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Cornell University Library 
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 Coincidences, Bacon and Shakespeare 
 
 3 1924 013 153 741 
 
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 COINCIDENCES 
 
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COINCIDENCES 
 
 BACON and SHAKESPEARE 
 
 By EDWIN KEED, A. M. 
 
 Amhor of BACON vs. SHAKSPERE, Brief for Plaintiff. 
 
 FRANCjS BACON, OUR SHAKE-SPEARE. 
 
 NOTEWORTHY OPINIONS, PRO AND CON, Bacon vs. Shakspere. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 COBTJRIT PrjBI-IsmNG Co., 
 
 eo PBABI. STBBSIT, 
 
 1906 
 
 L 
 
 TT 
 
 i: ■) U 1 
 
Copyright, 1906 
 
 By Edwin Reed. 
 
 Entered at Stationers' HalL 
 London. 
 
 CoBintR Pbess, 
 ) Pkabl St., Bostor, Mass. 
 
IN 
 
 MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 
 NATHANIEL HOLMES, 
 The matfJiest maui of manly mea 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This book is an expansion of the first chapter of 
 my 'Francis Bacon, Our Shake-speare ' , published 
 in 1902. It will serve as a companion to my book of 
 Parallelisms, especially when the latter shall be issued 
 in its second edition, and the entries therein classified 
 as far as possible according to subjects. 
 
 I take this opportunity to remind my readers, as I 
 have already done in previous publications, that when 
 the reputed Stratford author is referred to, his name 
 is spelled as he and his kindred generally spelled it, 
 Shakspere; but when the author of the plays, as such, 
 without regard to personality, is meant, the name is 
 spelled as it was often spelled in the early editions of 
 the plays, both quartos and folios, — Shake-speare. 
 
 It is a noteworthy fact that while the orthography 
 of proper names in those days was very capricious, 
 the name of the dramatist was always (with two very 
 slight unimportant exceptions) printed in one way in 
 the dramas, but never so in a single instance in other 
 writings. That is to say, what was invariable in the 
 one case contrary to custom was in the other accord- 
 ing to custom variable. 
 
 The hyphen between the syllables appears fifteen 
 times in the printed editions of the poems and plays, 
 but not once in any record made of the reputed poet 
 during his entire life. This of itself seems to me to 
 establish the name, Shake-speare, as a pseudonym. 
 
 EDWIN REED. 
 
Coincidences. 
 
 I. 
 
 Kent County, 
 
 The author of the Shake-speare plays appears to 
 have had a special prepossession in favor of the people 
 of Kent County, England. In the drama of King 
 Henry VI., written in his youth, he says: 
 
 " Kent, in the Commentaries Caesar writ, 
 Is term'd the civil'st place in all this isle ; 
 S-weet is the country, because full of riches ; 
 The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy." 
 
 2 King Henry VI., iv. 7, 61. 
 
 No compliment of this kind is paid in the plays to 
 
 any other English county. 
 
 The Bacon family came from Kent. 
 
2 COINCIDENCES 
 
 II. 
 
 Aristocracy. 
 
 The author of the plays was a patrician. He never 
 
 speaks of the people but in terms of contempt. With 
 
 him it is always the fool multitude, tag-rag people, 
 
 sweaty rabblement; — 
 
 " The beast with many heads." 
 
 Coriolantis IV., i, 3. 
 
 " The monster with uncounted heads." 
 
 a King Henry IV, Induction, i8. 
 
 Bacon was a patrician, his rank in the peerage 
 having been successively as Sir Francis Bacon, Baron 
 Verulam, and Viscount St. Alban. In sentiment he 
 was an extreme royalist, the champion of the King's 
 prerogative against popular rights. According to 
 him, " the lowest virtues draw praise from the 
 people, the middle virtues work in them astonish- 
 ment, but of the highest virtues they have no sense 
 or perceiving at all." He advised all men, when 
 applauded by the multitude, "immediately to ex- 
 amine themselves to see what fault or blunder they 
 may have committed." 
 
 He was fond of using such expressions as these: 
 "The beast with many heads." 
 
 Charge against Talbot. 
 " The monster with many heads." 
 
 Conference of Pleasure. 
 
 The following will also indicate a like social rank : 
 
 "Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen." — 
 Shakespeare. Winter's Tale, iv., 4., 7^5. 
 
 " Men of birth and quality will leave the practice when it comes 
 so low as barbers, surgeons, butchers, and such base mechanical 
 persons." — Bacon. Speech on Duelling. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 3 
 
 III. 
 Cambridge University. 
 
 The author of the Shakespearean poems 'Venus 
 and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece ' was educated at one or 
 more of the three English universities, Oxford, Cam- 
 bridge, and the Inns of Court in London. His name 
 is given in such a connection as to indicate that he 
 was a graduate of one or another of them in a book 
 entitled ' Polimanteia,' and printed in Cambridge by 
 the Printer to the University in 1595. He is speci- 
 fically mentioned therein as the author of the Poems 
 ' Venus and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece.' 
 
 The particular university, thus indicated as Shake- 
 speare's alma maier^ it is almost certain, was Cam- 
 bridge, for a dialectical usage, peculiar to the 
 students there, found its way into ' Titus Andron- 
 icus,' a play written, as Coleridge affirms, when the 
 dramatist must have been fresh from college life. 
 Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke also held this view. 
 The usage in question was to substitute the verb to 
 keep for to live, as in the line, — 
 
 " Knock at his study where, they say, he keeps." 
 No person, however, by the name of Shakespeare, or 
 Shakspere, was ever enrolled at any of the institu- 
 tions mentioned above. Indeed, we have no pretence 
 in any quarter that Shakspere of Stratford ever at- 
 tended one of them. 
 
 The above-stated facts require some elucidation, 
 not only because of their importance, but also be- 
 cause of the extraordinary efforts hitherto made by 
 many Shakspereans to suppress them. 
 
 I . The author of the ' Polimanteia ' signed his 
 name to it as W. C, probably William Clerke, who 
 was matriculated as a sizar of Trinity College in 
 
4 COINCIDENCES 
 
 June, 1575, became a scholar there, and, four years 
 later, proceeded B. A. He was soon afterward 
 elected a fellow, and in 1583 commenced M. A. 
 We may therefore safely assume, as Dr. Grosart 
 assumes, in his Introduction to a reprint of the 
 ' Polimanteia,' and as the book itself plainly shows, 
 that Gierke was ' ' familiar with his illustrious con- 
 temporaries," and worthy of credence in what he says 
 of them. His character as an author has never been 
 called in question. 
 
 2. The book was printed at Cambridge by John 
 Legate, printer to the University, in 1595. It was 
 issued from the press two years after the ' Venus and 
 Adonis ' was issued, one year after the Lucrece, but 
 earlier than any Shakespearean play that has come 
 down to us. 
 
 3. Prominent among its contents is a letter pur- 
 porting to have been written by England in her 
 sovereign capacity, and addressed to her Three 
 Daughters, the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, 
 and Inns of Court. It is in spirit and terms highly 
 eulogistic, especially in comparison with institutions 
 of learning of the same rank on the continent. Then, 
 scattered throughout the text and along the margins 
 of the book are names of many persons who in the 
 writer's opinion have evidently done honor to these 
 institutions by their presence as students in one or 
 more of them. The persons thus named number 
 about thirty. They are called England's grand- 
 children, as the universities themselves are called 
 England's Daughters. They include Shakespeare, 
 and they include him specifically, too, as the author 
 of the Shakespearean poems ' Venus and Adonis ' and 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 5 
 
 ' Lucrece.' With one exception the ' Polimanteia ' 
 is thus the first book in English literature, other 
 than the two poems themselves, to contain the name 
 of Shakespeare; indeed, to contain the name as it 
 does, together with the titles of Shakespeare's works 
 as then published, it was absolutely the first. 
 
 4. The passages in the ' Polimanteia ' stand thus: 
 
 " All praise Wanton 
 
 worthy Adonis ' ' 
 
 Lucretia 
 
 Sweet Shak- 
 speare 
 
 Eloquent 
 Gaveston 
 
 These names and titles are in the margins of the 
 book; a fact, however, of no special significance, for 
 seventeen other names and titles are there also. In 
 another chapter where Queen Elizabeth is eulogized, 
 the author puts her name in the margin. 
 
 5. The persons mentioned, including all whose 
 careers we can trace, and the particular universities 
 to which they may be severally assigned are as 
 follows : 
 
 Edmund Campion (Oxford) 
 
 William Whitaker (Cambridge) 
 
 William Fulke (Cambridge) 
 
 Thomas Stapleton (Oxford) 
 
 Lawrence Humphrey (Oxford) 
 
 John Rainolds (Oxford) 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford) 
 
 Edmund Spenser (Cambridge) 
 
 Henry Stanley (Oxford) 
 
COINCIDENCES 
 
 Ferdinando Stanley 
 Sir Christopher Hatton 
 Earl of Essex 
 Thomas Campion 
 Nicholas Breton 
 William Percy 
 Henry Willoughby 
 Abraham Fraunce 
 Thomas Lodge 
 Sir John Davies 
 Michael Drayton 
 Sir Hugh Plat 
 Thomas Kidd 
 Gabriel Harvey 
 Thomas Nash 
 William Alablaster 
 Sweet Shakspeare 
 John lyydgate 
 Samuel Daniel 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 (Oxford, Inns of Court) 
 
 (Oxford, Inns of Court) 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 (Cambridge, Inns of Court) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 (Cambridge) 
 
 ( ) 
 
 (Cambridge, Oxford) 
 
 (Oxford) 
 
 The book is dedicated in terms of most extrav- 
 agant eulogy to the Earl of Essex, with whom 
 Francis Bacon was then, as legal adviser and friend, 
 closely associated. Bacon's name does not appear 
 in Clerke's list, although he had at that time been 
 out of college nineteen years, was a leading member 
 of Parliament, had produced a work on philosophy, 
 and become generally known as a man of extraordi- 
 nary talents. Perhaps Clerke included him under a 
 pseudonym, as any one now, in making a list of the 
 distinguished graduates of Miss Franklin's school in 
 Coventry, would insert, not the name of Mary Ann 
 Evans by which one of the pupils was known in 
 school, but that which Mary Ann Evans subse- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 7 
 
 quently adopted for literary purposes, George Eliot. 
 In that case the blank space above, in our assign- 
 ments to the respective universities, would be filled 
 up thus: 
 
 (Cambridge, Inns of Court.) 
 
 6. From 1595, date of publication of the Poliman- 
 teia, to 1849, a period of 254 years, this book in its 
 bearings on the education of the author of the plays 
 received from Shakesperean scholars no recognition 
 whatever. It was not mentioned, we believe, by any 
 one of them during that time. 
 
 But in 1849 the Rev. N. J. Halpin of Dublin pub- 
 lished a learned work on the ' Dramatic Writings ' of 
 Shakespeare, and in the course of some observations 
 on Shakespeare's knowledge of the Greek drama 
 made the following statement: 
 
 " There is in my possession evidence of the most 
 authentic kind, quite sufficient to satisfy me, that of 
 one (or perhaps more) of the English universities, as 
 then existing, William Shakespeare was a student. 
 Is not this an astounding discovery, which has kept 
 itself jjercZwe from the critics until the middle of the 
 nineteenth century? ' ' 
 
 It will be seen that Mr. Halpin does not venture to 
 name the book. If we may judge from the tone of 
 his confession, he appears to have been under some 
 personal restraint. 
 
 7. From 1849 until the present time, the state of 
 things on which we are commenting has become, if 
 possible, even worse. With hundreds of authors 
 searching or pretending to search every nook and 
 cranny for information relating to Shakespeare's 
 life, and especially to the extent of his knowledge 
 
8 COINCIDENCES 
 
 and where lie may have acquired it, not one, so far as 
 we know or can ascertain, has cited the ' Polimanteia,' 
 or even poor frightened Halpin's conviction on the 
 subject. Ingleby, to be sure, criticised the wholly 
 unimportant arrangement of the marginal names and 
 titles as given above; such as, for instance, the in- 
 sertion of the note, "eloquent Gaveston," between 
 the titles of the two Shakespeare poems; but on the 
 bearings of the book respecting the great question, 
 where was Shakespeare educated or was he educated 
 at all, not a word. Halliwell-Phillipps casually 
 mentions the book in his Outlines, and among the 
 formal documents in the second volume quotes from 
 it; but he carefully excludes all reference to it from 
 his index; a fact, however, not surprising in the case 
 of a man who was himself excluded for many years 
 from the privileges of the British Museum library on 
 charges of dishonesty. Sidney Lee says simply, " In 
 1595, William Gierke in his ' Polimanteia ' gave ' all 
 praise ' to ' sweet Shakespeare ' for his ' Lucretia.' " 
 This is all, for I<ee also excluded the subject wholly 
 from his index. Richard Grant White, Charles 
 Allen, Professor Dowden, Thomas Campbell, Howard 
 Staunton, George Brandes, F. J. Furnivall and others 
 never mention either the book or its author. 
 
 8. It cannot be claimed that this reticence is un- 
 studied and without significance. Here is a contem- 
 porary of the author of 'the plays, a man of high 
 character, of large acquaintance with men of letters, 
 himself a Cambridge graduate, who practically in- 
 forms us, in a book printed at a university and dedi- 
 cated to the Earl of Essex, that the author of the 
 plays was educated at one or more of the English 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 9 
 
 Universities. Why is this testimony ignored? Why 
 is it concealed from the public ? ' 
 
 Bacon was educated at Cambridge and Gray's Inn. 
 He entered the university at the age of twelve, and 
 left it three years later without waiting to take a de- 
 gree, for he was dissatisfied, as he confessed to his 
 amanuensis, Rawley, with the kind of philosophy 
 taught there. From college Bacon went almost im- 
 mediately to France, returning in 1579. It was in 
 1579, while he was studying law and living among 
 the enthusiastic young playwrights of Gray's Inn, 
 that the Shakespeare dramas began to be produced. 
 
 ^ The spirit of this extraordinary Letter will be well understood 
 from its opening paragraph: 
 
 "If from the depth of entire affection I take upon me to deal 
 more plainly than your honorably augmented dignities will well 
 permit, or from too fervent a love overweighingly value you at too 
 high a rate, persuade yourselves (if these be my faults) that the 
 name of a mother hath a privilege to excuse them both; and how- 
 soever a mother to her daughters might more fitly spealc in secret 
 and not hard, yet, seeing my naked truth desires not to shroud it- 
 self from my greatest enemies, I challenge those kingdoms that 
 have had children to be witnesses of my talk; and if either there be 
 folly in me, for to love so much, or fault in you to deserve so little, 
 then let them blame me of too blind affection, and accuse you of not 
 deserving; and so speedily from Fame's book will I cancel out your 
 praise, and recant my love to a mother's shame. But if I (justly 
 fortunate) have high cause to commend you, and Europe for your 
 sake hath greater cause to commend me, then may I not lawfully 
 with a mother's love show the affection of a grandmother to com- 
 mend your children? " 
 
 The chapter following in the 'Polimanteia' is entitled 
 England to ali, her Inhabitants, 
 and written without regard to university affiliations. 
 
lo COINCIDENCES 
 
 England to her 
 
 deared wit deckmg admired daugliterj) 
 
 write and let rhe worlde know thachea- 
 
 UQU& harmonic \sv\o muflckc, in rcfped 
 
 of your fw«te,and well arte tuned 
 
 Arrngs : that Italun ArioHo did but ftia- 
 
 dowe the meanefl; part of thy mu(e,thac 
 
 Tajfos Codfrey'is not worchie to make 
 
 compare with your truelic eternizing 
 
 M. AldU' Elizas ftile: let France-admired BtlU^^ 
 
 s"^»r J ^"^ courtlike amarous ^oufard' con- 
 
 ctben. fefle that there be ofyour children,that 
 
 in thefc latter times haue farrc furpaf- 
 
 r^cd7h$' ^edthem. Let diuine-^^r/^^ eternally 
 
 tearesttre praifc worthle for his weeks worke*{ky 
 
 "w^"/- the beft thingcs were made firft : Let o- 
 
 ther countries(/wcet (Cambridge) enuie» 
 
 (yetadmire)my K/r^//,thy petrarch,di- 
 
 uine Spenfer. And vnlefTel erre»(a thing 
 
 Attfraife eafic in fuch fimplicitiej deluded by 
 
 *^^' dearlie beloued "Df/Mjand fortunatelie 
 
 Lucrecia (onnnzit QUoputra. OA/W,thoumailt 
 
 ^'Irf.^"^' ^^^°^^ ^^y courte-deare-verfe happie 
 Eloquent Damelly whofc fweete refined mufc, in 
 Caucnon. coHtradted fliapc j were fufficient a- 
 
 mongft 
 
 The above is a reproduction of a page of the Polimanteia. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE u 
 
 three^mghters* 
 
 mongft men , to gainc pardon of the ivamen 
 finnc to %nJemona, pittie to diftrefled -^^o""- 
 (^leopatra, and euerliuing praiTe to her hejre"^ 
 roumg1)^/M;Rcgifter your childrens .y<"»"/''i'''»- 
 pctegree in Fames forehead, fo "^^yZeXfir-'' 
 you fill volumes with ^hauftrs praife, uethimmar. 
 withLy^^r^.thc Scottifti Knight, and-^T/Lv 
 fuch like , whofe vnrefined tongues ofthatdi- 
 farre fhorte of the excellencie of this "'"'f .'"''L 
 age, wrote hmplie and purelie as the rwuacame- 
 times weare. And when bafe and in-'/'"?""^ 
 krious trades , the fworne enemies to ^'"f^fi'vu 
 Learnings cternitie ( a thing vfuall) ffenous. 
 fliall haue deuoured them, either with ^j^'^^^^f'^ 
 the fretting cancker worme of mouldie Man/J* '}«• 
 time : mxkitArabtan fpiccrie: with eng- "J^^^I'T 
 Kfli honnie : with outlandilh butter ^^^',/f^. 
 Cmacters of imployment for the aged -Dmm. 
 dayes of our late authors) yet that then 
 fuch r if you thinkc them worthie; in ^'^^l';^^^^' 
 dc^itc of bafe Crofers, ('whome Iproftoj. 
 charge vpon paine of learnings curfe, 
 notto handle a leafe of mine) may Hue 
 by your meanes , canonized in lear- 
 R 3 ^""^ 
 
 Tie above is a reproduction of the following f age of the Polimanteia. 
 
12 COINCIDENCES 
 
 IV. 
 
 Self-Confidence. 
 Shakespeare's self-confidence was unlimited. He 
 believed that his poetry would live forever. We 
 quote from one of his sonnets: 
 
 " Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
 Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 
 But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
 Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. 
 When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
 And broils root out the work of masonry, 
 Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn 
 The living record of your memory. 
 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity 
 Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room 
 Even in the eyes of all posterity, 
 That wear this world out to the ending doom. 
 So, till the judgment that yourself arise, 
 You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes." 
 
 Sonnet S3' 
 
 Again: 
 
 " Thy eternal summer shall not fade, 
 Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st ; 
 Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade. 
 When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. 
 
 So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, 
 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." 
 
 Sonnet tS. 
 
 Bacon's self-confidence was also unlimited. He 
 claimed to have been "born for the service of man- 
 kind." He began one of his works with this extra- 
 ordinary assertion: " Francis of Verulam thought 
 thus; and it was his opinion that both the living and 
 posterity ought to know the method he pursued and 
 the conclusions he reached." In the first book of 
 * The Advancement of Learning ' he tells the King 
 that inasmuch as " there has not been since Christ's 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 13 
 
 time a monarch so learned in all literature and erudi- 
 tion as yourself, there ought, therefore, to be some 
 solid work, fixed memorial and immortal monument 
 erected to your honor;" and such a work, or one 
 tending to that end, he goes on to say, "I now 
 present to your majesty. ' ' The two authors promise, 
 one to his friend and the other to his King, through 
 their own eulogistic tributes and in almost identical 
 language, immortal fame. 
 
14 COINCIDENCES 
 
 Vocabulary. 
 
 A common farm laborer in England uses, it is said, 
 five hundred words. The average educated business 
 man, three thousand. A writer, like Thackeray, five 
 thousand. The great poet, scholar and publicist, 
 John Milton, used seven thousand. According to 
 Professor George L. Craik, a recognized authority 
 in this branch of science, the author of the Shake- 
 speare plays and poems used twenty-one thousand 
 (inflectional forms not counted). This is admitted to 
 have been the largest vocabulary ever possessed by 
 any individual of the human race. 
 
 The extent of Bacon's vocabulary has not been 
 definitely ascertained. We are certain only that it 
 was immense, probably the greatest, with one excep- 
 tion (if it be an exception), ever known. Dr. Samuel 
 Johnson, the lexicographer, said that "a dictionary 
 of the English language might be compiled from 
 Bacon's works alone." Bacon made a study of com- 
 parative philology in order to show, as he said, " in 
 what points each language excels and in what it 
 fails, so that not only may languages be enriched by 
 mutual exchanges, but also the several beauties of 
 each be combined and thus made to constitute a 
 model of speech itself." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 15 
 
 VI. 
 Extent of Knowledge. 
 We quote from Dr. H. H. Furness, editor of the 
 Variorum Shakespeare, now in course of publication: 
 
 " Shakespeare [author of the Plays] so devoted himself to the 
 study of every trade, profession, pursuit and accomplishment that 
 he became master of them all, which his plays clearly show him to 
 have been." 
 
 We quote also from Francis Bacon in Youth: 
 
 " I have taken all knowledge to be my province." 
 
i6 COINCIDENCES 
 
 VII. 
 
 Premature Old Age. 
 
 The Sonnets were first mentioned as in existence 
 
 by Frances Meres in 1598. The author confesses 
 
 that he was then a prematurely old man, thus: 
 
 " That time of year thou may'st in me behold, 
 When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang 
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 
 Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
 In me thou seest the twilight of such day 
 As after sunset fadeth in the west. 
 Which by-and-by black night doth take away, 
 Death's second self, that seals up all the rest." 
 
 Sonnet 7_y. 
 
 The dramatist (whether Shakspere or Bacon) 
 could not have been over thirty-seven when the 
 above was written. 
 
 Bacon considered himself an old man when he had 
 
 reached the age of thirty-one. In a letter to his 
 
 uncle, Burleigh, written in 1592, he said: 
 
 "I am now somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great 
 deal of sand in the hour-glass." 
 
 We have the same sentiment from him, (peculiar 
 to poets) in a letter to Cecil (1599): 
 
 " Her Majesty being begun in my first years, I would be sorry 
 she should estrange in my last years, — for so I account them, 
 reckoning by health, not by age." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 17 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Oratory. 
 
 The dramatist was a great orator. Antony's 
 
 speech over the dead body of Caesar is famous as 
 
 perhaps the best specimen of the art as yet produced 
 
 in the history of the world. What Shake-speare says 
 
 of Prince Hal in this respect would certainly apply 
 
 to himself : 
 
 " When he speaks, 
 The air, a charter'd libertine, is still. 
 And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears, 
 To steal his s-weet and honey'd sentences." 
 
 King Henry V., I. i, 47. 
 
 Bacon was also a great orator. Ben Jonson says 
 that ' ' the fear of every man who heard him was, 
 lest he should make an end. ' ' Another contemporary 
 pronounced him, " the eloquentest man that was ever 
 born in this island." 
 
i8 COINCIDENCES 
 
 IX. 
 Knowledge of lyAw. 
 That the plays and poems of Shake-speare are 
 saturated with legal principles, technically expressed, 
 no one, competent to form an opinion on the subject, 
 can possibly deny. We quote the following from 
 well known jurists: 
 
 "I need go no further than this sonnet (46), -which is so in- 
 tensely legal in its language and imagery that without a consider- 
 able knowledge of English forensic procedure it cannot be fully 
 understood." 
 
 Lord Campbell, Chief yustice of England. 
 
 "To Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he propounds it, there can 
 be neither demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." 
 
 Idem. 
 " He wag a ripe, learned and profound lawyer, so saturated with 
 precedents that at once in his highest and sweetest flights he colors 
 everything with legal dyes." 
 
 Appleton Morgan, LL. D., President of the N. Y. Shakespeare Society. 
 
 ' ' He must have obtained his knowledge of law from actual 
 practice." Heard's ' Shakespeare as a Lawyer,' 
 
 With this conclusion all must sooner or later 
 agree. 
 
 Francis Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England, 
 and, with possibly one exception (Sir Edward Coke), 
 the greatest jurist of his age. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE ig 
 
 X. 
 
 Early Plays. 
 
 Bacon spent the years of his childliood partly in 
 I/ondon, and partly at his father's country seat at 
 Gorhambury, near St. Albans ; in 1573 he was 
 matriculated at Cambridge University ; from 1576 to 
 1579 he was in France ; on his return to London he 
 took up his residence as a law student at Gray's Inn; 
 in 1584 he entered Parliament. 
 
 The first in order of composition of the historical 
 dramas of Shake-speare was ' King Henry VI.' It 
 bears unmistakable marks of the immaturity of a 
 great genius. It bears, also, marks of the author's 
 personal acquaintance with those localities where, 
 previously to the date of the play, Bacon had lived. 
 Of the seventy-eight scenes into which its three 
 parts are divided, thirty are laid in London, where 
 Bacon was born ; three in St. Albans, where he was 
 brought up; twenty in France, and in those provinces 
 of France which he had visited; one is laid in the 
 Temple, an institution for lawyers closely associated 
 with Gray's Inn ; and one in the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment.^ 
 
 'A young author's first work altaost always bespeaks his recent 
 pursuits."— Samuei, Tayi,or Colbridgb. 
 
20 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XL 
 The French Language. 
 
 The author of the Plays knew the French lan- 
 guage. He had even a colloquial use of it, as we find 
 demonstrated in the drama of 'King Henry V.,' 
 where long conversations are carried on in that 
 tongue. This would seem to indicate for him an 
 actual residence of some considerable time in the 
 country. 
 
 Bacon was sent to France by his father in the suite 
 of the English ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet, in 
 September, 1576, when he was fifteen years of age. 
 He returned in March, 1579, having acquired a mas- 
 tery of the language during a residence there of two 
 years and six months. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 2t 
 
 XII. 
 English Campaigns in France. 
 
 In his earliest historical play, written in or about 
 1590, the dramatist devotes himself in part to the 
 English campaigns conducted in France during the 
 reign of King Henry VI. In so doing he displays an 
 intimate knowledge of the territory where the battles 
 were fought, including the cities of Orleans, Blois, 
 Tours, and Poictiers. In Orleans, as we have already 
 pointed out elsewhere, he mentions a church where 
 pilgrims were accustomed to resort, calling it by the 
 name of the saint to which it was dedicated. Richard 
 Grant White wonders at this local and apparently 
 uncalled-for reference in the play. 
 
 Francis Bacon was in France in 1577, and, for 
 reasons not stated, visited the cities of Orleans, Blois 
 and Tours, which were immortalized by the dramatist 
 for the parts they played in those campaigns. In 
 Poictiers, where Edward, the Black Prince, won his 
 great victory, he spent three months. 
 
22 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XIII. 
 Joan of Arc. 
 That the author of the Plays had resided in France 
 in early life, and under circumstances that gave him 
 unusual access to some of the political records of the 
 country, seems to be indicated in the Plays them- 
 selves. 'In 'King Henry VI.,' Part i, we have a 
 most extraordinary scene in which the famous Joan 
 of Arc and the Duke of Burgundy are the principal 
 characters. The Duke is an ally of the English. He 
 is marching at the head of his troops toward Paris, 
 while the French King, also at the head of his troops 
 and accompanied by the Maid, appears on the field 
 in the distance. A herald demands a parley, and 
 then the following dialogue ensues: 
 
 " King. A parley with the Duke of Burgundy ! 
 Bur. Who craves a parley 'with the Burgundy? 
 King. The princely Charles of France, thy countryman. 
 Bur. What say'st thou, Charles ? for I am marching hence. 
 King. Speak, Pucelle, and enchant him with thy words. 
 Joan. Brave Burgundy, undoubted hope of France ! 
 
 Stay, let thy humble handmaid speak to thee. 
 Bur. Speak on ; but be not over-tedious. 
 Joan. Look on thy country, look on fertile France, 
 
 And see the cities and the towns defaced 
 
 By wasting ruin of the cruel foe. 
 
 As looks the mother on her lowly babe, 
 
 When death doth close his tender dying eyes, 
 
 See, see the pining malady of France ; 
 
 Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds, 
 
 Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast. 
 
 O, turn thy edged sword another way ; 
 
 Strike those that hurt, and hurt not those that help. 
 
 One drop of blood drawn from thy country's bosom 
 
 Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore. 
 
 Return thee, therefore, with a flood of tears. 
 
 And wash away thy country's stained spots. 
 Bur. Either she hath bewitch'd me with her words 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 23 
 
 Or nature makes me suddenly relent. 
 
 Joan. Besides, all French and France exclaims on thee, 
 Doubting thy birth and lawful progeny. 
 Who join'st thou with but with a lordly nation 
 That will not trust thee but for profit's sake ? 
 When Talbot hath set footing once in France, 
 And fashion'd thee that instrument of ill, 
 Who then but English Henry will be lord, 
 And thou be thrust out like a fugitive ? 
 Call we to mind, and mark but this for proof: 
 Was not the Duke of Orleans thy foe ? 
 And was he not in Bngland prisoner ? 
 But when they heard he was thine enemy, 
 They set him free without his ransom paid, 
 In spite of Burgundy and all his friends. 
 See, then, thou fight'st against thy countrymen, 
 And join'st with them will be thy slaughter-men. 
 Come, come, return ; return, thou wandering lord ; 
 Charles and the rest will take thee in their arms. 
 
 Bur. I am vanquished ; these haughty words of hers 
 Have batter'd me like roaring cannon-shot, 
 And made me almost yield upon my knees. 
 Forgive me, country, and sweet countrymen, 
 And, lords, accept this hearty, kind embrace. 
 My forces and my power of men are yours ; 
 So farewell, Talbot ; I'll no longer trust thee." — iii. 3. 
 
 No such interview as above described ever took 
 place. The duke did, indeed, abandon the cause of 
 the English, but not until 1435, four years after the 
 death of Joan. But was this scene, therefore, wholly 
 and absolutely an invention of the dramatist ? Did 
 the author merely anticipate the duke's defection, 
 and, by connecting Joan of Arc with it, violate, in 
 spirit as well as in letter, the truth of history ? 
 
 In 1780, according to the well-known historian of 
 the House of Burgundy, M. Brugiere de Barante, 
 some one in France for the first time put in print a 
 letter, dated July 17, 1429, addressed to the then 
 reigning duke, and written by Joan of Arc. It con- 
 
24 COINCIDENCES 
 
 tains a passionate appeal to the duke to take pre- 
 cisely the same course which is urged upon him in 
 the play. The letter is as follows : 
 
 " IHESUS MARIA 
 
 " High and mighty Prince, Duke of Burgundy, Joan la Pucelle 
 prays you, for the sake of God in heaven, my rightful and sov- 
 ereign Lord, to make a long and durable peace with the King of 
 France. Pardon each the other -with a good heart, as good Chris- 
 tians ought to do ; if it please you to make war, go against the 
 Saracens. 
 
 " Prince of Burg;undy, I pray you, I supplicate and entreat you, 
 as humbly as I am able to do, to make no further war upon the 
 kingdom of France ; withdraw at once all your forces from the 
 towns and fortresses you are occupying in the kingdom. The 
 noble king of Prance is ready to make peace with you, on any 
 terms consistent with his honor ; you will find no difiSculty with 
 him. 
 
 " I warn you, however, in the name of God in heaven, my right- 
 ful and sovereign Lord, and for the sake of your own well-being 
 and honor, that you can win no battle against the loyal people of 
 Prance ; and that all those who war against the said kingdom of 
 France, war against Jesus, the King, the King of heaven, and 
 of all the world, my rightful and sovereign Lord. I pray you and 
 beseech you with clasped hands not to do battle or fight against us, 
 neither you, nor your family, nor your subjects. Be assured that 
 however large an army you may bring against us, you will gain no 
 victory over me ; it will be a pity to fight a great battle and shed 
 the blood of those who come against us. 
 
 " It is now three weeks since I wrote to you and sent good 
 letters by a herald, asking you to come to terms with his sacred 
 majesty who, to-day, Sunday, July 17, is in the city of Rheims. I 
 have received no response to those letters, nor indeed any tidings 
 of the herald. 
 
 "I commend you to God. May he protect you, if it so please 
 Him ; and I pray God to give us peace. Written at Rheims, the 
 said 17th of July [1429] ." 
 
 It is safe to say that the existence of this letter 
 was unknown in England in the time of Shake- 
 speare. Neither Hall nor Holinshed nor any other 
 English chronicler mentions it. It appears to have 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 25 
 
 been unknown also in France, for it remained in 
 manuscript, buried among the ducal papers at Lisle, 
 the capital of Burgundy, for a period of three hun- 
 dred and fifty years after it was written. Fabert, 
 who wrote a history of the House of Burgundy in 
 1687, knew nothing of it. And yet this identical 
 letter opened the series of negotiations that finally 
 resulted in the treaty of peace in 1435, as represented 
 in the play. The dramatist simply changed its form, 
 preferring a spoken address in the open field as better 
 suited to stage effects. Even for this he had an his- 
 toric basis, for the duke is known to have marched 
 to Paris over the plain of Rouen in the summer of 
 1429, and to have agreed to a truce soon after his 
 receipt of the Maid's letter. 
 
 Here, then, is substantial proof that the author of 
 ' King Henry VI.' was acquainted with an important 
 fact in French history which English and French 
 historians did not discover until more than two cen- 
 turies after the date of the play. 
 
 The only rational explanation of the mystery 
 seems to us to be this: the author we call Shake- 
 speare was in France when he first formed the plan 
 of portraying dramatically the foreign campaigns of 
 his countrymen in the reign of Henry VI.; and that 
 in pursuance of this design he not only visited the 
 scenes made memorable by those great campaigns (as 
 we know that Bacon did), but that he also personally 
 gathered some of the materials for his undertaking 
 from the French and Burgundian national archives. 
 Not the slightest evidence exists to show that Wil- 
 liam Shakspere of Stratford was ever in France. 
 
26 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XIV. 
 Sonneting. 
 At various times, beginning in or about 1598, the 
 autbor of the Sbake-speare plays wrote 154 sonnets. 
 Tbey are the finest in the language. 
 
 In 1599 Bacon wrote a sonnet to Queen Elizabeth, 
 which was highly praised. Unfortunately it is now 
 lost. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 27 
 
 XV. 
 John Florio. 
 In the year 1591, the well-known Italian teacher, 
 John Florio, published a book entitled ' Second 
 Frutes,' in London. The book contained a remark- 
 able sonnet, addressed to Florio, but name of author 
 not given. The sonnet was as follows: 
 
 " Sweet friend wtiose name agrees with thy increase, 
 
 How fit a rivall art thou of the Spring? 
 
 For when each branche hath left his flourishing, 
 
 And greeu-lockt Sommers shadie pleasures cease. 
 She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace, 
 
 And spend her franchise on each living thing. 
 
 The dazies sprout, the little birds doo sing, 
 
 Hearbes, gummes, and plants doo vaunt of their release ; 
 So when that all our English Witts lay dead, 
 
 (Except the Laurell that is evergreene) 
 
 Thou with thy Frutes our barrenness o'respread, 
 
 And set thy flowrie pleasance to be scene. 
 Sutch frutes, sutch flowrets of moralitie, 
 
 Were nere before brought out of Italic." 
 
 Phaethon, 
 
 Judging from internal evidence. Professors Baynes 
 and Minto pronounced this sonnet the work of the 
 author of the Shakespeare plays. 
 
 A few years later, however, Florio published 
 another book (' A Worlde of Words ')> and in it took 
 occasion to refer to the sonnet of 1591 as having been 
 written " by a gentleman, a friend of mine, that 
 loved better to be a poet than to be counted so." 
 That is, according to Florio himself, the author was 
 high born, a personal friend of his, and a concealed 
 poet. Bacon answers to all of these qualifications: 
 He was a gentleman (patrician), his father having 
 been Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal ; 
 he was Florio' s friend, having often entertained 
 
28 COINCIDENCES 
 
 Florio at his home in Gorhambury ; and on his own 
 confession, as made to Sir John Davies, he was a 
 "concealed poet." To the third of these points, the 
 only one concerning which there can be the slightest 
 doubt, Aubrey, Milton's friend, also testifies: "His 
 lordship [Bacon] was a good poet, but concealed." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 2g 
 
 XVI. 
 Growth of Democratic Sentiment. 
 
 In the first draft of 'Hamlet,' published, as we 
 have said, in 1603, but produced on the stage in 1586, 
 the prince, referring to the clown in the grave- 
 digger's scene, says to Horatio, — 
 
 " An excellent fellow, by the lord, Horatio ; 
 
 These seven years have I noticed it ; the toe of the peasant 
 
 Comes so near the heel of the courtier 
 
 That he galls his kibe."— v. i. 
 
 In the second quarto (1604) this speech appears as 
 follows : 
 
 "By the Lord, Horatio ; this three years have I taken note of it ; 
 the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so 
 near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe." 
 
 The period of seven years in the first edition gives 
 place to that of three years in the second. 
 
 Bacon returned from the continent, where he had 
 been living from boyhood, in 1579 ; consequently, in 
 1586, he had been an observer of manners and cus- 
 toms in and around the court of Elizabeth, to which 
 he had had easy access, for a period of seven years. 
 
 In 1603, we find Bacon full of alarm over the 
 progress of democratic sentiment in the country. 
 He then wrote to his cousin. Secretary Cecil, that he 
 thought of abandoning politics and putting himself 
 wholly "upon his pen ;" he even predicted the revo- 
 lution that followed forty years later. This fear had 
 its chief origin in the last parliament of Queen Eliza- 
 beth, when he saw the House of Commons converted 
 into a pandemonium over public grievances. 
 
 The play of ' Hamlet ' was re- written and re-pub- 
 lished in 1604 ; the last parliament under Elizabeth 
 sat three years earlier, in 1601. Hence the substi- 
 tution of this last-named period for the first. 
 
30 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XVII. 
 Inns of Court. 
 
 Bacon, as we have seen, was a member of Gray's 
 Inn ; tie had lodgings there during the greater part 
 of his life. In close alliance with Gray's Inn was 
 the Inner Temple, the two fraternal institutions 
 always uniting in their Christmas revels, and each 
 bearing its associate's coat-of-arms over its own gate- 
 way. Of their internal affairs the public knew but 
 little, for guests were seldom admitted behind the 
 scenes. 
 
 The Inner Temple was governed in accordance 
 with some very remarkable rules. One of these 
 rules, handed down from the time of the founders, 
 the old Knights Templar, enjoined silence at meals. 
 Members, dining in the hall, were expected to make 
 their wants known "by signs," or, if that were not 
 practicable, in low tones or whispers only. 
 
 Another rule provided that members should seat 
 themselves in the dining-hall in messes of four, the 
 tables being of the exact length required to accom- 
 modate three messes each. This arrangement pre- 
 vails to the present day. 
 
 Shake-speare was familiar with these petty details. 
 He laid one of the scenes of ' King Henry VI.' in the 
 Temple garden itself, where we have, properly 
 enough, a legal discussion on the rights of certain 
 claimants to the throne. In the course of this dis- 
 cussion the following colloquy takes place : 
 
 " Plantaganei. Great lords and gentlemen, what means this silence? 
 Dare no man answer in a case of truth ? 
 Suffolk. Within the Temple hall we were too loud; 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 31 
 
 The garden here is more convenient. 
 
 Plan. Thanks, gentle sir ; 
 
 Come let ■as four to dinner." — ii. 4. 
 
 Edward J. Castle, Esq., of London, a member of 
 the Queen's Council and a life-long resident in the 
 Temple, comments on the above passage as follows: 
 
 " This reference to the Temple Gardens, not saying whether the 
 Inner or the Middle Temple is meant, curiously enough points to 
 the -writer being a member of Gray's Inn ; ... an Inner or a 
 Middle Temple man would have given his Inn its proper title." — 
 Shakespeare, Bacon, yonson, and Greene ; a Study, 65 n." 
 
 Gray's Inn garden had not been laid out when the 
 play of ' King Henry VI.' was written. 
 
32 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XVIII. 
 Commonplace Books. 
 In one of the Shake-speare sonnets every scholar 
 is advised to keep a commonplace book. 
 
 " Look ! what thy memory cannot contain 
 Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find 
 Those children nurs'd, deliver'd from thy brain 
 To take a new acquaintance of thy mind. 
 These o£Sces, so oft as thou wilt look, 
 Shall profit thee, and much enrich thy book." 
 
 Sonnet ly. 
 
 Bacon kept a commonplace book. He began it 
 in December, 1594, and continued it until January, 
 1596. A few years later (1605), after he had tested 
 its value in his own experience, he said: *' I am not 
 ignorant of the prejudice imputed to the use of com- 
 monplace books, but ... I hold the keeping of them 
 to be of great use in studying." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 33 
 
 XIX. 
 
 The Northumberland Manuscripts. 
 
 Some of Bacon's manuscripts, bound together 
 •with a few others in the form of a volume, and evi- 
 dently belonging to the age of Elizabeth, came to 
 light about forty years ago (1867) in a private library 
 in London. Among them, according to the table of 
 contents, were once included two of the Shake- 
 spearean plays, 'Richard II.' and 'Richard III.' 
 These, however, at some unknown time and for some 
 unknown reason, had been abstracted from the book 
 and never recovered. 
 
 In close proximity to these Shakespearean titles 
 on the cover the name of William Shakespeare, as 
 printed on the plays, and not as it appears in a single 
 instance on the records at Stratford, had been written 
 and rewritten several times. Also, the long lyatin 
 word honorificahiUludine, found in ' Love's Labor's 
 Lost ' (a play first printed in 1598, at about the time 
 this strange volume was bound up), is seen there. 
 A few lines from the Shakespearean poem ' Lucrece ' 
 ■v^ere also on the cover. And the same person who 
 wrote Shakespeare's name in so many places there 
 also wrote Bacon's with it, over and over again, thus 
 showing that, at the time when the Shakespearean 
 plays were beginning to come from the press, these 
 two names were closely associated together in the 
 mind of, at least, one contemporary, and that one 
 having access in the most confidential manner pos- 
 sible to Bacon's private papers. 
 
 The present custodian of this collection at the 
 Northumberland House library expresses the opinion, 
 it is said, that the MS. contents of the cover, in- 
 
34 COINCIDENCES 
 
 eluding some of the entries, if not all of them, that 
 connect the book with the poems and plays of Shake- 
 speare, are in Bacon's handwriting. An accomplished 
 expert, employed in this line of work by the city of 
 Boston, Mass., concurs in this view. 
 
 It thus appears that the only known place in the 
 world where any of the manuscripts of the Shake- 
 spearean plays ever existed, was in Bacon's portfolio. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 35 
 
 XX. 
 
 Friendship for Lord Southampton. 
 Shake-speare dedicated his poem ' Venus and 
 Adonis ' in terms of social equality to lyord South- 
 ampton, in part as follows : 
 
 " Right Honorabi,e: 
 
 I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished 
 lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for 
 choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden ; only, if 
 your honor seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and 
 vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honored you 
 with some graver labor." 
 
 It appears from this that the Earl's consent to the 
 dedication had not been previously obtained ; a cir- 
 cumstance so improvident in a play-actor that the 
 poet would probably, as a consequence, have lost his 
 ears. 
 
 One year later (1594), this time in terms of high 
 friendship, Shake-speare also dedicated the ' Rape of 
 Lucrece ' to Lord Southampton, thus : 
 
 " The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end, whereof 
 this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. . . . 
 What I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours ; being part 
 in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty 
 would show greater ; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lord- 
 ship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all hap- 
 piness." 
 
 Evidently the first dedication had given no offence, 
 for the reason, we venture to say, that the dedicator 
 and dedicatee were both noblemen. 
 
 Bacon was politically and socially an intimate 
 friend of Lord Southampton. Both were members 
 of Gray's Inn, and both were closely attached to the 
 personal fortunes of the Earl of Essex. 
 
 On the occasion of Southampton's prospective re- 
 
jd COINCIDENCES 
 
 lease from imprisonment in tlie Tower Bacon wrote 
 him tlie following letter : 
 
 "It may please your Lordship: 
 
 I would have been very glad to have presented my humble 
 service to your Iiordsbip by my attendance, if I could have fore, 
 seen that it should not have been unpleasing unto you. And there- 
 fore, because I would commit no error, I choose to write; assuring 
 your l/ordship (how "credible [incredible] soever it may seem to you 
 at first, yet it is as true as a thing that God knoweth) that this 
 great change hath wrought in me no other change toward your 
 Lordship than this, that I may safely be now that which I was be 
 fore. And so, craving no other pardon than for troubling you- 
 with this letter, I do not now begin, but continue to be 
 
 Your Lordship's humble and much devoted." 
 
 The estrangement between the two was caused by 
 Southampton's complicity in Essex's act of treason 
 two years before. They had previously been the 
 closest of friends. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 37 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Venus and Adonis. 
 
 In the dedication of the poem 'Venus and Adonis,' 
 published in 1593, to Southampton, the author calls 
 this poem " the first heir of his [my] invention." A 
 work of invention, as the term was then used in such 
 connection as this, meant one of imagination; it was 
 applied to poetry and the drama. It is curious to 
 see into what a dilemma this statement of the author 
 has thrown Shakespearean scholars. If the poem 
 were the author's first poetic composition, as he says 
 it was, it must have ante-dated every Shakespearean 
 play. It must also have ante-dated the reputed 
 poet's arrival in London, for Shakespearean plays 
 had been on the boards there for years before that 
 more or less important event occurred. Richard 
 Grant White says that Shakspeare brought it with 
 him from Stratford "in his pocket." But here an- 
 other and perhaps a still greater difficulty confronts 
 us. We are quite certain that the poem could not 
 have been written by a citizen of Stratford who had 
 had no other means of education than that the town 
 afforded. Not a word of patois appears in it, nor 
 anything inconsistent with the purest, most elegant 
 and scholarly English of the time. Hence on the or- 
 dinary hypothesis no escape from this dilemma is 
 possible. The difficulty on that basis is to this day 
 unsolved and insoluble. 
 
 On the other hand, if Bacon wrote the poem, it 
 must be conceded that he wrote the plays also. The 
 latter down to the date of the poem were anonymous. 
 In the two cases of poems and plays, however, the 
 reputation of authorship was very different. To be 
 
38 COINCIDENCES 
 
 known as a writer of plays would have disgraced and 
 ruined Bacon ; but for a poem, especially one under 
 a pseudonym, he might have safely called it, when- 
 ever written, the first of his inventions, ignoring all 
 others. The pseudonym did not appear on a play 
 until 1598, after several plays had been published ; it 
 did appear on the first Shakespearean poem. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 39 
 
 XXII. 
 The Stage. 
 
 The Shakespeare plays began to appear on the 
 stage in London in or about 1580, the ' Two Gentle- 
 men of Verona ' certainly as early as 1585, before 
 the Queen, and the ' Hamlet ' in 1586. They con- 
 tinued to be acted, sometimes several in the same 
 year and frequently to crowded houses, during the 
 life time of the author, whoever the latter may have 
 been. 
 
 The difference in this respect between the two can- 
 didates for the honors of their authorship is signifi- 
 cant. 
 
 William Shakspere, the play-actor, lived in a 
 community to which theatrical performances were 
 obnoxious. In 1602 the town authorities of Strat- 
 ford prohibited everything of the kind under a 
 penalty of ten shillings; the penalty was increased 
 to ten pounds (about $500 in our money) in 161 2. 
 At the last mentioned date Shakspere had returned 
 to Stratford, had been living there continuously for 
 eight years, and yet, though the richest man in 
 town, he does not seem to have exerted any influence 
 whatever in favor of such performances, even of one 
 of his own plays (if he ever wrote any), before his 
 fellow-townsmen. At his death he possessed no 
 book, dramatic or otherwise, and nothing to indicate 
 that he had, or ever had had, as author, any interest 
 in the drama. 
 
 Francis Bacon cherished a high opinion of the 
 stage as a means of inculcating virtue. He recom- 
 mended that the drama be taught in the schools. He 
 even drafted a theatre building to be erected near 
 
40 COINCIDENCES 
 
 him, and provided under it a dressing-room for the 
 actors as large as the auditorium itself. His brother 
 Anthony, who was in full sympathy with him on all 
 points, removed at one time from Gray's Inn, where 
 he had been living with Francis, to the neighbor- 
 hood of Bull's Inn where he could conveniently at- 
 tend a theatre, and one accustomed to put the Shake- 
 speare plays on its boards. The two brothers had 
 such a penchant for the business of play-acting that 
 their mother, a puritan, severely chided them for it. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 41 
 
 XXIII. 
 Use op Others' Plots. 
 
 The dramatist is noted for his frequent use of 
 others' plots on which to base his own dramas. For 
 instance : 
 
 ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona ' was founded on 
 Jorge de Montemayor's Spanish romance of Diana. 
 
 'Hamlet,' on the History of Hamblet, originally 
 composed in I/atin by the Dane, Saxo Grammaticus. 
 
 ' Othello,' on an Italian novel by Giraldo Cinthio; 
 
 ' All's Well that Ends Well,' on one, also in Ital- 
 ian, by Boccaccio. 
 
 'Twelfth Night,' on one by Bandello, either in 
 the original Italian, or a French version of it. 
 
 ' The Winter's Tale, on Greene's Pandosto. 
 
 ' Romeo and Juliet,' on one in Massutio's collec- 
 tion. 
 
 ' Timon of Athens', on Lucian in untranslated 
 Greek. 
 
 'Julius Caesar,' on Plutarch. 
 
 ' Anthony and Cleopatra,' also on Plutarch. 
 
 ' Cymbeline, on Boccaccio.' 
 
 In Bacon's first sketch of his history of the reign 
 of Henry VII. he explains why he did not begin that 
 work farther back in time. It was because he would 
 then fail to get the help he wanted from historians 
 who had preceded him. He was content to leave to 
 earlier writers the simple actions of the times to be 
 treated, provided that he himself could enrich the 
 narrative (as he said) "with the counsels, and the 
 speeches, and the notable peculiarities." Hence 
 his frequent use of the plots of others. This was 
 exactly what Shake-speare did. 
 
42 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXIV. 
 Love's Labor's Lost. 
 
 ' Love's Labor's Lost ' is one of the earliest of the 
 Shakespeare dramas. Mr. Staunton assigns the date 
 of its composition to a period somewhere between 
 1587 and 1591. The best evidence indicates that it 
 was written in or about 1588. 
 
 The scene is laid at the court of Navarre, a small 
 rude kingdom situated between France and Spain 
 among the Pyrenees Mountains. The writer of the 
 play seems to have been strangely familiar not only 
 with this distant and at that time little-known terri- 
 tory, but also with its internal politics, for he has in- 
 troduced, as dramatis personcB, the king himself and 
 the leading councillors of state, mostly under their 
 proper names. The king was at a later day the fam- 
 ous Henry IV. of France, but, as he was living when 
 the play was published in 1598, Shake-speare has 
 given him the name of Ferdinand. Of the king's 
 councillors, we have also in the play Biron and Long- 
 aville (Longueville), both of whom were active in 
 the cause of Henry, and Boyet (Bois) , who was the 
 king's marshal at Paris and who came to Navarre in 
 the train of the princess. 
 
 The question arises, how did the dramatist acquire 
 this intimate knowledge of the court of Navarre in 
 1588, at so early a period in the career of its king? 
 
 William Shakspere came to London from an illit- 
 erate town, himself wholly illiterate, in or about 
 1586, one year or so only before the composition of 
 the play. On the other hand, Anthony Bacon went 
 to the Continent in 1579, and for five years — to wit, 
 from 1585 to 1590 — was an honored guest at Henry's 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 43 
 
 court in Navarre, *' on terms of close intimacy," says 
 the Dictionary of National Biography (ii. 325), 
 "with the king's councillors," and in confidential 
 correspondence with his brother Francis in London. 
 
 The author of the play had knowledge, also, of a 
 very obscure event in the history of Navarre, which, 
 it is safe to say, was unknown in England in the 
 time of Shake-speare, especially to persons who had 
 never crossed the channel. We find it in the chron- 
 icles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, where it is thus 
 narrated : — 
 
 " Charles, King of Navarre, came to Paris to wait on the King. 
 He negotiated so successfully -with the King and his Privy Council 
 that he obtained a gift of the castle of Nemours, with some of its 
 dependant castlewicks, which territory was made a duchy. He in- 
 stantly did homage for it, and at the same time surrendered to the 
 King the Castle of Cherbourg, the county of Evreux, and all other 
 lordships he possessed within the kingdom of France, renouncing 
 all claim or profit in them to the King and to his successors, on con- 
 sideration that with this duchy of Nemours the King of France 
 engaged to pay him two hundred thousand gold crowns of the 
 King our Lord." — i. 54. 
 
 This is given in the play as follows : — 
 
 " Madame, your father here doth intimate 
 The payment of a hundred thousand crowns, 
 Being but the one half of an entire sum 
 Disbursed by my father in his wars. 
 But say that he or we (as neither have) 
 Received that sum; yet there remains unpaid 
 A hundred thousand more." — ii. i. 
 
 The Chronicles of Monstrelet were not translated 
 into English until 1809, or more than two hundred 
 years after the play was written. That Shake-speare, 
 the dramatist, was perfectly competent to read Mon- 
 strelet in the original French, however, there is suflS- 
 cient evidence in the play itself. He puns twice in 
 that language ; once when he uses the word 
 
44 COINCIDENCES 
 
 " capon" in the double sense of a fowl and a love- 
 letter, and again the word " point" as the tip of a 
 sword and a strong French negative. The play is 
 also full of sentences in Latin, Spanish, and Italian, 
 so much so that Professor Stapfer thinks it "over- 
 cumbered with learning, not to say pedantic." An- 
 other commentator finds in it a * ' manifest ostenta- 
 tion of book-learning." Francis Bacon, it must be 
 remembered, spent nearly three years in France and 
 at other places on the continent in his youth, after a 
 course of study at Cambridge University. . 
 
 Singularly enough, also, the embassy of the prin- 
 cess itself had an historical basis. Catherine de 
 Medici made a journey from Paris to Navarre, " with 
 many beautiful ladies," it is expressly stated, "in 
 her train," in 1586, of which, it is quite safe to say, 
 there could not have been any public account, known 
 in England, in 1588. This took place, however, 
 during Anthony Bacon's residence in Navarre. 
 
 In ' All's Well that Ends Well,' we read, — 
 
 " I am St. Jacques' pilgrim, thither gone." — iii. 4. 
 
 St. Jacques had a church dedicated to him at 
 Orleans, to which in the time of Francis Bacon's visit 
 to that city pilgrims were used to resort. This fact 
 could scarcely have then been known in England, 
 certainly not with such prominence as to suggest the 
 statement in the text; for, as Richard Grant White 
 says, "it has no relation whatever to the dramatic 
 progress, the interest, or even the vraisemblance of 
 the scene. For Shake-speare's purpose one saint 
 was as good as another, — St. Geprge, St. Andrew, 
 excepted." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 45 
 
 Mr. George James of Birmingliam, Eng., calls at- 
 tention to the use of the word Venvoy in this play. 
 The word is in the highest degree technical. Ety- 
 mologically considered, it means simply what is 
 sent, but, as defined by the dramatist himself, it is 
 the last couplet of a song, — 
 
 " An epilogue or discourse, to make plain 
 Some obscure precedence that hath tofore been sain." — iii. i. 
 
 Such songs, according to a custom peculiar to 
 France, were written in competition for prizes, and, 
 it is needless to add, would have been unknown at 
 that time to a foreigner who had not studied French 
 lyric poetry on the spot. 
 
 Mr. James has also been able to connect one of the 
 principal characters of the play historically with 
 Francis Bacon. He identifies Antonio Perez, the 
 well-known Spanish refugee, with Don Armado. 
 Perez visited England in 1593, and at once, joining 
 the followers of Essex, was presented to the Bacon 
 brothers, with whom for a time he seems to have 
 been on terms of intimacy. The intimacy, however, 
 was of short duration, for the Spaniard speedily de- 
 veloped so much affectation and bombast in the courtly 
 circles to which he had been admitted that he soon 
 fell into contempt. Essex left London to avoid him. 
 In the following year Perez published a book under 
 the assumed name of Raphael Peregrine, an un- 
 doubted allusion to which Mr. James discovers in 
 ' l/ove's Labor's Lost.' Holophernes is ridiculing 
 Don Armado, who, like Perez, is a " traveller from 
 Spain ' ' and noted for his bombastic style of writing, 
 and says of him, — 
 
 " He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, 
 too peregrinate, as I may call it." — v. I. 
 
46 COINCIDENCES 
 
 As if to make the reference more pointed and un- 
 mistakable, Sir Nathaniel replies, — 
 
 " A most singular and choice epithet," 
 
 and at once enters it in his note-book. Don Armado 
 is, of course, a caricature of Perez. 
 
 * lyove's lyabor's Lost ' was first printed in 1598, 
 with the statement on its title-page that it had been 
 " newly corrected and augmented." This parody on 
 Perez' sobriquet was evidently one of the aiigmenta- 
 tions. 
 
 But it is in the motif ox raison d^etre of the comedy 
 that we find the strongest proof of its Baconian 
 authorship. ' I/Ove's Labor's Lost ' stands, indeed, 
 as one of Bacon's earliest protests against the barren 
 philosophy of his time. 
 
 According to the play, the King of Navarre and 
 his nobles pledge themselves under oath to retire 
 from the world for three years and give their whole 
 attention during that time to study. They are to 
 lay aside all the cares, obligations, and pleasures of 
 life for this purpose. The comedy turns upon the 
 utter futility of such a scheme. It is a travesty on 
 the kind of learning, and particularly on the methods 
 of acquiring learning, then in vogue. For ages men 
 had sought knowledge by turning their backs upon 
 nature and upon human life. All that they had 
 wanted was Aristotle and the Fathers ; all that they 
 acquired was, in the language of Hamlet, "words, 
 words, words." 
 
 In the ' Advancement of Learning ' Bacon attri- 
 butes to this method of study what he calls the 
 " first distemper of learning." He says : — 
 " Men have -withdrawn themselves too much from the contempla- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 47 
 
 tion of nature and the observations of experience, and have tumbled 
 up and down in their own reasons and conceits. 
 
 " As many substances in nature which are solid do putrefy and 
 corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowl- 
 edge to putrefy into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome and (as 
 I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind 
 of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or good- 
 ness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign 
 amongst the schoolmen ; who had sharp and strong wits, abund- 
 ance of leisure, and small variety of reading ; but their wits being 
 shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dic- 
 tator), as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and 
 colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did, 
 out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit, 
 spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in 
 their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, 
 which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh ac- 
 cording to the stuff, and is limited thereby ; but if it work upon 
 itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings 
 forth cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and 
 work, but of no substance or profit." — Book I. 
 
 Here, then, is tlie key to the drama of ' Love's 
 Labor's Lost.' It was Bacon's first indictment against 
 the Aristotelian philosophy as it had been studied 
 by the schoolmen, and as it was still studied and 
 taught in his own time. The lesson it teaches is 
 this : that the closer the scholar keeps himself in 
 touch with his fellow-men, the more successful will 
 he be in the pursuit of truth. The rays of the sun 
 give out no heat till they strike the earth ; so those 
 of truth cannot warm or fructify till they come into 
 actual contact with human life. 
 
 Bacon left the University of Cambridge in his six- 
 teenth year, before the completion of his course and 
 without a degree. He did this, as he afterwards ex- 
 plained to Dr. Rawley, because he was disgusted 
 with the methods of study which prevailed there, 
 and which, it appears, are ridiculed in ' Love's 
 Labor's Lost.' 
 
48 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXV. 
 Doctor Caius. 
 One of the most amusing characters in Shake- 
 speare is Dr. Caius in the 'Merry Wives of Windsor.* 
 He is an irascible, hot-headed French physician who 
 is ready to draw his rapier on the slightest provoca- 
 tion against anybody who comes in his way, but with 
 a special antipathy toward the honest Welsh parson, 
 Sir Hugh Evans. Seeing in Evans a possible rival 
 for the hand of Mistress Anne Page, he sends a chal- 
 lenge to him, charging the messenger who carries 
 it,— 
 
 " You jack'nape, give-a this letter to Sir Hugh ; by gar, it is a 
 challenge ; I vill cut his troat in de Park ; and I vill teach a scurvy 
 jack-a-uape priest to meddle — by gar, I vill kill de jack priest." 
 — 1.4. 
 
 At the appointed time and place for the duel the 
 parson fails to appear, whereupon the following 
 colloquy occurs between Caius and his servant : — 
 
 " Caius. Vat is de clock, Jack? 
 
 " Rugby, 'T is past the hour, sir, that Hugh promised to meet. 
 
 " Caius. By gar, he has save his soul, dat he is no come ; he has 
 pray his Pible well, dat he is no come ; by gar. Jack Rugby, he is 
 dead already if he be come. 
 
 "Rugby. He is wise, sir ; he knew your worship would kill him, 
 if he came. 
 
 " Caius. By gar, de herring is no dead so as I vill kill him. Take 
 your rapier, Jack ; I vill tell you how I vill kill him. 
 
 " Rugby. Alas, sir, I cannot fence. 
 
 " Caius. Villany, take your rapier." — ii. 3. 
 
 On another occasion he threatens Simple, whom 
 Mistress Quickly for his safety had hidden in a closet, 
 with instant death. 
 
 It may astonish some of our readers to learn that 
 this ridiculous character in the play was drawn from 
 life. The prototype was Dr. John Caius of Cam- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 49 
 
 bridge University, a physician, the re-founder of 
 Gonville Hall (which still in part bears his name), 
 and in his relations with the students an exceedingly 
 choleric and revengeful instructor. His true name 
 was Kaye, but as he had been educated abroad, and 
 was inclined to ape foreign manners, he changed his 
 English cognomen into its I^atin form, Caius, (pro- 
 nounced Keyes), by which he was then and is now 
 generally known. The Dictionary of National Biog- 
 raphy says of him : 
 
 "Caius's relations with the society over which he ruled at Cam- 
 bridge were less happy. Lying, as he did, under the suspicion of 
 aiming at a restoration of Catholic doctrine, he was an object of 
 dislike to the majority of the fellows, and could with difficulty 
 maintain his authority. He retaliated vigorously on the malcon- 
 tents. He not only involved them in law-suits which emptied their 
 slender purses, but visited them with personal castigations, and 
 even incarcerated them in the stocks. Expulsions were frequent, 
 not less than twenty of the fellows, according to the statement of 
 one of their number, having suffered this extreme penalty." 
 
 To complete the likeness between the two charac- 
 ters, dramatic and historical, we find that Caius had 
 an especial antipathy to Welshmen, for in the ordi- 
 nances of the college founded by him, Welshmen are 
 expressly excluded from the privileges of fellowship. 
 
 It appears then — 
 
 1. That both were physicians. 
 
 2. That both came from abroad. 
 
 3. That both were phenomenally quarrelsome, 
 even to the extent of inflicting chastisement upon 
 others with their own hands. 
 
 4. That both hated Welshmen. 
 
 Now, how did William Shakspere of Stratford be- 
 come acquainted with these idiosyncrasies of a Cam- 
 bridge professor, and how did he acquire sufficient in- 
 
50 COINCIDENCES 
 
 terest in the subject to induce him, twenty-nine years 
 after the professor's death, to hold the man up to 
 public ridicule in a play ? Dr. Caius died in July, 
 1573, at which time the reputed poet was living at 
 Stratford, nine years old. The controversy, as it 
 raged in Cambridge and as it is reflected in the play, 
 was a personal one, and in the absence of newspapers 
 or equivalent means of disseminating general infor- 
 mation could hardly have been known beyond uni- 
 versity circles. 
 
 Francis Bacon was the nephew of Lord Treasurer 
 Burghley, to whom the students appealed for protec- 
 tion against their oppressor. He entered the uni- 
 versity in April, 1573, three months before Dr. Cains' 
 death and in the height of the prevailing excitement. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 51 
 
 XXVI. 
 Magna Charta. 
 
 In the historical drama of ' King John ' Shake- 
 speare does not mention Magna Charta, the granting 
 of which was the great event of the reign. The fair 
 inference may be that he was not in sympathy with 
 such a movement. 
 
 Francis Bacon also in all his writings does not 
 allude to the subject. He despised the people and 
 thought them unworthy of taking any part in public 
 affairs. He stood inflexibly, even against the nobles, 
 for the royal prerogatives. Any attempt to extort 
 concessions from a King by force was his special ab- 
 horrence. 
 
52 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXVII. 
 Humphrey, Duke of Gioucester. 
 
 A singular instance of what must be regarded as a 
 misjudgment of character is found in the drama of 
 ' King Henry VI.' Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 
 was the youngest son of Henry IV. On the death of 
 his brother, Henry V., he became, in the absence of 
 the Duke of Bedford, Protector of the Kingdom, and 
 was therefore practically for many years at the head 
 of the government. His administration of public 
 affairs, however, was very unsatisfactory. The 
 country was kept in a continual turmoil by his ill 
 temper and his fondness for intrigues. " His greedi- 
 ness," says the Dictionary of National Biography, 
 '* was notorious. He was unprincipled, factious and 
 blindly selfish." The introduction into the country 
 contrary to law of the practice of torture in judicial 
 proceedings was due to him. He persecuted Wick- 
 liffe's followers, who were driven to hold their con- 
 venticles for worship and to read the bible in peas- 
 ants' huts, saw-pits and field ditches, at the risk of 
 being burned alive at the stake. Even the reputa- 
 tion for patriotism which he acquired among the 
 vulgar was false, for it was his scandalous marriage 
 with the Countess of Hainault that led, as he must 
 have known that it would lead, to the estrangement 
 of the Duke of Burgundy and to the consequent expul- 
 sion of the English from France. At the meeting of 
 Parliament at St. Edmondsbury in 1447 he was 
 arrested for treason, and the next morning was found 
 dead in his bed. His death was natural. 
 
 The Duke is represented very differently in the 
 play. There he is always the "good Duke Hum- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 53 
 
 phrey." In every quarrel lie is the innocent victim, 
 while the Queen, the Duke of Suffolk and Cardinal 
 Beaufort, his brother, are the wicked conspirators. 
 As to the circumstances of Gloucester's death which, 
 according to the dramatist, was a deliberate murder, 
 parliament having been summoned to an out-of-the- 
 way place for this special purpose, we again quote 
 from the Dictionary of National Biography: 
 
 " His health, ruined by debauchery, had long been weak. The 
 portraits of him depict a worn and prematurely old man. He had 
 already been threatened with palsy, and the sudden arrest and 
 worry might well have brought about a fatal paralytic stroke. 
 Fox's contemporary narrative of the parliament at Bury, the best 
 and fullest account of his last days, says no word of foul play. . . . 
 The fact that Suffolk was never formally charged with the murder 
 in the long list of crimes brought up against him when he fell, is 
 almost conclusive of Gloucester's innocence. . . . Cardinal Beau- 
 fort certainly could have had no part in the tragedy. Bitter as was 
 the Duke's emnity against him, the Cardinal would never have 
 done a deed which was so contrary to the interests of the Lancas- 
 trian dynasty, and which opened the way for the ambitious schemes 
 of the rival house. A few weeks later the great Cardinal died. 
 The scene in which Shakespeare portrays the " black despair " of 
 his death has no historical basis." 
 
 The explanation of this great discrepancy gen- 
 erally given, is, that the Duke founded a public li- 
 brary at Oxford and thus won the hearts of scholars. 
 This is wholly inadequate and inadmissible. 
 
 Francis Bacon lived at Gorhambury in the imme- 
 diate vicinity of St. Albans. The Duke of Gloucester 
 also lived at St. Albans. The Duke and his wife 
 were admitted to the fraternity of the great Abbey 
 there in 1424. A stately arched monument of free- 
 stone, adorned with figures of his royal ancestors, 
 marks his last resting place near the shrine. He 
 was, therefore, identified in the closest manner with 
 the town and particularly with its religious institu- 
 
54 COINCIDENCES 
 
 tions. The Abbot himself venerated his memory. If 
 a good opinion of him could have existed anywhere 
 in England, it would naturally be found at St. 
 Albans. The play was a youthful production, written 
 at a time of life when such impressions are strongest. 
 Furthermore, in considering a case of this kind it 
 must never be forgotten that the portrayal, not of 
 history, but of human nature, is the chief aim and 
 end of dramatic art. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE sS 
 
 XXVIII. 
 The Merchant of Venice 
 
 In this drama a Jew, who had loaned money to a 
 Venetian merchant and for non-payment at maturity 
 exacted a penalty that would have caused death, is 
 held up to scorn and ridicule for all time. 
 
 Francis Bacon once borrowed money of a Jew 
 named Simpson, and was sued for it in the spring of 
 1598. Soon afterward the creditor, contrary to 
 agreement and under circumstances intended to in- 
 flict personal disgrace, had Bacon arrested on the 
 street and held in custody. 
 
 The play was entered on Stationers' register in 
 July, 1598. 
 
56 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXIX. 
 ' TROII.US AND Cressida.' 
 
 The play of ' Troilus and Cressida ' was first pub- 
 lished in 1609. A singular circumstance attended 
 its appearance. The first copies that were issued 
 from the press contained a preface which, for some 
 reason not acknowledged, became unsatisfactory to 
 those ' ' grand possessors ' ' (as they were called) who 
 controlled the manuscript, and it was accordingly 
 for the remainder of the edition withdrawn. Shake- 
 spearean scholars have hitherto sought in vain for an 
 explanation of this curious anomaly. The truth, 
 however, seems to us to be quite apparent. The play 
 bears on its surface, as well as in its texture, the 
 proof of its having been the work of a lawyer. At 
 the same time we can easily understand that a sug- 
 gestion to this effect in the preface might not have 
 been agreeable to all concerned. And yet here it is, 
 almost in so many words : 
 
 " Were but the vain names of commedies chang'de 
 for the titles of commodities, or of playes for pleas 
 [pronounced in those days plays\ you should see all 
 those grand censors, that now stile them such 
 vanities, flock to them." 
 
 That is, were they but pleas, (or the work of a 
 lawyer), people of quality would flock to see them. 
 
 Francis Bacon was a lawyer. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 57 
 
 XXX. 
 
 Julius C^sar. 
 
 The dramatist seems to have had a special admira- 
 tion for Julius Csesar. He not only wrote one of his 
 greatest tragedies on Caesar's life, but he also men- 
 tions Caesar, generally in approbation of him, thirty- 
 nine times in his poems and plays. 
 
 Bacon's admiration of Julius Csesar was unbounded. 
 He wrote a highly appreciative treatise on Caesar's 
 life, besides referring to him approvingly thirty-four 
 times in his other writings. 
 
 The two agree, also, as to the cause of the con- 
 spiracy that ended in Csesar's assassination, as the 
 following respective citations from them will show : 
 
 Bacon: " How to extinguish envy he knew excellently well, and 
 thought it an object worth purchasing even at the sacrifice of 
 dignity. . . . He did not put off his mask, but so carried himself 
 that he turned the envy upon the other party. At last, whether 
 satiated with power or corrupted by flattery, he aspired likewise to 
 the external emblems thereof, the name of king and the crown, 
 which turned to his destruction." 
 
 Imago Civilis yulii Casaris. 
 
 Shakespeare: 
 
 " All the conspirators, save only he [Brutus], 
 Did that they did in envy of great Csesar." 
 
 TAe Tragedy o/yulius Ccesar, V, V, 6g. 
 
 The assassination itself they described in almost 
 the same language : 
 
 Bacon : " They came about him as a stag at bay." 
 Shakespeare : " Here wast thou bay'd, brave hart." 
 
 Both of our authors seem to have laid great stress 
 
 upon Caesar's reformation of the Roman calendar. 
 
 Bacon says of it : 
 
 " So we receive from him, as a Monument both of his power and 
 learning, the then reformed computation of the year ; well express- 
 
58 COINCIDENCES 
 
 ing that he took it to be as great a glory to himself to observe and 
 know the law of the heavens as to give law to men upon the earth." 
 
 Advancemint of Learning, 
 
 The author of the plays after his manner illustrates 
 the popular confusion that necessarily attended the 
 introduction of a new calendar among the people of 
 Rome, as follows : 
 
 The Tragedy of Julius C^sar. 
 Act II, Scene I. 
 
 The Conspirators at Brutus' House before sunrise; Brutus and Cassius 
 apart, whispering. 
 
 "Decius. Here lies the east ; doth not the day break here ? 
 
 Casca. No. 
 
 Cinna. O ! pardon, sir, it doth ; and yon grey lines, 
 
 That fret the clouds, are messengers of day. 
 Casca. You shall confess that you are both deceiv'd. 
 
 Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises ; 
 
 Which is a great way growing on the south, 
 
 Weighing the youthful season of the year. 
 
 Some two months hence, up higher toward the north* 
 
 He first presents his fire, and the high east 
 
 Stands as the Capitol, directly here." 
 
 Not a single editor of the play or commentator 
 on it has, so far as we know, ventured a word to ex- 
 plain the grounds of this disputation among the con- 
 spirators or even to account for its existence. The 
 difference of opinion was due, as we have already in- 
 timated, to the recent introduction of a new calendar, 
 by which nearly 80 days had been added to the civil 
 year, to make it coincide with the course of the sun. 
 The conspirators had simply spoken from the points 
 of view of different calendars. 
 
 Shakespearean editors, however, unable to appre- 
 ciate the text, have resorted, as usual under such cir- 
 cumstances, to mutilations of it. Brutus, awaking 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE S9 
 
 early on the morning of the fifteenth, or Ides, of 
 March, and uncertain what day it was, had the fol- 
 lowing colloquy (as Shakespeare wrote it) with his 
 valet : 
 
 "Brutus. Get you to bed again, it is not day. 
 
 Is not tomorrow, boy, the first of March? 
 Lucius. I know not, sir. 
 Brutus. Look in the calendar and bring me word. 
 
 Lucius. Sir, March is wasted fifteen days." 
 
 Editor Lewis Theobald (1733), unable to compre- 
 hend how Brutus could commit such an error as to 
 mistake the fifteenth of March for the first, promptly 
 substituted for the latter the word Ides., and has been 
 followed by editors generally from that time to the 
 present, a period of one hundred and seventy-two 
 years. Probably none of them ever heard that under 
 the operations of the old calendar, which did not ter- 
 minate until January ist, 46 B. C, the Roman year 
 had been advancing at the rate of eleven minutes and 
 fourteen seconds per annum against true time for 
 hundreds of years. Theobald (the hero of the Dun- 
 ciad) also tampered with Lucius' reply, making Lu- 
 cius say that March had wasted fourteen instead of 
 fifteen days, because it was very early in the morning 
 of the fifteenth when Lucius spoke. In this respect 
 also he has been followed by other editors, though 
 none of them could hardly have been ignorant that 
 the law recognizes no parts of days. The author of 
 the play was a lawyer. 
 
 The Earl of Beaconsfield once seriously asked the 
 question, " Did Shakespeare ever write a single whole 
 play ?" A safe answer, considering the parts that ed- 
 itors have taken and that they still take in correct- 
 ing (!) Shakespeare, would be, no. 
 
6o COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXXI. 
 The Reign of King Henry VII. 
 
 With the exception of ' King John,' the historical 
 dramas of Shake-speare extend consecutively from 
 the reign of Richard II. to that of Henry VIII., a 
 period of i8i years. One break, and one only, 
 occurs in the series, viz., that of Henry VII., which 
 is omitted. 
 
 Bacon wrote one historical work, that on the reign 
 of Henry VII. He began it abruptly with the vic- 
 tory of Bosworth Field, making but slight reference 
 to the causes and events that led up to it. Shake- 
 speare leaves us at this exact point in the drama pre- 
 ceding ' Richard III.' This ends with the crowning 
 of Henry on the battle-field by I^ord Stanley who 
 plucks the crown for the occasion from Richard's 
 "dead temples." Bacon's history begins with the 
 crowning of Henry on the battle-field by I/ord 
 Stanley, who finds the crown "among the spoils." 
 The two accounts seem to be tongued and grooved 
 together, as though from one hand. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 6i 
 
 XXXII. 
 Henry the Eighth. 
 
 ' Henry VIII.' was also one of those dramas of 
 Shakespeare, sixteen in number, that were printed 
 for the first time in the folio of 1623. Possibly it 
 was in existence in an earlier draft in 1613, for at 
 the bu-ning of the Globe Theatre on the afternoon 
 of June 29 of that year, a play, described by a con- 
 temporary as ' ' representing some principal pieces in 
 the reign of Henry VIII." was in course of perform- 
 ance there, under the title of 'All is True.' Whether 
 this be so or not, the drama, as we now have it, 
 seems in some important particulars to have been 
 suggested by the condition of things under King 
 James in 1621. It treats of fallen greatness, of 
 Queen Catharine, the divorced wife of Henry, and of 
 Lord Chancellor Wolsey, who was degraded from his 
 high office, stripped of the seals, and ordered to be 
 imprisoned in the Tower. 
 
 The argument for Bacon's authorship of this play 
 may be rested in part on three points : 
 
 1. The author was indebted for some of his mate- 
 rials directly to Cavendish's 'Life of Wolsey,' which, 
 though written in 1557, was not printed until 1641, 
 or eighteen years after the appearance of the play. 
 As Bacon was one of Wolsey's successors in office, he 
 would naturally have had access to this manuscript, 
 while a play-actor would not. 
 
 2. It is practically certain that in 1622-23, Bacon 
 was engaged upon a work pertaining to the reign of 
 Henry VIII. He completed his history of Henry 
 VII. in October, 1621. This was so much admired 
 that Prince Charles immediately requested him to 
 
62 COINCIDENCES 
 
 •write also a history of Henry VIII. Bacon prom- 
 ised to do so. Accordingly, in January, 1623, lie 
 applied to the proper authorities for the loan of such 
 documents as might be in the public archives relat- 
 ing to that monarch's reign. The application was 
 formally granted. At this time. Bacon appears to 
 have been actually at work in real or apparent fulfil- 
 ment of his undertaking, for under date of February 
 ID, Mr. Chamberlain writes : — 
 
 " Lord [Bacon] busies himself about books, and hath set out two 
 lately ' Historia Ventorum ' and * ^e Vita el Morte,' with promises of 
 more. I have not seen either of them because I have not leisure ; 
 but if the life of Henry VIII., which they say he is about, might 
 come out after his own manner, I should find time and means 
 enough to read it." 
 
 A few days later (February 21), Bacon himself 
 writes to Buckingham, who had gone to Spain with 
 Prince Charles, asking to be remembered to the 
 Prince, " who, I hope ere long, will make me leave 
 King Henry VIII. and set me on work in relation to 
 his Highness's heroical adventures." 
 
 The next reference to the subject is also in one of 
 Bacon's own letters. Acknowledging the receipt of 
 a communication from Toby Matthew, June 26, 1623, 
 he says : — 
 
 "Since you say the Prince hath not forgot his commandment 
 touching my history of Henry VIII., I may not forget my duty. 
 But I find Sir Collier, who poured forth what he had in my other 
 work, somewhat dainty of his materials in this." 
 
 It appears, however, that notwithstanding all 
 these repeated implications to the effect that he was 
 engaged upon a history of Henry VIII., he was act- 
 ually doing no such thing. He did, indeed, make a 
 beginning ; he gathered materials ; he dictated one 
 morning about two pages ; and then he wrote to 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 63 
 
 the prince, apologizing for not going on with the 
 work and for dropping it altogether. But did he 
 drop it? From whose pen came those wonderful 
 panegyrics of Queen Elizabeth and King James that 
 were printed six months afterward in the drama of 
 ' Henry VIII.,' and that can be exactly paralleled in 
 the ' Advancement of I^earning ' and the Infelicem 
 Memoriam Mizabethoe? Those heart-breaking la- 
 mentations over fallen greatness, such as Bacon must 
 have still been uttering in private over his downfall 
 in 162 1? Those entrancing visions of peace and 
 plenty, of honor and gladness for the English people, 
 characteristic of one in whom forgiveness of injuries 
 was a cardinal virtue, and love of mankind an ab- 
 sorbing passion ? 
 
 3. Queen Catherine, the first wife of King Henry 
 VIII., made her residence during the latter part of 
 her life at Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire. The 
 Duke of Manchester, to whom the place belongs, 
 published in 1864 a valuable collection of papers, 
 found in the castle and at Simancas in Spain, which 
 show that of all the numerous and gifted persons 
 who have written of that unfortunate princess, two, 
 and two only, have correctly adjudged her character. 
 These two, thus in singular agreement, are Francis 
 Bacon and the author of the Shake-speare dramas. 
 The Duke says : — 
 
 " So far as concerns all popular ideas of her, Catherine is a creat- 
 ure of the mist. Shakespeare and Bacon, the highest judges and 
 firmest painters of character, have, it is true, described her, if only 
 lightly and by the way, as a woman of flesh and blood ; the flesh 
 rather stubborn, the blood somewhat hot ; as a lady who could 
 curse her enemies and caress her friends ; a princess full of natural 
 graces, virtues, and infirmities. Had the portraits by Shakespeare 
 and Bacon been painted in full, they would have been all that we 
 
64 COINCIDENCES 
 
 could hope or wish. But they are only fragments of the whole ; 
 and the work of all minor hands is nothing, or worse than nothing. 
 In these inferior pencillings, the woman is concealed beneath the 
 veil of a nun. In place of a girl full of sun and life, eager to love 
 and to be loved, enamoured of state and pomp, who liked a good 
 dinner, a new gown, above all a young husband ; one who had her 
 quarrels, her debts, her feminine fibs, and her little deceptions, 
 even with those who were most near and dear to her ; a creature to 
 be kissed and petted, to be adored, and chidden, and ill-used — all 
 of which Catherine was in the flesh — we find a cold, grim Lady 
 Abbess, a creature too pious for the world in which her lot was 
 cast, too pure for the husband who had been given to her. Such a 
 conception is vague in outline and false in spirit. Catherine was 
 every inch a woman before she became every inch a queen." — 
 Court and Society, i, 5. 
 
 This judgment is confirmed by high literary au- 
 thority : 
 
 "The whole story of the Queen, as now told from the ample 
 Simancas text, is in perfect harmony with what Shakespeare and 
 Bacon say of her." — The Atkenaum, January 16, 1867. 
 
 Lord Montagu of Kimbolton, first Earl of Man- 
 chester, was one of Bacon's dearest friends. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 65 
 
 XXXIII. 
 Insanity. 
 In the famous interview between Hamlet and his 
 mother in the chamber-scene, already referred to, the 
 prince sees the ghost of the murdered king and 
 addresses it. The Queen, unable to hear or see any- 
 thing to account for her son's conduct, finally ex- 
 claims, — 
 
 " This is the very coinage of your brain ; 
 This bodiless creation ecstacy 
 Is very cunning in." — iii. 4. 
 
 Hamlet replies : 
 
 " It is not madness 
 That I have utter'd ; bring me to the test 
 And I the matter will re-word ; which madness 
 Would gambol from." 
 
 Dr. Wigan, a specialist, points out the scientific 
 pertinence of this reply. Hamlet asks to be put to a 
 test, and suggests one known only to experts, viz. : 
 to repeat, word for word, what he had previously 
 uttered. Inability to recall a train of thought is 
 said to be a special mark of insanity, even in the 
 mildest form of the disease. 
 
 Other passages in the plays show the writer's ex- 
 ceptional knowledge in this branch of therapeutics. 
 When King Lear, for instance, falls into a deep 
 sleep in the fourth act and gives signs of immediate 
 restoration to health, the physician in charge orders 
 music, thus : 
 
 (Enter Lear in a chair carried by servants.') 
 Doctor. Ay, madam ; in the heaviness of sleep 
 
 We put fresh garments on him. 
 Kent. Be by, good madame, when we do awake him ; 
 
 I doubt not of his temperance. 
 Cordelia. Very well. \Mtisic. 
 
 Doct. Please you, draw near. Louder the music there." — iv. 7. 
 
66 COINCIDENCES 
 
 In the 'Tempest,' also, Prospero refers to the 
 effects of music, on the insane, as follows : 
 
 [Solemn music, 
 " A. solemn air, and the best comforter 
 To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains." — v. i. 
 
 No less clear are Richard II. 's words on the sub- 
 ject in his last monologue : 
 
 "This music mads me ; let it sound no more ; 
 For though it have holp madmen to their wits, 
 In me it seems it will make wise men sad." — y. 4. 
 "Shakespeare knew, however he acquired the knowledge, the 
 phenomena of insanity as few have known them." — Goethe. 
 
 Bacon wrote to Queen Elizabeth in the spring of 
 1600 that his mother was " much worn " ; soon 
 afterward, perhaps at the death of her son Anthony 
 in 160 1, she became violently insane, and continued 
 so under the sole, unremitting care of her only sur- 
 viving son Francis until her death in 1610. It was 
 during this period that ' King I^ear ' and the revised 
 version of ' Hamlet ' were written. The author's 
 portrayal of insanity in these plays is still regarded 
 by specialists as a psychological marvel. 
 
 "Shakespeare must have had an opportunity of observing [a 
 person or] persons afflicted in mind. Prof. Neumann very justly 
 remarks concerning Ophelia's case : ' Whence could Shakespeare 
 have known that persons thus afflicted decorate themselves with 
 flowers, offer flowers to other people, and sing away to themselves ; 
 I myself cannot conceive where.' Dr. Bucknill even maintains 
 that watching persons mentally afflicted must have been a favorite study of 
 Shakespeare's" — Prof. Ei,ZE'S William Shakespeare, ip^. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 67 
 XXXIV. 
 
 BOSPHORUS. 
 
 The tragedy of ' Othello ' was first printed in 
 quarto in 1622 (six years after the reputed author's 
 death), though it had been in existence as an acting 
 play for ten or twelve years preceding. In the folio 
 of 1623, it appears in a revised form, containing 
 among other striking improvements one hundred and 
 sixty additional lines, due without the slightest 
 doubt to the dramatist himself. Among these lines 
 we find the following : 
 
 " Like to the Pontic sea, 
 Whose icy current and compulsive course 
 Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on 
 To the Propontic and the Hellespont." — iii. 3. 
 
 It seems to be probable, then, that sometime between 
 the date of the first appearance of the play on the 
 stage (1610) and that in the Folio (1623) the author's 
 attention had been called to a tidal peculiarity of 
 the Mediterranean Sea ; namely, that the current 
 through the Bosphorus flows continuously in one di- 
 rection, from east to west. William Shakspere died 
 in Stratford six years before the first publication of 
 the play in its original draft, which was, as we have 
 said, in 1622. Francis Bacon investigated the tides 
 of the Mediterranean in or about 1616, and in his 
 treatise on the subject, entitled De Fluxu et Refluxu 
 Maris, made especial reference to the fact that 
 through the Bosphorus the tide never ebbs. 
 
 It is curious, also, that the two seas, east and west 
 of the Bosphorus, are mentioned under the same 
 names by both authors : 
 
 " Pontus and Propontis " — Bacon. 
 
 " Pontic and Propontic " — Shake-SPEarb. 
 
68 COINCIDENCES 
 
 Also, the same minute particulars regarding the cur- 
 rent : 
 
 " Pursues its course " — Bacon. 
 
 " Keeps due on " — Shakb-SpBARB. 
 
 " With extraordinary swiftness." — Bacon. 
 
 *' With violent pace." — Shaks-SPBARB. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 6g 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 Sir John Falstaff. 
 The great dramas of ' King Henry IV.' (two parts) 
 and ' King Henry V. ' were developed from a preced- 
 ing one written by the same author in his youth, 
 covering both of these reigns, entitled ' The Famous 
 Victories of Henry the Fifth.' In this early produc- 
 tion the buffoon was named Sir John Oldcastle, an 
 historical personage who lived one hundred and fifty 
 years before the time of Shake-speare, and was a 
 highly respectable martyr to the cause of religion. 
 The name was brought along and used on the stage 
 in the new play, as we now have it, of ' King Henry 
 IV. , ' Part First ; but, before the play was printed (in 
 1598) it was withdrawn (probably under compulsion 
 from the royal court) and that of Sir John Falstaff 
 substituted for it. The latter must therefore have 
 been selected in or about 1597. At this time or 
 thereabouts, perhaps while the manuscript of the 
 play was in the hands of the printer, Bacon was 
 prosecuting an important suit at law before the 
 courts in London, with an associate named John Hal- 
 staff. The- origin of the name in the play has been 
 for more than a hundred years the subject of a great 
 deal of wild and absurd speculation. 
 
70 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXXVI. 
 An Idiosyncracy. 
 Bacon had a habit, which he derived from his 
 mother, of writing on special occasions in one lan- 
 guage with the alphabet of another. This he did 
 whenever he wished to conceal something he had 
 in mind from people generally or from those not 
 in the secret. The languages selected for this 
 purpose were Greek and English. A notable in- 
 stance is found among his private papers pre- 
 served in the library of the Lambeth palace in 
 Irondon, in which he seems to hint that there was a 
 reason, although under the circumstances he could 
 not make it known, why he offered no defence against 
 the charges of bribery brought against him before 
 the House of Lords. We have the explanation, how- 
 ever, from his servant Bushel, who says that his 
 master made no defence because the King, fearing its 
 effect upon himself and his favorite, the Duke of 
 Buckingham, privately forbade it. What Bacon 
 wrote was as follows : 
 
 O^ ju,y offxjyev^, <l>ap /8e it <f>poii fi€ to aay, 8aT veviayi. 
 Kopvt,<s; ve^aT Kevavpa KoXvjMjSas" ^vt l taiXX cray dar i 
 ave yooS (oappavT ^op- dey (oepe vor 9e ypeaTecrr otfxpejf 
 8e/3S iv la-paeX vttov wyofi Oe toaXX ^eXX- 
 
 Converting the Greek letters into the correspond- 
 ing English ones in the foregoing, we have the fol- 
 lowing transcription : 
 
 Of my offence, far be it from me to say, lia/ veniam corvis; vexat cen- 
 sure Columbas: but I will say that I have good -warrant for : they 
 were not the greatest offenders in Israel upon whom the wall fell. 
 
 Lady Bacon and her son often used this device in 
 their private correspondence. In compositions in- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 71 
 
 tended for the general public the order of substitu- 
 tion would naturally be reversed. 
 
 The dramatist did the same thing. In the Merry 
 "Wives of Windsor he represents the Host as inviting 
 some friends to accompany him to a field of honor 
 where a duel was to be fought. After some parley 
 he repeats the invitation thus : 
 
 " Will you go, An-heires ? " 
 
 The word An-heires has been an inexhaustible 
 puzzle to all modern editors of the play. They are 
 agreed that the word is not English, that it appears 
 in the text by a printer's blunder, and that the best 
 substitute possible must be found for it. Accordingly 
 in the following named editions, all of good and reg- 
 tilar standing, we have the line given respectively 
 thus : 
 
 Kemble, Heath, Campbell: " Will you go on, hearts? " 
 Stanton, Dyce, Verplanck, Theobald: " Will you go, Myn- 
 heers?" 
 
 " Warburton : " Will you go on, heris ? " 
 Malone : " Will you go on and hear us ? " 
 Steevens : " Will you go on, heroes? " 
 Boaden, Singer : " Will you go on, Cavaliers ? " 
 Collier : " Will you go on, here?" 
 White : " Will you go on, Min-heers? " 
 Becket : '"Will you go on, eh, sir? " 
 Halliwell-Phillips, Hudson : " Will you go on, Sirs ? " 
 Knight : ' ' Will you go on, heers ? ' ' 
 Harness: Will you go, Cavalieres? " 
 
 The word, which Mr. White pronounces " an in- 
 comprehensible combination of letters," is the Greek 
 airqp (gentleman), avepe^ (gentlemen), in which English 
 letters of the alphabet are substituted for the Greek. 
 The meaning is — 
 
 Will you go, gentlemen? 
 
72 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXXVII. 
 The Spanish Language. 
 
 Shakespeare gave to the name of the Bermuda 
 Islands the Spanish pronunciation Bermoothes. This 
 was before the islands were settled by the English 
 and before the name could have become extensively 
 known in England. Even in the Jourdan pamphlet, 
 published in London in 1610, a short time only before 
 the play was written, giving an account of the au- 
 thor's and Sir George Somers' shipwreck there, one 
 year earlier, the name is printed with a d. 
 
 Singularly enough, we find a statement of about 
 this date in Bacon's works that " the Spaniards dis- 
 like thin letters and change them immediately into 
 those of a middle tone," thus flattening thed in Ber- 
 muda into the medium intervocal z (th). Bacon was 
 a member of the company whose ship was wrecked. 
 Both authors seem to have been familiar with the 
 principles of the Spanish language. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 73 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 The Italian Language. 
 ' ' When Othello in the dawning of his jealousy 
 chides Desdemona for being without the handker- 
 chief he had given her as his first love-token, he tells 
 her, — 
 
 ' There's magic in the web of it. 
 A sibyl that number'd in the world 
 The sun to course two hundred compasses, 
 In her prophetic fury, sew'd the work.' 
 "The phrase, 'prophetic fury,' is so striking, so picturesque, 
 and so peculiar that in itself it excites remark and remains upon 
 the memory as the key-note of the passage. Now, in the Orlando 
 Furioso, . . . we have the identical thought, and, in their Italian 
 form, the identical yfioi&.& furor prophetico, used in the description of 
 a woman, sibyl-like, if not a sibyl, weaving a cloth of magic 
 virtues. There is, too, in both passages the idea of a great lapse of 
 time. . . . There was no other translation of the Orlando 
 Furioso into English in Shakespeare's time than Sir John Harring- 
 ton's, published in 1591, and in that the phrase, ' prophetic fury,' 
 or any one like it, does not occur. -^. G. White. 
 
 " The great majority of the dramatis persona: in Shakespeare's 
 comedies, as well as in some of his tragedies, have Italian names, 
 and many of them . . . are as Italian in nature as in name. 
 The moonlight scene in ' The Merchant of Venice ' is Southern, ra 
 every detail and incident. ' Romeo and Juliet ' is Italian through- 
 out, alike in coloring, incident and passion. In the person of 
 Hamlet Shakespeare even appears as a critic of Italian style." 
 
 Gervintts. 
 
 Bacon made free use of Italian literature, quoting 
 it in its own language. 
 
74 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 The Greek Language. 
 
 The dramatist punned in Greek. In the tragedy 
 of 'Anthony and Cleopatra,' Cleopatra pronounces 
 the following eulogy on Anthony, thinking him 
 dead : 
 
 " His legs bestrid the ocean ; his rear'd arm 
 Crested the world ; his voice was propertied 
 As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends ; 
 But when he meant to quail and shake the orb. 
 He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, 
 There was no winter in't ; an Anthony 't was. 
 That grew the more by reaping." — V, 2, 82. 
 
 Mark Anthony always boasted that he was a de- 
 scendant of Hercules, being named indeed, as he 
 claimed, for Hercules' son, Anthos. Shake-speare 
 knew this, for, mentioning Hercules in this same 
 play, he adds, — 
 
 "Whom Anthony lov'd." 
 
 The word anthos in Greek means flower, thus sug- 
 gesting to the dramatist an analogy between An- 
 thony's bounty and a flowering plant, — 
 
 "That grew [grows] the more by reaping." 
 
 Unfortunately, editors of Shake-speare, in igno- 
 rance of their author and of his knowledge of the 
 Greek language, have regarded the word Anthony in 
 this connection as a printer's blunder, and for nearly 
 200 years have actually substituted autumn for it, 
 making this substitution simply and solely because 
 this word seems to bear some slight typographical 
 resemblance (in number of letters at least) to the 
 original. They are not to be chided, of course, for 
 doing all in their power to extinguish one of the 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 75 
 
 finest metaphors in Shake-speare, for their prejudices 
 on the subject of Shake-speare 's scholarship blinded 
 their eyes to it. But with this example before us, 
 ■what becomes, may -we ask, of the "sacred text" ? 
 
 Further proof of the dramatist's knowledge of 
 Greek is found in 'King Lear'. The King, referring 
 to Edgar, says, — 
 
 " I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban," — 
 
 evidently alluding to Simmias in the Phaedo, whom 
 Socrates calls " my Theban friend," and with whom 
 he discusses the nature of the human soul. The dia- 
 logues of Plato had not been translated into English 
 when the play was written. 
 
 It is unnecessary, of course, to show that Bacon 
 was familiar with Greek. It was household knowl- 
 edge in the Bacon family, and exactly the kind of 
 knowledge possessed by the author of the Shakespeare 
 plays. 
 
76 COINCIDENCES 
 
 Epilepsy. 
 
 Bacon had a curious notion regarding epilepsy. 
 Treating of this disease (Nat. Hist., X, 966) he attributes 
 it to " gross vapors rising and entering the cells of 
 the brain." 
 
 Shake-speare had the same singular belief. In 
 the drama of ' Julius Caesar ' he represents the Dicta- 
 tor as having had an attack of epilepsy (falling sick- 
 ness) in the market-place of Rome, caused by the 
 foul breath of the multitude of people surrounding 
 him, thus : 
 
 Casca. "The rabblement hooted, and clapp'd their chopt 
 hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a 
 deal of stinking breath, because Caesar refus'd the crown, that it 
 had almost choked Caesar ; for be swoonded, and fell down at it. 
 And for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my 
 lips, and receiving the bad air. 
 
 Cassim. But, soft, I pray you. What, did Caesar swound ? 
 
 Casca. He fell down in the market-place, and foam'd at mouth, 
 and was speechless. 
 
 Brutus 'Tis very like he hath the falling-sickness." 
 
 Modern editors print the line, last quoted above, 
 thus : 
 
 " 'T is very like ; he hath the falling-sickness," — 
 
 converting Brutus' conjecture into a statement of 
 fact. This is unwarrantable. Brutus had no in- 
 formation, so far as we know, that Caesar was thus 
 afflicted, for Caesar had had but one or two attacks of 
 the disease, and those in recent and distant cam- 
 paigns. Plutarch mentions it, but Plutarch wrote 
 his life of Caesar 150 years after Caesar's death. 
 
 Epilepsy was very prevalent among the Romans, 
 so much so that the Senate had a standing rule 
 immediately to adjourn whenever one of its members 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 77 
 
 was seized with it. The line in question, as written 
 hy Shakespeare^ exactly fits Casca's description of 
 what had taken place in the Forum ; why garble it ? 
 
 No historical authority exists for this remarkable 
 scene in the market-place, the connection between 
 foul breath, " entering the cells of the brain," and an 
 attack of epilepsy being wholly due to a private theory 
 of the dramatist, in which Francis Bacon agreed with 
 him. 
 
 And even in minute details respecting the kind of 
 odors suited to the purpose the two authors were also 
 agreed, thus : 
 
 " They clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty 
 sight-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath that it had 
 almost choked Caesar." — Shakespeare. 
 
 " If such foul smells be made by art and by the hand, they consist 
 chiefly of man's flesh or sweat putrified; for they are not those stinks 
 which the nostrils straight abhor and expel that are most pernicious; 
 but such airs as have some similitude with man's body." — Bacon. 
 
 " The rabblement hooted; the common herd was glad." — 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 " These empoisonments of air are the more dangerous in meetings 
 of people, because the much breath of people doth further the in- 
 fection. Therefore, when any such thing is feared, it were good 
 those public places were perfumed before the assemblies." — Bacon. 
 
78 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XLI. 
 Central Fire in the Earth. 
 The tragedy of ' Hamlet ' was written in or about 
 1586, but not printed until 1603. In this first draft 
 of the play we find a letter, written by the prince to 
 Ophelia, in which she is told she may doubt any 
 proposition whatever, no matter how certain it may 
 be, but under no circumstances must she doubt the 
 writer's love. From this letter, which is partly in 
 verse, we quote : 
 
 " Doubt that in earth is fire, 
 Doubt that the stars do move, 
 Doubt truth to be a liar, 
 But do not doubt I love." — ii. 2. 
 
 Among the certainties here specified, which 
 Ophelia was at liberty to question before she could 
 question the writer's love, is the doctrine of a cen- 
 tral fire in the earth. " Doubt that in earth is fire." 
 The belief in the existence of a mass of molten 
 matter at the centre of the earth was then, as it is 
 now, universal ; but for some reason the author of 
 the play changed his mind in regard to it within one 
 year after the play was published. The second edi- 
 tion of ' Hamlet ' came from the press in 1604, and 
 then the first line of the stanza, quoted above, was 
 made to read as follows : 
 
 " Doubt that the stars are fire." 
 
 The doctrine of a central fire in the earth was thus 
 taken out of the play some time between the appear- 
 ance of the first edition in 1603 and that of the sec- 
 ond in 1604. How can this be accounted for ? Was 
 there another person known to fame in all the civil- 
 ized world at that time, besides the author of ' Ham- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 79 
 
 let,' who entertained a doubt as to the condition of 
 the earth's interior ? Yes, there was one, and per- 
 haps one only. Francis Bacon wrote a tract, entitled 
 Cogitationes de Natura Berum, assigned to the latter 
 part of 1603 or the early part of 1604. Mr. Spedding, 
 the last and best editor of Bacon's works, thinks it 
 was written before September, 1604. In this tract, 
 evidently a fresh study of the subject. Bacon boldly 
 took the ground that the earth is a cold body, cold 
 to the core, the only cold body, as he afterwards 
 affirmed, in the entire universe, all others, sun, 
 planets, and stars, being of fire. 
 
 It appears, then, that Bacon adopted this new view 
 of the earth's interior at precisely the same time that 
 the author of ' Hamlet ' did ; that is to say, accord- 
 ing to the record, in the brief interval between the 
 appearance of the first and that of the second edi- 
 tions of the drama, and, furthermore, against the 
 otherwise unanimous opinion of physicists through- 
 out the world.^ 
 
 1 " The heaven, from its perfect and entire heat and the extreme 
 extension of matter, is most hot, lucid, rarefied, and moveable ; 
 whereas the earth, on the contrary, from its entire and unrefracted 
 cold, and the extreme contraction of matter, is most cold, dark, 
 and dense, completely immoveable. . . . The rigors of cold, 
 which in winter time and in the coldest countries are exhaled into 
 the air from the surface of the earth, are merely tepid airs and 
 baths, compared with the nature of the primal cold shut up in the 
 bowels thereof." Bacon's £>e PrincipHs atqut Originibus. 
 
8o COINCIDENCES 
 
 XUI. 
 CoPERNicAN System. 
 The second line of the stanza in this extraordinary 
 love-letter is also significant. In the first edition it 
 tuns as follows : 
 
 " Doubt that the stars do move." 1603. 
 
 In the second edition the change is merely verbal : 
 
 "Doubt that the sun doth move." 1604.' 
 The doctrine that the earth is the centre of the 
 universe around which the sun and stars daily re- 
 volve is thus retained. It has been retained in every 
 succeeding edition of the play to the present time. 
 How can this, also, be accounted for ? 
 
 Copernicus published his heliocentric theory of the 
 solar system in 1543, eighteen years before Bacon 
 was born. Bruno taught it in Geneva in 1580 ; in 
 Paris, in 1582 ; in lyondon and Oxford, in 1583 ; in 
 Germany, in 1584 ; in Switzerland, in 1588 ; in 
 Venice, in 1590; and he was burned at the stake as a 
 martyr to it in Rome in 1600 ; Kepler announced two 
 of his great laws, governing planetary motions, in 
 1609 ; Galileo established the truth of the Coperni- 
 can system beyond the shadow of a doubt by his dis- 
 coveries of the phases of Venus and the satellites of 
 Jupiter in 1610; Harriot saw the sun spots and 
 proved the rotation of that luminary on its axis in 
 161 1 ; Kepler proclaimed his third law in 1619 ; and 
 yet, notwithstanding all these repeated and wonder- 
 ful demonstrations and in opposition to the general 
 current of contemporary thought, '^ Bacon persistently 
 
 ' The change was made necessary in reforming the stanza by the 
 promotion of the word stars to the first line. 
 
 ' We take no notice of the opinions of theologians, or of astron- 
 omers writing under the influence of the Church. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 8i 
 
 and witli ever increasing vehemence adhered to the 
 old theory to the day of his death. The author of 
 the Plays did the same. The two were agreed in 
 holding to the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy after 
 all the rest of the scientific world had rejected them ; 
 and they were also agreed in rejecting the Coperni- 
 can theory after all the rest of the scientific world 
 had accepted it.' 
 
 ' In 1622, Bacon admitted that the Copernican theory had be- 
 come prevalent (quce nunc quoque invalait), but he thought that a 
 compromise might be effected between the two opposing systems, 
 evidently unable, on account of the mathematical principles in- 
 volved, to comprehend either of them. At one time he seems to 
 have deprecated both. 
 
 A slight circumstance throws some light upon the state of his 
 mind on this subject. In the first edition of the ' Advancement of 
 Learning ' (1605), he said that " the mathematicians cannot satisfy 
 themselves, except they reduce the motions of the celestial bodies 
 to perfect circles, rejecting spiral lines, and laboring to be dis- 
 charged of eccentrics." In the second edition (1623) he omitted 
 the reference to eccentrics. 
 
 " Shakespeare does not appear to have got beyond the Ptolemaic 
 system of the universe." — Ei,zB'S William Shakespeare, page 390. 
 
82 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 The Tides. 
 
 In the second edition of ' Hamlet,' 1604, we find 
 
 the tides of the ocean attributed, in accordance with 
 
 popular opinion to the influence of the moon. 
 
 " The moist star, 
 Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands, 
 Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse." — i. 1. 
 
 This was repeated in the third quarto, 1605 ; in 
 the fourth, 1611 ; in the fifth or undated quarto; 
 but in the first folio (1623), the lines were omitted. 
 Why? 
 
 During the Christmas revels at Gray's Inn in 1594, 
 Bacon contributed to the entertainment, among other 
 things, a poem in blank verse, known as the Gray's 
 Inn Masque. It is full of those references to natural 
 philosophy in which the author took so much de- 
 light, and especially on this occasion when Queen 
 Elizabeth was the subject, to the various forms of at- 
 traction exerted by one body upon another in the 
 world. Of the influence of the moon he says : 
 
 " Your rock claims kindred of the polar star, 
 Because it draws the needle to the north ; 
 Yet even that star gives place to Cynthia's rays, 
 Whose drawing virtues govern and direct 
 The flots and re-flots of the Ocean." ' 
 
 At this time, then. Bacon held to the common 
 opinion that the moon controls the tides ; but later 
 in life, in or about 1616, he made an elaborate inves- 
 tigation into these phenomena, and in a treatise en- 
 titled Be Fluxu et Refluxu Maris definitely rejected 
 the lunar theory. 
 
 ' The Masque is not in Bacon's name, but no one can read it and 
 doubt its authorship. Bacon was the leading promoter of these 
 revels. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 83 
 
 " We dare not proceed so far as to assert that the motions of the 
 sun or moon are the causes of the motions below, -which correspond 
 thereto ; or that the sun and moon have a dominion or influence 
 over these motions of the sea, though such kind of thoughts find an 
 easy entrance into the minds of men by reason of the veneration 
 they pay to the celestial bodies." — Bacon's D' Fluxu et Refltucu 
 Maris. 
 
 " Whether the moon be in her increase or wane ; whether she 
 be above or under the earth ; whether she be higher or lower 
 than the horizon ; whether she be in the meridian or elsewhere ; 
 the ebb and flow of the sea have no correspondence with any of 
 these phenomena." — Ibid. 
 
 In every edition of ' Hamlet ' published previously 
 to 1616, tlie theory is stated and approved ; in every 
 edition published after 1616, it is omitted.^ 
 
 ' It should be said that those of the plays in which the theory 
 had been stated approvingly before 1616, but which were not re- 
 vised after 1616, still retain it. The passage from ' Hamlet ' has 
 been restored to the text by modern editors. Bacon ascribed the 
 spring or monthly tides however to the combined influences of the 
 sun and moon. 
 
84 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XLIV. 
 Motion and Sense. 
 In ' Hamlet,' again, we have a singular doctrine 
 in the sphere of moral philosophy, advanced by the 
 author in his early years but subsequently with- 
 drawn. 
 
 The prince, expostulating with his mother in the 
 celebrated chamber-scene where Polonius was hidden 
 behind the arras, says to her, — 
 
 " Sense, sure, you have, 
 Else could you not have motion." — iii. 4 (1604). 
 
 The commentators can make nothing of these 
 words. One of them suggests that for " motion " 
 we substitute notion; another emotion. Others still 
 contend that the misprint is in the first part of the 
 sentence ; that ' ' sense ' ' must be understood to mean 
 sensation or sensibility. Dr. Ingleby is certain that 
 Hamlet refers to the Queen's wanton impulse. The 
 difficulty is complicated, too, by the fact that the 
 lines were omitted from the revised version of the 
 play in the folio of 1623, concerning which, how- 
 ever, the most daring commentator has not ventured 
 to offer a remark. But in Bacon's prose works we 
 find not only an explanation of the passage in the 
 quarto, but also the reason why it was excluded from 
 the folio. 
 
 The ' Advancement of Learning ' was published in 
 1605, one year after the quarto of ' Hamlet ' contain- 
 ing the sentence in question appeared; but no repu- 
 diation of the old doctrine, that everything that has 
 motion must have sense, is found in it. Indeed, 
 Bacon seems to have had at that time a lingering 
 opinion that the doctrine is true, even as applied to 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 85 
 
 the planets, in the influence which these wanderers 
 were then supposed to exert over the affairs of men. 
 But in 1623 he published a new edition of the ' Ad- 
 vancement ' in Latin under the title of De Augmentis 
 /Scientiarum, and therein expressly declared that the 
 doctrine is untrue ; that there can be motion in in- 
 animate bodies without sense, but with what he 
 called a kind of perception. He said : 
 
 " Ignorance on this point drove some of the an- 
 cient philosophers to suppose that a soul is infused 
 into all bodies without distinction ; for they could 
 not conceive how there can be motion without sense, 
 or without a soul." 
 
 The Shake-speare folio with its revised version of 
 ' Hamlet ' came out in the same year (1623) ; and the 
 passage in question, having run through all previous 
 editions of the play, — i. e. in 1604, in 1605, in 1611, 
 and in the undated quarto, — but now no longer 
 harmonizing with the author's views, dropped out. 
 
86 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XI.V. 
 Music. 
 ' King Lear ' was published in quarto in 1608, two 
 editions having been issued in that year. It contains 
 the following speeches on the disorders of the time : 
 
 " Gloucester. These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no 
 good to us ; though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and 
 thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love 
 cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide ; in cities, mutinies ; in 
 countries, discord ; in palaces, treason ; and the bond crack'd 
 'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the pre- 
 diction ; there's son against father. The king falls from bias of 
 nature ; there's father against child. We have seen the best of our 
 time ; machinations, hoUowness, treachery, and all ruinous dis- 
 orders follow us disquietly to our graves." . . . \Exit. 
 
 ^'Edmund. . . . O! these eclipses do portend these divi- 
 sions." — i. 2. 
 
 The next appearance of the play, in print, was in 
 the folio of 1623, where the closing part of Edmund's 
 soliloquy, suggested by what Gloucester had said be- 
 fore leaving the stage, is given as follows : 
 
 " O ! these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi." 
 
 Here is a musical phrase added to the text fifteen 
 years after the play was first printed; probably 
 seventeen or eighteen years after the play was 
 written. It consists of syllables for solmization (in- 
 cluding a tritonus or sharp fourth), which in Shake- 
 speare's time and until a comparatively recent date im- 
 plied a series of sounds exceedingly disagreeable to 
 the ear. It was called the " devil in music." As an 
 illustration of the state of moral, political, and physi- 
 cal discord described by Gloucester, nothing could 
 have been more felicitous ; but how shall we explain 
 its late introduction into the play ? 
 
 Evidently the figure was suggested to the author 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE S7 
 
 for use in this connection sometime between 1608 and 
 1623, ^^^ then only after the careful study of a 
 science the technique of which is exceptionally diffi- 
 cult and abstruse. William Shakspere, the reputed 
 dramatist, was then living in Stratford,^ in an en- 
 vironment wholly unfitted for such a study. He died 
 in 1 61 6. Francis Bacon, on the other hand, began 
 the composition of his Sylva Sylvarum in October, 
 1622 and in that work investigated not only the gen- 
 eral laws of harmony, but also this particular tri- 
 tonus or sharp fourth, given one year later in the re- 
 vised version of the play.^ 
 
 ^ See Bacon vs. Shakspere, Stli ed., Chapter II. 
 
 2 "Edmund alludes to the unnatural division of parent and child, 
 etc., in this musical phrase which contains the augmented fourth, 
 or mi contra fa, of which the old theorists used to say, diabolus est." 
 — Nayi,OR'S Shakespeare and Music, p. 36. 
 
 Example of Sol-Fa (i6th and 17th centuries). 
 
 Fa sol la Fa sol la MI fa 
 
 fa sol la Fa sol la MI 
 
 " The augmented fourths, formed by the notes fa and mi, marked 
 ■with X, are the mi contra fa which diabolits tsi." — Hid., p. 186. 
 
88 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XLVI. 
 Nature and Art. 
 The antitliesis between nature and art was a con- 
 spicuous dogma of the peripatetic school of phil- 
 osophy. In the contention of Aristotle the distinc- 
 tion between nature and art is sufficiently expressed 
 when we say that a formative principle is at work in- 
 herently in one, while in the other the source of 
 energy is without.* Bacon declared that no antithe- 
 sis whatever exists between the two cases ; that the 
 processes are identical, except in one particular, 
 namely : man has power by bringing natural objects 
 together to institute new processes, or by separating 
 natural objects to destroy old processes, the processes 
 themselves, however, being always strictly in accord- 
 ance with natural law. The difference, according to 
 Bacon, resolves itself into a power of motion. For 
 instance, the sun shining through drops of water 
 falling from a cloud creates a rainbow ; so, also, when 
 it shines through the spray of a fountain. Nature 
 does the work in her own way in both cases. Given 
 a shower of rain or mist, whether natural or artifi- 
 cial, in sunlight, and the rainbow comes as a matter 
 of course. Gold is refined by one method, and by 
 one only, whether in the hot sands of the earth or in 
 a furnace prepared by art. In the grafting of a tree, 
 man may insert a scion in the stock, but the new 
 fruit is developed under the same laws that govern 
 the production of the old. This view was then not 
 altogether a new one, but it is significant in our 
 
 ' y) ykp T^vri ipxv "o^ elSos rou "yevoiiiiiov dXV iv iTip(f rj St r^t (piaeut 
 
 Aristotle De Gen.-Anim. — ii. i. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 8g 
 
 case because profound scholars only, and those com- 
 paratively few in number in the world, had knowledge 
 of it. That the author of the Plays, however, was 
 perfectly familiar with this abstruse speculation, 
 and that he stated it in almost the same language, 
 word for word, as Bacon did, the following parallel- 
 ism will show : 
 
 "Nature is made better by no 
 
 mean [means] 
 But Nature makes that mean ; 
 
 so, over that art 
 Which, you say, adds to Nature, 
 
 in an Art 
 That Nature makes. You see, 
 
 sweet maid, we marry 
 A gentler scion to the wildest 
 
 stock ; 
 And make conceive a bark of 
 
 baser kind 
 By bud of nobler race. This is 
 
 an art 
 Which does mend nature, change 
 
 it rather ; but 
 The art itself is nature." 
 
 Winter's Tale, iv. 3 (161 1). 
 
 The doctrine appeared for the first time in Bacon's 
 prose works, as above, in 1612 ; in the plays in 1611. 
 
 It appears, then, that the two authors made the 
 same recondite study of the relations between nature 
 and art, made it at the same time, and reached the 
 same conclusion. 
 
 " It is the fashion to talk as if 
 art were something different 
 from nature, or a sort of addition 
 to nature, with power to finish 
 what nature has begun, or cor- 
 rect her when going aside. . . . 
 In truth man has no power over 
 nature except that of motion, — 
 the power, I say, of putting nat- 
 ural bodies together or separat- 
 ing them, — the rest is done by 
 nature ■within.'" — Descriptio Globi 
 Intellectualis {cir. 1612). 
 
go COINCIDENCES 
 
 XIvVII. 
 Torture. 
 The 'Second Part of King Henry VI.' was pub- 
 lished under another title, in 1594, in 1600, and 
 again (three years after the death of the reputed 
 poet at Stratford) in 1619. In each of these versions, 
 Gloucester is forced to confess that in his administra- 
 tion of affairs as Protector during the minority of 
 the king he had tortured prisoners contrary to law. 
 It was he, in fact, that actually introduced the prac- 
 tice into England. He says in the play, as first 
 printed in the quartos : 
 
 " Why, 't is well known that whilst I was Protector, 
 Pity was all the fault that was in me ; 
 A murderer or foul felonious thief. 
 That robs and murders silly passengers, 
 I tortur'd above the rate of common law." 
 
 In the folio (1623), however, where the play ap- 
 pears again in a revised form, this statement, that 
 torture of suspected criminals was contrary to, or 
 " above the rate of " common law, was omitted. The 
 passage was then made to read as follows : 
 
 " Why, 't is well known that whilst I was Protector, 
 Pity was all the fault that was in me ; 
 For I should melt at an ofiender's tears, 
 And lowly words were ransom for their fault ; 
 Unless it were a bloody murderer, 
 Or foul felonious thief that fleec'd poor passengers, 
 I never gave them condign punishment. 
 Murder, indeed, that bloody sin, I tortur'd 
 Above the felon, or what trespass else." — iii. i. 
 
 English lawyers were always opposed to use of the 
 rack as unknown to law. The right was claimed, 
 however, by King James, who ordered Bacon, as 
 Attorney-General, to take part in some proceedings 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE gi 
 
 of the kind in the Tower. Bacon complied ; but as 
 author of the play, in its revision after 1619, he 
 would not naturally have cared to retain in it a judg- 
 ment against himself. 
 
^2 COINCIDENCES 
 
 XLVIII. 
 The Passion of Envy. 
 Shake-speare wrote a drama after his manner to 
 exemplify the passion of Envy. It is that of ' Julius 
 Caesar,' which in this view is saved from the de- 
 grading hypothesis, hitherto entertained by many 
 scholars, that originally, as it came from Shake- 
 speare, it was two dramas, but afterward imperfectly 
 or loosely united in one by another hand. The 
 ground of its unity is indeed distinctly stated in the 
 play itself, thus : 
 
 " All the conspirators, save only he, 
 Did that they did in envy of great Caesar." 
 
 It follows, of course, that the evil deed and its 
 punishment are legitimate and equally important 
 parts of the famous tragedy. 
 
 Bacon wrote an essay on Envy, every point of 
 which is illustrated and enforced in the play. 
 
 Of the many misinterpretations of this play, now 
 current, the worst perhaps is that of Reverend Fred- 
 eric G. Fleay, as follows : 
 
 "The Tragedy of Julius Caesar contains Caesar's Revenge as 
 ■well as his Tragedy, and seems to me to be a condensation of two 
 plays into one, made after Shakespeare's retirement by Ben Jonson." 
 
 We regret to add that this has been pronounced a 
 "plausible" view by Professor Barrett Wendell of 
 Harvard University. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE gj 
 
 XIvIX. 
 Obsolete Laws. 
 
 On one subject Bacon was continually, but unsuc- 
 cessfully, pressing his views upon tlie government. 
 It was on the necessity of a regular systematic re- 
 vision of the laws, so many of which had then be- 
 come obsolete. He laid the matter before parliament 
 in what was perhaps the first speech he made there, 
 citing the customs that had prevailed in Greece and 
 Rome, and those that were still prevailing in France, 
 in reference to it, and showing on his own part spe- 
 cial interest in the subject. This was in 1593. In 
 1608 he spoke again in advocacy of the appointment 
 of a commission for the purpose. In 161 1, in 1614 
 and once more also in 1621 he urged the matter di- 
 rectly upon the attention of the king, offering his 
 personal services in the execution of the work. 
 
 Shake-speare wrote a drama to demonstrate the 
 importance of removing laws that were obsolete from 
 the statute-books. ' Measure for Measure ' waa 
 printed for the first time in the Folio of 1623, al- 
 though probably written in the last days of Eliza- 
 beth. We may be sure that the author's heart was 
 in it, for .••t is one of the grandest productions that 
 ever came from a pen. 
 
94 COINCIDENCES 
 
 I.. 
 Period of Final Publication. 
 
 The Shake-speare Plays began to issue from the 
 press, singly and in quarto form, in 1597. They 
 continued to do so until 1623 when they were col- 
 lected together, enlarged, revised and published in 
 one folio volume for preservation. 
 
 Bacon began to write for the public and for publi- 
 cation in book form also in 1597. He brought his 
 great work, the Novum Organum, to a finish, after 
 having spent many years upon it, in 1620. He did 
 the same with the Advancement of Learning, first 
 printed eighteen years earlier, in 1623. ^^^ Essays 
 were printed by him for the last time in 1625. The 
 latter had been continually growing, in number, size 
 and excellence, during the entire preceding period of 
 twenty-eight years. It was, therefore between 1620 
 and 1625, and chiefly in 1623, that Bacon devoted his 
 time to the revision, enlargement, publication and 
 preservation of his prose writings. The two authors 
 began and ended their respective careers, as shown 
 by their works, at substantially the same time. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE gs 
 
 Sir Edward Coke. 
 The dramatist seems to have had a prejudice 
 against the great lawyer, Sir Edward Coke. He 
 caricatured Coke in ' Twelfth Night,' thus : 
 
 Sir Toby. " Taunt him with the license of ink ; if thou thou'st 
 him thrice, it shall not be amiss, and as many lies as will lie in thy 
 sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the Bed of 
 Ware in England, set 'em down." 
 
 This is a reference to one of Coke's brutal speeches 
 made at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh, in which 
 occurred these words : " Thou viper! for I thou thee, 
 thou traitor! " Louis Theobald (1733) cites this 
 passage as a proof of the author's detestation of Coke. 
 
 Bacon's most implacable enemy throughout his 
 life was Sir Edward Coke. In our ' Bacon vs. Shak- 
 spere, Brief for Plaintiff,' we say: 
 
 "The two were constant rivals for the favor of the Court and for 
 the highest honors of the profession to which they belonged. They 
 were rivals, too, for the hand of Lady Hatton, the beautiful widow, 
 who finally waived the eight objections which her friends urged 
 against Coke (his seven children and himself) and gave him the 
 preference. At one time the contention became so personal and 
 bitter that Bacon appealed to the government for help." — 7th ed. 
 p. 311. 
 
 When the Novum Organum appeared. Coke said 
 of it: 
 
 " It deserveth not to be read in schools. 
 But to be freighted in the ship of fools." 
 
g6 COINCIDENCES 
 
 Queen Elizabeth, A Virgin. 
 In tlie drama of ' King Henry VIII,' written after 
 Queen Elizabeth's death, the author declared that 
 the Queen had lived and died a virgin. 
 
 " She shall be, to the happiness of England, 
 An aged princess ; many days shall see her, 
 And yet, no day without a deed to crown it, 
 'Would I had known no more ! but she must die — 
 She must, the saints must have her — yet a virgin ; 
 A most unspotted lily shall she pass 
 To the ground." — v. 4, jy. 
 
 Bacon entertained for the Queen nothing but the 
 sincerest and most affectionate sentiments. In 1608, 
 five years after her death, he wrote a memorial of 
 her in which he gave many points of her character 
 and condition in life that had contributed to her 
 felicity. One was the fact that " she was childless 
 and had no issue of her own; " and another as fol- 
 lows : " She was, no doubt, a good and moral queen. 
 Vices she hated, and it was by honest arts that she 
 desired to shine. . . . Very often, many years 
 before her death, she would pleasantly call herself an 
 old woman, and would talk of the kind of epitaph 
 she would like upon her tomb, saying that she had 
 no fancy for glory or splendid titles, but would rather 
 have a line or two of memorial, recording in few 
 words only her name, her virginity, the time of her 
 reign, the reformation of religion, and the preserva- 
 tion of peace. ' ' 
 
 Bacon was so impressed by his sense of duty to the 
 Queen's memory that in his will (first draft) he gave 
 special directions to his executors to publish this 
 memorial of her. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 97 
 
 Queen Elizabeth died March 24, 1603. Within a 
 few months of that event Bacon recorded his opinion 
 of her in the following words : " If Plutarch were 
 now alive to write lives by parallels, it would trouble 
 him, I think, to find for her a parallel among 
 women." 
 
 Belief in the Queen's virginity may be said to rest, 
 therefore, upon the testimonies of Francis Bacon, 
 William Shake-speare, and the Queen herself. Ben 
 Jonson also testified to the same effect in his conver- 
 sations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, 
 sixteen years after the Queen's death. We pity those 
 -who can doubt it. 
 
98 COINCIDENCES 
 
 IvIII. 
 
 Writings Despised. 
 The author of the Plays was fully aware that his 
 writings were generally despised. He did not per- 
 mit himself, so far as we are informed, to become 
 personally known as their author to any one in 
 London, either within or without theatrical circles, 
 Ben Jonson (who was often at Gorhambury with 
 Bacon) and Sir Thomas Bodley (who was Bacon's 
 confidential correspondent) alone excepted. The 
 Plays were constantly on the boards, and more than 
 sixty editions of some of them published during a 
 period of thirty- two years, but no letter, written by 
 the author on the subject, or in which the slightest 
 reference is made to them, has ever been discovered 
 or heard of. 
 
 Certain important writings of Bacon, as we know 
 from his own confession, were despised. In a prayer 
 which he composed shortly before his death he com- 
 mended himself to God because he had, as he said, 
 * ' (though in a despised weed) procured the good of 
 all men." What this " weed " or kind of composition 
 was, we may perhaps infer from a statement made by 
 Sir Thomas Bodley that " Bacon had wasted many 
 years of his life on such study as was not worthy of 
 him." Bodley was founder of the library that bears 
 his name at Oxford ; under the terms of his gift he 
 specially excluded from it all dramatic productions, 
 on the ground (to use his own words) that they are 
 nothing but " riff-raffs." 
 
 No attempt to identify the particular work or 
 works of Bacon that were despised has ever been 
 made. Bodley's condemnation of dramas for his 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE pp 
 
 library, his condemnation of Bacon for writing what 
 was "unworthy of him," and Bacon's confession 
 that ** he had sought the good of all men " in some 
 kind of effort that was " despised," may, taken to- 
 gether, lighten the search. If it could be admitted 
 that Bacon wrote dramas, every difficulty would 
 vanish. 
 
loo COINCIDENCES 
 
 LIV. 
 Bribery. 
 Judge Say was another character in the drama of 
 * King Henry VI.' He was arrested by Cade and 
 accused of various crimes and misdemeanors for 
 which he was finally beheaded. According to the 
 quarto editions of 1594, 1600, and 1619, he answered 
 his accusers as follows : — 
 
 " Kent, in the Commentaries Csesar wrote, 
 Is term 'd the civil 'st place of all this land ; 
 Then, noble countrymen, hear me but speak ; 
 1 sold not France, I lost not Normandy." 
 
 In the play as revised after 161 9 and published in 
 the Folio of 1623, t^^s speech is thus enlarged : 
 
 " Kent, in the Commentaries Csesar writ, 
 Is term'd the civil'st place in all this isle ; 
 Sweet is the country, because full of riches ; 
 The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy ; 
 Which makes me hope you are not void of pity. 
 I sold not Maine, I lost not Normandy 
 Yet to recover them would lose my life ; 
 Justice with favor have I always done ; 
 Prayers and tears have mov'd me, gifts could never. 
 When have I aught exacted at your hands, 
 But to maintain the king, the realm, and you ? 
 Large gifts have I bestow'd on learned clerks, 
 Because my book preferr'd me to the king ; 
 And seeing ignorance is the curse of God, 
 Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven, 
 Unless you be possess'd with devilish spirits. 
 You cannot but forbear to murder me ; 
 This tongue hath parley'd unto foreign kings 
 For your behoof." — Second Part, iv. 7. 
 
 In this addition to the speech four passages may be 
 noted : 
 
 I . The judge denies that he has been guilty of bribery, though 
 not accused of it in the play, nor, historically, in the administra- 
 tion of justice in his court. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE lor 
 
 Bacon fell from power in the spring of 1631, under 
 charges of bribery, which he also declared to be false 
 and of which we now know he was innocent. 
 
 2. The judge had sent a book of which he was the author to the 
 king and been "preferred " on account of it. 
 
 Bacon sent a copy of his Novum Organum in 1620 
 to King James, who immediately created him Vis- 
 count St. Alban. 
 
 3. The judge had bestowed large gifts on persons of subordinate 
 rank. 
 
 Bacon's generosity to the same class of people was 
 a distinguishing trait in his character. He fre- 
 quently gave gratuities to messengers, who came to 
 him with presents, of ;^5 los., or (in money of the 
 present time) _;^66 ($330). On one occasion the gra- 
 tuity (present value) was ;^300, or $1,500. In three 
 months (June 24 to Sept. 29, 1618) he disbursed in 
 this way the sum of ;^302 7s., equal now to ;^3,6oo, 
 or |i8,ooo. This was at the rate of $72,000 per 
 annum. 
 
 4. The judge had conversed on public affairs with foreiga 
 potentates. 
 
 Bacon had been attach^ of a British embassy 
 abroad, and on intimate terms with kings and 
 queens. 
 
 The above addition to Judge Say's speech was thus 
 made not only after 1619, at which time the reputed 
 poet had been three years in his grave at Stratford, 
 but even after May 3, 1621, the date of Bacon's de- 
 gradation from the bench on charges of bribery. 
 
I02 COINCIDENCES 
 
 LV. 
 Dark Period. 
 At one time Bacon thouglit himself in serious 
 danger of his life. The popular feeling against him 
 grew out of his connection with the Earl of Essex, 
 although Mr. Spedding has been able to show be- 
 yond a doubt tl^t it was wholly misdirected and un- 
 just. The fact of its existence, however, cannot be 
 questioned. Bacon frequently referred to it in his 
 correspondence during the period 1599-1601. 
 
 " My life has been threatened and my name libeled." — Letter to 
 the Queen. 
 
 " As for any violence to be offered me, -wherewith my friends tell 
 me I am offered, I thank God I have the privy coat of a good con- 
 science. I know no remedy against libels and lies." — Letter to Cecil. 
 
 " For my part I have deserved better than to have my name 
 objected to envy, or my life to a ruffian's violence." — Letter to 
 Howard, 
 
 The Shake-speare Sonnets were written in the 
 latter part of the sixteenth and the early part of the 
 seventeenth centuries. From some unexplained 
 cause the author of these productions seems also to 
 have been at that time in danger of his life. 
 
 " Then hate me if thou wilt ; if ever, now, 
 Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross, 
 Join with the spite of fortune." — Sonnet go. 
 
 " The coward conquest of a wretch's knife." — Sonnet 74. 
 
 " Your love and pity doth the impression fill, 
 Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow ; 
 For what care I who calls me well or ill. 
 So you o'ergreen my bad, my good allow ? 
 Yon are my all the world, and I must strive 
 To know my shames and praises from your tongue ; 
 None else to me, nor I to none alive, 
 That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong. 
 In so profound abysm I throw all care 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 103 
 
 Of others' voices, that my adder's sense 
 
 To critic and to flatterer stopped are, 
 
 Mark how with my neglect I do dispense." — Sonnet 112. 
 
 On this point we quote from Mr. Thomas Tyler's 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets,' as follows : 
 
 " In the series of Sonnets 100 to 126, there are allusions to some 
 scandal which, at the time when these sonnets were written, was in 
 circulation with regard to Shakespeare. . . . How deeply Shake- 
 speare felt the scandal is shown by the first two lines of 112, where 
 he speaks of his forehead as though branded or stamped thereby : 
 
 " ' Your love and pity doth the impression fill, 
 Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow.' 
 
 " The great difficulty in the way of supposing that the reference 
 is merely to the stage and acting is presented by the remarkable 
 language of Sonnet 121, from which it appears that the scandal bad 
 some relation to Shakespeare's moral character : 
 
 " ' 'T is better to be vile than vile esteem'd, 
 When not to be receives reproach of being.' 
 . ...... 
 
 "The poem consisting of Sonnets 100 to 126, which speaks of the 
 scandal from which the poet was suffering, we have placed in the 
 spring or early summer of 1601." Page 113. 
 
 The Earl of Essex was executed in February, 1601, 
 at which time, or immediately afterward, the scandal 
 against Bacon reached its height. 
 
 It appears, then, — 
 
 1. That each of these two authors (if there were 
 two) had a * ' dark period ' ' in his life ; 
 
 2. That this dark period arose in each from the 
 same cause, a public scandal ; 
 
 3. That it culminated in each at precisely the 
 same time, " in the spring or summer of 1601 ; " and 
 
 4. That it inspired in both cases fear of assassi- 
 nation. 
 
I04 COINCIDENCES 
 
 LVI. 
 Galen and Paracelsus. 
 Bacon seems to have had a special enmity against 
 both Galen and Paracelsus. In his ridicule of the 
 ancient sages he yoked these two men together, re- 
 gardless of the fact that they had nothing in com- 
 mon, were of different nationalities, and lived with 
 an interval between them of fourteen hundred years. 
 Bacon says of them : 
 
 " Galen was a man of the narrowest mind, a forsaker of experi- 
 ence, and a vain pretender. Like the dog-star, he condemned man- 
 kind to death, for he assumed that whole classes of diseases are in- 
 curable. , . . But I could better indure thee, O Galen, weighing 
 thy elements, than thee, O Paracelsus, adorning thy dreams. With 
 what zeal do both of you take shelter under the authority of Hippo- 
 crates, like asses under a tree ? And who bursts not into laughter 
 at such a sight ? Redargutio Philosophiarum. 
 
 Strangely enough, Shake-speare also uses these 
 two names together, and in Bacon's own vein of 
 ridicule and contempt. The passage is in ' All's 
 Well that Ends Well ' where they are held up to 
 scorn, and that, too, in connection with the Court 
 Physicians, "the learned and authentic fellows," 
 who had pronounced the King's malady incurable. 
 The passage is as follows : 
 
 " Lafeu. They say miracles are past ; and we have our philoso- 
 phical persons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural 
 and causeless. Hence is it, that we make trifles of terrors, ensconc 
 ing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit our- 
 selves to an unknown fear. 
 
 ParolUs. Why, it is the rarest argument of wonder, that hath 
 shot out in our latter times. 
 
 Bertram. And so 't is. 
 
 Laf. To be relinquish 'd of the artists, — 
 
 Par. So I say ; both of Galen and Paracelsus. 
 
 Laf. Of all the learned and authentic fellows — 
 
 Par. Right ; so I say. 
 
 Z<j/. That gave him out incurable." //. 3, i. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 105 
 
 What is said of Galen and Paracelsus in both sets 
 of works has every mark of an individual fancy. 
 
io6 COINCIDENCES 
 
 LVII. 
 
 Intellect. 
 Shake-speare. 
 
 " The glory of the human intellect." — De Quincy. 
 " The greatest intellect in literature." — Carlyle. 
 " An intellectual miracle." — Chalmers, 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 " The most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been 
 besto-wed on any of the children of men." — Macaulay. 
 " The greatest of all intellects." — Hallam. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 107 
 
 LVIII. 
 
 Wisdom. 
 
 Shake-s'peare. 
 
 " The wisest of men." — Walter Savage Landor, 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 " The wisest of men." — Henry Hallam. 
 
io8 COINCIDENCES 
 
 LIX. 
 Paradise Regained. 
 The object of Bacon's philosophy, as repeatedly 
 stated by him, was to restore man's lost empire over 
 nature. But in 1613 he was appointed by King 
 James, Attorney General, and therefore, being at that 
 time over fifty years of age, he could have expected 
 no further leisure for the prosecution of such work. 
 What could then have been more natural to him than 
 the conception of a specially devised drama in which, 
 before bidding farewell to the subject on which he 
 had expended so much thought and which he deemed 
 so important, he should display, on a field apart by 
 itself, some of the new powers he had sought to con- 
 fer upon mankind ? Macaulay says : 
 
 "In Bacon's magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild, 
 nothing but what sober reason sanctioned. He knew that all the 
 secrets feigned by poets to have been written in the books of en- 
 chanters are worthless when compared with the mighty secrets 
 which are really written in the book of nature, and which, with 
 time and patience, will be read there. He knew that all the won- 
 ders wrought by all the talismans in fables were trifles when com- 
 pared with the wonders which might reasonably be expected from 
 the ' philosophy of fruit,' and that, if his words sank deep into the 
 minds of men, they would produce effects such as superstition had 
 never ascribed to the incantations of Merlin and Michsel Scot. It 
 was here that he loved to let his imagination loose. He loved to 
 picture to himself the world as it would be when his philosophy 
 should, in his own noble phrase, ' have enlarged the bounds of 
 human empire.' " Essay on Lord Bacon. 
 
 Shake-speare actually wrote such a drama, on 
 precisely the same subject and at precisely the same 
 time. We quote from Sir Richard Garnett : " Here 
 [in the drama of the Tempest], more than anywhere 
 else, we seem to see the world as, if it had depended 
 upon him, Shakespeare would have made it." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE log 
 
 The date of the drama is assigned to the year 1613, 
 when it was first produced, and when Bacon, as we 
 now know, could have done no further dramatic work 
 until his downfall in 162 1. 
 
 It was almost immediately after his downfall that 
 he revised and published in complete form and for 
 final preservation his philosophical writings (1621- 
 23), precisely at the same time that the author of the 
 Shake-speare Plays collected together and published 
 in one folio volume all the plays (1623). This was 
 seven years after the death of the Stratford play- 
 actor. 
 
 During the middle ages it was a wide-spread opin- 
 ion throughout continental Europe that storms and 
 tempests are the work of evil spirits, and that they 
 can be dispersed by the ringing of consecrated bells. 
 For this purpose church bells were solemnly bap- 
 tized, often with water brought from the river Jordan, 
 and also duly tagged at their tongues with scriptural 
 texts. Fortunately the practice never gained a foot- 
 hold in England, at least in the time of Bacon and 
 Shake-speare, and yet these two authors became in 
 some measure both of them victims to the super- 
 stition. We quote from Bacon : 
 
 " It is thought that the sounds of bells will dispel lightnings and 
 thunder." Sylva Sylvarum, II, jzj. 
 
 In the Shakesperean play of The Tempest, Prospero 
 
 wishes to allay the storm that had wrecked the king's 
 
 ship, and he does so in part by the ringing of bells. 
 
 Ariel sings: 
 
 " Ding-Dong ; 
 Hark ! now I hear them,— ding-dong, bell." 
 
 The Sylva Sylvarum was written in 1622-25 ; The 
 
 Tempest was printed in 1623. 
 
no COINCIDENCES 
 
 IvX. 
 
 Prodigality. 
 
 ' Timon of Athens ' was neither printed in quarto 
 nor, so far as we know, produced on the stage previ- 
 ously to its appearance in the folio of 1623. No hint 
 of its existence before that date has ever been dis- 
 covered in contemporaneous literature. This is true 
 of no other play in the Shake-spearean canon. At 
 the outset of our inquiry, then, we encounter a pre- 
 sumption that the ' Timon ' of Shake-speare was a 
 new drama, fresh from the hand of its author in 1623, 
 or seven years after the death of the reputed poet at 
 Stratford. Indeed, the character of the play itself 
 seems to raise this presumption to the level of a 
 probability, if not, in connection with other well- 
 known facts, to that of a practical certainty. 
 
 Timon was a citizen of Athens ; at the beginning 
 of his career, of large means, but so prodigal of ex- 
 penditure for the good of others that he finally be- 
 came bankrupt. His ruin was due to an excess of 
 generosity, or to a fatal inappreciation of the value 
 of money. At the slightest need of a friend or even 
 of a servant his hand and purse were always ready to 
 help. The consequence was, that falling at last into 
 great pecuniary straits, and seeking in vain to supply 
 his wants from those whom he had befriended, he 
 became a misanthrope. 
 
 Except in one particular, this is an exact portrait- 
 ure of Francis Bacon, and one drawn at the exact 
 time in his own life when he too encountered a like 
 experience of ingratitude. 
 
 Bacon was perhaps the most prodigal man that 
 ever lived, more so even than was the younger Pitt, 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE in 
 
 in both of whom indifference to money considerations 
 amounted almost to a disease. Bacon kept his money 
 in his library, in a chest to which his servants had 
 free access and from which they were accustomed at 
 pleasure to fill their pockets. On one occasion he 
 gave to the man who brought him a buck as a pre- 
 sent from the king £2^^ a gratuity equal in our time 
 and in our money to $1500, Young men of good 
 families flocked to his service, because they were 
 sure not only of generous and kindly treatment 
 while they were in it, but also of gratuitous and val- 
 uable preferments when they left. At his downfall, 
 however, all his parasites forsook him. In vain he 
 begged for help. His letters to Buckingham and the 
 king on the subject of his pecuniary distresses are ex- 
 tremely pathetic. His experiences are precisely 
 those of Timon in the play, though with one charac- 
 teristic divergence, namely : under the rules of 
 dramatization Timon becomes a misanthrope; Ba- 
 con's sweetness of disposition is retained to the last. 
 
 Bacon falls from power in 1621 ; the play first be- 
 comes known in 1623. 
 
112 COINCIDENCES 
 
 IvXI. 
 
 Revisions op Writings for the Press. 
 
 Many of the Plays were revised and re-revised by 
 the author before they were printed, and also be- 
 tween successive editions. The custom may be said 
 to have been an idiosyncrasy with him. We give 
 some examples : 
 
 The drama of ' King John ' was first published in 
 1 591 ; it was extensively re-written for the Folio of 
 1623. 
 
 ' The Taming of the Shrew ' came out anonymously 
 in 1594. More than one thousand new lines were 
 afterwards introduced into it. 
 
 ' King Richard II.' was published in several edi- 
 tions between 1597 and 1623. The edition of 1608 
 had a new scene added to it ; and that of 1623 many 
 other important additions. 
 
 ' King Henry V. ' was published and re-published 
 several times before its appearance in the Folio. It 
 grew in the meantime from 1721 lines, as it was in 
 1602, to 2133, as it was in the Folio. 
 
 ' Titus Andronicus ' was published in 1600, but it 
 had a new scene added to it in 1623. 
 
 ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' began with 1620 
 lines in 1602, and reached 2701 in its final form in 
 1623. 
 
 ' Hamlet ' was revised by the author three times at 
 least in successive editions before it appeared in the 
 Folio. 
 
 ' King I,ear ' came from the press in 1608, but 
 underwent many alterations for the edition of 1623. 
 
 The second and third parts of ' King Henry VI.' 
 were printed in 1594, but the changes made in them 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 113 
 
 in 1619, and again in 1623, were extensive. The 
 number of lines was carried, in the one from 2214 to 
 3353) and from 2311 to 3217, in the other. The old 
 lines retouched (and many of them after 1619) were 
 about 2000. 
 
 ' Othello ' was published for the first time in 1622, 
 six years after William Shakspere's death at Strat- 
 ford. One year later, however, it appeared again in 
 the Folio, with 160 new lines and other important 
 emendations. 
 
 ' King Richard III.' was subjected to like revision, 
 with marked additions and improvements in its final 
 form in 1623. 
 
 Bacon rewrote the Novum Organum twelve times 
 before its publication in 1620. To the edition of his 
 Advancement of Learning (1605) he added seven 
 books in 1623, having extensively revised and re- 
 written the former text. The Essays which he pub- 
 lished in 1597 he rewrote for the edition of 1612 ; and 
 those of 1612, including many of the older ones, he 
 rewrote again for the edition of 1625. Many of his 
 private letters have come down to us in two drafts, 
 the second one rewritten, enlarged and improved 
 from the first. 
 
 It will be seen, as already noted, that in the case 
 of both authors the work of revision culminated in or 
 about 1623. William Shakspereof Stratford had then 
 been seven years in his grave; and during the last 
 twelve years of his life, while living in Stratford and 
 unemployed, had taken no steps to preserve his works 
 (if he had any), or shown any interest whatever in 
 them. 
 
114 COINCIDENCES 
 
 I.XII. 
 Posthumous Works. 
 
 It has always excited some astonisliment among 
 the students of Shake- speare to learn that of the 
 thirty-six plays printed in the first collective edition 
 (1633), fourteen of them had been written many years 
 earlier, but never before printed. And these in- 
 cluded some of the most important, such as The 
 Tempest, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleo- 
 patra, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Measure for 
 Measure, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. The 
 inquiry naturally arises, why were they kept back 
 from the custody of type for fifteen or twenty years 
 on the average, while an equally formidable list had 
 been issuing from the press since 1591? 
 
 How was it now with Bacon ? Was he also in the 
 habit of restraining his literary ambition and post- 
 poning for years the publication of his works ? The 
 answer to this question must be in the affirmative. 
 The following were written at various dates between 
 1603 and 1 61 6, but were kept in MS. by him for 
 about twenty years during the remainder of his life : 
 Cogitata et Visa, De Interpretatione Maturoe, Descriptio 
 Globi Intellectualis, Thema Coeli, Filum Ldbyrinthi, De 
 Fluxu et Refluxu Maris, Redargutio Philosophiarum, 
 and many others. The first draft of his greatest 
 work, Novum Organum was made in 1608, but the 
 book was not printed until 1620. 
 
 So far as one set of these works is concerned, we 
 may have a partial explanation of these delays in a 
 preface to the ' Troilus and Cressida,' for we are told 
 in it that this play had escaped for purpose of publi- 
 cation from grand possessors ; but for others we have 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 115 
 
 the explanation in Bacon's own -words, written to the 
 Bishop of Winchester in 1622 : 
 
 " I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of 
 his own writings before his death to be but an untimely anticipa- 
 tion of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along 
 with him." 
 
ii6 COINCIDENCES 
 
 I.XIII. 
 Fallen Greatness. 
 The drama of King Henry VIII. -was first printed 
 in tlie Folio of 1623 ; no certain proof of its existence 
 previous to tliat date has been discovered. Its prin- 
 cipal character is Cardindal Wolsey, and its most 
 brilliant speech the Cardinal's lament over his fallen 
 greatness. 
 
 " Parewell ! a long farewell to all my greatness ! 
 This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth 
 The tender leaves of hope ; tomorrow blossoms, 
 And bears his blushing honors thick upon him ; 
 The third day comes a frost, a killing frost. 
 And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 
 His greatness is a ripening, — nips his root. 
 And then he falls, as I do. I have ventur'd. 
 Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, 
 This many summers in a sea of glory, 
 But far beyond my depth ; my high-blown pride 
 At length broke under me, and now has left me 
 Weary, and old with service, to the mercy 
 Of a rude stream that must forever hide me. 
 Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye." 
 
 Then follow the well known lines : 
 
 " O Cromwell, Cromwell ! 
 Had I but serv'd my God with half the zeal 
 I serv'd my King, he would not in mine age 
 Have left me naked to mine enemies." Hi. 2, 4^4. 
 
 Bacon fell from power, and from the same exalted 
 
 office as that from which the great Cardinal fell, with 
 
 equal shame and disgrace, in 162 1. A few months 
 
 afterward, in a letter to the King, he wrote : 
 
 "Cardinal Wolsey said that if he had pleased God as he had 
 pleased the King he had not been ruined." 
 
 Shake-speare wrote that passage from the Cardi- 
 nal's speech in the play, and Bacon the same passage 
 in a letter to the King, at practically the same time. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 117 
 
 LXIV. 
 
 Disappointment in Life. 
 
 The author of the Plays led a disappointed life. 
 
 He makes this confession in one of the Sonnets : 
 
 '• O ! for my sake do you ■with fortune chide, 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 Than public means, which public manners breeds 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
 And almost Aence my nature is subdu'd 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. 
 Pity me then." Sonnet Hi. 
 
 We quote from Bacon : 
 
 "I do confess, since I was of any understanding, my mind hath 
 in effect been absent from that I have done ; . . . knowing my- 
 self by inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than to play a part. 
 I have led my life in civil causes for which I was not very fit by 
 mature, and more unfit by the preoccupation of my mind.'" 
 
 Bacon's Praver. 
 
ii8 COINCIDENCES 
 
 LXV. 
 
 Companionship in Distress. 
 
 The craving for sympatliy wliicli the dramatist 
 felt called upon on many occasions to express almost 
 always took a particular direction; it was for that 
 which comes from companionship. This is especially 
 noticeable in ' King Richard II.', ' King I,ear ' and 
 ' The Tempest.' 
 
 Bacon's life, it may generally be said, was one long 
 series of misfortunes. In 1595 the Queen refused to 
 admit him into her service, on the ground that, as 
 member of Parliament, he had been too independent 
 in his course. His friends frequently importuned 
 him to make an apology for it, but he never did. On 
 the contrary he suffered himself to be disgraced for 
 ten long years on account of it, simply saying that 
 ' ' he was indifferent whether God or her Majesty 
 called him." Six years later his old friend, the Earl 
 of Essex, was executed for treason, his " entire dear 
 brother Anthony " died, and his mother became vio- 
 lently insane. In 1621 he fell from power under 
 charges of bribery (since proved to have been false) 
 and was sentenced to pay a fine of ;^40,ooo, to be im- 
 prisoned in the Tower, to be forever incapable of any 
 office in the Commonwealth, never to sit in Parlia- 
 ment, or come within the verge (twelve miles) of the 
 court. 
 
 It is therefore easy to understand why the craving 
 for sympathy runs through so much of his private 
 correspondence, and especially for that peculiar and 
 exceptional form of it that brings consolation from 
 companionship. In a letter to a friend he said : 
 ♦« amongst consolations it is not the least to repre- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE iig 
 
 sent to a man like examples of calamity in others." 
 The examples he cited, as applicable to his own case, 
 were those of Demosthenes, Cicero and Seneca, men 
 who, like himself, were orators and statesmen. 
 
 It is worthy of remark that the cases cited in the 
 plays are also, as with Bacon, similar in kind, one 
 with another. Take the case in ' Richard II.' The 
 king is about to be deposed and murdered, and the 
 sympathy he calls for is such as belongs to kings : 
 
 " For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, 
 
 And tell sad stories of the death of kings ; 
 
 How some have been depos'd, some slain in war, 
 
 Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd. 
 
 Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd. 
 
 All murder'd." "«'. 2, S3. 
 
 In ' King Lear ' Edgar seeks consolation for him- 
 self by comparing his own misery with the King's, 
 for he sees the King borne off to escape being mur- 
 dered by his daughters : 
 
 " When we our betters see bearing our woes, 
 We scarcely think our miseries our foes. 
 
 How light and portable my pain seems now, 
 
 When that which makes me bend makes the king bow." 
 
 Hi. 6, J02. 
 
 In ' The Tempest ' Gonzalo has been shipwrecked; 
 accordingly he turns to distresses among mariners : 
 
 " Our hint of woe is common ; every day some sailor's wife, 
 The master of some merchant, and the merchant. 
 Have just our theme of woe." «•• ^1 3' 
 
I20 COINCIDENCES 
 
 lyXVI. 
 
 Death op Desdemona. 
 
 The most perplexing denouement in Shakespeare, 
 one that has been deemed so utterly at variance with 
 the laws of human nature that few editors and com- 
 mentators have ventured to discuss it, is found in the 
 circumstances attending Desdemona 's death in the 
 tragedy of 'Othello.' Shakespearean scholars have 
 here as a rule and with exceptional modesty stood 
 aghast, conscious of their inability to explain, and 
 yet unwilling to risk against the great dramatist, who 
 seems to have taken all knowledge for his province, a 
 charge either of ignorance or of wilful violation of 
 the canons of art. Dyce, Staunton, Halliwell- 
 Phillipps, White, and many others do not even men- 
 tion it. Voltaire and Furness, however, are two con- 
 spicuous exceptions ; the one, exhausting his powers 
 of ridicule over the scene as depicted in the drama, 
 and the other, referring the difficulty to professional 
 experts, and then in despair leaving it undefended 
 and unexplained. 
 
 Desdemona, it is well-known, is smothered to death 
 in bed by her husband. Within about a half minute 
 to a minute, if we may judge by the dialogue between 
 Othello and Emilia that ensues, to make sure that 
 there will be no recovery, she is smothered again, 
 this time beyond all question, for she is now pro- 
 nounced by the dramatist, who has every fact at his 
 command, to be actually dead. Three minutes more 
 elapse, during which she lies motionless, without 
 breath, when she suddenly speaks, utters several sen- 
 tences at three several times, with pauses and replies 
 in a rational conversation, and then, no further vio- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 121 
 
 lence having been offered her, expires. The question 
 is, how could Desdemona have retained consciousness 
 and power of cognition and speech, not less than four 
 or five minutes, after the actual stroke of death had 
 been inflicted upon her ? 
 
 Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, in his Variorum edi- 
 tion of the play published in 1886, discussed the 
 matter at some length. Intimating as he did that 
 ' ' there does seem to be something not altogether true 
 to physiology in the subsequent revival of Desde- 
 mona," and desirous of bringing to the aid of his 
 exegesis the light of modern science, he addressed 
 letters to several eminent physicians of this country, 
 soliciting their views on the subject. We summarize 
 the replies received, excluding all speculations in 
 conflict with the text, as follows : 
 
 Dr. AgnBw. " I would say that Shakespeare has been most un- 
 fortunate in killing Desdemona. Death by strangulation, inferred 
 from the language used by Othello, — ' whose breath, indeed, these 
 hands have newly stopp'd ' — cannot readily be reconciled with a 
 temporary revival and ability to speak at three different times on 
 the part of the victim, after all signs of life had apparently dis- 
 appeared. 
 
 Dr. Da Costa. That she should have spoken after being 
 smothered is not possible ; if she had regained consciousness suffi- 
 ciently to speak intelligently, as she did, recovery would have 
 ensued." 
 
 Dr. Hammond. "A person smothered, and speaking afterwards, 
 would not die from the smothering. . . . As to what really killed 
 her, I think it is clearly apparent that Shakespeare was ignorant of 
 the modus operandi of smothering." 
 
 Dr. Furnivall, in his edition of the play, simply 
 says that Shake-speare " forgot that a person, once 
 stifled, couldn't speak again." In view of these 
 opinions, no one will be surprised to learn that some 
 actors, in order to rescue the scene from absurdity. 
 
122 COINCIDENCES 
 
 have actually stabbed Desdemona on the stage. Booth 
 and Fechter did it. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne thinks that the difficulty arises 
 from the want of proper stage directions which the 
 author would have supplied, had he revised the play. 
 Such directions must have explained, he says, " how 
 Desdemona manages to regain her breath so as to 
 speak three times . . . after being stifled to death. 
 To recover breath enough to speak, to think, . . . 
 can hardly be less than to recover breath enough to 
 revive and live." 
 
 The question now recurs, what could have induced 
 the dramatist to foist upon the narrative a circum- 
 stance so extraordinary and so contrary apparently 
 to all human experience ? Is it known that at any 
 previous time in his career he had ever investigated 
 the possibility of so strange an occurrence ? 
 
 The answer is at hand. 
 
 Francis Bacon was retired to private life in May, 
 162 1 ; he died in April, 1626. One of the first of his 
 works to which he gave attention during this interval 
 was the Historia Vitae et Mortis. In this we find pre- 
 cisely what we are looking for, proof that one person 
 at least, in the time when the Shakespeare plays 
 were coming out, carefully inquired how long one's 
 physical and mental powers can act in certain direc- 
 tions after every sign of life is gone. We now quote 
 from Bacon : 
 
 " Eels, serpents, and insects move a good while in all their parts 
 after being cut in pieces ; so that countrymen imagine that the dif- 
 ferent parts are trying to unite again. Birds likewise flutter for a 
 little after their heads are cut off ; and the hearts of animals beat 
 for a long time after being torn out. Indeed, I remember to have 
 seen the heart of a man who had his bowels torn out (the punish- 
 ment with us of high treason), which, on being cast according to 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 123 
 
 custom into the fire, leaped up at first about a foot and a half high, 
 and then by degrees to a less height, for the space, as I remember, 
 of seven or eight minutes. 
 
 " There is likewise an old and trustworthy tradition of an ox 
 bellowing after his bowels were torn out. But there is a more cer. 
 tain report of a man who, having undergone the said punishment 
 for treason, when his heart had been torn out and it lay in the 
 hands of the executioner, was heard to utter three or four words of 
 prayer." 
 
 Desdemona spoke after she had for a long time been 
 deprived of breath ; here was a man who, according to 
 Bacon's account of him, spoke not only after he had 
 lost his bowels, but also an appreciable length of time 
 after he had lost his heart. In such cases as these, of 
 bird, mammal and man. Bacon seems to have seen 
 only the natural flickerings of the lamp of life. He 
 would, of course, have had the same opinion in a like 
 case after smothering, for life is then, as in the case 
 cited, instantaneously and irrevocably extinguished. 
 
 The tragedy was first printed in 1622 ; the Hisloria 
 Vitae et Mortis, early in January following. The two 
 studies in this exceptional matter were apparently 
 simultaneous. 
 
J24 COINCIDENCES 
 
 IvXVII. 
 Philip Henslowe. 
 
 Henslowe was a proprietor and manager of theatres 
 in lyondon in the time of Shakespeare. He had deal- 
 ings with nearly all the dramatic poets among his 
 contemporaries, entering their names in his diary, 
 the titles of the plays they sold him, and the amounts 
 paid them. This diary was found at Dulwich in 
 1790, and is still extant. It covers almost the exact 
 period (1591-1609), during which the Shakespearean 
 plays were being first produced. 
 
 The following named playwrights are mentioned in 
 it : Drayton, Jonson, Wilson, Hathway, Dekker, 
 Monday, Chettle, Webster, Middleton, Heywood, 
 Chapman, Day, Nash, Pett, Smith, Birde, Daborne. 
 Mandeville, Singer, Slater, Marston, Porter, Rowley, 
 Haughton, Rankins, Wadeson and Boyle. These 
 were all mentioned by name. 
 
 The plays themselves which are credited to these 
 dramatists in the diary are very numerous, but others 
 are entered there which have no authors assigned to 
 them. Among these are King Lear, Henry V., Henry 
 VI. (15 times), Richard III., The Taming of a Shrew, 
 and Titus Andronicus. It is probable that Love's 
 Labor's Lost under another name (Berowne, a char- 
 acter in it) was also acquired and produced by Hens- 
 lowe in the same manner. But though the diary ex- 
 tends over a period of eighteen years and bears a rec- 
 ord not only of the dramas played in the theatres 
 under Henslowe 's management but also of the 
 amounts of money advanced by him from time to 
 time to their authors, to those whose abilities and 
 honor commanded his confidence, the name of Shake- 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 125 
 
 speare never once occurs in it from beginning to end. 
 Why is this? Evidently a deliberate suppression, 
 and explanable only on the ground that the author, 
 perhaps because he was a nobleman or a high officer 
 of the government, was, as Aubrey says of Bacon 
 and as Bacon once said of himself, a " concealed 
 poet." 
 
126 COINCIDENCES 
 
 LXVIII. 
 George Sandys. 
 It is practically certain that both Bacon and Shake- 
 speare read George Sandys' book of Travels, pub- 
 lished in 1615, and even made use of much of its con- 
 tents in their respective writings. Indeed, we know 
 from Bacon alone not only what countries Sandys 
 visited, but also the order in which he visited them. 
 We give a few examples from each : 
 
 Bacon. "The water of Nilus is sweeter than other waters in 
 
 taste." 
 Sandys. " Than the waters whereof there is none more sweet." 
 
 Bacon. " It is certain that in Egypt they prepare and clarify the 
 water of the Nile by putting it in great jars of stone, and 
 stirring it about with a few stamped almonds ; wherewith 
 they also besmear the mouth of the vessel ; and so draw it 
 off after it hath rested some time." 
 
 Sandys. "They put the water in large jars of stone, stirring it 
 about with a few stamped almonds, wherewith also they be- 
 smear the mouth of the vessel ; and for three or four hours 
 do suffer it to clarify." 
 
 Bacon. " It is reported of credit that if you take earth from land 
 adjoining to the river of Nile, and preserve it in that man- 
 ner that it come to be neither wet nor wasted, and weigh it 
 daily, it will not alter weight until June 17, which is the 
 day when the river beginneth to rise." 
 
 Sandys. " Take of the earth of Egypt, adjoining to the river, and 
 preserve it carefully, that it neither come to be wet nor 
 wasted ; weigh it daily, and you shall find it neither more 
 nor less heavy until the 17th of June ; at which day it be- 
 ginneth to grow ponderous, and augmenteth with the 
 augmentation of the river." 
 
 Bacon. " It is an old tradition that those that dwell near the 
 cataracts of Nilus are strucken deaf." 
 
 Sandys. " He spouts down from a wonderful height into the 
 valley below, and that with such a roaring of waters that a 
 colony, planted by the Persians, and made almost deaf with 
 the noise, were glad to abandon their habitations." 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 127 
 
 Bacon. " Upon that very day when the river first riseth, great 
 plagues in Cairo use suddenly to break up." 
 
 Sandys. " The Plague, which here oft miserably rageth, upon the 
 first of the fiood doth instantly cease." 
 
 Shakespeare. "They take the flow o' the Nile 
 
 By certain scales i' the pyramid." 
 Sandys. " By the pillar, standing in a vault within the Castle, 
 entered by the Nile, they measure his increase." 
 
 Shakespeare. " They know 
 
 By the height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth, 
 Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells, 
 The more it promises." 
 
 Sandys. " Answerable to the increase of the river, is the plenty 
 or scarcity of the year succeeding." 
 
 Shakespeare. " As it ebbs, the seedsman 
 
 Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain. 
 And shortly comes to harvest." 
 Sandys. " Retiring a month after within his proper bounds, it 
 giveth way unto husbandry (the earth untilled) by throwing 
 the grain on the mud, and rice into the water." 
 
 Sandys' book of travels was published in London 
 in 1615 ; that is, as years were then reckoned, be- 
 tween March 25, 1615, and March 25, 1616. William 
 Shakspere, the reputed poet, died at Stratford 
 April 23, 1616, or within less than one year and one 
 month, perhaps one month only, after said publication 
 in London. His will was drawn by a scrivener in 
 January preceding, at which time he was unable to 
 recall the name of a grandchild, eleven years of age. 
 His death was occasioned, according to the best evid- 
 ence that we possess, by a drunken debauch. That 
 Shakspere became acquainted with Sandys' book 
 during the last year of his life in such a town as 
 Stratford, where, according to Richard Grant White, 
 not a half-dozen books, outside of the school and the 
 church, could be found, and where only six of the 
 
128 COINCIDENCES 
 
 nineteen aldermen and burgesses could write their 
 names, is well nigli incredible. If he did, his own 
 daughters could not have read the title-page. One 
 of them signed her name to a bond on the day of her 
 marriage with a mark, and the other, after living with 
 her husband twenty-seven years, could not distinguish 
 his handwriting from another's. 
 
 Shakespere made his last will and testament at the 
 very time he would have been reading Sandys, that 
 is, during the last year of his life, but no mention of 
 such a book or, indeed, of any other, is found in it. 
 It seems to be highly improbable, therefore, that he 
 could have been the author of the Shakespearean 
 drama, ' Anthony and Cleopatra,' in which the pass- 
 ages, taken from Sandys, appeared for the first time in 
 1623, seven years after his death. Bacon's work, 
 8ylva Sylvarum^'' in which like passages appeared, 
 was written in 1623-26. Bacon died in 1626. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE izg 
 
 LXIX. 
 Future I/IFE. 
 On the subject of a future life two authors of dis- 
 tinction perceive a remarkable coincidence between 
 the writings of Sbake-speare and Bacon : 
 
 "In his great tragedies he traces the -workings of noble or lovely 
 human characters on to the point, and no further, where they dis- 
 appear in the darkness of death, and ends -with a look back, never 
 on toward anything beyond." E. D, West. 
 
 " As for the hopes and fears of a second life, they are as com- 
 pletely absent [from Bacon's Essays] as they are from the Penta- 
 teuch." Edwin A. Abbott. 
 
ijo COINCIDENCES 
 
 LXX. 
 
 The Bust at Stratford-upon-Avon. 
 
 Under Shakspere's bust in the churcli at Stratford 
 is the following inscription : 
 
 JudicioPylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem. 
 
 [In wisdom a Nestor, in genius a Socrates, in art a 
 Virgil.] 
 
 In other words, the person thus commemorated 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 13 t 
 
 was a statesman, a philosopher and a poet. It is 
 also stated under the bust that the body of Shak- 
 spere lies "within this monument;" this is, of 
 course, an error, for the body of the Stratford Shak- 
 spere is buried under the floor of the chancel, at some 
 distance from the monument, whence Mr. Halliwell- 
 Phillipps justly inferred that the inscription was 
 composed " neither by a Stratfordian nor by any one 
 acquainted with its destined position." 
 
 Can it be that these words were intended to apply, 
 not to an ignorant yokel, but to Francis Bacon? No 
 one who does not stand at or near the head of the 
 human race can satisfy the requirements, as the fol- 
 lowing considerations will show : 
 
 Wisdom. Bacon can be compared to no other person in ancient 
 or modern times more fitly in this respect than to Nestor, who for 
 his wisdom in practical affairs was reckoned by the Greeks among 
 the immortal gods. Indeed, the title by which Bacon has now be- 
 come universally known is, Thb Wisest op Mankind. 
 
 Genius. Socrates and Bacon, one among the ancients and the 
 other in modern times, are perhaps the two greatest moral forces 
 ever introduced into humanity. Indeed, Bacon is often called 
 Socrates. "No book," says Macauley, referring to the Novum 
 Organum, "ever made so great a revolution in the mode of think- 
 ing, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many new opin- 
 ions. Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is em- 
 ployed only to illustrate and decorate truth." 
 
 Art. Under the head of art we have in the inscription as our 
 third exemplar the Author of the ^neid. This is perhaps the 
 happiest inspiration of all in the matter before us, for it serves to 
 explain and justify the finest piece of literary criticism ever made 
 on Francis Bacon. We give it without comment : 
 
 " There is something about him not fully understood or discerned 
 which, in spite of all curtailments of his claims in regard to one 
 special kind of eminence or another, still leaves the sense of his 
 eminence as strong as ever. George L. Craik. 
 
 The discrepancy between the bust (which all good 
 judges say " has no more individuality or power than 
 
132 COINCIDENCES 
 
 a boy's marble ") and tbe inscription under it may be. 
 dismissed. 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 133 
 
 LXXI. 
 Portrait. 
 
 Droeshout Portrait (as reputed) of the Stratford Shakspere. 
 
 This is the portrait inserted as a frontispiece in the 
 iolio editions of Shake-speare, beginning in 1623) 
 seven years after the reputed author's death. It is 
 hardly considered as the likeness of a human being. 
 
 Mr. Boaden, in his ' Portraits of Shakespeare • 
 (1824), calls it "an abominable libel on humanity." 
 
 Richard Grant White, " a hard wooden staring 
 thing." 
 
IS4 COINCIDENCES 
 
 Dr. Ingleby, " such a montrosity that I for one do 
 not believe it had any trustworthy exemplar." 
 
 Mr. Norris, in his 'Portraits of Shake-speare,' p. 
 15, says, " it is not known from what it was copied, 
 and many think it unlike any human being. ' ' 
 
 Dr. Appleton Morgan, President of the New York 
 Shakespeare Society : " The face has the wooden ex- 
 pression familiar in the Indians used as signs for 
 tobacconists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare 
 that would be but a sorry advertisement for the hum- 
 blest establishment in that Trade." 
 
 Mr. Skottowe, in his ' I,ife of Shakespeare,' p. 76 : 
 *' Irreconcilable with the belief of its ever having 
 borne a striking resemblance to any human being. ' ' 
 
 Craig's ' Shakespeare and Art,' p. 25: " The head 
 is comparatively narrow, so very marked in this re- 
 spect that it indicates not only weakness in the por- 
 trait but feebleness in the character. . . . As a 
 monumental effigy, it would deservedly become the 
 scorn and scoff of future ages." 
 
 The greatest portrait painter, with the possible 
 exception of Sir Joshua Reynolds, England has pro- 
 duced was Thomas Gainsborough ; in 1768, he ex- 
 pressed this opinion of the Shakespeare frontispiece : 
 
 " A stupider face I never beheld. It is impossible that such a 
 mind and ray of heaven could shine -with such a face and pair of 
 eyes as that picture has." 
 
 It is marvelous that in all these years, nearly three 
 centuries, and in a matter to which scholars have 
 given so much time and attention, the explanation of 
 this mystery is only now just dawning upon the 
 world. Ben Jonson gives a hint of it in the lines re- 
 ierring to the engraver, contributed by him to the 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 135 
 
 first Folio and printed opposite tie frontispiece, in 
 part as follows : 
 
 " O, could he but have drawn his wit 
 As well in brass as he hath bit 
 His face, the print would then surpass 
 All that was ever writ in brass." 
 
 That is, as Mr. Donnelly interprets the lines, 
 
 AH that was ever writ — in brass. 
 
 The truth is, as Mr. Borman first conjectured, the 
 portrait is masked. Even the line of demarkation 
 along the chin is visible. The whole thing is evi- 
 dently a caricature, to which the engraver, in view 
 of a royal decree promulgated in the first year of 
 Elizabeth, that no man under a penalty of 3s. \A. 
 should appear at the great table with a beard exceed- 
 ing a fortnight's growth, has given a humorous 
 touch. 
 
136 COINCIDENCES 
 
 I^XXII. 
 Behind a Mask. 
 
 Bacon described his philosophy as The Interpreta- 
 tion of Nature. What he meant by nature in this 
 connection he tells us in the Novum Organum^ thus : 
 "It may be asked whether I speak of natural phil- 
 osophy alone, or whether I mean that the other sci- 
 ences, logic, ethics and politics, should also be car- 
 ried on by this method. Now I certainly mean what 
 I have said to be understood of them all ; and as the 
 common logic, which governs by the syllogism, ex- 
 tends not only to natural, but also to all sciences, so 
 does mine, which, proceeding by induction, embraces 
 everything. For I form a history and tables of dis- 
 covery for anger, fear, shame and the like ; for 
 matters political; and again for the mental opera- 
 tions of memory, composition, division, judgment 
 and the rest, not less than for heat and cold, or light, 
 or vegetation." (CXXVII). He says further, else- 
 where and with more particularity, that he will treat 
 of the ' ' characters and dispositions of men as they 
 are affected by sex, by age, by religion, by health 
 and illness, by beauty and deformity ; and also of 
 those which are caused by fortune, as sovereignty, 
 nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, 
 prosperity and adversity. ' ' 
 
 Bacon's philosophy, therefore, as he conceived it, 
 embraced our whole being, the mind and its traits as 
 well as the physical powers by which we are gov- 
 erned. It had no other limitation than that of our 
 life and its interests here on the earth. 
 
 Among the personal qualifications of such an in- 
 terpreter, as laid down by Bacon, is one to which thus 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 137 
 
 far little attention has been given, viz. Let him man- 
 age his personal affairs under a mask, but with due re- 
 gard to the circumstances in which he is placed.^ This is 
 probably as clear a statement on the point as Bacon 
 deemed it prudent to make, but the following infer- 
 ence from it is unmistakable ; any person who 
 would undertake Bacon's work as a philosopher and 
 carry it on as he did must wear a mask. Therefore 
 it follows that Bacon himself wore one. That is, he 
 wrote under a pseudonym. 
 
 The author of the Plays also wore a mask, for the 
 name he assumed — Shake-speare — could not possi- 
 bly have been his true one. No such patronymic 
 was ever known in the history of the world. It seems 
 to have been derived from Pallas, the goddess of wis- 
 dom, whose name was itself derived from iraWeii/, to 
 shake, and who was represented in the statuary art of 
 the Greeks with an immense spear in her right hand. 
 She was known indeed as the Spear-shaker or Shake- 
 spear of the Grecian civilization. 
 
 This name, with a hyphen between the syllables, 
 appears fifteen times in the Shakespearean Plays. 
 Ben Jonson refers to it in the poem with which he 
 opens the great Shakespearean Folio of 1623 : 
 
 " He seems to shake a lance, 
 As brandish't at the eyes of ignorance." 
 
 1 The original Latin is as follows : Privaia negotia fersonatus ad- 
 ministret, rerum tamen provisus subvenerans. Mr. Spedding says of it 
 in a foot-note : " I cannot say that I clearly understand the sen- 
 tence ; but I think it must refer to the necessity of using popular 
 ideas for popular purposes." His associate in the editorship of 
 Bacon's works, Mr. Ellis, is, to say the least, equally unhappy in 
 his translation of it : "He must affect more interest in them [his 
 private affairs] than he feels." This seems to have spurred Mr. 
 Spedding to still another conjecture of the meaning thus: The 
 interpreter must speak to people in their own language." Com- 
 ment on such ridiculous guesswork is unnecessary. 
 
138 COINCIDENCES 
 
 It may indeed have suggested tlie actual mask seen 
 in the Droeshout portrait of the author of the Plays 
 in the Folios. This explains why that portrait does 
 not resemble a human being. 
 
 In Liddell and Scott's Greek-English lexicon the 
 name of Pallas is etymologically given as The Brand- 
 isker of the /Spear, 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 139 
 
 Summary op Coincidences. 
 
 1. Shake-speare eulogizes the people of Kent 
 county (and of no other) in England, the home of the 
 Bacon family. 
 
 2. Both authors were aristocrats. 
 
 3. Both were educated at the same university. 
 
 4. Each was extraordinarily self-confident that 
 his own writings were immortal. 
 
 5. Shakespeare's vocabulary is the largest ever 
 attained by any individual in any language or in any 
 age of the world. Bacon's is equally remarkable for 
 its extent and richness. 
 
 6. Both seem to have acquired all knowledge 
 then existing, Bacon having made this one of his pro- 
 fessed aims in life. 
 
 7. Both considered themselves old men before 
 they were thirty-seven or thereabouts. 
 
 8. Both were great orators. 
 
 9. Both were profound lawyers. 
 
 10. The scenes of the early plays are those where 
 Bacon had spent his youth. 
 
 II Both had a colloquial use of the French lan- 
 guage. 
 
 12. Immediately before the historical drama of 
 King Henry VI. was written, Bacon visited the Eng- 
 lish battle-grounds, described in that drama, in 
 France. 
 
 13 Bacon had special opportunities, as an attache 
 of the English embassy in France, to investigate the 
 career of Joan of Arc. The author of the drama of 
 King Henry VI. must actually have investigated it. 
 
 14. Both wrote sonnets. 
 
 15. Florio published a sonnet the author of which 
 
I40 COINCIDENCES 
 
 he described as (i) his friend; (3) a person of high 
 rank ; and (3) a concealed poet. Bacon answers to 
 this description in every particular. 
 
 16. In the last days of Elizabeth both authors 
 feared the rising democracy. 
 
 17. Both were familiar with the private rules that 
 govern the Inner Temple in London, an institution 
 for lawyers to which the public were not admitted. 
 
 18. Both favored the use of commonplace books, 
 the dramatist advocating it at the time when Bacon 
 was actually keeping one. 
 
 19. Both names were inscribed in the handwriting 
 of the time on one of Bacon's private portfolios (re- 
 cently discovered), the latter containing, inter alia, 
 some of Bacon's manuscripts and among them two 
 of the Shake-speare plays. 
 
 20. The first of the Shake-speare poems to be 
 published was dedicated to one of Bacon's most inti- 
 mate friends, a nobleman whose consent (for the want 
 of which a play-actor would have lost his ears) had 
 not been previously obtained. 
 
 21. This poem was written before the reputed 
 poet's arrival in London, with no possible education 
 beyond that afforded by the Stratford grammar 
 school. And yet, as agreed by all scholars who have 
 examined the subject, it bears every mark of collegi- 
 ate elegance and culture. 
 
 22. Both were familiar with the art of play-act- 
 ing, one laying down rules for it in ' Hamlet, ' and the 
 other superintending exercises of the kind as a recog- 
 nized proficient therein among the young lawyers of 
 Gray's Inn. 
 
 23. Shake-speare made a practice of using the 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 141 
 
 plots of others for his dramas, and Bacon, in writing 
 history, acknowledged his dependence on authors who 
 had preceded him and given him the main facts. The 
 method which one acted upon the other explained 
 and defended. 
 
 24. Bacon's brother was residing in Navarre and 
 in constant correspondence with Francis at the time 
 when the comedy of 'I^ove's I,abor's Lost' was written. 
 The scene of the play is laid at the court of Navarre. 
 It deals with the mode of study then in vogue in the 
 world, the one that caused Bacon's disgust at Cam- 
 bridge and induced him to leave the university with- 
 out completing his course or taking his degree. 
 
 25. Bacon was an undergraduate at Cambridge at 
 the time when Dr. Caius was conducting himself in 
 so exciting a manner among the students there. The 
 doctor is ridiculed under his own name in the ' Merry 
 Wives of Windsor.' 
 
 26. One of the historical plays of Shake-speare 
 was devoted to the reign of King John, but no men- 
 tion is made in it of the Magna Charta, the great 
 event of the reign. Bacon disapproved of every effort 
 of the people to gain a part in the government. 
 
 27. The author of the plays gives in the drama of 
 King Henry VI. an erroneous view of the character 
 of the Duke of Gloucester. It is the view that was 
 taken of it at the Duke's home at St. Albans. Bacon 
 lived at St. Albans. 
 
 28. Bacon became debtor to a Jew and was arrested 
 in the street for non-payment under circumstances 
 designed to disgrace him. It was but a month or two 
 afterward that Shake-speare produced the ' Merchant 
 of Venice ' with Shylock as its principal character. 
 
142 COINCIDENCES 
 
 29. The author of ' Troilus and Cressida,' as in- 
 timated in the preface to it, was not only a member 
 of the nobility, but also a popular lawyer. Bacon 
 was both a nobleman and a lawyer. 
 
 30. Both of our authors had great admiration for 
 the character of Julius Caesar, one calling him " the 
 noblest man that ever lived, ' ' and the other, ' ' the 
 worthiest man that ever lived. ' ' Shake-speare wrote 
 a drama and Bacon a biography of him. Both were 
 impressed with Caesar's work on the calendar. 
 
 31. In Shake-speare 's series of historical dramas 
 the reign of Henry VII. is strangely omitted ; but 
 Bacon wrote a history of it in prose, beginning at the 
 exact point where Shake-speare left off in the preced- 
 ing drama, and leaving off at the exact point where 
 Shake-speare began again in the next. 
 
 32. The author of the Plays dramatised Woolsey's 
 downfall from the Lord Chancellorship of England 
 in the play of King Henry VIII., first published in 
 1623. Bacon fell from the same high office in 162 1, 
 and died in 1626. The reputed poet died at Stratford 
 in 1616. 
 
 33. Shake-speare portrayed the symptoms of in- 
 sanity in several of the plays published after 1603. 
 Bacon had sole charge of his mother, who was vio- 
 lently insane from 1601 to 1610. 
 
 34. Both authors knew that the tidal current 
 through the Bosphorus always flows from east to 
 west, Shake-speare mentioning the fact in one of his 
 dramas ; not however in the first edition of this drama, 
 published six years after the reputed poet's death at 
 Stratford, but in the second, published one year later 
 still. 
 
 35. When the author of the plays was obliged to 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 143 
 
 seek a new name for his famous buffoon, he adopted 
 that of Sir John Falstaff. The selection has never 
 been satisfactorily accounted for, but it is now known 
 that at the date of its adoption Bacon had an associ- 
 ate in the practice of law named John Halstaff . 
 
 36. Both authors had an idiosyncracy for writing 
 words in one language with the alphabet of another. 
 
 37. Both were familiar with the Spanish language. 
 
 38. Both were familiar with the Italian language. 
 
 39. Both were familiar with the Greek language. 
 
 40. Both held the opinion that foul odors were the 
 cause of epilepsy. 
 
 41. Both authors adopted the theory that the 
 centre of the earth is cold, at precisely the same time 
 and against the otherwise universal opinion of man- 
 kind. 
 
 42. Both opposed the Copernican theory, and con- 
 tinued to oppose it through life, even after it had 
 been generally accepted. 
 
 43. Both changed their views relating to the 
 cause of the tides at the same time, in the same man- 
 ner, and against universal opinion. 
 
 44. Both also changed their minds late in life re- 
 garding the philosophic connection between motion 
 and sense. 
 
 45. The two were further agreed on an abstruse 
 and purely technical matter in the science of music, 
 but neither opinion was expressed until many years 
 after the death of the reputed poet at Stratford, and 
 then at the same precise time. 
 
 46. The difference between nature and art was de- 
 fined by the two in the same terms and simultane- 
 ously. 
 
 47. In one of the early plays judicial torture was 
 
144 COINCIDENCES 
 
 condemned ; but in a later edition, after Bacon had 
 been obliged by command of the King to take part in 
 a case of the kind, the condemnatory passage was 
 omitted. 
 
 48. Both authors wrote on the subject of envy, 
 one a drama and the other an essay. The drama was 
 first published in 1623 and the essay in 1625, with 
 the same sentiments in the two productions. 
 
 49. Both took great interest in efforts to secure 
 repeal of obsolete laws, one writing a drama on the 
 subject and the other twice proffering his services to 
 the government to that end. 
 
 50. The writings of both were brought into com- 
 plete and permanent form and finally published for 
 preservation at the same time, the Shake-speare 
 plays and poems in 1623 and Bacon's Novum Or- 
 ganum and De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1620-23. 
 
 51. The two were alike at enmity with Sir Ed- 
 ward Coke. 
 
 52. Both declared that Queen Elizabeth had lived 
 and died a virgin. 
 
 53. Both produced works that were despised by 
 contemporaries . 
 
 54. Bacon was condemned for bribery against his 
 protestations of innocence in 1621. The dramatist, 
 in the name of one of his characters, disclaimed 
 charges of bribery after 1619 and before 1623. 
 
 55. Each had a dark period in his life, due to a 
 scandal of the same kind and producing the same 
 effect. 
 
 5 6. Each associated closely together in ridicule and 
 contempt two physicians, one who was born in Asia 
 Minor and had been dead more than a thousand years, 
 and the other born in Switzerland and had been dead 
 
BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 145 
 
 nearly a hundred years, with no apparent connection 
 between them. 
 
 57. Each has been considered by excellent judges 
 the greatest intellectual force that ever existed in the 
 world. 
 
 58. Each has acquired the title, given by general 
 consent, of ' the wisest of mankind.' 
 
 59. The great drama of 'The Tempest,' which 
 has so long been an enigma to scholars, is simply an 
 application of Bacon's philosophy to mankind. 
 
 60. ' Timon of Athens ' was unknown until it 
 was published in 1623, two years after Bacon's down- 
 fall. Its subject is prodigality, one of the causes of 
 Bacon's distress at that period of his life. 
 
 61. Both authors were in the habit of making 
 frequent revisions of their writings for the press, 
 even after the writings had been printed ; in some in- 
 stances, after they had been printed several times. 
 
 62. Both authors left an extraordinarily large 
 number of their works to be published posthumously, 
 Bacon confessing that he did it on principle. 
 
 63. Cardinal Wolsey's lament over fallen great- 
 ness, as given in the drama of King Henry VIII., ex- 
 actly befits Bacon's personal experience. 
 
 64. Both authors claim to have led disappointed 
 lives. 
 
 65. Both sought consolation in like examples of 
 distress in others. 
 
 66. Bacon investigated the question how long con- 
 scienciousness can exist after every sign of life in the 
 body has disappeared ; Shake-speare illustrated Ba- 
 con's erroneous and absurd conclusions in the death 
 of Desdemona. 
 
 67. Philip Henslow had extensive dealings with 
 
146 COINCIDENCES 
 
 lyondon dramatists during nearly all of Shake-speare's 
 life, but though keeping a diary, never mentions 
 Shake-speare by name. 
 
 68. Both authors are known to have read George 
 Sandy's book of Travels and to have quoted from it. 
 
 69. The tragedies of Shake-speare and the Essays 
 of Bacon are equally and strangely reticent on the 
 subject of a future life. 
 
 70. The inscription under the bust at Stratford 
 applies, not to Shakspere, the play-actor, but to 
 Bacon. 
 
 71. The frontispiece in the Shake-peare Folios 
 represents the author behind a mask. 
 
 72. Bacon advises all interpreters of human nature 
 and life, such as he acknowledged himself to be and 
 such as we know the author of the Shake-speare 
 Poems and Plays to have been, to write under pseud- 
 onyms.