The Theme

The Greatest Birth of Time
The Shakespeare Works have been the admiration of lovers of literature for nearly three centuries. No other works have attracted to themselves so much conflicting criticism, and so much senseless exaggeration. So widely have commentators differed with regard to them that, if their countervailing opinions were eliminated, the residuum would be inconsiderable, and were the ravings of delirious devotees gathered into a single volume, it would be a curious addition to the library of the alienist. We are told that the works were “the Greatest Birth of Time”; 1 that their author was “the only Exemplar of his Species”; that “there is but one Christ, there has been but one Shakespeare”; that “Shakespeare service, if not worship, is now acknowledged over the World”; and a quarto of bulky proportions has been recently published echoing the praises of devotees during the first century of the world’s knowledge of him, which, if continued to our time, would form a library by itself of forbidding magnitude. 1 Moreover, an immense body of literature has grown up treating of every phase of the works in question, which, with numerous be-emendated editions, was estimated in 1885 to comprise at least ten thousand volumes.

Since that time the number has largely increased. Some of these works possess elements of real value, but all are more or less misleading. Let us briefly quote from several. Their author’s knowledge is said to have been incomparable, and a volume of nearly five hundred pages has been given to the world crowded with biblical excerpts which profess to find a parallel in his works. Referring to the Stratford actor this author asserts that whatever else the poet had or lacked, he must have brought to his work a mind richly stored with the thoughts and words of the English Bible. The spontaneous flow of scriptural ideas and phrases which are to be found everywhere in the plays, reveals the fact most clearly that the mind of Shakespeare must have, indeed, been “saturated” with the word of God. And, if this knowledge of Scripture was acquired in manhood the presumption would be in favour of Shakespeare’s personal piety; if in youth, it would be a strong testimony in favour of the religious influences of his home and the training given by his parents and schoolmasters. 3 Some writers carry adulation to much greater extremes. Says Downing: “I see no sign that the most enlightened religious views of the present were any secret to Shakespeare. The position of supreme enlightenment, amid the wars, murders, massacres, mutual persecutions, barbarous controversies and jargoning, that then devastated the world, in the name of a generally misunderstood religion, must have been very moving to the heart of Shakespeare, since it was hopeless for him to attempt to breathe one syllable of the wisdom that would have redeemed the world from its madness and unhappiness. To develop and reconstruct Christianity in the light of the Reformation and Renaissance, this about the year 1598, I infer from all the evidence, became the great purpose and life work of Shakespeare; to be achieved, first, by living the developed life himself for our example; secondly, by certain symbolical works, namely: The Sonnets, already largely composed and ready to his shaping hand, and those which subsequently took form as The Tempest, Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline. These were to veil, till the fullness of time, his pregnant ideas of the Development and Reconstruction, together with himself as the necessary central figure and Messianic Personality of the Scene.” 4 And again: “I will show that the profane Actor was a Holy Prophet. “Nay, I say unto thee more than a Prophet,” the Messiah. Heine, a Hebrew, first spoke of Stratford as the northern Bethlehem; I will show that Heine spoke no more than he knew.” 5

Before leaving this branch of our subject, his religious nature, it may be well to remark that the author of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture, in which hundreds of passages from the Shakespeare Works are paralleled by passages from the Bible, finds a rival in the author of Shakespeare’s Relation to Montaigne, 6 who parallels many of the same passages by others in the celebrated Frenchman’s Essays. We had selected a number of examples of these parallels between Shakspere and Holy Scripture with corresponding ones from Montaigne, in order to show to what extremes such efforts may be carried; but, to avoid prolixity, omit them. The author of the Shakespeare Works, we are told, was a great lawyer. Says Lord Campbell: “Having concluded my examination of Shakespeare’s juridical phrases and forensic allusions, on the retrospect, I am amazed not only by their number, but by the accuracy and propriety with which they are uniformly introduced. There is nothing so dangerous as for one not of the craft to tamper with our free masonry. 7

It is proper to remark that Bacon was a friend of Harvey, and often must have discussed with him his then novel theory. On one occasion the doctor paid the philosopher the witty compliment that he “wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” The amusing old gossip, Aubrey, imagined that the remark was intended to be derisive, missing the better meaning that a Lord Chancellor stood for the highest authority. The scientific knowledge possessed by the author of the Shakespeare Works, especially of natural history, has been commented upon, and a large volume has been published with a reprint of portions of works on natural history of his time. We are informed in the preface that “The plan of the book is to give some illustration of each word mentioned by Shakspere, when there is nothing remarkable to be noted about it. The term “natural history” has been taken in its widest sense, as including not only fauna but flora, as well as some precious stones.” 8 The perusal of this book shows us how intimate a knowledge of the natural history of his age was possessed by the author of the Shakespeare Works, but no more so than the works themselves, and adds too little to our knowledge to require extended comment. His knowledge of gardens and plants was wide, and a book of nearly four hundred pages embellished with a frontispiece of an ideal New Place, and sumptuous garden, which in the actor’s day would have set Stratford wild, has already passed through three editions.

There is no doubt that the author of the Shakespeare Works was a great poet and a great philosopher; that he possessed a mind stored with all the lore of his age, lingual, biblical, legal, scientific, historical, medical, and musical; indeed, that he was in power of expression the greatest literary genius that has yet adorned the world of letters; nor is it an idle claim that there was living in London at the time the works were written, one man, and one man only, who in a large degree exemplified these requirements; a philosopher, 9 a “concealed poet,” to use his own words; 10 a learned linguist, 11 Biblical student, 12 lawyer, 13 scientist, 14 historian, 15 author of treatises on medicine, 16 natural history, 17 gardens, 18 music. 19

This man was Francis Bacon, who took all knowledge for his province. Most of the sentiments, however, which we have quoted and we have spared the reader by selecting as few as possible to illustrate our subject would be the grossest exaggeration if applied to the greatest genius of any age. There is no knowing to what extremes devotees of the Stratfordian cult might have carried their efforts, had not a halt been called by Bacon’s introduction to them as a claimant to the authorship of The Greatest Birth of Time. Not only have their unwise panegyrics ceased, but since the light has been turned upon the object of their devotion, they have bent their efforts to the Sisyphean task of proving that he was deficient in the knowledge which they had hitherto ascribed to him; in fact, that it was not the result of study and intellectual training, but being the common possession of the time in which he lived he simply helped himself there from. It would seem that rightly to avail one’s self of such a varied store would require not only a mind “saturated” with knowledge, according to Furnivall, but intellectual training of a high degree. Especially do they now disparage the classical and legal erudition displayed in the works which they formerly extolled. Doubtless, unprejudiced minds will prefer the opinions of Upton, Collins, Baynes, Lord Campbell, Justice Wilde, Judge Holmes, and other eminent scholars and jurists, to those of partisans who have shown themselves to be so untrustworthy. Of these we hare less hope than of those who deck the object of their devotion with meretricious garlands, though we agree with Tolstoy that their “effort to discover in him non-existent merits, thereby destroying aesthetic and ethical understandings, is a great evil, as is every untruth.” 20