Part Four - Introduction to The Law in Shakespeare

It has been lamented that we do not know the man. It is true that we do not know him as Boswell has made us to know Johnson, and often to respect him less than he deserves. But, as Emerson has shown, we do know him. " What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king what forms and humanities pleased him: his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving." "So far from Shakespeare being the least known, he is the one person in all modern history known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of ceremony, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office or function or district of man's work has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?" All this is true, but it is not the whole truth. We see a man who revered womanhood, who has given us the finest types of manhood, who was generous, gentle, blameless, who saw through shams clearer than Montaigne, who scourged lust, gluttony, lying, slander, cowardice, pedantry, and all personal meanness with more than the wit of Rabelais, and yet who was silent concerning those great agitations for personal right and liberty which so shortly after he died subverted the monarchy, put aside the peerage, overthrew the church, and for ever established that the state is made for man and not man for the state.

And now comes some one and says that here is more proof that Shakespeare is a mere alias for Francis Bacon. It is difficult to touch or let alone this vagary with any patience. One is inclined simply to protest in the words of Shakespeare's epitaph—

and pass on, deeming all secure against a desecration worse than that which the poet cursed. But the identity has been the subject of so much assertion that it may be well to pause before the unreal mockery and exorcise a few of its fantastic shapes.

It is not true that Shakespeare was an unlearned man. He was learned, but was not a man of finished learning. Bacon was a perfected scholar. Compare Shakespeare's classical allusions with the Wisdom of the Ancients and the difference is manifest. The one is the learning of a "marvelous boy," the other that of the completed scholar. Nor is it true that he was an obscure man. He is the first English author who made a fortune with his pen. In his last years he wrote himself, gentleman.

In 1592 he received from Greene one of those malevolent attacks which are made upon none but authors of established renown. Spenser praised him, and he praised Spenser. In 1598, Meres classed him with Plautus and Seneca. Davies in 1607 addressed him as the English Terence. Fuller's account of him is known to every one. His works were gathered with pious care and published by his friends within seven years after he died. Ben Jonson was one of the most learned men of his time. He so much resembles Samuel Johnson in personal and mental traits that it is Ben whom we seem to see with Garrick and his friends at the theater. He was a fierce critic, a good hater, learned in the classics "as any man in England," a despot in conversation, gross, gluttonous, and scrofulous, his face was seamed with scars, he was passionate, was abject in repentance, feared no man, and loved but few, yet he loved Shakespeare, and claiming him as a child of eternity, has pictured him to us in lines which nothing but great love working upon great sorrow could have produced from such a man.

Jonson, we know, was the friend of Francis Bacon, and to him these men were different beings.

Milton, who was a child when Shakespeare died, who lived in London, and enjoyed its theatrical pleasures, and must have talked with many of Shakespeare's cotemporaries, installs him into an inheritance of everlasting fame more durable than pyramids or any tombs of kings.

It is certain that the influence of Shakespeare on the youthful Milton was very impressive, and that it lasted until it was removed by those great events which made the laureate of Paradise an ascetic patriot. The associations of his early days seem to have revived in that magnificent lamentation of Samson Agonistes,

(as Landor finely read the lines,) over a commonwealth destroyed, himself proscribed, and the time forever gone when the bold Ascalonite of prelacy and the divine right of kings,

Milton's epitaph upon Shakespeare stands in the folio of 1632. In 1637 we find him writing from London the first elegy ad Carolum Deodatum, in which he informs his friend how his time is spent, and attests his habitual attendance at the theater:

The last four lines have been thought to refer to Romeo, and to Banquo's ghost or to the one in Hamlet.
Comus is filled with undisguised borrowings from Shakespeare.

is Shakespeare's

The possessor of chastity is "alad in complete steel;" so is the ghost in Hamlet.

With Milton philosophy is

With Shakespeare love is

Comus' dissertation on virginity is a manifest adaptation of Parolles' discourse upon that subject.
Sabrina sets her

And Prospero's elves

The spirit is another Ariel who

like Hecate, who says that

These extracts have been adduced to show that Shakespeare was clearly seen by the greatest man of the next generation.

Charles I. was sixteen years of age when Shakespeare died. Bacon dedicated to him his history of Henry VII. Shakespeare, in Macbeth, nobly magnified the house of Stuart by a prophecy of its perpetuity. The works of Shakespeare were the closet companion of Charles, who was reproached for this by Milton at a time when the fierce zealots of rebellion had come to look upon the drama as sinful. Falkland was Charles' councillor, and it is from him that we have respecting Caliban the first critical estimate extant of any character in Shakespeare. And yet from prince, king, courtier, poet, or scholar, we hear no hint which can give this modern theory the slightest support.

Bacon was actively engaged in the court of chancery for many years before he became lord chancellor. It was then that the memorable war of jurisdiction was waged between Ellesmere and Coke, and yet there is not in the works of Shakespeare, to the best of my belief, a single phrase or word, much less any application of any principle, peculiar to the chancery.

Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, to the Earl of Southampton, with strong expressions of affection, and it is a tradition that he was munificently treated by that nobleman. No one has ever denied that the author of these poems is also the author of the plays. But if Bacon was Shakespeare, it is incredible that within a few years the former should have appeared as volunteer counsel against Essex and Southampton in that trial which has so stained Bacon's name, or that he should have undertaken afterwards, in his Declaration of the Treason of Robert, Earl of Essex, the task of proving the complicity of his friend and patron in that conspiracy.

It is also remarkable that in this same production, in order to fasten guilt upon the conspirators, Bacon lays especial stress upon the fact "that the afternoon before the rebellion, Merick, with a great company of others, that afterwards were all in the action, had procured to be played before them the play of deposing King Richard the Second. Neither was it casual, but a play bespoken by Merick; but when it was told him by one of the players that the play was old, and that they should have loss in playing it, because few would come to it, there were forty shillings extraordinary given to play it, and so thereupon played it was. So earnest was he to entirely satisfy his eyes with the sight of that tragedy, which he thought soon after his lordship should bring from the stage to the state, but that God turned it upon their own heads."

If Francis Bacon wrote Richard II, it was a piece of matchless effrontery for him to maintain that his own production had been displayed as a counterfeit presentment in aid of a treason in which his friend was engaged.

And in the face of all this and much more we are asked to believe that Bacon, colluding with Shakespeare, practiced this stupendous imposture for nearly twenty-five years, and that it was undetected and unsuspected until after more than two centuries had passed away.

If we look to the intrinsic evidence wrenched and misapplied by conjecture from the treasures which these men left to us, we find nothing "but a foolish and extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions, begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion."