What Is Man? and Other Essays
uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so’s, and
might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and the
rest of that ton of plaster of Paris out of which the biographers have
built the colossal brontosaur which goes by the Stratford actor’s name,
that it quite convinces me that the man who wrote Shakespeare’s Works
knew all about law and lawyers. Also, that that man could not have been
the Stratford Shakespeare—and _wasn’t_.
Who did write these Works, then?
I wish I knew.
IX
Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare’s Works? Nobody knows.
We cannot say we _know_ a thing when that thing has not been proved.
_Know_ is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and
absolutely conclusive. We can infer, if we want to, like those
slaves.... No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it is not
courteous. The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call
_us_ the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all
the time; very well, if they like to descend to that level, let them do
it, but I will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call
them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms
reflecting my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.
To resume. What I was about to say was, those thugs have built their
entire superstition upon _inferences_, not upon known and established
facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to be able to say
our side never resorts to it while there is anything else to resort to.
But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that
sort.... Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn’t have written the
Works, we infer that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some
more inferring.
Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a
tidal wave whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration,
delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up and claim the
authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or two? One reason is,
because there are a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that
poem. Do you remember “Beautiful Snow”? Do you remember “Rock Me to
Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep”? Do you remember “Backward, turn,
backward, O Time, in thy flight! Make me a child again just for
tonight”? I remember them very well. Their authorship was claimed by
most of the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every
claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least—to wit, he
could have done the authoring; he was competent.
Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven’t. There was good
reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time
who was competent—not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago the
dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of
prodigious footprints stretching across the plain—footprints that were
three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong
deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any
doubt as to who made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?
Where there two? No—the people knew who it was that had been along
there: there was only one Hercules.
There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn’t be two; certainly
there couldn’t be two at the same time. It takes ages to bring forth a
Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him. This one was not matched
before his time; nor during his time; and hasn’t been matched since.
The prospect of matching him in our time is not bright.
The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not qualified to
write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was. They claim that Bacon
possessed the stupendous equipment—both natural and acquired—for the
miracle; and that no other Englishman of his day possessed the like;
or, indeed, anything closely approaching it.
Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and
horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has synopsized
Bacon’s history—a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford
Shakespeare, for he hasn’t any history to synopsize. Bacon’s history is
open to the world, from his boyhood to his death in old age—a history
consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and multitudinous
detail; _facts_, not guesses and conjectures and might-have-beens.
Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a
Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was “distinguished
both as a linguist and a theologian: she corresponded in Greek with
Bishop Jewell, and translated his _Apologia_ from the Latin so
correctly that neither he nor Archbishop Parker could suggest a single
alteration.” It is the atmosphere we are reared in that determines how
our inclinations and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished
by the parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere
saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep
subjects; and with polite culture. It had its natural effect.
Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use for
books, since its owners, his parents, were without education. This may
have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know, because we have no
history of him of an informing sort. There were but few books anywhere,
in that day, and only the well-to-do and highly educated possessed
them, they being almost confined to the dead languages. “All the
valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe
would hardly have filled a single shelf”—imagine it! The few existing
books were in the Latin tongue mainly. “A person who was ignorant of it
was shut out from all acquaintance—not merely with Cicero and Virgil,
but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of
his own time”—a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his
fictitious reputation’s sake, since the writer of his Works would begin
to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was
hardly more than out of his teens and into his twenties.
At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years
there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador,
and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and
the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. A total of six
years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of
men. The three spent at the university were coeval with the second and
last three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference—with nothing
to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were “presumably”
spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the
thugs presume it—on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when
they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business
purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also
know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a
fact is better than a presumption, it doesn’t take a presumption long
to bloom into a fact when _they_ have the handling of it. They know by
old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is
not going to _stay_ tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to
develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of _fact_, and make him
sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and
insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure
authenticity with a thundering bellow that will convince everybody
because it is so loud. The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty
persons where reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn’t be a thug, not
even if—but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the
argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better than a
thug, is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the praise. That
is the right spirit.
They “presume” the lad severed his “presumed” connection with the
Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also “presume”
that the butcher was his father. They don’t know. There is no written
record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it would have helped
their case any, they would have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to
fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers—all by their patented
method “presumption.” If it will help their case they will do it yet;
and if it will further help it, they will “presume” that all those
butchers were his father. And the week after, they will _say_ it. Why,
it is just like being the past tense of the compound reflexive
adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative Noun of
Multitude; which is father to the expression which the grammarians call
Verb. It is like a whole ancestry, with only one posterity.
To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and mastered
that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he was
daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual
onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a theater, but
as a practicing lawyer—a great and successful one, a renowned one, a
Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood
of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law’s atmosphere thenceforth,
all his years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult
steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving behind
him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that
majestic place.
When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other
illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,
brilliances, profundities, and felicities so prodigally displayed in
the Plays, and try to fit them to the historyless Stratford
stage-manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but
when we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they
seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there.
Please turn back and read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of
Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate
extravagancies—intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so
to speak; attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden
glories of the moon’s front side, the moon at the full—and not
intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. “At
every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile,
or illustration, his mind ever turned _first_ to the law; he seems
almost to have _thought_ in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases,
the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end of his pen.”
That could happen to no one but a person whose _trade_ was the law; it
could not happen to a dabbler in it. Veteran mariners fill their
conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their similes from the
ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere _passenger_ ever does it,
be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could do it with anything
resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to try. Please read again
what Lord Campbell and the other great authorities have said about
Bacon when they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of
Stratford.
X
THE REST OF THE EQUIPMENT
The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his
time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind,
grace, and majesty of expression. Every one has said it, no one doubts
it. Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always wanting to
break out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of
Stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of these acquirements.
The only lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially
barren of them—barren of all of them.