside his individual peculiarities and assuming those of a different man.

If you ask me what I say to Bacon’s own confession in the case of Richard II., I say that your inference is founded entirely upon a misconstruction of a relative pronoun. “About the same time I remember an answer of mine in a matter which had some affinity with my Lord’s cause, which though it grew from me went after about in others’ names.” I say that “which” means not the matter but the answer [Professor Holmes had assumed the story of the first year of King Henry IV., which was the matter in question to be the Shakespearian play and argued that, in saying that namely the play grew from him, Bacon confessed himself the real author. Mr. Holmes allows that he had misconstrued “which,” and that this point of the confession must be given up, but remains otherwise satisfied that Bacon was the author and that the Queen knew it.]

You make it appear to refer to the “matter” only by inserting “and” (p. 251, 1. 8), which is not in the original: and if so there is an end of your whole superstructure. When the Queen asked him whether there was not treason in Dr. Hayward’s history of the first year of Henry IV., he parried the question by an evasive answer; which was quoted afterwards and ascribed in conversation to other people, but was really his own. Even if it were possible to believe that the “matter” in question was the play of Richard II., the only inference that could be drawn as to the authorship is that the ostensible author was a doctor. But for my part I can see nothing in it but a reference to Dr. Hayward’s historical tract.

These are my reasons for rejecting your theory. If you had fixed upon anybody else rather than Bacon as the true author anybody of whom I knew nothing I should have been scarcely less incredulous; because I deny that a prima facie case is made out for questioning Shakespeare’s title. But if there were any reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author, I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not Bacon.

The difficulties which such a supposition would involve would be almost innumerable and altogether insurmountable. But if what I have said does not excuse me from saying more, what I might say more would be equally ineffectual. I ought perhaps to apologize for speaking with such confidence on the question of style in a matter where my judgment is opposed to yours.

But you must remember that style is like hand-writing not easy to recognize at first, but unmistakable when you are familiar enough with it. When some twenty-five years ago I began the work of collating the manuscripts with the printed copies, and plunged into a volume of miscellaneous letters written in the beginning of the seventeenth century, I could scarcely distinguish one hand from another, and it was some time before I discovered which was Bacon’s own. But after a little of the close and continuous attention which collating and copying involves, I began to feel as if I could know it through all its varieties, from the stateliest Italian to the most sprawling black-letter, and almost swear to a semi-colon. And I am convinced that I could produce many cases in which the most expert palaeographers and facsimilists would at the view pronounce two hands different, yet find on examination that they were the same.

Now it is the same with a man’s manner of expressing himself. The unconscious gestures of the style, scarcely discernible at first, are scarcely mistakable after. The time may have been I do not know when I could have believed the style of Hamlet and of the Advancement of Learning to be the style of the same man: and the time may yet come when you will yourself wonder that you did not perceive the difference.