IT was, and still is, the custom in some countries for the benighted natives to rush forth from their dwellings at the approach of a lunar eclipse, and howl lustily, with the intention of scaring away the demon of darkness that is supposed to be devouring the moon.  But if I, in common with a few others, do raise my voice and put on literary war-paint to face the Donnellian phantom, it is not from any presentiment that the bogey Bacon is going to swallow Shakspeare, nor from any fear that our luminary is about to suffer its eclipse.  Mr. Donnelly may talk of "hurling Shakspeare down front his pedestal;" according to my calculation, there would be less disparity between modern engineering appliances and the hoisting of the Alps bodily from their base, than there is betwixt his proposed means of removal and the dethronement of Shakspeare.  I think he might just as well decree a new volcano, or propose a motion for a general earthquake.  Therefore I do not turn aside from the more immediate purpose of the present work to say one word in defence of Shakspeare's authorship, because of any anticipation that this revolt against common sense is going to effect his dethronement.  I should not even like it to be thought that I take au sérieux the proposition that Francis Bacon wrote the Plays and other poetry of Shakspeare; indeed, I am willing to confess that the joke of attributing the works of Shakspeare to Bacon is huge enough to be enjoyable.  Only to think of the maddening effect on serious Shakspeareans who will not see the joke!  I look upon Mr. Donnelly's information that Bacon was the real author of Shakspeare's and Marlowe's Plays, not to include Montaigne's Essays, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, as a "very great secret" indeed; far exceeding the one confided to George Dyer by Charles Lamb when he told the guileless gobemouche that Lord Castlereigh was the author of the Waverley Novels.  To me it is what Shakspeare himself terms a "fanatical phantasm."  Nevertheless, for the truth's sake, I shall treat the matter seriously in my own way.  For it is the same here as everywhere else, there is no sure protection, now or at any time, against fraud and fallacy except in our mastering the fundamental data for ourselves.  It is only by taking full possession of the genuine facts that we can prevent the phantoms of unreality from taking possession, of us, and haunting us with their delusions!  We are continually learning and having to relearn the lesson that there is no defence against impostures, no freedom from fallacies, past, present, or future, save in ascertaining the facts, truly estimating their force, and holding on hard and fast to their evidence.

    I have no intention of calling names as a substitute for argument.  Mr. Donnelly complains that a deluge of opprobrium has been let loose upon him; but the people who have pursued Shakspeare with a blizzard of abuse should not cry out or squirm and squeal when the pitch is made hot for their own behoof.

    The Donnellians have been studiously offensive in speaking of Shakspeare.  They have done their dirtiest to defame and degrade the life, the character, the relations, and outward circumstances of the man whom Mr. Donnelly calls "Caliban," and to defile his image in the innermost sanctuary of our affection.  Mr. Donnelly has raked in sterquinariæ to have his fling of filth at Shakspeare.  He writes as if he were obsessed with a spirit of hatred and uncleanness against Shakspeare; his personal enmity looks like an unmistakable symptom of confirmed mania.  It is only the snob in soul that would speak ignobly of any man, even a Shakspeare, on account of his poverty in early life, or seek for a writer's nobility in his surroundings.  Mr. Donnelly's vulgarly virulent treatment of our great Poet, his parents, his bringing-up, his early occupations, his wife, his children, his character, is a thing to be held in derision so long as it may be had in remembrance.  Moreover, he who has said "the proposition that Shakspeare, the man of the documents, and the writer of the Plays were one and the same person cannot be accepted by any sane man" (p. 46), has no right to complain if he or his co-mates should happen to be called crazed.  Personally I do not see how anything but a great mental delusion could account for the hypothesis that Francis Bacon WAS the author of Shakspeare's Plays, Poems, and Sonnets!  But one would not therefore say that the Donnellians are ordinarily insane.  Nevertheless, it does seem in accordance with the fitness of things that this delusion should have been engendered in the brain of poor Delia Bacon.  I feel that hers was amongst the saddest of all human tragedies—those in which the martyr falls ineffectually on behalf of an error that was sincerely mistaken for the truth.  Her sufferings make one gentle for her sake—

But facts must be faced, and whether as a birth of physical disease or only of mental perversion, whether as the cause of disease or the result of it, this fabric of false vision was first dreamed into existence by Delia Bacon in the year 1845; her belief being announced in Putnam's Magazine for January, 1856. The delusion was primarily conceived through falsely assuming that Shakspeare had neither the natural qualifications nor the education befitting the writer of the plays; and all the efforts following her desperate venture have been directed to the support of that fundamental fallacy.

     First, it was hastily assumed that Shakspeare could not, and it was then inferred that he did not, write his own works.  They tell us that his handwriting and the nose of his bust at Stratford are dead against his being the real author of the Plays and Poems!

    But to suppose that a college education and a profound acquaintance with the classics are necessary to the bringing forth of a Shakspeare is to miss the lesson of his life, the supreme lesson of all literature, because in him it was triumphantly demonstrated once for all, that these are not necessities of the most real self-developing education; that nature grows her geniuses like her game-birds and finer-flavoured wildfowl, by letting them forage for their own living, to find what they most need.  It was learning in the school of life that was the best education for him, and in that school, as he says of Cardinal Wolsey,

Probably he had not many books to read; but he was not made out of books.  When Nature wants a new man, it is not her way to make him out of old books.  Books are too often used as the means of getting our thinking done for us.  Shakspeare did his own.  He could transmute from books, but his genius preferred to work on nature, and draw his drama directly from the life.  It is with too many people as Butler says—

That delusion has been very common, and it is a delusion still, although one that is being exploded.

    Mr. Ruskin once wrote to me—"Your education was a terrible one, but mine was far worse!"  The one having had all that wealth could buy, the other all that poverty could bring.

    "Fair seed-time had my soul," says Wordsworth in referring to the influences of nature that helped to educate him as a boy, when he too was a bit of a poacher, and indifferent to the study of books.

    The great point here is, that nature did not produce Shakspeare as the result of a scholastic education, nor by refining an ancient type that had been long manipulated by men, but threw back for a fresh start to produce a new type altogether from her own font.  She did just what she taught Shakspeare himself to do!  Instead of adopting and polishing or further effacing the old literary types, it was his wont to go back to nature on numerous lines of character to find the fresh soil in which he could secure the life and strength and hoarded riches of an original rootage.  The secret of this matter is to be found in nature, and not in the cram of mere acquirement.  It was by nature Shakspeare had that relationship with Source itself, that rootage in the spiritual which taps the well-springs of the universal life, and directly draws its strength and succour from the Infinite!

    No approximately correct estimate of Shakspeare in relation to those few bare facts of his life to be found in the documents can be formed unless we take them plus the personality of the Man, as he was known to his "fellows," to Chettle, to Marston, to Henry Wriothesley, to Ben Jonson, to the stage, and as we see him in the mirror of his works.  "The older one grows," says Goëthe, "the more one prizes natural gifts, because by no possibility can they be procured and stuck on."  And in "natural gifts," as we know, our Shakspeare was pre-eminent, was supreme.  Ben Jonson saw this when he told the world how little Shakspeare was indebted to Latin and still less to Greek.  Nor did he need it, says Jonson, who was the nearest of them all in taking the measure of the man!

He recognized the well-spring of ebullient life that rose and overran with its irrepressible force of abundance.  He portrays him as a very Mercutio of a man, flowing with that facility which made it necessary that he should at times be stopped to prevent a deluge.  Such an inexhaustible fount of life rose in him, springing fresh and free from the world of life beyond all literature!

    In the minds of Delia Bacon, Mrs. Pott, and Mr. Donnelly, the genesis of the delusion may be traced to the beginning at first with false ideas concerning Shakspeare, and next to fallacious inferences resulting in a false Ideal of Bacon.  It is not a fact that Shakspeare was a low-born, illiterate fellow, or that his father was a "Poor Peasant," but a falsehood to begin with.  His father was a Yeoman.  As to his classical acquirements; in accordance with the education of the time, he would learn sufficient Latin at the Grammar school to read and draw from Ovid as he does some years afterwards in his Venus and Adonis, to which he prefixes the Latin motto, and says proudly and defiantly to those who had decried him and his scholarship, "Let the mob marvel at things base, to me also golden-locked Apollo shall supply cups filled with water of Castaly."

    Mr. Donnelly soon demonstrates the fact that he is not to be trusted either in his statements or quotations without verification.  He writes again and again, "he was not for an age, but for all time."  Twice over the "mightiest Julius" is quoted as the "mighty Julius."  These are small matters, but significant when credit is at stake.  He falsely asserts, that in Shakspeare's time the very name of Shakspeare was considered to be the quintessence of vulgarity!  He falsely asserts that Shakspeare's pursuits and his associates (who included Lord Southampton) were not favourable to his acquiring knowledge in London.  He falsely asserts that there is no evidence whatever to show that Shakspeare was a diligent student of books!  The satirist Marston has emphatically assured us that he was.  Also we learn that Shakspeare was a buyer of books at sales by some memoranda that were found at Stratford on the back of the panel of a jury dated Nov. 1596, beginning, "Mr. Shaxpere, one book.  Mr. Barber, a coverlet."  There had been a suit between Margaret Younge and Jane Perat, and a sale, at which Shakspeare was present on the look-out for books.  At least we infer that it was he, and not his father, who could not write.

    The Great Cryptogram abounds in errors concerning well-known matters of fact, in oversights and contradictions.  Shakspeare was not "an obscure actor" in 1601 (p. 633).  We are NOT told that Bacon dashed off a play in a fortnight (as Mr. Donnelly says), but that Shakspeare did so!  It is not, as he asserts, wholly different with Shakspeare from other men of the time.  We know far more about him, for instance, than we do of Beaumont and Fletcher.

    The Dedications of Shakspeare's two Poems to the Earl of Southampton are not merely "supposed to imply" a close "social relationship," as Mr. Donnelly phrases it: they prove it!

    Judith Shakspeare signs her initials in a very straggling manner, whereupon Mr. Donnelly gets up a long and futile tirade against Shakspeare for not teaching his daughter to read and write; ergo he could not have written the plays! and yet the cipher proclaims that Susannah Shakspeare was "WELL-TAUGHT" (p. 747).  In short, it is difficult to believe one word the gentleman says who has a waistcoat on of THAT colour.  His reasoning constantly reminds one of the man who prognosticated that people would soon cross the Atlantic in three days, and who "did not see how it could be otherwise."  He has no diffidence on account of ignorance.  He quotes—

"But I con him no thanks."

and

"Yet, thanks, I must you con."

and denounces both as "sheer nonsense."  But to "con thanks" is good provincial English still current in the North.  Sidney uses it in the Arcadia (p. 224)—

"I con thee thank to whom thy dogs be dear." (1590.)

It means to express an obligation.  The same ignorance, ludicrous errors, and absurdities of assertion are apparent in the cipher-narratives, which of themselves suffice to prove the ciphers cannot have been the work of Bacon.  There is no need to "rack the style" of Mr. Donnelly to make it confess that the language is not Bacon's.  It is thrice impossible for this to be Bacon's English—"My lord struck his spur up to the rowel against the panting sides of his horse" (p. 737).  Struck his spur up to the rowel has no meaning, because the rowel includes the spur-points that revolve with it.  Neither is one spur enough to be struck against both sides of the horse.  What Shakspeare himself wrote on the subject was this—

That is English. But in picking out the cipher-narrative the English has been completely destroyed.

    Again, the narrative says—"Bardolfe is now almost as good as dead; slain, killed outright by the hand of the old jade."  Now a man who was not quite dead could not be said to have been killed outright.  Moreover, the act could not be attributed to the hand of the Queen, who had only ordered the pursuit (p. 682).

    Stratford is called "one of the Peasant Towns of the West" (p. 730).  A double impossibility, as the town was not in the West, but exactly in the middle of England, and townspeople are not identical with but opposed to the Peasantry or Pagani.  They were not 15,000 peasants who lived in Stratford-on-Avon in the time of Shakspeare.  The number is Mr. Donnelly's.

    The cipher story tells of a desperate attempt on the part of the Queen (in 1601) to find out who was the author of the play of Richard II., which was certainly well known to be Shakspeare's, as it had been published in 1597 and again in 1598, with his name on the title-page; of that fact there never was a doubt.

    One of Mr. Donnelly's many "reasonable probabilities" is that Robert Cecil, "Says Ill," or "Seas-Ill," being Bacon's most bitter and inveterate enemy, was well aware that he was the real author of the Plays; knew that he had shared in the Essex conspiracy, and wrought on behalf of rebellion in writing the Play of King Richard II., but that he concealed the fact and kept the secret to himself, only having his revenge by compelling Bacon to take a dastardly part against Essex at his trial!

    And here is a pretty story told of Shakspeare by the cipher-narrative.  "His health is very poor.  It was my presurmise that he is blasted with that dreaded disease, a most incurable malady.  His looks prove it.  One day I did chance to meet him, and although I am well acquainted with him I would not have known him, the transformation was so great. . .  He is not more than thirty-three, in his youth, written down old with all the characters of age.  His cheek is white, his voice hollow, his hand dry, his hair grey, his step feeble, and his head WAGS as he WALKED.  There is a beastly wound new healed on the side of his neck, and a great wen or gall, something like the king's evil, which every day grows greater."  In another statement assigned to Bacon, Shakspeare is said to be "not yet thirty three," but he is a stooping, decrepid, WHITE-haired old man.  He is being eaten away with several diseases.  He has the gout, the French pox, horrible breakings out, doubtless meant for buboes, and he "hath fallen into a consumption."  Now, Shakspeare was thirty-three in 1597, and at this time, in 1596-7, the character of Falstaff was created for the dramas of First King Henry IV., and the following Merry Wives of Windsor.  The cipher-narrative also volunteers the information that Bacon and his brother Anthony drew the fat man Falstaff and his "great round belly" from Shakspeare as their "original model" (p. 815), who is also described as a great over-greedy glutton, or greedy-guts, "weighing two hundred pound" (p. 814).  And the narrative relates how the play-house was crowded to see this decrepid, diseased, consumptive, pox-rotted, strumous, white-faced, white-haired, worn, wizened, and bowed-down old man (in 1597) "caper" in his grossness with his "great round belly."

    Thus we have it all on the same authority that Shakspeare was physically decayed or rotten and sick unto death in the year 1597; his life was being eaten out of him daily by at least two incurable diseases, not to mention the "venerean speculation," or latest novelty from France; and that he was then tottering and trembling on the crumbling edge of the grave.  At the same time, or immediately afterwards, in 1597, we find him not only as the original model for Falstaff, but capering on the stage in the performance of that character; still later, we are told by the same authority, that the Queen calls Shakspeare "the fat creature," and Cecil refers to him as "the fat fellow."  And, it may be added, when Shakspeare signed his will in March, 1616, we find he did so "in perfect health and memory."  If these revelations are considered astounding, it must be confessed that the language in which they are put forth is altogether in keeping.  Here are a few samples of the new Baconian English conveyed by the mediumship of figures.

    "I derived these news."  "Almost half dead."  "I asked him what he is doing here."  "The much-admired plays we all rate so high!"  "The subjects are beyond his ability."  "He is subject to the gout in his great toe."  "Enough brain-power."  "A bold, forward, and most vulgar boy." This was done—"So that not only their bodies but their souls might be damned."  The question is, how did the figures got infected so that Bacon's English should be converted into the vulgarest nineteenth century newspaperese?

    The cipher goes with the language of it—the one cannot be Elizabethan and not the other.  If the language be not Bacon's, then he is not the author of the cipher, nor responsible for the narratives evolved by Mr. Donnelly.  In one place the cipher-narrative says that Shakspeare "is a poor, dull, ill spirited, greedy creature."  Here we can at once convict it of lying grossly and maliciously by the personal testimony of the men who knew him, such as Chettle, John Davies, and Ben Jonson.  Their evidence is sufficient to destroy all credence in the narrative, and consequently all truth in the cipher.  But independently of these eye-witnesses, the cipher goes on to convict itself once more, for, on another page (815), the narrative affirms that the same man "hath a quick wit."  Mr. Donnelly plainly shows us how his theory was falsely founded from the first.  He lets us see the unfolding of his drama of self-delusion.  How the false vision was externalized, and the eyes were brought to see that which was subjectively supplied.  He that hides may find; and he has consequently found the ciphers that none but himself had hidden and none but himself could find.  For example, he discovered that the words "disease" and "diseases" occurred more frequently than usual in the Play of 2 Henry IV.  He says, "They are found twelve times; this, with the cipher-system of using the same word over many times, probably implies thirty-six different references, nearly all, I take it, to Shakspeare's diseases" (p. 80).  Such a fanatical faith would furnish the writer's mind with germs of Shakspeare's manifold diseases which are afterwards unfolded by aid of the cipher.  Mr. Donnelly declares that such compounds as "Seas Ill" for Cecil, "Jack spur" for Shakspeare, "And It" for Aunt, and "Ba and Can" for Bacon, were necessitated and adopted in order that the secret cipher might not be detected.  At the same time, the whole inscrutable scheme was revealed to him because the name of Bacon is openly used in the Play of 1 King Henry IV., and the name of Francis appears twelve times over; the writer having gone out of his way to emphasize the name of Francis by reading Tom, Dick, and Francis, instead of Tom, Dick, and Harry.  Thus the directions for finding the veritable author of the plays were given plainly and publicly as those on a sign-post; Francis Bacon, Nicholas Bacon's son, St. Albans (1 Henry IV., IV. ii.).

    Mr. Donnelly could not understand why Falstaff should say "On, Bacons, on," unless Francis Bacon wrote that and the other plays.  If they had been called "Hogs" he might have comprehended.  But Bacons!  Here was a mystery indeed.  He did not know that "Bacons" was good provincial English for country clowns, as we have it still in "Chaw-Bacons," with no particular reference to Francis or Delia Bacon, or the "Bacons" that do follow them.  With a simplicity almost touching he says, "When I read that phrase, 'On, Bacons, on,' I said to myself, 'Beyond question there is a cipher in this play.'"   And he did not see how it could be otherwise.  Beginning with the "Francis Bacon" and "St. Albans" in 1 Henry IV., we can see how the picking out of certain words suggested his narratives.  For example, the word "Bacon" had been looked up by Mr. Donnelly in the Plays, and found in the Merry Wives of Windsor, IV. i., where it is said that "Hang hog is Latin for Bacon."  This also is supposed to furnish evidence that Lord Bacon wrote the Plays!  The story was that Sir Nicholas Bacon, father of Francis, being on the Northern Circuit, a criminal once pleaded with him for his life on account of their kinship, for, as he urged, his name was Hog and the Judge's was Bacon.  Whereupon Sir Nicholas replied that Hog was not Bacon until it had been well-hanged.  We may suppose the "Hang hog is Latin for Bacon" in the play to have been based on the story.  But what then?  The story would not be alluded to without a moral or a purpose.  What would that intention be in the year 1599?  At that time Bacon had got all he could out of Essex or by his mean, and was working against him more than was visible above board.  Bacon wits an avid, not to say a greedy man.  As Mr. Donnelly might say, he was somewhat "hoggish," and a hog that is hanged being Bacon, the humour in reversion would consist in Bacon being a hog, well-hanged.  That I offer as the likelier version of the interpolated passage or shifting scene in this Play.

    If, as now to be inferred, there was an intended gird at the living Bacon, considered as a hog only, then another of Mr. Donnelly's mysteries may be cleared up, as this would account for the name of Francis occurring twenty times in one column, when the special object was to conceal the writer's own name!  In thus repeating the Christian name the writer is rubbing in the salt, as it were, to make the Bacon.  Moreover, he has added a sign-post in his reference to the St. Alban's road, so that none of the initiated could mistake the way.

    But imagine Bacon as the author making fun of that kind at his own expense, or giving any such a chance for people to point the moral in this way—Hang-hog = Bacon, Bacon = Hog to be hanged!  What an enjoyable jest for him!  No wonder the young lords of the Essex faction were spending their time in 1599, as Rowland White records, "doing nothing but seeing Plays."

    Mr. Donnelly has not understood the humour of Shakspeare, but has taken his "Gammon of Bacon" much too seriously.  The man who caricatured King James on the stage in 1606 would never have hesitated at making fun of Bacon or any one else who offered the occasion.  There is, however, a far more important thing to be considered in the Windsor Play—that is, the deer-stealing and the venison of which game—or game-pie—is made in this drama.  Was Bacon the deer-stealer, and all the rest of Shakspeare the Stratford youth?  Assuredly the man who did steal the deer also wrote the Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the deer-stealing is acknowledged, and the Lucys' coat of arms is punned upon by name, and Sir Thomas Lucy is converted into Justice Shallow, and served up with the venison, for the amusement of all the world for all time.  The Luces, fish, are turned into Louses by Sir Hugh Evans!  Page says, "I thank you for my venison, Mr. Shallow," and Shallow says, "It was ill-killed."  But Page hopes to "drink down all unkindness" over the venison pasty.  The writer of that was most certainly Will Shakspeare, the native of Stratford, not the Londoner, Francis Bacon.  Moreover, this Play was composed by command of Queen Elizabeth, and, as we are credibly assured, was written in a fortnight by the man who stole the deer!  That command would cause a flutter at the theatre, and a fitting of parts by Shakspeare himself, with copy in his own handwriting.  Do you think that his playfellows Burbage and Kempe, Lowine and Arnim, were not sharp enough to know their man, of whom they were so proud as a "shrewd fellow," who beat all the University men?  Do you imagine they did not know whether he wrote his own work, or only kept a ghost that came up through the trap-door when called for, as Bacon?  Such a quick response in fulfilment of the royal command would be the crowning feat of that fertility of invention, that facility and incredible celerity in execution, which gave him his unapproachable supremacy amongst the playwrights of his or any other time.

    It is strange for me, who have spent many years with Shakspeare, to recount facts and reformulate the evidence that shows he was really the writer of his own works!  But as I happen to be responsible for this elaborate elucidation of the Sonnets, I am able to bring forward witnesses with testimony that seems to have been but little suspected by the Baconians.  Also I see that Mr. Donnelly quotes me as having said something which appeared to favour his view.

    There is some advantage in a writer being well-read in his own subject, but I have seen no instance of the anti-Shakspeareans knowing anything like enough of the evidence that bristles against them impenetrably in the Sonnets.  Either from ignorance or from wariness they appear to be very shy of the Sonnets, and I can assure them there are sound reasons for their being so.  The Sonnets have something decisive to say on this part of the subject.  They will furnish a reply against which there will be no possible appeal.  The Sonnets are full of data the most definite, criteria the most conclusive, and facts the most fatal to their great fallacy.  But these facts will not be ignored by any sticking of one's head in the sand not to see them; they remain visible to others, however the Baconians may be blinded by the miopœia of a false theory!

    To recapitulate.  Briefly, the facts are these.  In the year 1590 Shakspeare had begun to be known as the writer of Songs and Sonnets.  As already shown, he began to write them in 1590 for the young Earl of Southampton, then a youth of seventeen.  The early ones were written with his "Pupil Pen," before he had printed his first poem of Venus and Adonis.  Afterwards he writes some of them in a book that has been provided for the purpose by the Earl.  In writing such Sonnets in Southampton's own table-book or album, his friend is to supply the subject-matter, is to furnish his own arguments, is to become the Tenth Muse, is to inspire and give light to the invention or imagination needed for the purpose of writing.  So much is to be read in Sonnet 38.  In Sonnet 77 we see him writing in this very Book, which he calls "Thy Book," when he invites his friend also to write in it!  In that Book certain of the Sonnets were written by Shakspeare himself.  There they were to stand in the sight of his friend, and his friends, to be read, as he says, by those "curious days."  There they were read by the "Private Friends" (as known to Meres) in the Poet's own handwriting, which certainly could not be mistaken by Southampton and Essex for Francis Bacon's.

    Thus the Sonnets were known to be Shakspeare's when they were circulating in MS. among his "Private Friends" before 1598.  They were known to Francis Meres as Shakspeare's in 1598.  Two of them were printed as Shakspeare's in the Passionate Pilgrim (1599).  They circulated amongst the Private Friends during many years in Shakspeare's own hand-writing.  Chief of his "Private Friends" was the Earl of Southampton, to whom he publicly dedicates his two poems; when he tells his friend that he has future work then in hand that is pre-dedicated to him!  He offers the Sonnets as this promised work, hence he describes them as the "Barren tender of a Poet's debt"—that is, the debt already contracted and acknowledged in the inscription to Lucrece.  In 1609 the Sonnets were printed by Thorpe as Shakspeare's, and dedicated to William Herbert, who was one of the later Private Friends of the Poet; and who, as the editors of the first folio tell us, had pursued Shakspeare with very great favour.  Although Shakspeare did not publish them himself they were known to be his, and, as we learn from Benson, the editor of the second edition (1640), Shakspeare not only identified them as his own, he likewise defended them against some charge of impurity.  Now, they tell us that Shakspeare was one of those unlearned people who are not educated at college, and therefore he was not qualified to write the Plays, Poems, and Sonnets; whereas Bacon was one of the Learned.  He was educated at Cambridge.  This same charge of not being one of the Learned, as Marlowe, Nash, and Bacon were, was made against Shakspeare by his earliest opponents and rivals.  He was pointed to as the man of a little country grammar knowledge, i.e. he was educated at a country grammar school, and never was "gowned in the University."  But they identified him as the unlearned man who DID write the Plays, not as the unqualified man who did not!  They charged him with stealing from them—not from Bacon.  Now, the writer of the Sonnets is confessedly this man who did not receive a College education!  He personally recognizes the charges brought against him by the Nash and Greene clique that he was one of the unlearned, not a University man, not a Master of Arts, but a self-educated man, and, in short, an ignoramus!  Nash personified him as "Ignorance," and Shakspeare, as writer of the Sonnets, accepts that designation.  He tells Southampton—

Whereas Francis Bacon WAS one of the Learned, WAS a College man, educated at Cambridge, was "gowned in the University;" and he was a man whose rude ignorance could not be lifted to the side of Learning by the patronage of Southampton, or anybody else, as Shakspeare's had been!  That is the reply of the Poet who wrote the Sonnets, to the people who say he did not write them because he was an unlearned man!

    We also gather from the Sonnets, not only that Shakspeare -wrote Plays, but that he looked upon the writing of Plays as his own proper "work," for he speaks of his Poems and Sonnets, devoted to Southampton, as being the product of his "idle hours," distinguished from his working hours. Next, we have the disparaging estimate made by Shakspeare himself of his own work as a play wright. This occurs in the 100th Sonnet, about the year 1598. He had not written to his friend for some time past, and he chides his Muse for playing truant and neglecting her one supreme subject—

His labours for the theatre were spent on subjects considered to be inferior when compared with the work he had to do for his noble friend!

    The Baconians do not explain whether Southampton, Essex, Herbert and other of the "Private Friends," amongst whom the Sonnets circulated as Shakspeare's, were impostors also as parties to the stupendous fraud, or whether they were humbugged into thinking that the Sonnets, with their promises of immortality, and the dedications, with their offering of eternal love, were Shakspeare's, whereas he was only a mask, and the man behind it all the while was Francis Bacon, who pretended to be the non-academic and unlearned Shakspeare whom Southampton had exalted to a seat beside the University men.  Are we to suppose that Southampton never knew which was Shakspeare and which was Bacon; that Shakspeare himself was only the friend of Southampton by proxy, and that both he and Bacon were co-partners in practising a huge, an unfathomable, an impossible imposture,—fooling Southampton, Essex, and the other "Private Friends" with the Sonnets, even as they were fooling all the clever actors and keen rival dramatists, the public, and the world in general for three hundred years in the matter of the Plays?  Do they mean to say that Bacon pretended to be a poor, despised player in the Sonnets?  Did he assert that he had gone "here and there" to play the part of the fool on the stage, and that Fortune was guilty of these disreputable deeds which branded his brow with indelible disgrace, because she had made him an actor on purpose to delude them into the belief that he was Shakspeare?

    The Sonnets present evidence for Shakspeare's authorship like the links of chain-mail in an armour of proof.  And the man who wrote the Sonnets must also have written the Poems and Plays.  This can be established by those principles of scientific demonstration that have been applied to both in the present work.  The same unlearned man wrote both!  Thus the secret history in the Sonnets is in agreement with the public history of the time, and both are in antipodal antagonism to the Great Cryptogram.

    A most important witness is Henry Chettle, who was both a writer and a printer or publisher of the time.  Greene's Pamphlet had been issued to the public by Chettle, and upon learning that it had given offence to Shakspeare, he offered an apology in an epistle to the Gentlemen Readers, which he prefixed to his Kind-Hart's Dream.  In this he tells the public that he himself has observed Shakspeare's personal demeanour as being no less civil than he was excellent in the quality he professed, i.e. as a player and a playwright.  Besides which, he says "divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art."

    This testimony to Shakspeare as a known and proved writer was given in 1592, the year before he printed the poem of Venus and Adonis, therefore it was as the writer of Plays that he was known to Chettle, who was himself a dramatist, and to those "divers of worship" who had come forward in defence of Shakspeare personally, and testified to his uprightness of character, and to the facetious grace or graceful felicity of his writing.  As he was then known to be the author of the Comedy of Errors, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love's Labour's Lost, no apter epithet than that of "facetious grace" could have been applied to such of his early dramas as were entirely original.  Then we have the public and personal dedication of Shakspeare's two poems to the Earl of Southampton in 1593-4.  In the next year Jervais Markham salutes Southampton as the man "whose eyes do crown the most victorious pen;" obviously in allusion to his patronage of Shakspeare, and not of Bacon.

    In 1594 Robert Southwell grudgingly refers to Shakspeare as one of the "finest wits" who are distilling love-sweets from "Venus' Rose!"  In his epigrams Richard Weever salutes him in 1595, and says—

    Then there is the description of the man as the author of Romeo and Juliet, written by the satirist Marston, who shows us what a diligent student and collector our Shakspeare must have been with his "huge long-scrapèd stock of Plays;" the "worthy poet" who "put on the pumps" when the "orbs celestial" danced Kempe's jig at Shakspeare's theatre.

    In 1598 he was proclaimed by the competent critic, Francis Meres, to be the supreme genius of his time, the most all-round man in tragedy, comedy, and lyrical love-poetry.  If the Muses would speak English, he says, it would be with Shakspeare's tongue.

    Next we can cite the appreciation of his fellow-players, who, like Kempe, knew that their "fellow Shakspeare" could "put down all the University pens" as recorded in the "Return from, Parnassus," where Kempe says—"Few of the University pen plays well.  Why, here's our fellow Shakspeare puts them all down, ay! and Ben Jonson too!"  "It's a shrewd fellow indeed!" responds Burbage. (1601-2.)  Something of this same pride looks out from Shakspeare's representations of country mother-wit in the plays.  He is noted by Camden in his Remains (1603) as one of the "most pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire."  He is appealed to by Chettle in 1603 as the Poet who ought to write the National Elegy on the death of Elizabeth.  John Davies of Hereford addresses Shakspeare as our English Terence about 1611, and says—

That is, the Players reaped the benefit of what Shakspeare honestly sowed in writing the Dramas, and, as Davies knew, they held and kept the copyright!

    Here, by the bye, is an answer to the Baconians who urge that Shakspeare made no claim to the Plays and no disposition of them in his will.  He could not!  They were left the property of the theatre.

    This is followed by the evidence of Heminge and Condell, who collected and edited the Plays, and who declare from personal knowledge that the author was known to them as Shakspeare, "and that as he was a happy imitator of nature, he was a most gentle expresser of it.  His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we scarce received from him a blot in his papers."

    These men were eye-witnesses for many years to what they testify!  And lastly we have the long, loud, and lasting blazon of Ben Jonson, who knew and loved the man, and sounded his praise as with the trumpet of eternal truth, when he wrote his IN MEMORIAM in remembrance of "MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MR. WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US," which would be recognition enough of the man, his genius and his works, even if it stood by itself alone in literature.  Jonson testifies that Shakspeare's "mind and manners," as known to him in personal intercourse, ARE reflected in his works, just as the father's face "lives in his issue."  He, the classical scholar, the learned rival and less popular writer, had no misgiving as to whether Shakspeare was personally qualified to write the Plays.

    Mr. Donnelly comments on the remarkable fact that Shakspeare left no manuscripts behind him.  But we see that he did leave manuscripts behind.  How else should the Folio have been printed?  Shakspeare's manuscripts were preserved at least for seven years after his death.  Per contra, the Baconians have not one jot or tittle, shred or vestige of contemporary evidence, to rebut or invalidate the testimony of all these and other witnesses for Shakspeare's authorship.  Not one word was ever uttered on behalf of Bacon; no claim was ever set up by him or his friends even for having had a hand in a single one of the thirty-six Plays!  What they are forced to do is to falsify the facts.  Thus when Ban Jonson says the writer of the Plays "had small Latin and less Greek," this charge Mr. Donnelly holds to have been aimed satirically at Bacon in verses written by his own request as an intentional blind.  And he thinks that Ben must have vastly enjoyed the whacking of his good friend Bacon over Shakspeare's shoulders.  He likewise misunderstands or perverts the lines—

where "yet" means still.

    He tells his readers that the writer here expresses the hope that the Poet will reappear. And as he had also said, "Thou art alive still," and "Shine forth, thou star of Poets," here is good evidence that he was not addressing the spirit of any dead Shakspeare, but was really aiming at the living Bacon.  In short, everybody did everything to prove that Bacon did not write the Plays, but you've only got to stand on your head or go off it altogether to reverse all that, and see that Bacon was the real author.

    There is no doubt of Bacon being greedy for enduring fame.  He HAD the last infirmity of noble minds most profoundly.  He made every preparation for the perpetuation of his works, and did his utmost to insure their transmission to future times.  He not only wrought at them himself, he paid others to render his writings from English into Latin, for the express purpose of insuring their descent to posterity on the double line of two languages.  He showed the greatest care for their being preserved in the most accurate, elegant, and perfect form.  He was the most fastidious of writers himself; one who could never finish his work to satisfy his acute critical sense.  With him the file was even more than the pen.  He transcribed and amended his Advancement of Learning seven times over, his NOVUM ORGANUM twelve times over, his ESSAYS thirty times over.  And yet the collected Plays came into print with some 10,000 errors on their head.  Also, any number of these errors were repeated without question from the earlier quartos.

    Not only did Bacon NOT correct a single play, nor make sure that one was corrected, or turned into Latin, he did not take the trouble to identify which of the thirty-six Plays were genuine, or what part of the whole was spurious work, where the mixture is such that the author only could have discriminated.  Moreover, the folio edition was collected and published in the very beginning of the time when Bacon set about collecting, revising, and translating his own works, on purpose to secure their survival after his death.  He stamped them as his by name with his own living hand.  In his last will and testament Bacon wrote—"As to that durable part of my memory, which consisteth in my works and writings, I desire my executors, and especially Sir John Constable and my very good friend Mr. Bosville, to take care that of ALL MY WRITINGS, both of English and of Latin, there may be books fair bound and placed in the King's library, and in the library of the University of Cambridge, and in the library of Trinity College, where myself was bred, and in the library of the University of Oxonford, and in tile library of my Lord of Canterbury, and in the library of Eaton." [156]

    Not a sign is there in the Will, or the Works, of the Plays, Poems, or Sonnets. Yet Shakspeare had been gone nine years, and the first folio was printed, and left with none to look after it, two years before Bacon made his Will.  And in spite of all this nervous anxiety on the subject of his writings, all the fastidiousness in correction and finish, all his precaution against misrepresentation or mistake, all this manifest intention for his own works to live on as his own under his own name, he never deposited at Cambridge or elsewhere, never translated into Latin or corrected in English, never claimed a single one of the Plays in folio, or quarto, or MS., on the stage or off it, in conversation, in his Will, or anywhere else.  Nor did he breathe a whisper of the great Cryptogram that he had concealed in the folio edition of the Plays, nor leave any hint or clue for its discovery.

    Bacon actually wrote a chapter on ciphers in his "De Augmentis," published in the same year as the folio edition of Shakspeare's Plays, and did not include Mr. Donnelly's, nor mention that he had employed it, nor offer any clue either to the discovery or the reading of it.  And we are asked to believe that this cipher was invented by Bacon a score of years before it was wanted, and woven bit by bit as a kind of birth-mark into the warp of his work, so secretly, so inscrutably, that it could only be discovered by the man who has shown his inability to make out a very simple cipher that is found in Bacon's own works!

    We now come to the second of the two factors in the genesis of this delusion, which has to be identified in the likeness of thought and expression to be found in the works of Shakspeare and Bacon.  The process of attaining a false conclusion may be followed in this way.

    Mr. Donnelly holds that Bacon not only wrote the Plays of Shakspeare and Marlowe, but that he is likewise the veritable author of Montaigne's Essays.  Doubtless the cipher might be devised that would show him to have been the author of the Bible.  But this inference with regard to Moutaigne is not derived as one of the cipher-revelations!  It is founded on internal evidence, viz. the identities and likenesses of thought and expression which are more or less apparent in the writings of both Bacon and Montaigne.  The evidence for Bacon being the writer of Montaigne's Essays, then, is just as good and entirely of the same nature as is that for his being the author of the Plays, and in each case the false conclusion was attained independently of any cipher.  The comparative faculty of the Baconian advocates is preternaturally alive to the least likeness that seems to tell in their favour.  The vast mass of their comparisons are of non-effect.  Not more than one in ten would stand close scrutiny.  In many cases it is enough to remember that both Shakspeare and Bacon wrote Elizabethan English, or drew from a common source.  Indeed there are close upon 200 parallels in Mr. Donnelly's first volume, which only show that both writers USED THE SAME WORD IN EACH PARTICULAR QUOTATION—and these words were first used by Shakspeare, as our great National Dictionary will show.  But when all deductions are made there does remain a considerable residuum of likeness, not only distinguishable in separate ideas, for the philosophical writings of Bacon are suffused and saturated with Shakspeare's Thought!  Such is the fact, although their explanation of it is false.

    There is sufficient likeness between the writings of Bacon and Shakspeare to arrest attention and call for remark.  Also these likenesses in thought and expression are mainly limited to those two contemporaries.  It may also be admitted that one must have copied from the other.  This fact is reasonably certain, and deserves to be treated reasonably.  But I am about to show how the true explanation of the fact does not depend upon the assumption that Bacon's and Shakspeare's works were both written by one author.  I quote from the identical evidence the anti-Shakspeareans trust to for demonstrating that Bacon wrote the Plays.

In all these instances of likeness, as well as in a hundred others, the chronology will show that the thought or expression is Shakspeare's originally, and that it was repeated by Bacon in a later writing.  Shakspeare's work being first, he could not be the borrower; and, as Bacon could, we need no remoter explanation of the fact.

    So far from these vaunted parallelisms proving the Plays of Shakspeare and the writings of Bacon to be the work of one mind, all they do tend to establish is the priority of Shakspeare.  No matter whether it may be as the natural philosopher, the philologist, the politician, the legist, or any other character, it is Shakspeare who is everywhere first, and it is Bacon who follows him, as demonstrated by the dates.  In his Advancement of Learning, Bacon recommends the taking of Notes and making collections of these, or keeping a Common-place book as a "provision or preparatory store for the furniture of speech and readiness of invention."  This, as the Promus proves, had been his own custom.  It was likewise the practice of Shakspeare, who, as Marston says, had made a Common-place book out of his huge, long-scrapèd stock of plays.  Bacon compiled his notes from various sources, plays being one of them.  But not only PRINTED plays.  He appears also to have Jotted down numerous things that he heard in the spoken drama!  Mrs. Pott and others have assumed the impossibility of Bacon having made notes from Shakspeare's Plays on the stage!  But this is not only a possible explanation, it is a PROVABLE one according to demonstrable fact.  And this is the conclusion that is destined to be final.

    A study of the Promus folios will show us something of Bacon's method, and allow us to overlook him at work either with his tablets in hand at the theatre, or else filling his folios afterwards from memory when imperfect recollection may be held to account for some of his inaccurate quotations.  At one time he quotes, at another he comments; sometimes he moralizes the meaning, or generalizes the particular thought that is to be found expressed over and over again by Shakspeare.  Sometimes his reflection takes the form of paralleling or finding an equivalent in Latin or some other language.  He paraphrases to utilize, and possibly to disguise.  Shakspeare's favourite phrases may often be seen in transition.  Some of the notes contain repartees or snatches of dramatic dialogue in the form of a saying and a retort which can be paralleled in the Plays.  Note 198 (fol. 87) reads "Hear me out." Answer: "You never were in!" which sounds like an echo of "If my hand is out, then belike your hand is in" (L. L. L., IV. i.).  The mode is essentially Shakspearean, and the thought, the quip, the turn of expression, are often identifiably Shakspeare's.

    Bacon has thus recorded various words characteristic of Shakspeare, which were but little used by his contemporaries, and some of which were first used by Shakspeare as his own coinage.  Numerous expressions were copied by Bacon from the early plays, which are Shakspeare's from the first and several times over afterwards!  Evidence can be adduced and multiplied indefinitely by those who have the time, and think it worth while to show that making notes at or from the Play was one of Bacon's modes of "setting down the knowledge of scattered occasions."  For instance, he listens to a complex passage in the Two Noble Kinsmen, I. i. 75, and condenses it in his note—"The soldier like a Corselet; bellaria et appetina."  "He had rather have his will than his wish" is Bacon's note (113, fol. 85).  Who would?  Why, Proteus in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV. ii.  Silvia.  "What is your will?" roteus.  "That I may compass yours."  Silvia.  "You have your wish; my will is even this," &c.  Comment by Bacon—"He had rather have his will than his wish!"  This play is one of the earliest—about 1591.  "Black will take no other hue" (38, fol. 83 b) looks like Bacon's reflection on Biron's praise of Rosaline's black beauty.

Whereas black would not change its hue.

    Here are a few parallels drawn from the Promus Notes and the Plays—

    In the opening scene of this last play Romeo had said of Rosaline, "O teach me how I should forget to think;—Thou canst not teach me to forget."  Afterwards he tells Friar Laurence, when he mentions Rosaline, "I have forgot that name."  In another scene Juliet says she has forgotten why she called her lover back; and Romeo would stay and have her still forget.  Bacon's comment on all this forgetting is, "Well to forget" (1232, fol. 111).  Now, a crucial test of Bacon's practice is afforded by his Promus and Shakspeare's play of Romeo and Juliet, and therefore we must look a little closer at these.  First we see that "ROMEO" is quoted by name—the sign over the 'e' showing that the vowel 'o' has suffered elision; next the salutation Bon iouyr, Bon iozcr Bridegroome, represents the Bon jour Romeo in the play.  Then we find the following "heads" of the play are all noted in this ONE folio, No. 111, the previous folio being headed "Play."  Good morrow (1189).  Bon iouyr, Bon iour Bridegroome (1194).  Good day to me and good morrow to you (1195).  I have not said all my prayers till I have bid you Good morrow (1196).  Late-rising—finding a-bed.  Early-rising—summons to rise (1197).  Rome (1200).  Falsa quid est somnus Gelidæ nisi mortis imago (1204).  Golden sleep (1207).  The cock (1211).  The lark (1212).  Abed—rose you out bed (1214).  Uprouse, you are up (1215).  Amen (1221).  Well to forget (1232).  Various other "heads" found in, or characteristic of, Romeo and Juliet might be quoted, but here is enough to show the method of Bacon.  It renders a bird's-eye view of the play, or a sketch of it in a thumb-nail etching, for his own use.  He notes the salutations especially, and applies them and manipulates them mentally.  A compliment is suggested (1196) which he will probably pay to the Queen, as he is in search of "FORMULARIES AND ELEGANCIES" of expression—SUCH BEING THE TITLE FOUND ON THE BACK OF THIS FOLIO.  He realizes the Poet's description of Juliet in the "borrowed likeness of shrunk death," by turning it into Latin.  He is greatly struck with the notes and signs of early rising, being a regular slug-a-bed himself, and one who enjoys the antithesis; hence the "cock," the "lark," the "golden sleep," and the "uprouse."  His own mother had been an early riser who had great trouble o' mornings with her boys.

    In a letter dated May 24, 1592, Lady Bacon had written to Anthony, "I verily think your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then musing I know not what (nescio quid) when he should sleep; and then in consequence, by late rising and long lying in bed, whereby his men are made slothful and himself continually sickly.  But my sons haste not to hearken to their mother's good counsel in time to prevent."

    In making these jottings he probably mused upon his mother.  We also gather from Lady Bacon's letters that her sons were confirmed play-goers about the year 1594.  The Promus then affords sufficient proof of his practice and method of noting anything curious, proverbial, rarely old or newly rare, as he does the provincial modes of morning and evening salutation which Shakspeare had brought to town with so many other things that were familiar enough to the country folk if not to courtiers.

    No writer ever made such a use of antithesis and analogy as Shakspeare, more particularly in his earlier writings.  No one like him for moralizing two meanings in one word.  No one like him for showing his wit in wisdom and wisdom in his wit.  No one whose thought was so pregnant in suggestion, or flowered double so determinedly, as if everything with him must needs be born twin from the lusty fertility of so liberal a nature.  These indigenous qualities are specially noted and illustrated by Bacon's quotations from the Plays, in which he must have found provender in plenty.  Now when we have once traced Francis Bacon at the playhouse making his notes and storing his mind from Shakspeare's treasury, as we can and do where the drama is Romeo and Juliet, we are at the beginning of a discovery of which we cannot see the end.  How many more of the plays had he listened to with the express object of gathering gems of thought and ingots of intellectual gold?  The practice and the purpose can be proved, but the extent of his direct borrowing and indirect assimilation are not to be gauged; his indebtedness cannot now be measured.

    Mrs. Pott asserts that there are several hundred notes in Bacon's Promus of which no trace has been discovered in his acknowledged writings nor in those of any other contemporary writer except Shakspeare, and that these appear in the Plays and Sonnets.  "Several hundreds" and "no trace" are exaggerations, but the Promus DOES contain a vast deal that was taken from Shakspeare's dramas, and we can now see how it was derived orally, and how the notes of Bacon were made, his memory stored, his pockets replenished from the Shakspearean mint of source.  In fact, we are witnessing the building up of Bacon instead of the demolishing of Shakspeare.  Bacon would be one of the first to perceive the value of Shakspeare's work, especially in its wealth of proverbial wisdom and folk-lore.  He would there find in profusion that which comes most home to the business and the bosoms of men.  Shakspeare, who portrayed the country clowns, provincial mother-wits, and queer kinky characters among the peasantry, was also in possession of their humours, their oral wisdom, their homely sayings, pithy apophthegms, wise saws and quaint expressions; much of which matter HE BROUGHT INTO LITERATURE FOR THE FIRST TIME.  All this would be richly appreciated by the town-born, book-learned Bacon, then striving more and more for the realities of nature.  Shakspeare had brought his proverbial philosophy directly from the people, and fresh from the country, having gathered it as the Ancient Wisdom used to be imparted, orally, from that source which underlies the literature of different lands, and often obliterates the claims of any one special nationality, because the Sayings are common to all.  Bacon must have known that the mind of Shakspeare was a richer storehouse even than Heywood's Book of Epigrams, or Erasmus's Adagia.

    The Promus jottings PROVE that he did not go to Shakspeare on the stage for FORMULARIES AND ELEGANCIES OF EXPRESSION only, but that he also took note of many things, ranging from the lightest foam and flash of fancy on the surface down to the plumbing of his profoundest depths of thought.  Still, the Promus jottings do not betray the Poet, or the lover of poets, in search of the sweets of poetry, nor yet of humour in its glory.  What he most appreciated was analogy, antithesis, and double meaning, felicities of expression, the wisdom of thought in the wit of words, which furnished matter that was portable in prose.  And nowhere else could he have discovered such an EL DORADO of this wealth as in the works of Shakspeare.

    Bacon in search of antithetic thoughts and expressions would delight in a passage like this, from Romeo and, Juliet (I. ii.)—

    And Bacon in his far later Wisdom of the Ancients, writes of Cupid as an Atom.  "They say that Love was the most ancient of all the Gods and existed before everything else, except Chaos, which is held coeval therewith.  Love is represented absolutely without progenitor"—this being the later version of the two, and Shakspeare's indubitably first.

    The tables are suddenly and satisfactorily turned on the Baconians if it can be demonstrated that the ownership of the observations, the subtleties of thought, the imagery, the antithesis, the metaphors, the peculiar turns of expression, the newly-coined words, belongs to Shakspeare primarily and pre-eminently; and that can be proved once for all by the chronology!

    The only time that Bacon is known to have had a hand in the production of a play was when he helped in devising the "dumb show" for The Misfortunes of Arthur.  He was also engaged on a masque or two, and he asserts that he did ONCE WRITE A SONNET—much as Beau Brummel once ate a pea—but even that one Sonnet has never been found.  Shakspeare was a well-known writer for some years before Bacon had begun to make these preliminary PROMUS notes.  The earliest date found on the top of the first page of Promus is Dec. 5, 1594.  At that time Shakspeare had published his two poems and written at least one-half of the Sonnets.  Some ten of the Plays were then extant, including Henry VI. in three parts, Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Taming of the Shrew.  Further, the notes were continued for some two years according to date, and so they cover the ground for including Romeo and Juliet, Richard III., King John, and The Merchant of Venice.  Thus nearly one-half of Shakspeare's harvest was reaped, and he had stored the seed-corn for producing the rest before he could possibly have derived anything whatever from Bacon, who first printed ten of his Essays, and also the Colours and Meditations, in the year 1597.  It is the idlest folly to point to the later plays as evidence that the wise or witty antithetic thoughts, the special imagery or peculiar turns of expression are Bacon's because they may come later than the Promus, i.e. after 1594-6.  For it was Shakspeare's constant habit to reproduce a character, a fundamental figure, a description, or an image in later dramas far more perfectly than in the early ones.  He would often give his gems of thought a different setting, or cut them with a fresh facet, to catch the ray of another relationship, and show them in a newer light.  For example—

Their first appearance in the early plays, however, stamps and warrants the property to be Shakspeare's own when it reappears in the later works.  Thus, a number of thoughts, images, wise sayings, and proverbial expressions found in Bacon's notes and essays can be identified first of all in the early plays of Shakspeare.  Some of these appear afterwards in the Promus.  They reappear in plays that are later than Promus, and then have been short-sightedly attributed to Bacon as the author; whereas they are Shakspeare's from the first; Shakspeare's several times over; his in the seed, his in the germ, his in the final flower, no matter how or where or by whom they are made use of intermediately.

    When Bacon sent a portion of his History to James I. he wrote— "This being but a leaf or two, I pray your pardon if I send it for your recreation, considering that love must creep where it cannot go."  Of this Mrs. Pott remarks—"The same pretty sentiment reappears in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' IV. ii., in this manner, 'You know that love will creep in service where it cannot go.'"  "REAPPEARS" ! !  Why the play was written as early as the year 1592, and James did not come to England until 1603, eleven years later.

    "You shall not be your own carver" is found in The Advancement of Learning, which was not printed until 1605. "This," says the same writer, "is the model which is adopted in 'Richard II.,'  'Let him be his own carver and cut out his way;'" whereas the Play was published in 1597, that is, eight years earlier.  Now you cannot reverse things in that way without your head being turned.

    Amongst other antithetic apophthegms assigned to Polonius is the wise saying—

This is adopted, altered, and reapplied by Bacon in his Essay Of Wisdom for a Man's Self, where it furnishes the sage Baconian reflection, made in the attitude of offering advice—"Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to any man"!  Here we have the proof of Shakspeare's priority and of Bacon's deliberate adoption or borrowing from the great original whom he so thoroughly ignored!  The Play of Hamlet was entered on the Stationers' Register July 26th, 1602.  We know not how much earlier it was acted, but it was printed in 1603, in 1604, and again in 1605; therefore it must have been much sought after by readers.  The Essay was NOT amongst the Earliest Ten, and therefore could not have been borrowed from by Shakspeare!  In this same Play Hamlet tells his mother to

This IS the Essay Of Nature in Man visible in the embryo, "He that seeketh victory over his nature, let him not set himself too great nor too small tasks," etc. "There is no means to help this, but by reasonable intermission," etc.  The merest hints of Bacon's way of working must suffice, as others can complete the full comparison.  My point is that these two Essays were not amongst the first ten (1597), and did not appear until 1612, consequently Shakspeare could not have been the borrower.  Here, as elsewhere, HIS is the germ which Bacon developed into the Essay.  Here we can see the philosopher at work from the printed book, just as we previously traced him making his notes from the acted Play.

    Various other Essays show the same elaboration in stately prose of that which Shakspeare had already said more pithily and compressly in his poetry, which contains a thousand such Essays in embryo, together with a thousand other things beside!  A closer study on the right track will make this more and more manifest, and the setting up of false claims on behalf of Bacon will make the true claims of Shakspeare all the more apparent.

    It is this borrowing from Shakspeare BY Bacon that has given so much trouble and labour in vain to the Baconians.  It is this adopting, developing, assimilating, and transforming the thought of Shakspeare that has so bewildered, disturbed, and unsettled their wits, and set them off in pursuit of their false lights and ignis fatui of the likenesses.  The simple solution is that Bacon was the unsuspected thief, who has been accredited with the original ownership of the property purloined from Shakspeare.  As Bacon himself reminds us, "The nature of everything is best considered in the seed" (Promus, 1451, fol. 128), or, as Shakspeare had previously said it of "Things as yet not come to life, which in their seeds and weak beginnings lie intreasured!" (2 King Henry IV., III, ii.).

    By taking this cue we shall find that Shakspeare's early plays and poems provided the seed for all the rest; and they were produced before the Promus and the Essays of Bacon!  But, as Shakspeare was writing so long prior to the publication of Bacon's first Essays, it has been assumed that there is no other way of accounting for his mind being mirrored in Bacon's works except by concluding that Bacon was the author of Shakspeare's Plays and Poems!  This leap has been logically taken by the leaders in the Baconian aberration who have thus gone the whole hog; but they are wrong from the first, wrong all through, and wrong for ever.  It is true the ways of working in poetry and in prose may be diametrically different.  When Shakspeare adopted matter of thought as the ore for his mintage, he stamped his own ineffaceable features on the coin that he made current for all time; whereas Bacon melted the coins down again, and mixed the gold into an amalgam that was remoulded by him in his prose.  In this way much of the original likeness was lost.

    The likeness looks doubly definite in the original poetry.  Hence it is not so easy to identify the good things that Bacon borrowed from Shakspeare!  A vast deal of Shakspeare's thought must have gone into Bacon's sweating-bag or melting-pot, which is not to be recovered or recognized now by any familiar features or quotation marks.  But, as we have seen, it was his practice to make notes at the theatre, or to jot down from memory the remarkable things that arrested his attention there.  His Promus is the record of much that he took directly from Shakspeare.  For eight or ten years he had free play and full pasturage in Shakspeare's field before he published his first ten Essays!  Moreover, as Spedding points out, Bacon had a regular system of taking notes, and of intentionally altering the things that he quoted.  This was a Baconian PROCESS of making the borrowed matter his own, or chewing the food to digest it, by so far disguising the original or giving to it the turn and trend of his own thought.  Such a method of manipulation being left visible in his notes and other writings, this opens a vast vista of possibility in his covert mode of assimilating the thought, purloining the gold, or clipping the coinage of Shakspeare.  Also, the first folio of Promus is numbered eighty-three, so that eighty-two preceding folios of Bacon's notes are missing!  But doubtless they were made and used.

    A large number of Wise Sayings and Adages are quoted by Bacon in his Promus which are not directly used in his known writings, ergo it was thought they must be used in his unacknowledged ones.  And as large numbers of these same Sayings, or something like them, appear in the Plays, it seemed to follow of course that Shakspeare's acknowledged writings must be the unacknowledged work of Bacon!  Such reasoning is as logical as that of the Quaker who tried to palm off his dog as a wolf-hound.  He had found the animal was totally unfit for anything else, and so he inferred that it MUST be a wolf-hound, faute de mieux!  No cloud appears too unsubstantial for a castle in the air.  No mental mist is too thin to sustain a delusion.

    Bacon quotes a Latin Saying from the Adagio of Erasmus—"Ijsdem e' literis efficitur Tragedia et Comedia"—Tragedies and Comedies are made of one alphabet.  Which merely means that both are composed from the same letters.  But the word "alphabet" has an underlined significance, because Bacon alludes to his Works of the Alphabet, of which he sends a copy to his friend Tobie Matthew.  These works of the "Alphabet" are in all likelihood, as Mr. Spedding guesses, communications written in Bacon's cipher.  The language denotes a cipher composed of letters, instead of a numerical one, such as was used by Rowland White.  It was something for USE between the two friends, and it was EMPLOYED FOR THE PURPOSE OF SECRECY.  Hence Bacon's remark—"These works of the alphabet are in my opinion of less use to you where you are now than at Paris;" meaning that where he is now there is less need of secrecy than there was in the French capital; still he sends the communication in  cipher for the use of friends, but says cautiously—"For my part, I value your own reading more than your publishing them to others."  Now as the word "alphabet" is used by Bacon in writing of his letter-cipher, and as both Tragedies and Comedies are composed of the same letters or alphabet, it ought to follow as another matter of course that Bacon is alluding in this letter to those tragedies and comedies which he had written, and which have been so falsely ascribed to Shakspeare!

    When James I. was on his way to England, Master John Davis went to meet him, and Bacon sent after him a letter in which he begs for Davis to use his influence and good offices with the King in his favour, and concludes with desiring him "to be good to all concealed Poets."  This, says Mr. Donnelly, half proves my case, and he quotes it for us to infer that Bacon was the concealed Author of the Plays.  What the letter does point to is, that Bacon was practising a bit of his covert and underhand work; just as he did when he wrote of himself to Essex as if from his brother Anthony, saying of himself that he was "too wise to be abused and too honest to abuse" in a letter intended for the eyes of the Queen.  He had a natural instinct for underhand methods and the low politique.  In the present instance he had evidently written some adulatory lines of greeting to the King, these were sent unsigned, and the suggestion is that Davis will make known, "quite promiscuous like," who the concealed and diffident poet is.  The tone is identical with that of his other "Apology," in which he alludes to the Sonnet he had once written, "although I profess not to be a poet!"  According to Mr. Donnelly, "Francis Bacon seems to have had these Plays in his mind's eye when he said—'If the Sow with her snout should happen to imprint the letter A upon the ground, wouldst thou therefore imagine that she could write out a whole tragedy as one letter?'"  No doubt he had the Plays in view.  It is strictly in keeping with Mr. Donnelly's system that as the sow makes bacon we should read the sow = Bacon.  But what a rebuke is administered in this passage to the Baconians, when the august Shade itself appears to say with a grave look and a modest majesty—

    "If Bacon did write a Sonnet or a few lines of poetry (not the A B C, mark, but only the A of the alphabet), wouldst thou therefore imagine that he could write (not the whole of the tragedies and comedies, but) a whole tragedy?"  The spirit of Bacon evidently stands aghast at such temerity in going the whole Hog, or, as he phrases it, "the Sow!" [157]

    Ben Jonson describes Bacon at a celebration of his own birthday as looking self-absorbed and rapt away from the persons around him; he says—

Here, again, is good evidence for Mr. Donnelly that Jonson knew the great secret, and that Bacon was looking conscious of writing the Plays!

    Baconians like Mr. Smith will pretend to quote from Bacon's Will, and claim that he hinted at some great secret which was intended to be made known "after some time be passed over."  But there are no such words in the "Will."  And still they continue to quote this mis-quotation in proof of the forthcoming revelation.  What Bacon did say was this, "For my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages."  This was a reference to his trial and his other troubles, NOT to his authorship of Shakspeare's Plays!

    My contention now is, in reply to the Anti Shakspeareans, that the writer of the Promus notes was not the Author of the Plays, but he was the plagiarist from them; and in such wise that the EXTRACT of Shakspeare became ESSENCE OF BACON. As early as 1592 Shakspeare had written in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, II. iv.—

and one of Bacon's notes in the Promus contains the adage "Clavum clavo pellere."  Shakspeare's lines really contain an erroneous scientific theory of heat which Bacon seems to have adopted as a result of utilizing the proverbial wisdom that he found in Shakspeare or in earlier writers.

    The inevitable inference is that Bacon was enormously indebted to the man whose name and works he never mentioned, for felicitous expressions and words, old sayings, profound reflections, antitheta, and the ripe results of wisdom found ready to hand.  Personally I have sometimes thought there was something conscious, not to say sinister, in the silence of Bacon respecting Shakspeare, whom he must have known as the friend of Southampton, the friend of Essex, the friend of Bacon.  Bacon as a frequenter of the theatre with Essex and Southampton, and other of the "Private Friends," who are described as "spending their time in seeing Plays," must have apprehended the presence of that genius which had arisen to enrich the stage with Love's Labour's Lost, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Taming of the Shrew, the Midsummer Night's Dream, and the early historic plays; they presented such a fund of noteworthy matter.  He must have perceived how lavishly this new writer scattered his wit and Wisdom round with such a bounty of abundance that harvests might be had for the gleaning by those who listened intently and gathered industriously.  It has often been a matter of much surprise that Bacon should not have recognized Shakspeare or his work.  But we now know that he did.  He has shown this in his own way, and left us the means of convicting him of the fact.  He has amply proved his appreciation by his system of conveying the wisdom into his own works, and by his mode of drawing directly from the fountain head of living speech at the theatre, as well as from Shakspeare's published Poems and Plays.  The truth of the matter then is, NOT that Bacon was the author of Shakspeare's plays, but that he took so many notes of them, and derived so much mental sustenance from them, beginning as a listener to them on the stage, that much of the wisdom attributed to him is really and originally the personal property of Shakspeare.  It is enough to know that he noted, adopted, absorbed, and assimilated so much from Shakspeare's works as to give 'a colourable pretext to the inference that the writer of Bacon's books and his Promus was also the author of Shakspeare's dramas.  And such is the ACTUAL state of the case when we can get the horse once more in its proper place before the cart!  Such is the true explanation of his Notes!  Such is the solution of the problem which has been so foolishly apprehended and so falsely presented to the world.

    Moreover, we have ample means of differentiating the two men, Shakspeare and Bacon, and various ways of distinguishing their completely diverse minds one from the other.  For  example, Bacon had been the right-hand man of the Earl of Essex.  But, as early as the year 1596 he had begun to fall away from him, and to speak unwelcome words of warning with regard to his wild courses and ambitious designs.  It is certain that after 1596 Bacon was NOT heartily WITH his early friend. In 1597 it was seen by him that Essex was on the road that led to his fatal end on the scaffold.  He reasoned with him, he tried to serve him, but was totally opposed to him in polity.  In 1599 the two men stood on the opposite sides of a separating gulf that widened between them day by day.

    As Mr. Donnelly points out, "When the fortunes of Bacon and Southampton afterwards separated, because of Southampton's connection with the Essex treason, the Poem of Venus and Adonis was reprinted (in 1599) without the dedication to Southampton, because Bacon was then opposed to Essex."  At last, as some people would say, Bacon deserted Essex altogether.  In a letter written by Essex to Bacon in 1600, he says scornfully, "I can neither expound nor censure (judge of) your late actions."

    It is enough for me to maintain that Bacon did not abet him, but was opposed to his secret plans and rash public acts, and that they took directly opposite sides.  But the Writer of the Plays and Sonnets continued to be a devoted and a fettered friend of the Essex faction.  He continued to fight on their side and in their behalf.

    The absence of the dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton in the edition of 1599 [158] may be attributed to the caution of the publishers.  In King Henry V. the writer goes out of his way to compliment the Earl, and make a popular appeal in his favour.  This was in 1599; and it is provably impossible for Bacon to have done this, as it was diametrically opposed to his view of affairs with regard to Essex and Ireland.

    It can be shown that Shakspeare wrought most covertly in Hamlet on behalf of the Essex faction, in one of the Players' Shifting Scenes, and in a way that can only be explained by the personal friendship of Shakspeare for Southampton, the most intimate friend of Essex.  It is also shown by the playing of King Richard II., and the adding of the deposition scene for the purpose.  Now the man who had opposed the pretensions of Essex to his face, and opposed his policy publicly in parliament, and privately before the Queen, would not have given him his secret support at the same time in plays performed on the stage or in the streets.

    The Queen declared to Lambard that Richard II. had been played forty times for the conspirators in "open streets and houses."

    If it were a fact that Queen Elizabeth is called an old jade and a termagant in the Plays, that would make for Shakspeare's authorship and NOT for Bacon's, as he was on the Queen's side against Essex, and Shakspeare was not.  If Bacon was practising covertly at that time, it would not have been in that way nor in favour of Essex, but in his own behalf.  For he was then playing a somewhat double part, and one that bordered on treachery.  Being prescient of the coming danger, he was prepared to rat and leave the vessel that he foresaw was doomed to wreck.  But if he had been the writer of Richard II. and Hamlet he would not have dared to turn on Essex during his trial and compare him with Cain.

    The man who wrote the Plays stuck to his friends, although he did not always approve of their course.  It was he who had said in King Richard II.—

It was he also who wrote about this time in Twelfth Night—

Whether intentionally aimed or not, the friends of Essex could not but see how that applied to Bacon.  Not, however, as the writer of the Play.

    The Sonnets present further proof that their author was not Bacon, but that he was on the other side of the gaping gulf which divided Essex politically from Bacon.  Here is another way of distinguishing the two men.  Bacon was a VIVISECTOR, Shakspeare was NOT.  Bacon writes—"Though the inhumanity of ANATOMIA VIVORUM was by Celsus justly reproved, yet in regard of the great use of this observation, the inquiry needed not by him so slightly to have been relinquished altogether, or referred to the casual practices of surgery; but mought have been well diverted upon the dissection of beasts alive, which notwithstanding the dissimilarity of their parts, may sufficiently satisfy this enquiry."—Advancement of Learning.

    Shakspeare writes in Cymbeline—

In these two passages the two men again stand face to face with each other, and are seen to be directly opposed.  Bacon condemns Celsus because he had not only reproved the cruelties of Anatomia vivorum, but had protested against the practice of vivisection itself as inhuman.  He distinctly advocates the "dissection of beasts alive."  Cymbeline was produced later than Bacon's book, which Shakspeare may have read.  He makes the vile queen a vivisectionist or torturer of animals, on purpose to point out the heart-hardening effect on human nature, and therefore he is protesting against such practices.  Shakspeare's writings, more particularly the Sonnets and Love's Labour's Lost, prove that he was a devout student of Sidney's poetry; whereas the writings of Bacon show no obvious or necessary acquaintanceship with Sidney's verse.  Indeed it may be said that the direct indebtedness in the one case is so great, and the non-indebtedness in the other so apparent, that these of themselves would suffice to differentiate two distinct literary workers.

    In truth Bacon was not a poet himself.  He has left us quite evidence enough in the verse which he did write to show and determine very definitely what he did not write, and could not have written.  He never possessed the temperament, the ear, the eye, the inner soul, the voice, or outer vesture of the poet; he never was possessed by the essential passion for poetry.

    The intellect of Bacon was as typically scientific as Shakspeare's was poetic.  He had not that emotional transcendency or afflatus of inspiration which mounts and demands the highest expression in poetry as its natural language.  The lyric rapture, the winged motion, the golden cadences, the communicative kindly heat of heart, the glow of animal spirits, the vision and the faculty divine,—these are NOT the characteristics of Francis Bacon.  He never mistook himself, and never can be mistaken for Shakspeare.  He disowns any claim to the title of poet.  He says of his own mental moods and tendencies—"The contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly."  When, in the same letter to Burleigh, he speaks of taking all knowledge for his province, it is for the purpose of analysis and scientific discovery, which were the works of his recreation, NOT for the dramatic representation of human life.  That was no more his aim than it was within his scope.  Bacon was amongst the least dramatic-minded of men; whereas Shakspeare was the world's one supreme dramatist, the hive of whose thoughts swarmed year by year with ever-issuing crowds of human personalities.

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Footnotes.

[156.](page 380)  Spedding's Life and Letters of Bacon, vol. vii. p. 539.

[157.](page 392)  Interpretation, of Nature.

[158.](page 394)  Isham Reprints.  Edited by Charles Edmonds.

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