SHAKESPEARE V. SHAKESPEARE

Turnbull Library Record, Volume VII, 1 June 1947, Page 1

SHAKESPEARE V. SHAKESPEARE

A. Woodhouse

It is said that every new idea and theory that is put forth goes through three stages in the public mind. First, ‘ absolute nonsense! ’ next, ‘ there may be something in it ’, and finally, ‘of course it has always been so ’. Anyone can see this exemplified if he thinks of the history of Copernican astronomy, of the theories of evolution and of germ infection, or the suggestion that there was a possibility of human flight. The idea that the ‘ Shakespeare ’ plays were written by someone other than the actor from Stratford, whose name (in a different spelling), they bear, is at present going through all three stages. The majority of people-people that is, who know anything of English literature at alltake it for granted that they were written by the Stratford man, but there is a growing number of people going through the second stage, and a minority who are fully convinced that whoever did write the plays, it was not the actor, though they are divided in their beliefs as to who really was the author. In this article we will follow the ‘anti-Stratfordians’ and for the sake of clearness will spell the name of the actor ‘ Shakspere ’ and that of the writer of the plays, ‘ Shakespeare ’.

No student of English literature can ignore the question entirely, nor could a collector such as Alexander Turnbull. His Shakespeare collection was not extensive, as he concentrated particularly on Milton and some of the nineteenth century writers, but it had some interesting highlights. The copy of the Second Folio is a fine tall copy in a beautiful light calf binding, and there is also a copy of the Oxford Fascimile of the First Folio, and early editions of such sources as Holinshed’s Chronicle, North’s Plutarch, and the English version of the Decameron. (The tales of course were well-known before they appeared in print.) Rowe’s edition of the plays in seven volumes is here and the twenty volumes of the Variorum edition, published by J. B. Lippincott, as well as other good early and modern sets. The 1853 set of the Shakespeare Society’s publications, and the two series of the New Shakspere Society’s, issued in the ’seventies and the ’eighties, are not to be found in every library. On

the biographical side he had the inevitable Sidney Lee, and Halliwell-Phillipps’ Outlines and Mrs Stopes’ Shakespeare’s Environment. Bacon was represented chiefly by the sevenvolume edition of the Works, edited by Spedding, Ellis and Heath (1878-89), which has Rawley’s Life in the first volume, and by one or two seventeenth century editions of which the best are the second issue of the Novum Organum (1620) and a nice little copy of the first edition of Baconiana (1679) which has the portrait frontispiece, missing in both the British Museum copies.

On the authorship question, however, Mr Turnbull had only a handful of books. Probably he was in the first stage of thinking on the subject; moreover the Baconians were only just getting into their stride when he was collecting, and the De Vere theory had not yet been born. His small group included Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? and Is it Shakespeare, by Walter Begley (a Cambridge graduate) and also Andrew Lang’s Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, and one or two others. The Library added to the group as occasion offered, often by donations. From the Atkinson Bequest, for instance, came the Eldest Son of Queen Elizabeth, by Isabella Nicholls, R. M. Theobald’s Dethroning Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon . . . versus Phantom Captain Shakespeare, by W. F. C. Wigston. To these were added Bertram G. Theobald’s Exit Shakespeare, Enter Bacon, and Francis Bacon Concealed and Revealed, presented to the Library by the author.

Then with the Kinsey collection, which came to the Library in 1937, there came a copy of T. J. Looney’s Shakespeare Identified, which claims the authorship of the plays on behalf of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The author, starting off with an anti-Shakspere bias, but none in favour of anybody else, began by comparing the Shakespearean sonnets with other ’Elizabethan literature, and, much to his surprise, arrived towards the end of a long trail, at the Earl of Oxford. Although the book had been published several years before, there had not previously been a copy in the library, and this theory, together with the acquisition of the Theobald books, aroused interest in the whole business of Shakespeare authorship. Just before the

war the Library became a member of the Bacon Society, whose enthusiastic secretary, Mr Valentine Smith, was pleased at the contact with a library at this faraway end of the world. He was instrumental in getting for the Library a very good set of the Society’s magazine, Baconiana, going back to the first volume, but not altogether complete, and also procured some of the Society’s pamphlets and books by members, some of which are now out of print. It was indirectly through the Society, too, that there came to the Library the largest donation it has yet received on the Bacon-Shakespeare question and on Bacon generally. This was the collection of Mr Harold Large, of Napier, an ardent Baconian of more than half-a-century’s standing. When Mr Large was troubled about the disposition of the books that he had spent so long collecting, Mr Valentine Smith suggested that he should make contact with the Library, and the result was that we were presented with close on a hundred items—books, pamphlets and typescripts—dealing with the subject.

That the whole question, depending as it does on the sifting of evidence for and against the various claimants, has had a fascination for the legal mind is obvious by the number of lawyers who have taken part in the argument, and it is not surprising, therefore, that it had an interest for one of Wellington’s leading lawyers, Sir Francis Dillon Bell. Amongst the books from his library presented recently by his son, Mr Cheviot Bell, there were several on this subject, the most useful, perhaps, being Mrs Gallup’s The Bi-Literal Cipher of Sir Francis Bacon, the Library having only Part 111, published in 1910, from Mr Large’s collection. Other items from the Bell Library include E. Bosnian’s Francis Bacon’s Cryptic Rhymes, Edwin Reed’s Francis Bacon our Shakespeare, and W. A. Sutton’s The Shakespeare Enigma.

Those who have not studied the subject are probably unaware that the beginning of the Baconian idea goes back to the middle of the eighteenth century. As far back as 1769 there appeared a book called The Life and Adventures of Common Sense, by Herbert Lawrence, in which the theory that the plays and poems ascribed to Shakespeare were the work of Francis Bacon appears to have been first pro-

pounded. Roderick Eagle, in Shakespeare : New Views for Old, refers to this book, and states that ‘ Although Bacon is not openly named, it is clear that the unknown author attributed the Shakespeare plays to him ’. About the same time there was living a Rev. James Wilmot, rector of Barton-on-the-Heath, in Warwickshire, who became convinced that the Bacon and Shakespeare writings had a common authorship and so impressed his views on a certain Mr Cowell of Ipswich, who met him in 1785, that the latter found himself unable to deliver a lecture on Shakespeare that he had promised to give. The next year, 1786, a book was published anonymously, called The Learned Pig, which referred to the Shakespeare plays, and which Eagle attributes to Wilmot. About sixty years later, in 1848, the Shakespeare question appeared again in, of all things, a book entitled the Romance of Yachting, by J. C. Flart. Gilbert Standen in Shakespeare Authorship (1930) quotes from this book the sentence: ‘ Who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to Shakespeare? ’ Delia Bacon in the United States, and W. H. Smith in England were both working on the Baconian idea at the same time, the latter publishing in 1856 a letter to Lord Ellesmere, which appeared

1 1 1 the next year, 1857, as a small book entitled Bacon and Shakespeare: an Enquiry touching Players, Play-houses and Play-writers in the days of Elizabeth. Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of Shakespeare Unfolded, was published in the same year. Other champions of Bacon came forward—over 250 entries were listed in 1884—and a new aspect was given to the case in 1883, with the publication of Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram, in two volumes, a copy of which is in the Large collection. Donnelly was the first of the cipher enthusiasts. Impressed with the idea that if Bacon had written the plays he would have left some kind of message in them he was struck by the allusion to ‘ bacon ’ in a scene of the Merry Wives of Windsor and in King Henry IV, Part I, but his search for any system in these references to ‘ bacon ’ and ‘ hog ’ and so on, was baffled through his use of a modern edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It was only when he obtained a facsimile of the First Folio that it seemed to him that he could see a method in the

position of certain words in the lines and columns, and he declared that he was able to work out a system of ‘ key numbers’; which had also to be altered by the addition or subtraction of certain ‘ variables ’. Guided by these numbers he picked out an exciting story about Bacon, Shakspere the actor, and Queen Elizabeth which proved to his satisfaction that Shakspere could not have written the plays.

A new line was taken up by Mrs Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She began to investigate Bacon’s ‘ Bi-Literal Cipher ’ which is described with one or two other ciphers in De Augmentis Scientarum, published in 1623. (Spedding’s edition gives both Bacon’s Latin works and an English translation.) The basis of this cipher is that each letter of the alphabet may be represented by a combination of a’s and b’s in groups of five. The same system is used in the Morse code, with its group of dots-and-dashes in print, and its combination of long and short flashes or tappings according to whether lights or sounds are used. But to make it possible to write in cipher without it being obvious, each letter represents also an a or b according to a pre-arranged code, so that every

group of five letters in an ordinary-looking sentence is really a group of as and b’ s and equals one letter of the cipher. Just to help things along Bacon also suggests using two different founts of letters, one kind representing as and the other b’s, so that an m say, would be an a in one fount and b in an other. Mrs Gallup, using Bacon’s cipher key, worked away on the plays, but like Donnelly, she was held up until she was able to get hold of original editions or facsimiles, not only of the plays, but also of Bacon’s acknowledged works, and, being struck with the number of words and letters in italic founts/she worked on these, and found that it was only the italics that mattered. After investigating not only Shakespeare and Bacon, but much of the Elizabethan literature, she evolved a story, that at first sight seems so fantastic as to be quite incredible. The cipher messages tell, she says, that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

(History tells us that during 1560 Elizabeth’s infatuation for Leicester was so marked as to cause comment, and Bacon’s birth-date is given as January, 1561. Robert Deve-

reux, afterwards Earl of Essex, is supposed to be a second son.) Francis was given into the care of Sir Nicholas and Lady Bacon, and brought up as their son, but discovered his real birth when he was about fifteen, and was sent to France for a time by the Queen to get him out of the way, returning to England while still a young man. He was never acknowledged publicly by Elizabeth, and, frustrated and embittered by being deprived of what he considered his rightful position, he wrapped up the story of his life, and much of the secret history of the reign, into his various works, giving at the same time clues to the ‘ word cipher ’ that Dr Owen had stumbled on independently, and revealing the other names under which he wrote. According to these revelations he was the author of not only the Shakespeare plays and poems, and of his acknowledged works, but—hold your breath!—of the works of Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Green and Edmund Spenser, and of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He also did some translating of Homer, and is supposed to have had a hand in revising the works of the translators of the 1611 Bible.

Now what is the ordinary reader to think of all this? The fact that only original editions or facsimiles are of any use puts any checking up beyond the reach of the great majority of people, and, any attempt to wade through Donnelly’s two volumes, with their pages and pages of exploration, their rows and rows of figures, with all their additions and subtractions, can only cause the reader to join in the poignant cry of ‘ Lost in the Wilderness! ’ with which Donnelly himself, struggling through the thickets of his ‘ cipher ’, heads one of his chapters. Even many convinced Baconians are somewhat suspicious of Donnelly’s ‘ variables ’ and do not place much reliance on him. The ‘ Bi-Literal cipher ’, to which Bacon himself has given the key, seems to be more acceptable, and most Baconians now take for granted the story which is claimed to be revealed by it. The literature on the subject is already considerable and is growing. The new General Catalogue of the British Museum under the entry for Bacon, has a section headed ‘ Concealed life and writings ’, under which are listed 37 items. H. C. Batchelor and Lord Penzance, members of an older

generation of Baconians, are examples of the more cautious type. The former, in Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare published in 1912, says that he will ‘ pass by all questions of secret cipher and “cryptograms” in the “Shakespeare” literature. I will not pronounce a personal opinion as to whether there is a cipher He bases his Baconian conclusions mostly on a comparison of the lives of the two men concerned and what seemed to him other indications of Bacon’s authorship. Lord Penzance, one of the legal minds which has interested itself in the question, writing ten years earlier in a Judicial Summing Up, bluntly denies that there is any trace of Donnelly’s cipher, and depends mostly on ‘ parallelisms ’ between Bacon’s works and the plays. This method can, of course, be carried too far. A great many of the ideas and phrases common to both sets of writings are to be found all through Elizabethan literature, and were part of the ordinary speech and writing of the time. All the same, Mrs Henry Pott, studying the Ms. in the British Museum containing Bacon’s Prom us of Formularies and elegancies gives the seekers after parallelisms something to go on. Everybody knows that Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer, Milton coming second, quite a long way behind, but perhaps they hardly realise that he coined quantities of new words that had never been used before, though many of them are now used by everybody. Mrs Potts claims that hundreds of these are found in the Promus, a collection of notes on words and phrases which had been unpublished till the appearance of her book in 1883.

Besides Bacon and Shakespeare, various claimants have been put foreword—Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford), Roger Manners (Earl of Rutland), and William Stanley (Earl of Derby), Oxford’s son-in-law. Of these the most favoured is the Earl of Oxford. The circumstantial evidence in his favour, as put forward by T. J. Looney and other champions, is quite strong, and, of course, if the cipher testimony is not accepted, the evidence for any of the claimants is entirely circumstantial. Curiously enough, as G. H. Rendall points out in Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere his life story parallels Bacon’s in many respects. ‘ Bacon’s mother

(nee Ann Cooke), was sister to Sir William Cecil’s wife (Lady Burleigh); from fourteen onwards the Earl of Oxford was a member of the Cecil household; on his marriage with Ann Cecil (1571) he became first cousin by marriage to the young Francis Bacon. All their lives they moved in Cecil surroundings: both by Lord Burleigh’s influence were entered as law students at Gray’s Inn, both from time to time held chambers there .... Both travelled on the Continent, and had contact with the Court of France—Oxford from 1575 to 1576, Bacon from 1576 to 1579.’ And so on. So much of the evidence which seems to favour an aristocratic authorship of the plays could apply to either one or the other.

Perhaps the most intriguing theory is the ‘ group theory ’. According to Gibert Standen’s little book on Shakespeare Authorship, already referred to, this was put forward by Delia Bacon, who suggested, besides Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and others as authors of the plays. The idea has gained ground lately, chiefly through the work of Colonel B. R. Ward and the members of the ‘ Shakespeare Fellowship ’, a society formed to unite those ‘ who desire to see the principles of scientific and historical criticism applied to the problem of Shakespeare authorship ’. , Briefly, the idea is that the plays, the historical plays in particular—-

were propaganda put out to keep up the national morale during the struggle with Spain, and were the work of a group which had the Earl of Oxford at the head, and included Bacon, the Earl of Derby, and Sh’akspere the actor. The latter is supposed to have replaced Marlowe in the group after Marlowe’s death in 1593. It is known, of course, that Marlowe was engaged in Secret Service work, and it has been discovered from Elizabethan Exchequer documents that Oxford was receiving about £IOOO a year for many years from a secret fund. The name ‘ Shakespeare ’ is presumed to have been chosen because its war-like suggestion of ‘ shaking a speare ’ at the enemy fitted with the name of a real person who could pass as the author. This exciting theory with its suggestion of secret service and its gathering up of all the claimants into a group, should give satisfaction all round, but is unlikely to please either the ardent Baconians

or the orthodox Stratfordians, and unless actual documentary evidence turns up to decide the matter, the question of authorship will doubtless continue to be argued happily—or otherwise—by opposing groups for a long time to come.

In whichever direction one turns, one is met with what appears to be an impossibility. Here are these plays, acknowledged to be the finest things of their kind, not only in English literature, but in any literature, full of allusions to the work of classical and European writers, their ideas clothed in a magnificence of words which no other of our poets can equal—words and phrases so fitting that they have passed into our English speech, and people ‘ talk Shakespeare ’ without knowing that they are doing so. How could they have been written by a man born into an illiterate household, of whose education there is no record whatsoever (though it may be presumed that he had some), whose only known activities were acting and business dealing? On the other hand, supposing they were written by a well-known man of the time, or a group of men, how could the secret be kept? The more one examines the question the more impossible the first alternative seems. The difficulties of the second largely disappear when one realises the lack of publicity of those days, and the Elizabethan’s love of mystery in their writings—how fond they were of assumed names, and anagrams and ‘ emblems ’/and how they peppered their work with initials, like the ‘ T.T. ’ and ‘ W.H. ’ which have given students of the sonnets so many sleepless nights, and with decorations and devices which might mean anything or nothing. To those in the secret all allusions would be perefectly clear; they would not think it either desirable or necessary to make any other record, and the mass of the people neither knew nor cared who were the authors of the plays they flocked to see.

With the exception of five of the items mentioned—the books of Lawrence, Wilmot, Hart, Delia Bacon, and W. H. Smith—all the works referred to in the article are in the Library, most of them in the Harold Large collection. Lest it be thought that the Library’s interest is partizan, one should understand that this section is dwarfed by other material on editions of Shakespeare of Stratford. There

are plenty more books on the authorship question, books of Shakespearean studies and criticisms, biographies on contemporaries, books on the Elizabethan theatre and on the dramatic literature of the time. It is impossible to list them all in this article, but mention may be made of the Malone Society reprints, the set of facsimilies of the quartos, and the splendid set of Materials for the Study of the old English Drama, published at Louvain from 1902 to 1914, and from 1927 to 1939. This fine work interrupted by two wars, may perhaps be continued when—if ever—peace returns to Europe.