Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown

ions, his scientific studies, and his absorbing scientific preoccupation, is a probable author of the Shakespearean plays. Mr. Greenwood finds the young Shaks

s; so bad at paying one debt at least; so eager a creditor; a would-be encloser of a common;

ke what I should expect from the author of the plays. Moreover, the conduct of Shelley in regard to his wife was, in my opinion, very mean and cruel, and the last thing that we could have expected from one who, in verse, was such

a member of the Scottish Bar it was inconsistent with his honour to be the secret proprietor of a publishing and a printing business. This is the unexplained moral paradox in the career of a man of chivalrous honour and strict

to found families. But in the mysterious mixture of each human personality, any sober soul who reflects on his own sins and failings will not think other men's failings incompatible with intellectual excellence. Bacon's own conduct in money matters was that of a man equally grasp

e circumstance "that a man should be writing Hamlet, and at the same time bringing actions for petty sums lent on loan at some unspecified interest." [171b] Nor do I see anything at all out of the way in Bacon's prosecution of his friend and benefactor, Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing Hamlet. Indeed, Shakspere's case is the less "out of the way" of the two. He wanted his loan to be repaid, and told his lawyer to bring an action. Bacon wanted to keep his head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders; or to keep his body out of the Tower; or he

n he had often to be examining persons accused of conspiracy,-and do not forget his long and poignant anxiety about Essex, his constant efforts to reconcile him with Elizabeth, and to advocate his cause without losing her favour; and, finally, the anguish of prosecuting his friend, and of knowing how hardly the world judged his own conduct. Follow him into his relations with James I; his eager pursuit of favour, the multiplicity of his affairs, his pecuniary distresse

e of obituary verses. This fills Mr. Greenwood with amazement. "Was it because 'the friends of the Muses' were for the most par

sight

in our water

the Swan of Avon? As Jonson was fairly sane, we can no more suspect him of having hoped for this miracle than believe that most of the poets kne

ight from hence hat

y, but for thy

died in the depths of the country, weary of London. Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary poems dropped on the grave of the famous Beaumont? Did Fletcher, did Jonson, produce one melodious t

Mr. Greenwood that he had no books. Mr. Greenwood is a lawyer; so was my late friend Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton, who remarks that Shakesp

ily exclusive of books, for Mr. Elton takes it as a quite natural fact that Shakespeare's books passed, with his other goods, to Mr

ially mentioning his books proves that he had none. Lawyers appear to differ as to this inference: both Mr. Elton and Mr. Greenwood seem equally confident. [175b] But if it were perfectly natural that the actor, Shakspere, should have no books, then he certainly made no effort, by the local colour of owning a few volumes, to persuade mankind that he was the auth

ly, when she was married to the Earl of Bothwell in 1566. At all events, Lady Jane "made her mark." It may be feared that Judith, brought up in that very illiterate town of S

ch she may have possessed. Mr. Greenwood "would have supposed that she would have had much to say about the great poet," exhibited his books (if any), and so forth. Perhaps she did,-but how, if we "know nothing about her disposi

wealth and Restoration, "the friends of the Muses" knew that the actor was no

ord monument of Shakespeare in the parish church is haunted by Baconian mysteries. If the gentle reader will throw hi

that all

my soul

Jacobean." The same may assuredly be said of the monument; it is in good Jacobean style: the pillars with their capitals are graceful: all the rest is in keeping; and the two inscriptions are in the square capital letters of inscription

Hollar or not, represent a Jacobean work? Look at the two ludicrous children, their legs dangling in air; at the lions' heads above the capitals of the pillars; at the lettering of the two visible words of the inscription, and at the gloomy hypochondriac or lunatic, clasping a cushion to his abdomen. That hideous design was not executed by an artist who "had his eye o

isfy himself on this point, Sir George Trevelyan, as he wrote to me (June 13, 1912), "made a sketch of the Carew Renaissance monument in Stratford Church, and found t

lace them," "on the whole sees no reason at all why we should doubt the substantial accuracy of Dugdale's figure . . . It is imp

f the Carew monument. Mr. Greenwood, elsewhere, repeating his criticism of the impossible figures of children, says: "This is certainly mere matter of detail, a

is half-length of a gloomy creature clutching a cushion to his stomach? With his inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we to accept him as accurate in his representation of the bust? Moreover, ot

nstructed," and so must have become no longer what Dugdale's man drew, but

for anything like what Dugdale's man drew

6, Mr. Ward (grandfather of Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with "a cry of players." He devoted the proceeds of a performance of Othello to the reparation of the then existing monument. The amount was twelve pounds ten shillings. The affair dragged on, one of the Church-wardens, a blacksmith, held the ￡12, 10s., and was troublesome. The document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in the matter. It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or painter, is to "take care, according to his ability, that the monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected." This appears to have been the idea of Mr. Greene. A

painting is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 "

e did. She writes: "It would only be giving good value for his money" (￡12, 10s.) "to his churchwarden

struct an entirely new monument. Now Hall was a painter, not (like Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor. Pour tout potage he had but ￡12, 10s. He could not do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy "the original monument" and make a new monument in Jacobean style. He was straitly ordered to "repair and beautify the original monument"; he

he copied badly. Mr. Greenwood proceeds: "In his Outlines Halliwell simply ignores Dugdale. His engraving was doubtless too inconvenient to be brought to public notice!" Here Halliwell is accused of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about the repeated reparation of the writing hand,-not represented in Dugdale's design,-he also lied with circumstance. But he certainly quoted a genuine "contemporary account" of the or

n. In the same way I do not expect any artist or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe's Shakespeare (1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made à plaisir. In Pope's edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument

writes that "if I should be told that Dugdale's effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring an exceptionally bad harvest, 'I should not feel it to be strange!' Neither should I f

were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood's words, "Was Dugdale's bust thought to bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of Stratford? Or was it thought that the presence of a woolsack" (the cus

the first words of a Latin insc

, genio Socrat

opulus m?ret,

e such notable false quantities in his plays had no cause to object to another on his monument. We do not know who erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) "a clayver man." The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare's daughter and son-in-law

"by the author of Hamlet." Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable that the authority for Shakespeare's authorship of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall

Mrs. Hall, died, her epitaph spoke quite

her sex, but

tion was good

akespeare was i

h whom she's now

as Suckling, and the rest of the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the plays

out his monument and his grave, and asks if he "died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might move his bones

er), went to Stratford, and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen's. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was a great ossuary or bone-house in the

f his wisdom, or his wit. [189a] Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean

"a good send-off." The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if from any, it was executed. Richard Burbage is known to have amused himself with the art of design; p

father of the literary "tribe of Ben." Thus he naturally sat for his portrait. In the same way George Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox. But as a scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as tutor of his King, and was the "good pen" of the anti-Marian nobles, Murray, Morton, and the rest. Therefore Buchanan's portrait was painted, while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, appar

ual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs of Dugdale's man's fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the evidence of style; and in spite of documentary evidence that "