The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies Part 27

in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has--

The greater navies look like walking woods.

They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself.

One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon's Psalms or compare navies to 'walking woods'! Mr. Holmes adds: 'Many of the sonnets [of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.' That is, Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pa.s.s from hand to hand, among Shakespeare's 'private friends,' as Shakespeare's (1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave offspring--rather late in life. Shakespeare's apparent allusions to his profession--

I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view,

and

The public means which public manners breeds,

refer, no doubt, to Bacon's versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has. .h.i.therto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare's friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is intended. Is it not obvious?

I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.

Bacon clearly had an a.s.signation with Her Majesty--so here is 'scandal about Queen Elizabeth.' Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is 'within sight of Her Majesty's Palace of White Hall.' She gave Bacon the reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen; he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested himself in a masque at Gray's Inn, while he and his friends 'partly devised dumb shows and additional speeches,' in 1588.

Nothing follows as to Bacon's power of composing Shakespeare's plays. A fragmentary masque, which may or may not be by Bacon, is put forward as the germ of what Bacon wrote about Elizabeth in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' An Indian WANDERER from the West Indies, near the fountain of the AMAZON, is brought to Elizabeth to be cured of blindness. Now the fairy, in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' says, capitalised by Mr.

Holmes:

I DO WANDER EVERYWHERE.

Here then are two wanderers--and there is a river in Monmouth and a river in Macedon. Puck, also, is 'that merry WANDERER of the night.'

Then 'A BOUNCING AMAZON' is mentioned in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream,'

and 'the fountain of the great river of the Amazons' is alluded to in the fragment of the masque. Cupid too occurs in the play, and in the masque the wanderer is BLIND; now Cupid is blind, sometimes, but hardly when 'a certain aim he took.' The Indian, in the masque, presents Elizabeth with 'his gift AND PROPERTY TO BE EVER YOUNG,' and the herb, in the play, has a 'VIRTUOUS PROPERTY.'

For such exquisite reasons as these the masque and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' are by one hand, and the masque is by Bacon. For some unknown cause the play is full of poetry, which is entirely absent from the masque. Mr. Holmes was a Judge; sat on the bench of American Themis--and these are his notions of proof and evidence. The parallel pa.s.sages which he selects are on a level with the other parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare. One thing is certain: the writer of the masque shows no signs of being a poet, and a poet Bacon explicitly 'did not profess to be.' One piece of verse attributed to Bacon, a loose paraphrase of a Greek epigram, has won its way into 'The Golden Treasury.' Apart from that solitary composition, the verses which Bacon 'prepared' were within the powers of almost any educated Elizabethan.

They are on a level with the rhymes of Mr. Ruskin. It was only when he wrote as Shakespeare that Bacon wrote as a poet.

We have spoken somewhat harshly of Mr. Holmes as a cla.s.sical scholar, and as a judge of what, in literary matters, makes evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon's as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote 'Richard II.,'

'which, though it grew from me, went after about in others' names.'

Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes's opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But 'nothing less than a miracle' could shake Mr. Holmes's belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon's) and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'--so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the visitation of G.o.d in the shape of idiocy, could bring the conviction that the person who wrote the masque could have written the play. The reader may compare the whole pa.s.sage in Mr. Holmes's work (pp. 228-238). We have already set forth some of those bases of his belief which only a miracle could shake. The weak wind that scarcely bids the aspen shiver might blow them all away.

Vast s.p.a.ce is allotted by Baconians to 'parallel pa.s.sages' in Bacon and Shakespeare. We have given a few in the case of the masque and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' The others are of equal weight. They are on a level with 'Punch's' proofs that Alexander Smith was a plagiarist. Thus Smith:

No CHARACTER that servant WOMAN asked;

Pope writes:

Most WOMEN have no CHARACTER at all.

It is tedious to copy out the puerilities of such parallelisms. Thus Bacon:

If we simply looked to the fabric of the world;

Shakespeare:

And, like the baseless fabric of a vision.

Bacon:

The intellectual light in the top and consummation of thy workmanship;

Shakespeare:

Like eya.s.ses that cry out on the top of the question.

Myriads of pages of such matter would carry no proof. Probably the hugest collection of such 'parallels' is that preserved by Mrs. Pott in Bacon's 'Promus,' a book of 628 pages. Mrs. Pott's 'sole object' in publishing 'was to confirm the growing belief in Bacon's authorship of the plays.' Having acquired the opinion, she laboured to strengthen herself and others in the faith. The so-called 'Promus' is a ma.n.u.script set of notes, quotations, formulae, and proverbs. As Mr. Spedding says, there are 'forms of compliment, application, excuse, repartee, etc.'

'The collection is from books which were then in every scholar's hands.' 'The proverbs may all, or nearly all, be found in the common collections.' Mrs. Pott remarks that in 'Promus' are 'several hundreds of notes of which no trace has been discovered in the acknowledged writings of Bacon, or of any other contemporary writer but Shakespeare.'

She adds that the theory of 'close intercourse' between the two men is 'contrary to all evidence.' She then infers that 'Bacon alone wrote all the plays and sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare.' So Bacon entrusted his plays, and the dread secret of his authorship, to a boorish cabotin with whom he had no 'close intercourse'! This is lady's logic, a contradiction in terms. The theory that Bacon wrote the plays and sonnets inevitably implies the closest intercourse between him and Shakespeare. They must have been in constant connection. But, as Mrs.

Pott truly says, this is 'contrary to all evidence.'

Perhaps the best way to deal with Mrs. Pott is to cite the author of her preface, Dr. Abbott. He is not convinced, but he is much struck by a very exquisite argument of the lady's. Bacon in 'Promus' is writing down 'Formularies and Elegancies,' modes of salutation. He begins with 'Good morrow!' This original remark, Mrs. Pott reckons, 'occurs in the plays nearly a hundred times. In the list of upwards of six thousand words in Appendix E, "Good morrow" has been noted thirty-one times.... "Good morrow" may have become familiar merely by means of "Romeo and Juliet."'

Dr. Abbott is so struck by this valuable statement that he writes: 'There remains the question, Why did Bacon think it worth while to write down in a notebook the phrase "Good morrow" if it was at that time in common use?'

Bacon wrote down 'Good morrow' just because it WAS in common use. All the formulae were in common use; probably 'Golden sleepe' was a regular wish, like 'Good rest.' Bacon is making a list of commonplaces about beginning the day, about getting out of bed, about sleep. Some are in English, some in various other languages. He is not, as in Mrs. Pott's ingenious theory, making notes of novelties to be introduced through his plays. He is cataloguing the commonplace. It is Mrs. Pott's astonishing contention, as we have seen, that Bacon probably introduced the phrase 'Good morrow!' Mr. Bucke, following her in a magazine article, says: 'These forms of salutation were not in use in England before Bacon's time, and it was his entry of them in the "Promus" and use of them in the plays that makes them current coin day by day with us in the nineteenth century.' This is ignorant nonsense. 'Good morrow' and 'Good night' were as familiar before Bacon or Shakespeare wrote as 'Good morning' and 'Good night' are to-day. This we can demonstrate. The very first Elizabethan handbook of phrases which we consult shows that 'Good morrow' was the stock phrase in regular use in 1583. The book is 'The French Littelton, A most Easie, Perfect, and Absolute way to learne the Frenche Tongue. Set forth by Claudius Holyband. Imprinted at London by Thomas Vautrollier, dwelling in the blacke-Friers. 1583.' (There is an edition of 1566.)

On page 10 we read:--

'Of Scholars and Schoole.

'G.o.d give you good morrow, Sir! Good morrow gossip: good morrow my she gossip: G.o.d give you a good morrow and a good year.'

Thus the familiar salutation was not introduced by Bacon; it was, on the other hand, the very first formula which a writer of an English-French phrase-book translated into French ten years before Bacon made his notes. Presently he comes to 'Good evening, good night, good rest,' and so on.

This fact annihilates Mrs. Pott's contention that Bacon introduced 'Good morrow' through the plays falsely attributed to Shakespeare. There follows, in 'Promus,' a string of proverbs, salutations, and quotations, about sleep and waking. Among these occur 'Golden Sleepe' (No. 1207) and (No. 1215) 'Uprouse. You are up.' Now Friar Laurence says to Romeo:--

But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain Doth couch his limbs, there GOLDEN SLEEP doth reign: Therefore thy earliness doth me a.s.sure, Thou art UP-ROUSED by some distemperature.

Dr. Abbott writes: 'Mrs. Pott's belief is that the play is indebted for these expressions to the "Promus;" mine is that the "Promus" is borrowed from the play.' And why should either owe anything to the other? The phrase 'Uprouse' or 'Uprose' is familiar in Chaucer, from one of his best-known lines. 'Golden' is a natural poetic adjective of excellence, from Homer to Tennyson. Yet in Dr. Abbott's opinion 'TWO of these entries const.i.tute a coincidence amounting almost to a demonstration'

that either Shakespeare or Bacon borrowed from the other. And this because each writer, one in making notes of commonplaces on sleep, the other in a speech about sleep, uses the regular expression 'Uprouse,'

and the poetical commonplace 'Golden sleep' for 'Good rest.' There was no originality in the matter.

We have chosen Dr. Abbott's selected examples of Mrs. Pott's triumphs.

Here is another of her parallels. Bacon gives the formula, 'I pray G.o.d your early rising does you no hurt.' Shakespeare writes:--

Go, you cot-quean, go, Get you to bed; faith, you'll be sick to-morrow For this night's watching.

Here Bacon notes a morning salutation, 'I hope you are none the worse for early rising,' while Shakespeare tells somebody not to sit up late.

Therefore, and for similar reasons, Bacon is Shakespeare.

We are not surprised to find Mr. Bucke adopting Mrs. Pott's theory of the novelty of 'Good morrow.' He writes in the Christmas number of an ill.u.s.trated sixpenny magazine, and his article, a really masterly compendium of the whole Baconian delirium, addresses its natural public.

But we are amazed to find Dr. Abbott looking not too unkindly on such imbecilities, and marching at least in the direction of Coventry with such a regiment. He is 'on one point a convert' to Mrs. Pott, and that point is the business of 'Good morrow,' 'Uprouse,' and 'Golden sleepe.'

It need hardly be added that the intrepid Mr. Donnelly is also a firm adherent of Mrs. Pott.

'Some idea,' he says, 'may be formed of the marvellous industry of this remarkable lady when I state that to prove that we are indebted to Bacon for having enriched the English language, through the plays, with these beautiful courtesies of speech, 'Good morrow,' 'Good day,' etc., she carefully examined SIX THOUSAND WORKS ANTERIOR TO OR CONTEMPORARY WITH BACON.'

Dr. Abbott thought it judicious to 'hedge' about these six thousand works, and await 'the all-knowing dictionary' of Dr. Murray and the Clarendon Press. We have deemed it simpler to go to the first Elizabethan phrase-book on our shelves, and that tiny volume, in its very first phrase, shatters the mare's-nest of Mrs. Pott, Mr. Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke.