Bacon is Shake-Speare | Page 4

refers to him as being engaged in transcribing the "Novum
Organum" when Shakspeare enters with a letter from Her Majesty
(meaning Queen Elizabeth) asking him, Shakspeare, to see "her own"
sonnets now in the keeping of her Lord Chancellor.
Of course this is all topsy turvydom, for in Queen Elizabeth's reign
Bacon was never "Lord" Bacon or Lord Chancellor.
But to continue, Shakspeare tells Bacon "Near to Castalia there bubbles
also a fountain of petrifying water, wherein the muses are wont to dip
whatever posies have met the approval of Apollo; so that the slender
foliage which originally sprung forth in the cherishing brain of a true
poet becomes hardened in all its leaves and glitters as if it were carved
out of rubies and emeralds. The elements have afterwards no power
over it."
Bacon. Such will be the fortune of your own productions.
Shakspeare. Ah my Lord! Do not encourage me to hope so. I am but a
poor unlettered man, who seizes whatever rude conceits his own natural
vein supplies him with, upon the enforcement of haste and necessity;
and therefore I fear that such as are of deeper studies than myself, will
find many flaws in my handiwork to laugh at both now and hereafter.
Bacon. He that can make the multitude laugh and weep as you do Mr.
Shakspeare need not fear scholars.... More scholarship might have
sharpened your judgment but the particulars whereof a character is
composed are better assembled by force of imagination than of
judgment....
Shakspeare. My Lord thus far I know, that the first glimpse and
conception of a character in my mind, is always engendered by chance
and accident. We shall suppose, for instance, that I, sitting in a
tap-room, or standing in a tennis court. The behaviour of some one

fixes my attention.... Thus comes forth Shallow, and Slender, and
Mercutio, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Bacon. These are characters who may be found alive in the streets. But
how frame you such interlocutors as Brutus and Coriolanus?
Shakspeare. By searching histories, in the first place, my Lord, for the
germ. The filling up afterwards comes rather from feeling than
observation. I turn myself into a Brutus or a Coriolanus for the time;
and can, at least in fancy, partake sufficiently of the nobleness of their
nature, to put proper words in their mouths.... My knowledge of the
tongues is but small, on which account I have read ancient authors
mostly at secondhand. I remember, when I first came to London, and
began to be a hanger-on at the theatres, a great desire grew in me for
more learning than had fallen to my share at Stratford; but fickleness
and impatience, and the bewilderment caused by new objects, dispersed
that wish into empty air....
This ridiculous and most absurd nonsense, which appeared in 1818 in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was deemed so excellent and so
instructive that (slightly abridged) it was copied into "Reading lessons
for the use of public and private schools" by John Pierpont, of Boston,
U.S.A., which was published in London nearly twenty years later, viz.,
in 1837.
As I said before, the dialogue is really all topsy turvydom, for the
writer must have known perfectly well that Bacon was not Lord Keeper
till 1617, the year after Shakspeare's death in 1616, and was not made
Lord Chancellor till 1618, and that he is not supposed to have began to
write the "Novum Organum" before the death of Queen Elizabeth.
I have therefore arrived at the conclusion that the whole article was
really intended to poke fun at the generally received notion that the
author of the plays was an unlettered man, who picked up his
knowledge at tavern doors and in taprooms and tennis courts. I would
specially refer to the passage where Bacon asks "How frame you such
interlocutors as Brutus and Coriolanus?" and Shakspeare replies "By
searching histories, in the first place, my Lord, for the germ. The filling

up afterwards comes rather from feeling than observation. I turn myself
into a Brutus or a Coriolanus for the time and can at least in fancy
partake sufficiently of the nobleness of their nature to put proper words
in their mouths."
Surely this also must have been penned to open the eyes of the public
to the absurdity of the popular conception of the author of the plays as
an unlettered man who "had small Latin and less Greek"!
The highest scholarship not only in this country and in Germany but
throughout the world has been for many years concentrated upon the
classical characters portrayed in the plays, and the adverse criticism of
former days has given place to a reverential admiration for the
marvellous knowledge of antiquity displayed throughout the plays in
the presentation of the historical characters