POETICKS

FRANCIS BACON

The strength of the arguments for Shakespeare, and the weakness of the arguments against him have done little to discourage anti-Stratfordians from putting forward droves of different candidates for the title of True Author. The main ones at this writing are Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and William Stanley.

The most venerable authorship campaign has been the one carried out on behalf of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon was a born aristocrat, successful politician, and widely-admired philosopher and man of letters—the only man of the times who was capable of producing such great works as Shakespeare’s. Or so his backers imagine. The first argument in support of Bacon is based on a looneation, the fact that we have no report of Shakespeare’s ever meeting Bacon, nor any mention of him together with Bacon in the same text. For the perceptive, this oddity can only be explained by Bacon’s being Shakespeare. (No chance that no one would any more think of putting an entertainer like Shakespeare with a government man like Bacon back then than anybody would today couple singer Eminem and one-time US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.)

In January 1592 Bacon wrote his uncle, Lord Burghley, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” His life’s work was a project he called “the Great Instauration,” the regeneration of learning, based on scientific reasoning. Psychology was to be one of his topics. Its lessons, he wrote, should be taught through “visible representations” and through “actual types and models, by which the entire process of the mind should be set as it were before the eyes.” To Baconians, this could mean only one thing: that he planned to employ plays to set forth his psychology. Practically proving that is the fact that, except for discussions of various historical figures and comments on human behavior in his essays and other writings, we have no work of psychology from him—in his name.

Considering the horror of an important aristocrat’s being caught writing for the public stage, and how incapable any secret True Author would be of thinking to write novels or closet plays or plays for the court only instead, he must therefore have used Shakespeare as a front, or used his name as a pseudonym not realizing it belonged to someone else in the theatre.

The anti-Stratfordian, John Michell, admits that there are flaws in the supposition that Bacon wrote The Oeuvre. (Michell is very even-handed, always pointing out an equal number of flaws in each candidate’s case, including Shakespeare’s; he never points out, however, that in doing this, he covers all the “flaws” in Shakespeare’s case, but less than ten percent of the genuine flaws in any other candidate’s.) “There are some items in the list of Shakespeare’s alleged attributes that cannot easily be explained by the hypothesis of Bacon’s authorship,” says he. “Francis Bacon was no professional mariner, nor was he a soldier, and Shakespeare’s apparently first-hand descriptions of hunting and the sports and pastimes of the nobility seem rather too robust for someone with Bacon’s delicate health and studious habits. There is nothing to show that Bacon had the experience of Denmark which some have attributed to the author of Hamlet, nor is he known to have traveled in Italy. These are among the weak points in the case for Bacon as the sole author of Shakespeare. Despite their similarities, the two writers are still not perfectly matched.”

On the other hand: “Bacon and the author of Shakespeare both had the same classically learned, legally attuned cast of mind. Both were conservative traditionalists, supporters of lawful authority and a hierarchically ordered realm. Both writers were linguistically inventive, commanding a wide vocabulary and coining new words and expressions. They each quoted from the same literary sources, often in paraphrase or with slight inaccuracies, as if drawing from learned mnemones rather than looking up references. They had an equal tendency towards secretiveness and were interested in subterfuges, disguises and hidden communications. There are many examples of these in Shakespeare’s plays, while Bacon’s addiction to ciphers and coded messages is only too well known to those who have lost themselves in the quest for a cipher in Shakespeare. Finally, both Bacon and, on the evidence of his Sonnets, Shakespeare were lovers of young men.”

Even if all this were true, so what? That such similarities should be enough to overcome all all the hard evidence for Shakespeare is absurd. But it’s moot, because:

(1) Shakespeare the author was not classically learned, nor his mind any more legally attuned than the minds of the others writing plays at the time.

(2) The majority of those in the middle and upper classes supported lawful authority and a hierarchically ordered realm, so Bacon’s resembling Shakespeare in this means nothing.

(3) Many writers of the time (Nashe, for instance, and Harvey) were linguistically inventive, so both Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s being so is another so what.

(4) There is no evidence that Shakespeare had any “tendency towards secretiveness and (was) interested in subterfuges, disguises (including the cross-dressing practically obligatory with all-male casts, one would think) and hidden communications” outside the plot-energizing fun he had with them in his comedies, as have the majority of writers of comedies before and since, so he cannot be considered necessarily similar to Bacon in this respect.

(5) As for both Bacon and Shakespeare’s sexual preferences, there seems to be good evidence that Bacon was homosexual, but little or none that Shakespeare was. The only direct testimony about the latter that we have is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20,” in which Shakespeare explicitly denies any homosexual interest in the young man so many of his sonnets were addressed to.

Of course, all the orthodox authorities on either Bacon or Shakespeare have denied their identity on stylistic grounds alone. Baconians argue, with some plausibility, that if Bacon wrote poetry, its style would have differed from the style of his prose, and might well have sounded Shakespearean. They have no direct concrete evidence that he did write poetry, other than some nondescript verse translations of the Psalms he wrote toward the end of his life. Aubrey, however, speculated that he was “a good Poet, but conceal’d”–apparently because Bacon spoke of himself in a letter as a concealed poet. But he wrote it to a known poet, in such a way as to indicate that he was merely an unpublished poet since he took it for granted that his correspondent knew of his “concealed poetry.” Moreover, in a work about the Essex affair, Bacon later said he’d written a sonnet to Queen Elizabeth in hopes it’d reconcile her to Essex–adding, “Although I profess not to be a poet.” To authorship cranks, “I profess not,” would mean “I pretend not”; to the rest of us, it would mean, “poetry is a minor sideline for me.”

Proof that the diligent overturner-of-received-wisdom can always find evidence to support his delusions is the discovery by other Baconians of a hint of Bacon’s literary pseudonymity in a letter from the continent
that Bacon’s friend, Sir Tobie Matthew, wrote him. In a postscript to the letter, Matthew said, “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” Sidney Lee surmised that Thomas Southwell, living in Liege at the time, and a son of a man named Bacon, was meant, which makes sense. What does not make sense is the way the Baconians have taken Matthew, which is that he was referring to Francis or his brother (another authorship candidate)–revealing to him as a fact that might interest him that, hey, someone with your name (yourself—or your brother Roger) although he goes by another, is the brightest Englishman on this side of the sea. Preposterous, even if either of the Bacons was a resident on the continent.

Then there’s Durning-Lawrence. He managed to turn a 1645 anonymous work, The Great Assises holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessours, into evidence that Bacon was a poet because it names him (in a spoof trial) as “Chancellor of Parnassus,” which would make him a leading poet. Unfortunately, in the same text, Shakespeare is mentioned, as well, which suggests that even if Bacon was a secret poet, he was not Shakespeare.

There’s also Jonson, who in his The Poetaster includes a character, Ovid, Jr., who is supposed by Baconians to be based on Bacon-as-Shakespeare (Jonson, of course, being privy to The Truth but not above telling everyone about it through a satire). Ovid, Jr., is depicted translating a passage from Ovid that contains a couplet that Shakespeare put on the title-page of his Venus and Adonis. Ovid, Sr., finding Ovid, Jr., doing this, accuses him of writing a tragedy, Medea, for the common players, which Ovid, Jr., denies. Odd that Jonson would openly refer to Venus and Adonis’s title-page but then not find a play-title more like something actually written by Shakespeare for his satirical purposes. Once again, unbelievably flimsy speculation is all Bacon’s supporters can come up with in support of his candidacy.

But Michell brings in something better, he thinks: “a contemporary painting of a well-known Shakespearian scene” in an old inn, “the fourteenth-century White Hart Hotel on Holywell Hill (which) was in Bacon’s time the nearest inn to his mansion at Gorhambury, two miles away.” So, a painting about a subject Shakespeare used in a narrative poem, which was popular (“a common renaissance theme,” as one scholar put it) before he used it, and more popular after he used it, in an inn near where Bacon lived, is supposed to be more than a trivial coincidence. I don’t buy it. Even though, according to Michell, St. Albans, where Bacon lived, is named fifteen times in The Oeuvre, Stratford-upon-Avon, not once. Of course, St. Albans was somewhat more relevant to the military history of England than Stratford, but that means nothing to Baconians. I will say that I’ve written more than ten plays, myself, and not one of them mentions my hometown.

Next on the list of “evidence” for Bacon is Joseph Hall’s Satires (1599), which criticizes a writer Hall calls Labeo, a name with—steady, now—b, a and o, just like “Bacon!” What’s more, Labeo is a lawyer, like Bacon. Strained interpretation of Hall’s work can make it suggest that there are people pretending to be poets about, and that Shakespeare may be involved (due to a possible reference to the same Ovid poem the epigraph on the title-page of Venus and Adonis is from). A year later, in a continuation of his Satires, Hall writes of “the craftie cuttle (who) lieth sure/ In the black Cloud of his thick vomiture,” going on to ask, “Who list complaine of wronged faith or fame/ When he may shift it to anothers name?” To me, Hall is speaking of shifting blame to another; to a Baconian, he is speaking of shifting the writings others complain of (as beneath the dignity of a courtier, I imagine) to another author.

One Major Clue in the poem is a mention of a helmet, which is “a reference to the ‘Honourable Order of the Knights of the Helmet’ described in Bacon’s Gesta Greyorum, produced at Gray’s Inn in 1594, and thus pointing to him as the author of Venus and Adonis”–at least in the mind of Baconian Bertram Theobald, writing in 1932.

To follow up on this, we have to go first to the appendix of John Marston’s poem, Pigmalions Image (1598), which says, “So Labeo did complain his love was stone,/ Obdurate, flinty, so relentless none;/ Yet Lynceus knows that in the end of this/ He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.” Michell points out the parallel of the first two lines of this to lines spoken in Venus and Adonis by Venus to Adonis, “Art thou obdurate, flinty hard as steel/ Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth?” The other two lines refer to Adonis’s being transformed into a flower. To a sane person, all this shows is that Marston was (perhaps) influenced by a popular poem of the time, and/or using conventional language current in poetry then. To Baconians, he is practically screaming that he is using Venus and Adonis to alert us to the identity of The True Author as Labeo/Bacon.

To “prove” this, Michell brings in one of Marston’s Satires, number 4, entitled “Redactio.” There “Labeo is specifically identified in a line which Marston addresses to Hall: ‘What, not mediocria firma from thy spite?’ Mediocria firma (implying, ‘Hold fast to the middle course!’) was Francis Bacon’s family motto, belonging only to himself and his brother Anthony. So this is the conclusion: Francis Bacon was Labeo, Labeo was the author of Venus and Adonis, and Bacon was therefore responsible for at least some of the writings attributed to Shakespeare.”

Michell has found H. N. Gibson, a befuddled Shakespearean scholar who goes along with this crap, but comes to the rescue of the Bard by pointing out that Marston and Hall, thought Bacon the author of Venus and Adonis by mistake. I can’t see that, since the name of its author was on Venus and Adonis. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Marston and Hall thought Labeo the author of Venus and Adonis, and that one use of a conventional Latin phrase that was the Bacon family motto is a long way from plausibly demonstrating that Labeo was Bacon.  Even if Labeo was intended to satirize Bacon, there’s no reasonable connection from that to the authorship of Venus and Adonis.  I suppose I have to go along with Gibson, though, in considering the Labeo matter the best evidence extant for Bacon. Which is saying nearly nothing at all.

One last bit of “hard” evidence for Bacon is the Northumberland Manuscript, a damaged and now-incomplete collection of writings discovered in 1867 that Michell says “seems to have come from the office of Francis Bacon.” It has a contents page that mentions both Bacon and Shakespeare—and Thomas Nashe—that obviously means that work by these three was initially in the manuscript. Baconians, however, find the sequence, “By mr ffrauncis Bacon/ Essaies by the same author/ William Shakespeare” followed by the names of two of Shakespeare’s histories, evidence that Bacon was Shakespeare, and that whoever wrote the sequence made a point of distinguishing the stuff in the collection that Bacon wrote under his own name from that which he wrote under Shakespeare’s—and, in case he forgot, I suppose, made sure to indicate that Shakespeare was the same author as Bacon. Even Michell doesn’t seem to take this too seriously.

The most notorious “evidence” for Bacon is cryptographic. For decades, fanatics have scoured Shakespeare’s and related works (including paintings, engravings, and the like) for secret messages, most of them finding nothing anyone but a few of their craziest followers also see. None of these escape William F. and Elizebeth S. Friedman’s demolition of all such ciphers and word-games past, present and to-be in their The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The thoroughness of the Friedmans’ work makes my bothering with the message-finders here unnecessary—though I will in due course critique a secret message found by one believing that Marlowe was the True Author, or something close to it. The reader will have to take my word that this secret message is the best of the crop, and that I could similarly dispose of any others, assuming the Friedmans hadn’t already done so. I might add that most recent anti-Stratfordians do their best to keep distance between themselves and the message-finders, for even they tend to agree with Orthodoxy about their nuttiness. Michell, as sympathetic to idiocy as any of them, is compelled to admit that while he thinks there are good reasons to believe in Baconianism, “the Baconian symbolists and cryptologists have done little to help it.”

Baconians, of course, like all anti-Stratfordians, can find references of every possible description to their man and events in his life in The Oeuvre. One such reference is Mistress Quickly, a servant-girl, inserting the following joke into a Latin lesson being given to the boy William in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “Hang-hog is latten for Bacon, I warrant you.” Here’s what Michell says about this: “This comic exchange echoes a Bacon family joke, included with other anecdotes in the 1671 edition of Francis Bacon’s Resuscitutio. It was about his father, Sir Nicholas. At the end of a trial in which he was judge, Sir Nicholas Bacon was about to pass sentence of death when the prisoner asked for his mercy on the grounds that they were related:

‘Prithee,’ said my lord judge, ‘how came that in?’

‘Why, if it please you, my lord, your name is Bacon and mine is Hog, and in all ages Hog and Bacon have been so near kindred that they are not to be separated.’ ‘Ay; but’, replied Judge Bacon, ‘you and I cannot be kindred except you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged.’

‘Hang-hog is Latin for Bacon’ is surely a reference to this joke. Its occurrence in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a mystery, typifying much of the Baconian evidence. It is suggestive and provocative, but leads to no particular conclusion.” To which I say, “Nonsense.” There’s no reason some version of the Latin joke couldn’t have been in wide circulation before the lives of both Lord Bacon and Shakespeare and/or that it couldn’t have occurred to some schoolboy who knew nothing of Bacon’s family. Or Shakespeare could have heard the Bacon joke and used (part of) it. For people like Michell, however, trivial coincidences don’t exist, only mysteries.

All kinds of wasted energy has been devoted by Baconians to parallelisms—thoughts, phrases and expressions which occur in the writings of both Shakespeare and Bacon. Ignatius Donnelly devoted nearly two hundred pages of “Identical Expressions, Metaphors, Opinions, Quotations, Studies, Errors, Unusual Words, Characters and Styles” of a Baconian book of his of 1888. John Michell is fair enough to present the orthodox response, which is that “there was no special relationship between the two great authors (or, I might insert, between Shakespeare and any other writer someone thinks was really Shakespeare–BG) other than the bond that linked all literary men of their time. This was clearly demonstrated by Harold Bayley in The Shakespeure Symphony, 1906. With scholarly dedication he read through the literature of Bacon’s time, finding the same phrases and metaphors in the works of many different authors.”

Ironically, Bayley used his findings not to vindicate Shakespeare but to show that Bacon was behind the creation of all the great literature of the time by schooling all the competent writers of the time in philosophy, teaching them new words and expressions, and overseeing the writings which he allowed them to publish under their own names. Among the problems with this is that there is no direct or even anecdotal evidence for it. It is also ridiculous.

There is little to be said against the Baconian case as a whole except that the best evidence is all against it, and there is no direct evidence, nor any convincing lesser sort of evidence, for it.

Specific problems with it are that Bacon died in 1626, three years after Heminges and Condell said Shakespeare was dead, which is direct evidence that he was not Shakespeare. There is also the evidence making Shakespeare an actor, which I don’t think even the wackiest advocates for Bacon think Bacon was. That a gigantic, complex, ungainly, preposterously implausible conspiracy would have been required to allow Bacon to secretly be Shakespeare is another grave problem with Bacon’s being Shakespeare. I will be saying more about that later, since it applies to all the contestants in the Who Is Shakespeare Contest—except Will Shakespeare.

Next Chapter here.
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