Bacon House

Noble Street, Aldersgate
This house was of old called Shelley-house, as belonging to the family of that name. Sir Thomas Shelley, Knight., was owner in the 1st of Henry the Fourth.

The house was afterwards called Bacon House, because the same was newly built by Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

Adjoining to it was the house of Serjeant Fleetwood, Recorder of London.Fleetwood was Recorder from 1571 until 1591, and many of his letters to Lord Burleigh are dated from Bacon House, where he died, February 28, 1594. In 1628 the house was purchased by the worshipful Company of Scriveners, and about the middle of the 18th century, it was sold by the Scriveners to time worshipful Company of Coach makers.

The back part of the house, as rebuilt after the great fire of London in 1666, was still seen in the 17th century from Oat-lane, and occupied as a glove manufactory. In the conveyance to the Scriveners, the house is stated to have been anciently called Shelley’s tenement, but then Bacon House, and that it had formerly been in the possession of Sir Ralph Rowlett, Knight, afterwards of Sir Nicholas Bacon, then of Christopher and Robert.Sir Ralph Rowlett was Master of the Mint to King Henry VIII., was connected by marriage with Sir Nicholas Bacon, they married two of the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke.

Barker, Nicholas Goff the elder, and Nicholas Goff the younger, and subsequently of Sara Savage and George Eglshaw, physician; and it was conveyed by Sir Arthur Savage and Dame Sarah, late wife of George Smithies, alderman, Thomas Viscount Savage, and Richard Millard, to Charles Bostock, scrivener, in trust for the Company. Christopher Barker and Robert Barker were printers to Queen Elizabeth I., he printed Acts of Parliament, &c. Christopher Barker died in 1509, and after 1588 the business was earned on by his deputies.

Robert Barker, his son, who was a prisoner in the King’s Bench from 1635, died there in 1645. The Recorder, Fleetwood, is not mentioned in the conveyance of Bacon House to Charles Restock; and although his letters are dated from Bacon House, Stow mentions the house of the Recorder as separate from Bacon House, which was rebuilt by the Lord Keeper.

It may be that the Recorder’s house was built upon part of the original site of Shelley House. In Coach makers Hall were held the meetings of the Protestant Association, which, under the presidency of Lord Geo. Gordon, led to the riots of 1780.

Could this house possibly be where Shakesperean manuscripts were stored and lost in the great fire of London in 1666?

A Little Controversy

On the night of December 28, 1598, Alleyn being absent in the country, Cuthbert Burbage, his brother Richard, his friend William Smith, of Waltham Cross, in the County of Hartford, gentleman, Peter Street, chief carpenter, and twelve others described as labourers such as wrought for wages, gathered at the Theatre and began to tear down the building. We learn that the widow of James Burbage was there, and did see the doing thereof, and liked well of it; and we may suspect that at some time during the day Shaksper and the other actors were present as interested spectators.

When Gyles Alleyn learned that the Burbages had demolished the Theatre and removed the timber to the Bankside, he was deeply incensed, not only at the loss of the building, but also, no doubt, at being completely outwitted. At once he instituted suit against Cuthbert Burbage; but he was so intemperate in his language and so reckless in his charges that he weakened his case. The suit dragged for a few years, was in part referred to Francis Bacon, and finally in the summer of 1601 was dismissed. Thus the history of the first London playhouse, which is chiefly the history of quarrels and litigation, came to a close.

It is in the year and month of September 18th, 1589 where Kit Marlowe is involved in a duel in Hog Lane: “A certain Thomas Watson, lately a gentleman of London, intervened upon the outcry of the bystanders, for the separation of the aforesaid William Bradley and Christopher Morley who were thus fighting.” Watson was found to have killed in self-defence and both poets went back to Newgate’s dungeon to await trial. Marlowe was obliged to find £40 as bail, and also furnish two sureties of £20 each, as conditions precedent to his release. The Privy Council appointed sureties for both Marlowe and Watson: Magnus enim (proh fata) diem Franciscus obivit, Arcadiae nostrae qui Meliboeus erat, et mihi subtristes qui (te mediante) procellas depulit, hyberno vela ferente Noto. [For, alas the Fates, great Francis has died, he who was the Meliboeus of our Arcady, a man who warded off baleful storms from me when a winter tempest blowing from the south struck my sail, thanks to your intervention.]

Also in 1598, Marsten published a poem founded on the lines and model of Venus and Adonis which he called Pigmalion’s Image (sic) a love poem, not a satire and as an appendix to it he wrote some lines “in prayse of his precedent Poem” where Pigmalion had, according to the old legend, succeeded in bringing the image he had wrought out of ivory to life, and in this appendix occur the following lines:

And in the end (the end of love I wot),
Pigmalion hath a jolly boy begot. So Labeo did complaine his love was stone,
Obdurate, flinty, so relentlesse none; Yet Lynceus knowes that in the end of this.

He wrought as strange a metamorphosis. Now compare the following lines from Venus and Adonis (199-200):

Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth.

Here we have Labeo’s complaint almost word for word, and we are reminded that at the end of Venus and Adonis there was the strange metamorphosis of Adonis into a flower, quite as strange as that of Pigmalion’s Image. Bishop Hall in his satires mentions Labeo several times, and reflects upon him as a licentious writer who takes care to preserve his anonymity, and, like the cuttle-fish, involves himself in a cloud of his own making. Thus in the second book of his satires, which he called (after Plautus) Virgidemiae, i.e., a bundle of rods, Hall attacks Labeo in the following words:

For shame! write better, Labeo, or write none; Or betterwrite, or, Labeo, write alone.

(Bk. II, Sat. I) and he ends this satire thus:

For shame! write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.

From these lines we may infer, as Mr. Begley says, that Labeo did not write alone, but in conjunction with, or under cover of, another author, and also that he did not write “cleanly,” but in a lascivious style, such as the style of Venus and Adonis, it might be. But there is a further passage in Hall’s Virgidemiae (Book IV, Sat. I): Labeo is whipp’d and laughs me in the face:

Why? for I smite, and hide the galled place. Gird but the Cynick’s Helmet on his head, Cares he for Talus or his flayle of lead? Long as the crafty Cuttle lieth sure, In the black Cloude of his thick vomiture, Who list complain of wronged faith or fame.

When he may shift it to another’s name? Mr. Begley comments that “Labeo is the writer of Venus and Adonis and as there is every reason to think that Marston used the name Labeo because Hall had used it, we are therefore able to infer that Hall and Marston both mean the same man.”

But what proof or evidence is there that Labeo stood for Bacon? Marston’s Satires were published, with his Pigmalion’s Image, in 1598, several months after Hall’s first three books of Virgidemiae had appeared, and in his Satire IV, entitled Reactio, Marston goes through pretty well the whole list of writers whom Hall had attacked, and defends them, but, curiously enough, he seems to take no notice of Hall’s attack on Labeo. In a line addressed by Marston to Hall:

What, not mediocria firma from thy spite? (Sat. IV, 77)

Mediocria firma, therefore, stands for a writer, and one who had been attacked by Hall. And who was that writer? Of this there can, surely, be no doubt: Mediocria firma was Bacon’s motto, and we find it engraved over the well-known portrait of Franciscus Baconus Baro de Verulam, which appears at the commencement of his Sylva Sylvarum. Moreover, it is a motto which has never been used except by the Earls of Verulam or the Bacon family. Mediocria firma, therefore, stands for Bacon.

To conclude this brief stop on the Authorship Controversy, I offer the gentle Reader the concluding words of E.W. Smithson from his Baconian Essays: “The Baconian authorship of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and, I would add, the Sonnets, may be rejected as not proven, but the idea that these works were written by the player who came to London as a Stratford rustic in 1587, is surely one of the most foolish delusions that have ever obsessed and deceived the credulous mind of man. O miseras hominum mentes, O pectora cceca!” Mr. Begley suggests (p. 17) that the Cynic’s helmet is an allusion to the Knights of the Helmet, of whom we read in the Gesta Grayorum, and, as he writes, we know that Bacon was “responsible for this Device performed at his own Gray’s Inn during the year 1594.” As to “Talus” and his flail, see Spenser’s Fairy Queen, Bk. V, Cant, i, St. 12.

Aristotle Proves Bacon is Shake-Speare

In an ancient Greek edition of Aristotle’s Eth. ad Nicom, chapter I, page 3, Aristotle speaks of political philosophy.

 

Bacon quotes Aristotle’s philosophy from Eth. ad Nicom in the Advancement of Learning and also in the De Augmentis, book 7, chapter 3 (Latin version):

Juvenes non esse idoneos Moralis Philosophiae auditors

The above phrase talks about moral philosophy (Aristotle however talks not of moral philosophy but of political philosophy) and who else did this mistake?

Here is Shake-Speare’s quotation from Troilus and Cressida, ii, ii:

Not much Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy.

Both Bacon and Shakespeare quote Aristotle in error.

However, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito published in 1622, made the same mistake. The error occurs in the address of the reader, p. 3, from the edition published in 1635.