SHAKSPERE DISINTEGRATED

[Arthur Neuendorffer]

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https://archive.org/stream/cultofshakespear00hall/cultofshakespear00hall_djvu.

_THE CULT OF SHAKESPEARE_ by F. E. HALLIDAY
...................................................
<< XI : SHAKSPERE DISINTEGRATED

To make a miracle out of the
quite unremarkable story of a successful genius, whose higher educa-
tion had been the conversation of poets and the companionship of cour-
tiers, they exaggerated the poverty of his origin and the illiteracy of his
environment. 'Removed prematurely from school;' Halliwell-Phillipps
had written, 'residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbour-
hood; thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic pro-
gress, it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford, he was
not all but destitute of polished accomplishments.' How was it possible to
reconcile this with Professor Masson's estimate? 'In Shakespeare's
plays we have Thought, History, Exposition, Philosophy, all within
the round of the poet. It is as if into a mind poetical in form there had
been poured all the matter which existed in the mind of his contem-
porary Bacon. The only difference between him and Bacon sometimes
is that Bacon writes an Essay and calls it his own, while Shakespeare
writes a similar essay and puts it into the mouth of Ulysses or a Polo-
nius.' Even their orthography proved unfortunate, for by adopting the
'Shakspere' spelling, which was the old-fashioned form of the early
Stratford records, they tended to divorce the Stratford man from the
London poet, whose name was generally spelt 'Shakespeare' — as, it is
worth remarking, it always is in the records of his acting. Finally,
though with the best intentions in the world, by the wholesale dis-
integration of the plays, they added to the general bewilderment, and
almost prepared the way for those who were ready to go a step further
and maintain that Shakspere, the Stratford actor, was quite distinct
from 'Shakespeare', the London dramatist; that Shakspere, in short,
wrote not a single line of the plays attributed to him.

In 1886 the Baconian Society was founded. A few years later the
New Shakspere Society was disbanded. Halliwell-Phillipps was dead;
Furnivall, having systematised Shakspere, felt that Shelley and Brown-
ing were in need of similar scientific study and Societies, Dowden, that
their minds and arts were in need of appraisal, and Fleay, metrical
tests exhausted, dedicated his talents to Egyptology and Assyriology.
The cause of Shakspere was left to the Germans and the Shakespeare-
Gesellschaft.
...............................................................
XII : SHAKSPERE UNMASKED

Had they known it, the Baconians were celebrating their centenary
when they founded their Society. Just a hundred years before, the solu-
tion of the Shakespeare mystery had been revealed to the Rev. James
Wilmot, an ardent admirer of the works of the great Lord Verulam.
Like Shakespeare himself, tired of London, Dr Wilmot had sought the
quiet and seclusion of his native Warwickshire, and settled as rector of
Barton-on-the-Heath, near Stratford, where his books, particularly
those of Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, formed his principal distrac-
tion. That was in 1 78 1 , when he was fifty-five. The more he read, the
more he was impressed by the similarity of knowledge displayed by his
two favourite authors. There was, for example, a reference in Corio-
lanus to the circulation of the blood, and in Love's Labour's Lost an
apparently intimate knowledge of the Court of Navarre at the time
when Anthony Bacon, Francis's brother, had stayed there. Shakespeare
must have been an exceptionally knowledgeable man with an extensive
library, though there was nothing in the scanty records of his life to
suggest that he was. The rector began to investigate. He covered him-
self with the dust of every private bookcase for fifty miles around, but
could find no more trace of Shakespeare's books in the course of twenty
years than could Samuel Ireland in ten days. Nor could he find in the
plays any trace of the legends and folklore retailed by John Jordan and
his cronies, or of the scenes that their author must have frequented in
his youth. Apparently the rector overlooked the fact that he himself
lived in the native village of Christopher Sly of The Taming of the
Shrew, 'old Sly's son of Burton-heath', incidentally the village of
Shakespeare's aunt and uncle, Joan and Edmund Lambert.

By the time he was eighty, Dr Wilmot had compiled volumes
of manuscript notes on his researches. But he told no one. Stratford
remembered only too well the havoc wrought by another clergyman,
and he had not even been a Warwickshire man. To reveal his secret
would be to court ostracism, and worse. Yet he did reveal it — to one
man.

In 1803 Mr James Corton Cowell of Ipswich agreed to read a
paper on the Life of Shakespeare to the local Philosophical Society. As
he knew very little about the subject and Malone's Life had not yet
appeared, he paid a visit to Stratford to gather material. He was dis-
mayed to find so little, astonished to be met everywhere by a strange
and perplexing silence. And then he met Dr Wilmot.

On February 7th, 1805, Mr Cowell read his promised paper on the
Life of Shakespeare. He was apologetic. He was, he confessed, a per-
vert, nay a renegade to the faith he had professed, and was prepared, as
he unfolded his surprising story, to be greeted with cries of disapproval
and even of execration. The truth was that he had met an ingenious
Warwickshire gentleman who had convinced him that 'the real author
of the Plays attributed to Shakspeare was Sir Francis Bacon'. The
Ipswich Philosophers were thrown into confusion, and not unnatur-
ally demanded the name of the author of this outrageous story. Mr
Cowell, having pledged them to secrecy, told them, elaborated the rec-
tor's arguments, and concluded with a modification of his original asser-
tion: 'Dr Wilmot does not venture to say definitely that Sir Francis
Bacon was the author; but, through his great knowledge of the works
of that writer, he is able to prepare a cap which fits him amazingly.'

Soon after this memorable meeting Dr Wilmot ordered all his papers
to be burned, and died. In 1813 Olivia Wilmot Serres published a Life
of the Rector of Barton-on-the-Heath. It is an interesting work,
although there is no mention of Bacon. Not only does Dr Wilmot
prove to have been the author of the Letters of Junius, but also the
husband of the King of Poland's sister. Secret marriages to royalty ran
in the family, for their daughter was the wife of the Duke of Cumber-
land, and Olivia herself the child of this union, Princess Olive of
Cumberland.

The Ipswich Philosophers kept their word, and it is only the com-
paratively recent discovery of the manuscript of CowelPs epoch-mak-
ing address that has revealed the first Baconian.* The founders of the
Society in 1886 knew nothing of Dr Wilmot and the priceless manu-
scripts that had perished with him, though they knew of an even earlier
exposure of the Stratford pretender. This was The Life and Adventures
of Common Sense: an Historical Allegory, published in 1769. According
to this fanciful history, soon after the defeat of the Armada, Wisdom,
Genius and Humour went to London, where they formed a friendship
with 'a person belonging to the Playhouse', one who had been a profli-
gate in his youth, and 'some say a Deerstealer'. Such a confirmed thief
was the plausible rogue that he robbed Wisdom of his commonplace
book, Genius of the mirror that reveals the souls of men, and Humour
of the mask that transforms the words of the wearer into incomparably
graceful wit. It was with these materials, and a profound genius stolen
from nobody, that he began to write plays. The thief's name was
Shakspeare. The author of this allegory was Herbert Lawrence, Gar-
rick's friend, the year of its publication that of the Stratford Jubilee, and
one would have thought his humorous sally a contribution to the
festivities, similar to Thomas King's whimsical speech on Shakespeare
as an underbred bully of our passions. But no; for the Baconians 'Wis-
dom' was obviously Bacon, and it is with the treasures of his common-
place book that the plays are stored. The Baconians forget to add the
conclusion of this episode: how Wisdom, Genius and Humour refused
to take any action against Shakespeare because they were 'apprehensive
that we could not distress this Man without depriving his Country of
its greatest Ornament'.

But Lawrence, after all, did not overtly claim Bacon as the author
of the plays. Nor did that sceptical sportsman, Joseph C. Hart, United
States Consul at Vera Cruz, in his unexpected outburst in his Romance
of Yachting of 1848. After watching a bullfight at Cadiz he describes
how he took a turn along the banks of the Guadalete, which inspired
him to quote the passage in The Winter's Tale about the deserts of
Bohemia and the storm. Falling into a reverie, he began, 'Ah, Shake-
speare — Immortal Bard,' and then, sharply — 'Who were you?' Cer-
tainly not the Stratford actor. That man was merely the factotum who
put the smut into plays which he eventually acquired after they had
been left with him at the Globe by starving poets. Then, a hundred
years after his death, said Rowe to Betterton, 'I want an author for this
selection of plays.' 'I have it,' Betterton replied; 'call them Shake-
speare's.' And so on for thirty-five pages before returning to the
romance of yachting. Although he came to no conclusion, Joseph C.
Hart has the honour of being the first openly to ask, 'Who wrote
Shakespeare?'

Two years later, in the Gentleman f s Magazine^ James Spedding
more modestly inquired, 'Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry VlllV As
Spedding's life-work was the editing of the works of Bacon, his answer
was read with some excitement by ardent admirers of Bacon who found
Halliwell's recent Life of Shakespeare distinctly flimsy and uncon-
vincing. His conclusion, however, was quite unsensational. There
was not a word about, not a suggestion of, Bacon; Shakespeare
and Fletcher had written the play in collaboration. Spedding was to
become a distinguished member of the New Shakspere Society,
and one of Mr Fleay's first metrical tests happily confirmed his find-
ings as to the authorship of Henry Fill. Shakespeare scholars had
themselves made a breach in the solid-seeming facade of the canon.
Yet the broader question of the nautical and literary Consul,
'Who wrote Shakespeare?', remained unanswered. He had not long to
wait.

Delia Bacon was the daughter of a missionary among the American
Indians. Proselytising, pioneering and teaching were in her blood, and
after conducting classes for women in history and literature, according
to her own original methods, she left New for Old England to dis-
cover who really wrote Shakespeare, and why. Thanks to the good
offices of the Vicar of Stratford she was allowed to spend whole nights
beside the grave in the church, where Samuel and William-Henry Ire-
land had lingered half a century before. Apparently her vigils were dis-
appointing and uninspired. There was no revelation as to how the
Stratford actor acquired the political sagacity and experience exhibited
in the plays, particularly in the Roman plays, particularly in Coriolanus^
full of the 'new philosophic statesman's ripest lore, the patient fruits
of observation strange'. Her own patient fruits appeared in 1857 as
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. Having rejected
the authorship of Shakespeare, it was perhaps inevitable that she should
discover the hand of her namesake, the impress of the master mind of
the new philosophic statesman, Francis Bacon. He was certainly there,
the principal author, though she generously conceded that he was only
the leader of a coterie, which included Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund
Spenser, jointly engaged in formulating a revolutionary, and therefore
dangerous, politico-philosophic system, so dangerous that they dared
do it only in the shadowy form of plays, ascribed to one 'Shakespeare'.
Miss Bacon was the first martyr to the cause. Her devotion to this one
idea had unbalanced her mind, and whilst she was in England it became
completely unhinged. She died insane in 1859, the year of the Collier
exposure.

In England there were other sceptics working along similar lines.
There was, for example, the anonymous contributor to Chambers
Journal^ who, after an ingenious discussion of the question, 'Who
wrote Shakespeare?', concluded that Shakspere 'kept a poet'. Mr Wil-
liam Henry Smith was more definite, though not altogether so. In
1857 he followed up a privately printed pamphlet with his Bacon and
Shakespeare^ in which he modestly suggested that Bacon was the most
likely author of the plays. It is a dull little book, its main burden being
that there is nothing in the little that we know about Shakespeare to
suggest that he could have written the plays, while Bacon possessed all
the necessary qualifications. Yet in its detail it pointed the way for
further advance. One great impediment, of course, was Ben Jonson's
lines in the folio, 'To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr Wil-
liam Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.' At first glance that seems
to suggest that Shakespeare was the author of the plays, that he was
dead, and that Jonson was referring to him. But a careful perusal of the
poem raises doubts. Bacon was still alive when the folio was published,
and the lines,

Thou art a Monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy Book doth live,

seem much more applicable to a living than to a dead person. Then
again, 'Soul of the age' seems more applicable to Bacon than to Shake-
speare, as does the famous line, 'And though thou hast small Latin and
less Greek', for there is reason to suppose that though Bacon was well
acquainted with Latin, he was not greatly proficient in the Greek
language. Here Smith was being culpably careless; Jonson wrote 'thou
hadst small Latin and less Greek'.

Mr Smith found the portrait in the folio equally ambiguous, for, as
it does not resemble the Stratford monument, it may be that the lines
of the engraver 'shadow forth Bacon, or Shakespeare, indifferently', a
supposition that is strengthened by the fact that the pose of a youthful
portrait of Bacon is similar to that of the folio engraving. Then there
is the parallel passage test:

Bacon: Poetry is nothing else but feigned history.

Shakespeare: The truest poetry is the most feigning.

Bacon: He wished him not to shut the gate of your Majesty's mercy.

Shakespeare: The gates of mercy shall be all shut up.

Bacon: . . . which I have called Essays.
The word is late, though the thing is ancient.

Shakespeare: I hope he wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue.

Mr Smith was getting out of his depth. Yet what are we to make of
the mysterious note from Bacon's Catholic friend, Tobie Matthew:
'The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this
side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, though he be known by an-
other^. If this does not mean that Bacon was known by the name of
Shakespeare, what does it mean?

It is not, perhaps, very convincing, but the nibbling process had
begun, the seeds of doubt were sown. Judge Nathaniel Holmes of
Kentucky wrote seven hundred octavo pages in support of Mr Smith's
thesis, reinforcing it with the peculiarly injudicial evidence that 'it is
historically known that Bacon wrote plays and poems'.* Mr Appleton
Morgan of Cincinnati entered the lists with his Shakespeare Myth as
the champion of Miss Bacon. 'My theory is', he wrote, 'that Delia
Bacon became insane — if at all — (for that she died in a mad house is
one of the many fictions of that irresponsible magazine writer Richard
Grant White) from the reception and treatment of her theory. I
should be very unwilling to admit a disbelief in W.S. as prima facie
insanity.' When Dr Thompson of Melbourne, Australia, joined the
fray, even Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, Walt Whit-
man, Mark Twain, John Bright, Emerson and A. P. Sinnett began to
waver, even the Iron Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, and Mrs Henry
Pott.

That, however, is not quite accurate. Mrs Pott arrived indepen-
dently at the conclusion that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. For years
she had been engaged on her great work of editing the manu-
script of Bacon's Promus of Formularies and Elegancies. This Promus,
or Storehouse, contains some sixteen hundred entries in various
languages: quotations, proverbs, memorable phrases and even
single words. Doubtless it was the commonplace book that 'Shake-
speare' stole from 'Wisdom', for how otherwise are we to account
for the correspondence between passages in the Promus and in the
plays? For example, six entries in the Promus which occur very
near together are found in eleven consecutive lines in Romeo and
Juliet'.

Promus Romeo and Juliet
.....................................................
Rome. Romeo.

Good morrow. Good morrow.

Sweet for speech in the morning. What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?

Lodged next. Where care lodges.

Golden sleep. There golden sleep doth reign.

Uprouse. Thou art uproused by some distemperature.

This parallelism can scarcely be mere coincidence; the writer of Romeo
and Juliet must surely have had Bacon's Promus at his elbow. Then,
on the very same page (Folio 1 1 2) Bacon makes the note, 'The Cock;
The Larke'. Shakespeare often mentions these birds: the former in
Hamlet^ Macbeth and The Tempest^ the latter (significantly) in Romeo
and Juliet as well as in Cymbeline. And compare Bacon's 'Wyld tyme
on the grownd hath a sent like a Cypresse chest', with A Midsummer
Night's Dream^ 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows'. It
cannot, of course, seriously be supposed that any borrowing was the
other way round, that Bacon made these notes from the plays, for use
in his philosophical writings. One can forgive the Baconians much,
but it is not easy to forgive Mrs Pott when, in order to equate her hero
with the author of the plays, she writes in a note to the Promus: 'From
the entries which refer to women we see that Bacon formed very un-
favourable views regarding them, views which unhappy passages in his
own life probably tended to confirm. The Shakespeare Plays seem to
exhibit the same unfavourable sentiments of their author.'

When Mrs Pott published the Promus in 1883, she appealed for
helpers to read, mark and annotate all the literature from about 1461
to 1661 , in order to prove to the public that the entries apply to 'Shake-
speare' and Bacon's prose works alone. She herself, of course, had long
been satisfied that this was so. But when further examined, the
Promus entries were found not to be confined to 'Shakespeare', and it
began to look as though Bacon wrote most of the Elizabethan drama,
as well as other classics such as Florio's translation of Montaigne's
Essays and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. This, however, was not
altogether surprising, for there are allusions in the Anatomy to Bacon's
Secret Society for the Advancement of Learning, and, though Mrs
Pott did not claim this, there is reason to believe that before assuming
the pseudonym of Shakespeare, Bacon wrote under the name of
Spenser, Watson, Greene, Lodge, Peele, Marlowe, Lyly and Nashe,
Euphues and Piers Penilesse^ of course, being autobiographical. It was
a stiffish assignment. The Faerie Queene alone is a tolerably long poem.
But as we know little more about Bacon's life from 1579 until at least
1590 than we do about Shakespeare's, we may assume that he had
plenty of time.

The Baconians were becoming a force to be reckoned with; the
evidence was accumulating, and things were beginning to look black
for Shakespeare. A few years earlier a number of late Elizabethan
manuscripts had been discovered at Northumberland House in Lon-
don, twenty-two doubled sheets, the outer one forming the title-page.
Some of these were copies of minor compositions by Bacon, a short
essay and a few speeches for delivery at tilts and entertainments, others
were letters and tracts by various authors. On the title-page was part
of a list of contents, most of them Bacon's and some of them missing,
then, after a space, four plays: 'Rychard the second', 'Rychard the
third', 'Asmund and Cornelia' and the 'He of Dogs'. None of the
plays was in the folder. The rest of the page was covered with scribbles
in another hand, including repetitions of the whole or part of the
names 'Mr ffranncis Bacon', 'William Shakespeare', 'Philip Sidney',
writer of one of the letters, and 'Thomas Nashe', author of the Isle of
Dogs, One would have thought that the doodler was airing his know-
ledge of the authors. But no! The names of Bacon and Shakespeare on
the same page ! Moreover Bacon's Essays^ Richard II and Richard III
were all published in 1597, tne ^ ast two anonymously] It was virtually
documentary proof that Bacon was Shakespeare. Then, one of the
scribbles was the word 'honorificabilitudine', a variation of 'honorific-
abilitudinitatibus' in Love's Labour s Lost. This horrific word, cited by
Dante as difficult to employ in poetry, must have some special signifi-
cance. Suppose it were an anagram ! It was an anagram ! The ingenious
Dr Piatt of New Jersey discovered that simply by reversing the first
eleven letters we get Bacifironoh', from which it is not difficult to
pick out 'Bacon'. But this was mere child's play compared with the
rearranging of all the twenty-seven letters: hi ludi tuiti sibi^ Fr Bacono
nati. Perhaps the Latin was a little shaky, the translation a little forced,
but it would serve: These plays intrusted to themselves proceeded from Fr
Bacon.

The revelations of Mrs Pott and Dr Piatt shook even the Germans.
Up till now Baconism had made no impression on them, but in March,
1883, the Jllgemeine Zeitung published an article saluting the 'indus-
trious and courageous lady', and appealing to the English aristocracy to
follow the example of the Duke of Northumberland, and search in
their family papers for hidden treasures of the 16th and 17th centuries.
'May the internal evidence, which speaks so repeatedly in favour of this
hypothesis', the article concluded, 'be, ere long, established by the find-
ing of documentary evidence, which will be required before the public
will be induced to accord to the great Thinker, Bacon, that open
recognition as a Poet also.' With this European support behind them,
the Baconians formed their Society for the study of Bacon, and of the
evidence in favour of his authorship of the plays commonly ascribed to
Shakespeare.

At the beginning of 1886, therefore, there were two Societies, the
New Shakspere and the Bacon, each claiming to represent the real
Shakespeare. The Baconian technique was quite simple, merely an
exaggeration, or caricature, of current orthodox scholarship and criti-
cism. Shakspere of Stratford is beneath contempt, 'a mean, drunken,
ignorant and absolutely unlettered rustic', while the author of the
plays is universally recognised as the greatest genius of all the ages;
'Classical scholars are amazed at the prodigious amount of classical
lore which they display. Lawyers declare that their author must
take rank among the greatest of lawyers. His knowledge is so ex-
tensive that there is not a single living man capable of perceiving half
of the learning in the plays.' Thus, by abusing the Stratford actor
and beating the orthodox bardolaters at their own game of rhapsodical
hyperbole they so widened the gap between Shakspere and the author
of the plays that, their premises granted, it became impossible to accept
both as the same man. It only remained to show that Bacon was the
greatest genius who had ever lived, and the only possible author of the
plays.

An attempt was made to seduce Spedding from his allegiance to
Stratford. As the greatest Bacon scholar of the age, he should have been
the first to see the light. However, Spedding replied courteously but
firmly: 'If there were any reason for supposing that the real author was
somebody else, I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was,
it was not Francis Bacon.' Furnivall was distinctly coarser: 'The idea
of Lord Bacon's having written Shakspere's Plays can be entertaind
only by folk who know nothing whatever of either writer, or are
crackt, or who enjoy the paradox or joke.' The Bacon Society could
afford to smile. They knew that the final proof was at hand. The Hon.
Ignatius Donnelly, of Hastings, Minnesota, had almost finished his
Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the so-called Shakespeare
Plays.

For many years the ex-Senator of Minnesota had been puzzled as
to why Bacon had fathered his immortal works on a dissolute player,
without leaving a clue to such a sacrifice. Then one day he came across
an elaborate Baconian cipher in Every Boy's Book. Like a flash came
the thought, 'Could Bacon have put a cipher into the plays?' He
searched the text for likely words. Henry IV sounded promising, with
Francis, gammon of bacon, great, seal, commonwealth, England. He
counted and he calculated, but there seemed to be no arithmetical rela-
tionship between the words; though he was convinced that the cipher
was there, he could not find it. Then came another flash of inspiration.
The key, if anywhere, would be in the folio. He bought a facsimile
copy and began again. He was struck by the word Volume in the first
scene of 2 Henry IV. It was the 208th word in the first column of
page 75. The number of words on page 74 was 532. Add 208 to 532
and we get 740. Divide by the number of the page, 74, and the result
is 10. And there were ten words in brackets in the first column of page J4.!
This made him realise that the bracketed, italicised and hyphenated
words were all part of the cryptogram, and at length he was able to
work out the formula indicating the words that made up the hidden
story. The system was in two parts. By the first process, the words that
were to compose the narrative were selected; by the second, they were
marshalled into terse, graphic and truly Baconian prose. It was Mrs
Pott who persuaded the author not to publish his second clue. He had
had time to decipher only Henry IV, and she wished to protect him
from any unscrupulous adventurers who might rob him of the fruits
of eight years' labour by working through the remainder of the
folio.

It would certainly have been a temptation to decipher the rest of the
plays after the revelations made by Bacon in Henry IV. We learn that
Bacon first wrote under the name of Marlowe: 'These plays are put
forward at first upon the stage in the name of More-low, a woe-begone
sullen fellow', but as 'he had engaged in a quarrel with one Arch-or'
and awkwardly got himself killed, Bacon had to find another dummy in
Shakspere. Unfortunately Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's chief minister and
no friend of Bacon, knew the truth: 'Seas-ill said that More-low or
Shak'st-spur never wrote a word of them. . . . He was in a state of the
greatest wrath, and would prove that the counterfeit image shown
upon the title-leaf of his volume is but a mask to hide my own face.'
And so he told the Queen that the face of Shakespeare in the folio con-
cealed that of the real author, Bacon. To prove his assertion, Seas-ill
described Shakspere's profligate youth, how he robbed Sir Thomas
Lucy's park, froze the fish in his pond, and fled to London leaving 'his
poor young jade big with child'. How could this infamous 'son of a
poor peasant, born in a hole', an even more woe-begone wretch than
More-low, have written the plays? The real author was Bacon, who
had written the histories to encourage rebellion and treason on behalf
of James VI of Scotland. However, the Queen refused to believe
Seas-ill and defended Bacon, though she ordered Shakspere's arrest on
the old charge of robbery, threatening to make a carbonado of him if
he refused to reveal the authorship of the plays.

Bacon was at St Albans when he heard the dreadful news, and
knowing that the craven Shakspere would confess the truth, took rats-
bane. He staggered into his orchard, fell and cut his head, and when
found and carried into the house feigned death to give the poison time
to work. But his stomach rejected it.

Meanwhile the unsuspecting Shakspere was lying ill in Stratford,
and Bacon's servant, Percy Hotspur, was sent on a swift horse to urge
him to fly the country. He found the sick actor sweating out his fever
in a fur-trimmed cloak, and when Percy convinced him that he could
not save himself by betraying Bacon he consented to fly. There fol-
lowed quite a scene. Mrs Shakspere hung upon her husband's neck and
wept; his sister, Mrs Hart, bawled; her children howled, and his
brother Gilbert, who was drunk, assaulted Percy with a rusty old
sword. But Percy felled him with a bung-mallet and knocked him into
the malt cellar. Then Bedlam was let loose. . . .

The story is left teasingly incomplete, for after a thousand pages of
analysis, calculation and exposition the Great Cryptographer progressed
only far enough to discover that Shakspere ran away to sea. Yet here,
with a vengeance, was new light on Shakspere — and the rest of the
folio still remained to be deciphered. But there seemed to be no con-
vincing some people; some were sceptical, others positively hostile, and
there were even those who were inclined to laugh. Perhaps, however,
Bacon did seem sometimes to be confused in his narrative. He appeared
to think that the folio was published before the death of Queen Eliza-
beth, and that Henslowe, the manager of a rival company of actors, was
Shakspere's colleague. And it was unfortunate that he should have
made the nineteenth-century error of misreading the name of Mar-
lowe's murderer, Ingram Frizer, as Francis Archer. Then his equiva-
lents for people's names, 'hence-low', 'shak'st-spur' and the rest, al-
though imaginative, somehow failed to carry conviction. And Mr
Donnelly's arithmetic constantly let him down. Sometimes it was
merely a mistake in the number of the column, sometimes an error in
addition, sometimes a faulty calculation. Perhaps, after all, the cipher
was over-ingenious and not altogether reliable, the cryptographic
revelation just a little too sensational; perhaps it proved too much.
From being a source of pride to the Baconians, it became a source of
embarrassment; it was not insisted on, and was allowed to fade into the
background. The episode was one to be forgotten.

The resilient Senator, however, was in no way disconcerted. In
1 892 he founded the American Baconian Society with its headquarters
in Chicago, and Mrs Pott contributed an article to the first number of
its magazine. There was no mention of the Great Cryptogram. But
two years later the author of a Retrospective Review in the English
Baconiana wrote sadly: 'Unfortunately, far from offering help to sift
truth from error, and to forward a discovery which if true is a very
great one, the public voice combined to belittle Mr Donnelly's efforts,
to laugh him down, and to prove him wrong. The result was, for a
time, to injure him and the Baconian cause in one.' Thirty-four of the
folio plays still remain to be deciphered.

Two other cryptograms emanated from America at about the same
time. Mrs Windle of San Francisco modestly disclaimed any discovery
or labour on her part; her cipher was merely a mysterious revelation
from the unseen world, from the spirit of Bacon himself. Mrs Elizabeth
Wells Gallup's Bi-literal Cipher was equally mysterious, for apparently
it proved that Bacon had made use of Pope's translation of Homer. In
one matter, however, she was able to confirm, and even advance, the
Senator's findings, for her cipher revealed that, 'Francis of Verulam is
author of all the plays published by Marlowe, Greene, Peele and
Shakspere'. She also found good reason to suspect the chastity of the
Virgin Queen, and hinted that Bacon was of even greater lineage than
had previously been imagined. But by now the cryptographic approach
had been somewhat overworked, and Sir George Greenwood more
moderately urged the relatively simple thesis that the Stratford actor
could not have written the plays, without pressing the claims of
Bacon.

But the publication of Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare roused the
Baconians to further activity. The book, or as they called it, 'romance',
was admittedly not a very inspiring work, and they simply could not
understand how anybody could still seriously advance the quaint theory
that Shakspere of Stratford was the author of the plays published in his
name. This phase of their offensive culminated in the most rollicking
of all the Baconian treatises, Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence's Bacon
is Shakespeare. Here, as the uncompromising title suggests, was no
boy's play, but a mature and skilful deployment of all the deadly
evidence that would deliver the coup de grace to the Stratfordians.

Sir Edwin first disposes of the monument and the folio engraving.
It will be remembered that in the middle of the eighteenth century,
thanks to the efforts of Joseph Greene, the monument was repaired,
and it was then, we are told, that the present bust was substituted for
the original one, for the purpose of fraudulently supporting the Strat-
ford myth. The old bust represented the real Shakespeare, the miserly-
looking rascal hugging a sack to his belly, as depicted in Dugdale's
Warwickshire of 1656. As for the folio portrait, that is merely a cun-
ningly drawn cryptographic picture, showing two left arms and a mask.
This is clear not only from the drawing, but also from Ben Jonson's
lines referring to it, for simply by changing 'out-do' to 'do-out*
and 'hit' to 'hid', we arrive at the correct meaning, which is that the
artist was concealing the real face behind a mask. Incidentally, the
number of letters in Jonson's lines is 287, showing that the author of
the plays intended to reveal himself 287 years after the publication
of the folio in 1623; that is, in 19 10, the very year of Sir Edwin's
book.

The possibility of the Stratford usurer's having written the plays is
dismissed with equal ease. The only writing of his that we possess is
the so-called signatures, but those on his will were written by his solici-
tor, as had been conclusively proved by Magdalene Thumm-Kintzel
in a Leipzig magazine. So far from his being able to write the plays,
there is a probability, practically amounting to a certainty, that the
Stratford money-lender could not so much as write his name. There is
the evidence of the plays themselves. In As Tou Like It^ for example,
when Touchstone, who of course is Bacon, asks William, who of
course is Shakespeare, 'Art thou learned?', he replies, 'No, sir.' This
means, unquestionably, that William Shakespeare could not read one
line of print.

Shakespeare, then, was not Shake-speare. That Bacon was, is clear
as daylight and champain. Consider Sonnet 81 :

Or I [Bacon] shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you [Shakespeare] survive when I in earth am rotten . . .
Your name [Shakespeare] from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I [Bacon], once gone, to all the world must die . . .
Your monument shall be my [not your] gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,
And tongues to be your being [which as an author was not] shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You [Shakespeare] still shall live, such virtue hath my pen
[not your own pen, for you never wrote a line],
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

The Tempest was written expressly to afford a clue to his identity.
Bacon, of course, is Prospero (each had a brother Anthony) and
Shakespeare the drunken Stephano (Shakespeare died of drink). At the
end of the play, the falsely crowned king of the island who had stolen
the wine (the poetry) flings away the crown (stephanos is Greek for
crown), and Caliban exclaims, 'What a thrice double ass was I to take
this drunkard for a God !' The Tempest was a favourite medium where-
by Bacon's contemporaries so thoughtfully revealed his authorship of
the plays on the title-pages of their books.

It is, however, in Love's Labour's Lost that Bacon most clearly
reveals his authorship. Sir Edwin boldly resorts again to cipher. Bacon
himself frequently used numerals as equivalents for letters, and if we
reckon A as 1, B as 2, and so on, the equivalent of Bacon's name is 33,
and of the all-revealing word, 'honorificabilitudinitatibus', 287, a
number we have met before. Sir Edwin gives an improved solution of
the anagram: 'Hi ludi F Baconis nati tuiti orbi', meaning, 'These
plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world'. Now, the
numerical value of the first and last letters of the seven Latin words is
136, while that of the intermediate letters is 151. This shows quite
clearly that the revealing word is the 1 5 1 st on page 1 36 of the Comedy
section in the folio, as indeed it is, italic words, of course, being
omitted. Moreover, six lines further down we find, 'What is Ab speld
backward with the horn on his head?' The Latin for horn being
cornu, the answer of course should be, l Ba corn-w fool'. And this ques-
tion occurs on line 33, the numerical signature of Bacon! It is worth
noting that, as 33 too obviously represented Bacon, 53 was frequently
used instead. This is the numerical value of Sow.

These are only some of the more convincing proofs adduced by Sir
Edwin; others are, perhaps, a little far-fetched and open to question.
But almost inevitably he clinches his thesis with a reference to Hamlet,
to Rowe's statement that 'the top of Shakespeare's performance was
the Ghost'. 'The moment we realise', writes Sir Edwin, 'that Bacon
is Hamlet, we perceive that the purpose of the rumour is to reveal to us
the fact that the highest point to which the actor, Shakespeare of Strat-
ford, attained was to play the part of Ghost to Bacon, that is to act as
his "Pseudonym", or in other words, the object of the story is to reveal
that Bacon is Shakespeare.'

'Men of great intelligence in other matters', concludes the author of
this remarkable book, 'seem, when the life of Shakespeare of Stratford
is concerned, quite prepared to refuse to exercise either judgment or
common sense, and to swallow without question any amount of pre-
posterous nonsense.'

Twenty years later, in Shake- Speare^s Sonnets Unmasked, Mr B. G.
Theobald proved, by similar methods and with equal ingenuity, that
Bacon wrote the poems as well as the plays. Sometimes he revealed
himself in quite a simple acrostic, as in Sonnet 14:

But from thine eies my knowledge I deriue
And instant stars in them I read such art.

But the main proof is much more complex than this. By adding and
arranging the number of roman and italic words and letters on the page,
and by using three ciphers, Mr Theobald was able to show that Bacon
wrote the Faerie Queene as well as the Sonnets. It is true that the author
reveals himself indifferently as Bacon, Shakespeare, Spenser, Greene,
Peele, Marlowe and Puttenham, in various forms, and that even Mr
Theobald admits an element of truth in the objection that there is no
end to the feats of juggling if once we begin playing with figures. But
these are not the book's main weaknesses. The Baconians had become
guilty of the very vice of which they had accused the Stratfordians, the
vice that had indeed been largely responsible for their own original
apostasy — that of idolatry.

'The mighty author of the immortal plays was gifted with the most
brilliant genius ever conferred upon man,' is the judgment of Sir
Edwin. 'In the whole history of literature, by far the most brilliant
figure is that of Francis Bacon,' is the opinion of Mr Theobald. These
are large claims, rivalling the exclamatory superlatives of Swinburne.
Yet they are not all. In some of the Sonnets Bacon reveals himself by
the signature Francis Tudor. And in the very year in which Mr Theo-
bald unmasked the Sonnets a book appeared with the title, 'Shakespeare
Unmasked: the self-named William Shake-Speare, the Prince of
Wales, born legitimate and unacknowledged: son of H.M. Queen
Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester: baptised in the false name of
Francis Bacon: Philosopher, Dramatist, Poet and Arch-Martyr.'
Bacon's royal birth has not yet been conclusively proved, but it is the
most fascinating topic discussed to-day in the Baconian magazine,
Baconian a.
...............................................................
XIII : SHAKE-SPEARE IDENTIFIED

James Greenstreet was as dissatisfied with the cryptographic
revelations of Bacon as he was with Halliwell-Phillipps's portrait of
Shakespeare as a young man 'all but destitute of polished accomplish-
ments'. The author of the plays was above all things polished and
accomplished; not necessarily a philosopher like Bacon, but an aristo-
crat, travelled and highly educated, a brilliant courtier, one who would
not dare to put his name to such a paltry thing as a play, which would
certainly be interpreted as treasonous by his enemies. He looked round
for a likely candidate, aired his views in The Genealogist in 1892, and
died. Though his work was frigidly received and quickly forgotten, it
had not been in vain; twenty-five years later it was discovered by
Professor Abel Lefranc, who was working along similar lines and in
1 91 9 published Sous le Masque de William Shakespeare: William
Stanley, Vl e Comte de Derby. As is always the way, one schism had led
to another; the original anti-Stratfordian heresy had produced the
Derby recusants. And the Derby recusants encouraged still further
apostasy.

In the following year Thomas Looney identified Shakespeare as
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. After all, Oxford was a poet,
his poems were extant, which was more than could be said about Bacon
or Derby. It was true that nobody had thought them worth editing and
publishing separately, but Mr Looney soon remedied this and made
them available for all to read. Nobody, however, read the poetry of
another candidate for fame, a third member of the growing group of
noble earls with Shakespearean pretensions, Roger Manners, 5th Earl
of Rutland. Although he might be said to have had literary contacts —
his wife was Sir Philip Sidney's daughter, and Shakespeare helped to
design a heraldic device for his successor, the sixth earl, — there was
nothing whatever to suggest that he wrote a single line of verse in his
life.

Sir Edward Dyer was a more promising candidate; he again was a
poet and, according to Mr Alden Brooks, had all fifty-four necessary
qualifications for being Shakespeare; he was, for example, an
undistinguished courtier, fond of flowers, of giving advice, and died
before 1608. His famous poem, 'My mind to me a kingdom is', is in
itself almost a sufficient proof that he was Shakespeare. And consider
the verbal parallels: Sonnet 114 has 'My great mind most kingly
drinks it up', while 'No worldly waves my mind can toss' is virtually
repeated in The Merchant of Venice, 'Your mind is tossing on the ocean'.
Of course William in As Tou Like It is the martext Shakspere, and
Touchstone, 'honest Ovid among the Goths', is Dyer. Dyer's coat of
arms displayed three goats. Finally, Sonnet 1 1 1 tells us in so many
words who the author really was: 'my nature is subdu'd / To what
it works in, like the Dyer's hand'. Not 'dyer', mark you, but 'Dyer',
with a capital D.

If anybody remained unconvinced by the claims of Dyer, Bacon,
Derby and the rest, there was Sir Walter Raleigh, or Anne Whateley,
or John Florio's father. . . . There was no end to exciting possibilities,
and 'true Shakespeares' became almost as abundant as authentic like-
nesses. All sects, however, were united in one article of belief, or dis-
belief: the Stratford actor did not write the plays; and in 1922 the
Shakespeare Fellowship was formed, under the neutral presidency of
the 'agnostic' Sir George Greenwood, to 'investigate the question of
the authorship of Shakespeare's plays and poems'. One of the vice-
presidents was Professor Lefranc, but the emphasis was all on the
claims of the Earl of Oxford.

Professor Lefranc patiently pursued the claims of his own candidate,
and by 1950 completed his monumental treatise on Derby, the two
volumes of A la Decouverte de Shakespeare, an erudite and immensely
detailed work, full of valuable information about sixteenth-century
England and France. Slighter and more popular books have been
written on the same theme.

What, ask the Derbyites, are the characteristics of the man who
wrote the plays? Unquestionably he was an aristocrat, scholar,
linguist, musician, hunter, traveller, and of course a rare poet. The
grammar school boy from Stratford is at once ruled out. But so are the
other candidates as well. As a writer of prose Bacon is superb, but
decidedly inferior as a poet. There is no evidence that Rutland was a
poet at all, yet if he was Shakespeare he must have written Venus and
Adonis when he was sixteen, which is absurd. Then, although Oxford
had almost all the necessary qualifications, his poetry lacks the majestic
and flowing rhythm, the humour and joie de vivre of Shakespeare. His
poems are those of an unhappy, frustrated man. Here they have good
authority on their side; according to Professor C. S. Lewis, 'Oxford
shows here and there a faint talent, but is for the most part undis-
tinguished and verbose.' Besides, his name was Edward, not William,
nor were his initials W.S. . . . But, ah, William Stanley, 6th Earl of
Derby!

William Stanley was three or four years older than Shakspere, and
probably, we are told, spent much of his youth at Meriden Manor,
near Stratford, which accounts for the numerous Warwickshire
references in the plays. (One of the Baconian arguments against Shak-
spere is the absence of such references.) After going to Oxford and
Gray's Inn he travelled abroad, and could not have failed to visit the
Court of Navarre, where he acquired the information that enabled him
to write Love's Labour's Lost. It is a pity that there is no evidence to
show that he really did visit the Court of Navarre. But, although
admittedly some of the reports of his travels are legendary, Stanley had
ample time to pick up the staggering knowledge of northern Italy re-
vealed in the plays. For example, the first act of Othello is thoroughly
Venetian in spirit and atmosphere, and Portia was obviously the true
red-golden-haired Titian type found in Venice.

Stanley returned to England, probably with the drafts of a number
of plays in his pocket. This was about the middle of 1587, when
Shakspere may have joined the Earl of Leicester's company of actors
who played at Lord Derby's house in July. It was there, doubtless,
that the two W.S.s met, and Shakspere's duty would then have been,
for a monetary consideration of course, to introduce Stanley's plays to
the professional stage, under the nom de plume of Shakespeare, or
Shake-speare, aristocratic variations of the vulgar Shakspere. The
hyphenated Shake-speare is, of course, an obvious pseudonym, dis-
tinguishing the real author from the mere actor, a fact that all anti-
Stratfordians stress, though for some reason or other they fail to make
the point that it must have been Derby (or Bacon or Oxford or Rutland
etc.) who was the Will. Shake-Speare who played in Jonson's Sejanus
in 1603.*

But how do we know that Stanley was the author? Well, we know
that he was a poet because Spenser, writing probably in 1 594, when
William Stanley succeeded his brother Ferdinando as Earl of Derby,
says so:

And there though last not least is Aetion,
A gentler shepheard may no where be found:
Whose Muse full of high thoughts invention,
Doth like himselfe Heroically sound.

Aetion is a Greek proper name meaning eaglet. The Earl of Derby
bore an eagle in his crest. Therefore there can be little doubt that
Aetion, the poet, was the Earl of Derby, a supposition that is strength-
ened if we assume that Spenser knew the secret of the pseudonym, for
no name sounds more heroically than Shake-speare. Then, we know
that Derby was a dramatist because a letter of 1599 describes him as
'busy penning comedies for the common players'. Of course there is no
record of any play of his. They are all in the folio.

As we should expect, the major incidents of Derby's life are mir-
rored in the plays. He wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream as a wed-
ding present for his bride, the Earl of Oxford's daughter, Elizabeth de
Vere, whom he married in 1595, while his financial difficulties are
reflected in The Merchant of Venice, his jealousy in Othello, Cymbeline
and The Winter's Tale. His public life, however, was uneventful, and
about 1623 he retired to Chester, leaving much of the management of
his affairs to his son. He would have plenty of leisure for writing, yet,
though he lived for nearly twenty years after the publication of his
folio, he wrote no more. The secret of his authorship died with him in
1642. Why it should have done is not very clear. As a result, there is
no record of his life in the Dictionary of National Biography,

The Derbyites do not necessarily maintain that William Stanley
wrote everything in the plays. There is, for example, evidence of a
woman's hand. Could a mere man have written, 'All the yarn that
Penelope spun in Ulysses' absence did but fill Ithaca with moths'?
Such feminine touches were most probably contributed by the Coun-
tess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney's sister, and mistress of Wilton
House, near Salisbury. Wilton was the centre of a brilliant circle of
courtiers and poets, and there we may imagine them, each making his
peculiar contribution to the plays. The eclectic approach has distinct
advantages. Oxford, of course, had much to give, and would help out
his son-in-law with his topography and duelling terms. Then Rutland,
who went to Denmark in 1603, supplied a few vivid details about
Elsinore, changing, for example, 'Walks over yonder mountain top'
to 'Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill'. There were no moun-
tains, he discovered, near Elsinore. Raleigh was invaluable as a source
of nautical information, while Bacon added his unparalleled know-
ledge of science, law and philosophy. All these, however, formed but
the circumference of the circle; at the centre was the master mind and
shaping hand of William Shake-speare, 6th Earl of Derby.

It is an idyllic picture, this of the brilliant group of aristocrats com-
posing plays for the common players in London, as they lay beside the
river that flowed through the gardens of Wilton House. Ben Jonson
knew the scene well, and celebrated it in his lines 'to the memory of
my beloved the author', printed in the folio twenty years before
Derby's death:

Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !

Jonson, of course, could not have meant the Warwickshire Avon, a
mere tributary. He meant unquestionably the Wiltshire Avon, which,
though admittedly small, is a river in its own right, receiving the waters
of the stream beside which so many of the plays of Shake-speare had
been composed.

Thomas Looney, however, was not satisfied. Although he entirely
agreed with the Derbyites that Shakspere did not write the plays, they
were running the wrong man. He knew the real Shake-speare; he had
traced him by following the clue of the Venus and Adonis stanza, and
then by his deductive reasoning, confirmed by unanswerable evidence,
demonstrated that he was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Pro-
fessor Freud was impressed by Looney's case; Mr Percy Allen, the
dramatic critic, was convinced. Oxford was indeed the hidden dramatist,
though not necessarily sole author of all the plays, and his Life Story of
Edward de Vere as William Shakespeare appeared in 1930. The case
for Oxford is as enthralling and convincing as those for Derby, Bacon
and the rest.

Edward de Vere succeeded to the Earldom of Oxford in 1562 at the
age of twelve, when he became a ward of Queen Elizabeth and en-
tered the household of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. There he fell
in love with Burghley's daughter, Anne, a situation reflected later in
Hamlet, with himself as the Prince, Anne as Ophelia, Burghley as
Polonius, and his favourite cousins Francis and Horace Vere as Fran-
cisco and Horatio. In 157 1 the young couple were married, but the
union proved an unhappy one. The Queen was jealous, made love to
Oxford, exactly like Venus in Venus and Adonis ^ and in 1574 became
his mistress. In the following year she bore him a son, and as the Coun-
tess of Southampton had opportunely given birth to an illegitimate
child at about the same time, the Queen's baby was substituted for hers,
growing up to be known as the 3rd Earl of Southampton, the 'lovely
boy' of his father's Sonnets^ published as 'Shake-speares'.

Meanwhile Oxford was abroad, storing up memories of the French
court to be dramatised in Love's Labour's Lost^ in which Sflu^a^zpton
played Moth, as can be seen by the appearance of the four letters in his
name. His Italian journey was precisely that of Bassanio in The Mer-
chant of Venice — and of course Portia is Queen Elizabeth besieged by
suitors. While he was abroad Anne gave birth to a daughter whose
legitimacy he suspected, partly because of the slanders directed against
his wife by his cousins Charles Arundel and Lord Henry Howard. But
he soon discovered their treachery and pilloried them in Much Ado
About Nothing as the slandering villains Conrade and Borachio. This
is obvious, as Conrade is an anagram of C.Aronde(l), Dogberry in-
cidentally being a near-anagram of Borachio — we have only to change
the D to an O to get Borregyo — though the relevancy of this is not
very clear. Cymbeline^ The Winter's Tale and Othello all dramatise the
same episode.

After a short disgrace Oxford was restored to the Queen's favour
and flattered by two critics of the time as being the most excellent poet
among the noble lords and gentlemen at Court, and in 1598 Francis
Meres was to mention him (along with sixteen others) as being one of
'the best for comedy amongst us' (at the same time giving three para-
graphs to Shakespeare, 'the most excellent' both in comedy and tra-
gedy). Most of Oxford's great tragedies, then, were written after 1 598.
But this is to anticipate.

In 1589 Oxford retired from Court, and may have gone to live in
his Manor House of Bilton, about twenty miles from Stratford in the
Forest of Arden, where he wrote As Tou Like It. He, of course, is the
courtly Touchstone, who makes game of the rustic William, the
illiterate Stratford actor on whom he fathered his plays. Anne was now
dead, and he repaired his dissipated fortunes by a second marriage,
moving in 1596 to King's Place, Hackney, where he wrote most of
the Sonnets and his last three tragedies, Macbeth^ King Lear and Antony
and Cleopatra. Kent in Lear is Oxford, for Kent tells us that he is forty-
eight, Oxford's exact age in 1598, the date of the play. It is astonish-
ing how the biographical details fit into the pattern of the plays.

Oxford died at King's Place in 1604, and most of the later plays of
'Shakespeare' are by various hands: Fletcher, for example, being the
chief author of Henry Fill and Raleigh of The Tempest. But when
Fulke Greville moved into King's Place in 1608 a number of Oxford's
manuscripts were discovered, including Lear^ Troilus and Cressida^
Pericles and the Sonnets^ all of which were published in the following
year. Incidentally, this clearing-up of the mystery of King's Place led
to the clearing-up of the mystery of 'Mr. W. H.' to whom the pub-
lisher of the Sonnets^ Thomas Thorpe, dedicated the volume.* The
late Colonel B. M. Ward discovered that a William Hall was married
in Hackney parish church in 1608, and the conclusion is obvious that
this was the man who secured the manuscripts during the removal and
handed them over to Thorpe. No wonder the grateful publisher wished
'Mr. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE'.

Mr Allen, however, will have nothing to do with this William Hall.
For him Mr. W. H. is Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the
son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Oxford. His portrait is even in
the centre of the ornament at the top of the Sonnets title-page, and
below are two hares symbolising the 'lovely boy', or 'heir', as he is so
often called by his father in the poems.

* 'TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF . THESE . INSUING .
SONNETS . MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE . AND . THAT . ETER-
NITIE . PROMISED . BY . OVR . EVER . LIVING . POET . WISHETH .
THE . WELL . WISHING . ADVENTURER . IN . SETTING . FORTH. T.T. '

Thorpe's dedication is equally clear; it is in fact signed in the phrase
'OVR . EVER . LIVING. POET', for of course Ever is E.Ver,
Edward Vere. If confirmation is required for anything so patent, we
have only to turn to sonnet 76:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keepe invention in a noted weed,
That every word, doth almost tell my name,
Shewing their birth and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I alwaies write of you . . .

'Eword Very' does indeed almost spell Edward Vere. Moreover, 'E.
Ver the same' in Latin is Semper Eadem, the Queen's favourite motto,
so that with exquisite subtlety Elizabeth, Oxford and their son, 'sweet
love', are brought together.

Another particularly illuminating sonnet is number 33 ('Full many
a glorious morning have I seen') when read as an open reference to the
birth of Southampton, for the imagery of the sun breaking through the
clouds symbolises Southampton and his mother, an emblem repeated in
visual terms in the famous Ditchley portrait of the Queen standing on
a map of England, with the city of Oxford between her feet and
Southampton immediately below. The sun, or son, however, was Ox-
ford's 'but one hour' before the 'region (regina) cloud' masked him
from his view. The so-called 'Will' sonnets (134—6) are a further
confirmation of Oxford's authorship, for though his name was Edward,
Will is an old form of well or springy and spring (the season that is) in
Latin is Ver.

And so, from the first sonnet to the last, the story is revealed of the
'dark lady' Queen Elizabeth, the lovely boy Southampton and his
father Oxford: from the opening line of sonnet 1 to the closing lines
of sonnet 154, with their reference to the pregnant Elizabeth's visit to
take the waters of Bath in 1574, and Oxford's reconciliation with her
there. Nobody would deny that the poet of the Sonnets is also the poet
of the plays, and as Oxford is unquestionably the author of the Sonnets
so is he as unquestionably the author of the plays.

Fifteen years after his study of Oxford's life Mr Allen was in a
position to offer a still perversely sceptical world a final solution of the
Shakespeare mystery, a solution that could scarcely be contested, since
he had it from the lips, if that is the correct expression, of the principal
characters themselves. And it was a very satisfactory solution, for with
one important qualification and some modification of detail, it con-
firmed his own conclusions, at the same time adding a wealth of new
and delightfully exciting information.

During the war he became interested in spiritualism, and in the
course of conversation with his communicant on the other side inevit-
ably touched on the subject that was always close to the surface of his
mind, the Shakespeare mystery. These talks proved so absorbing that
he began to wonder if he could get into contact with the Elizabethans
themselves, a scheme in which he was encouraged, through his
medium, by Walt Whitman, William Archer and Marie Lloyd. And
had not Mr Alfred Dodd just published a book reporting Bacon's
revelation from the spirit world that he was Shakespeare? At length,
therefore, he asked the medium's Control if it would be possible to
bring Bacon to speak to him. It was possible, Bacon would be pleased
to speak, or rather his words would be recorded by the medium in
automatic script. So it came about that he had his first sitting with
the quondam Lord Chancellor.

After the preliminary courtesies Mr Allen went straight to the
heart of the matter. Did Bacon write any or all of the plays of Shake-
speare? No, he wrote none of the plays, though he revised Love's
Labour's Lost (leaving in it a number of Baconian clues to mystify
posterity), and, as one of a circle of interested people, was frequently
asked for his opinion, which, however, was rarely accepted. So far so
good, but now the crucial question: Was the Earl of Oxford the
author? Yes, he was the author — that is, the principal author, but it
had to be remembered that he always collaborated with William Shak-
spere the actor. This was a staggering revelation, but Bacon was quite
firm; Shakspere normally suggested the plot and provided the frame-
work which Oxford filled in with his poetry and peopled with his
characters. Still, it was puzzling; it was a very different story from the
one he had recently told Mr Dodd. But Bacon explained. Mr Dodd
had not spoken to him directly, but through a Deputy who, convinced
that he, Bacon, had written the plays and poems, had reported to this
effect without troubling to consult him. It was all a mistake: 'I am no
poet, nor did I write a play.' 'I shall be glad', Bacon added, 'to refute
Dodd.'

He was able to refute others equally decisively. When asked if there
was any truth in the assertion that the Earl of Derby was Shakespeare,
he replied with a contemptuous and triple negative: Derby wrote plays
of a sort, but was not what you would call a dramatist. As for the Earl
of Rutland, he was not even a member of the Shakespeare circle. The
original group was composed of Oxford, Bacon, Raleigh and a few
others, all of whom worked incognito or under the general pseudonym
of 'Shake-speare', so masking their identity behind the name of Strat-
ford William, who, however, was himself part author of many of the
plays. After Oxford's death in 1604 another Shakespeare group was
formed, in which Fletcher played an important part, being mainly
responsible for Cymbeline, The Winter *s Tale, The Taming of the Shrew
and Titus Andronicus, published apparently when he was fifteen.

The rest of the conversation with Bacon was mainly concerned with
topical detail about the plays, though he did divulge the priceless in-
formation that three original manuscripts were preserved in a tomb, 'a
stone tomb', about which he suggested consulting Oxford, whom he
promised to ask to come and speak. Finally, he agreed to write a short
Preface to Mr Allen's proposed book on his revelation of the Shake-
speare mystery.

However, it was not Oxford who next came to be greeted, but the
Stratford man, a somewhat surly Shakspere, for until Bacon had dis-
closed his collaboration with Oxford Mr Allen had always thought him
merely a mask for the others and something of a fool. There is a subtle
change of tone in the initial catechism of Shakspere, the result no doubt
of a natural embarrassment, and Shakspere in turn was correspondingly
guarded in his replies. But the stiffness wore off, for Shakspere proved
a merry rogue, by no means a fool, and by the end of the third sitting
the two were on such good terms that he readily agreed to write his
biography through the hand of the medium. It is a fascinating docu-
ment.

He was born at the 'Birthplace', though his parents soon moved else-
where, and was brought up a Protestant. At the grammar school he
was a dull boy, for after seeing two plays in Stratford his thoughts were
always with the theatre, so that when his father insisted on his becom-
ing a butcher he ran off to London, where he got a job at the first
Globe theatre, a converted inn, as cleaner and ostler. That was in 1 58 1
when he was seventeen. In the following year he was persuaded by his
father to marry Anne Hathaway, who, however, did not live in the
famous cottage at Shottery. On his return to London he was given a
few comic parts at the Globe, and it was there that he met the Earl
of Oxford. The two soon became friends, and as the merry Shakspere
was full of good stories, and Oxford a poet, they began to collaborate
in the writing of plays, the former sketching the plot and the latter
supplying the characters and dialogue. Shakspere, however, created
most of the comic and villainous characters, and it was he who produced
the plays on the stage.

The collaborators used to work, and drink, in a quiet room in the
Mermaid, and it was there that Shakspere, who was no poet, made a
wager with the company of wits that he could nevertheless write a good
poem. The result was the very inferior Lucrece^ into which a number of
Baconian clues were inserted, though much against the wishes of
Bacon himself.* Shakspere's companions, of course, knew that he was
not the poet of the plays; they suspected Oxford, though they could
not be quite sure.

Oxford's death was a catastrophe. Shakspere retired to Stratford,
where he continued to write a little, but his fluency was gone. The fire
was burned out, and, though he had no hope of a future life, he was
resigned to his departure. When asked if he was not surprised to find
himself alive after death, he replied, 'I was not surprised, my dear sir;
for in nature there are no surprises. I accepted what was nature — I
died of a disease of the liver.'

Mr Allen had to wait six months before he was honoured by an in-
terview with Oxford. The Earl's first words were not encouraging:
'Very willing, but embarrassed by difficult conditions. O!' Nor did he
prove to be nearly as interesting as the other two informants, being
mainly concerned with corroborating their evidence and confirming
leading questions or the answers to his counter-questions. Thus, when
asked to explain an obscure allusion to a 'sun-tree', he countered, 'Yes
— well, I should like first to know how you have interpreted it.' Mr
Allen was helpful: 'I took the sun-tree to mean the Queen and her
son.' 'Yes,' the Earl admitted, 'you are right.' However, he helped to
find a title for Mr Allen's book, suggesting Talks with Elizabethans^
agreed to write an Epilogue to it, and even offered to compose a sonnet
that would be irrefutable proof of the authenticity of the conversations.

Again, in the fifteenth stanza we read of 'subtle-shining secrecies / Writ
in the glassy margents of such books'. And sure enough, the marginal letters
are B-C-N-W-S-N-M, which is, of course, 'Bacon, William Shakspere's
The single sonnet was generously increased to four, so that when the
book appeared it was with a Preface by Bacon, an Envoi by Shakspere
and an Epilogue by Oxford, immediately following three of the new
sonnets by 'Shake-speare'. The fourth was printed on the title-page. It
begins:

Enshrined in this tomb a secret lies,
Mark ye! The body must to dust decay;
The soul immortal is, it never dies,
A living flame that burns by night and day.

The reference is to the manuscripts buried in a 'stone tomb'.

Oxford, Bacon and Shakspere had all agreed that it was time to
reveal where these manuscripts lay hidden, as verifiable evidence for the
satisfaction of unbelievers. They were buried with Shakspere at Strat-
ford, one bundle as his pillow, another between his hands, and a third
at his feet. The plays are Hamlet^ Macbeth^ Lear^ Othello^ Henry Fand
Richard II and are in the handwriting of the joint authors, Oxford and
Shakspere. Yet after all, it was felt that it would be impossible to get
permission to open the grave; 'You might more easily disturb the
Holy Sepulchre,' was the opinion of the ex-Lord Chancellor, remem-
bering perhaps the abortive efforts of Dr Ingleby. So Mr Allen had to
be content with convincing himself. He arranged with his shadowy
friends to go to Stratford and stand above the grave in the parish
church, where Oxford and Shakspere would meet him and touch him
as a sign of their presence. And so, one morning in May, as he stood
there with hands outstretched towards the head and feet, he felt a glow,
accompanied by a tingling sensation, creep up his arms. Only a few
feet below him was the manuscript of Hamlet lying on Shakspere's
breast. It is one more alarming example of the extremes to which the
cult of Shakespeare may lead its devotees.

Another and younger dramatic critic, this time an American, has
been more successful in the matter of opening tombs. In the middle
nineteen-thirties Mr Calvin Hoffman began to study the Elizabethan
drama, and the more he read of Marlowe the more he was struck by the
similarity between his work and Shakespeare's. This should not have
surprised him. Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare,
went to Cambridge, and revolutionised the drama with half a dozen
blank verse plays before being killed in a brawl in 1 593. It was only to
be expected that the early verse of Shakespeare would be influenced by
the man who had got the start of him by his university education. But
Mr Hoffman finds more than this; the echoes are in the later plays as
well. For example: Marlowe, 'Shape we our course to Ireland' —
Richard II, 'To-morrow next we will for Ireland'. Marlowe, 'breakers
of the peace' — Romeo and Juliet, 'disturbers of the peace'. Marlowe,
'To cast up hills against the face of heaven' — Hamlet, 'And bowl the
round knave down the hill of heaven' (an allusion, doubtless, to that
whoreson round man, Falstaff). Marlowe, 'I arrest you of high treason'
— Henry Fill, 'I arrest thee of high treason'. Marlowe, 'Here is my
dagger' — Jidius Caesar, 'there is my dagger'. Such parallelisms can
scarcely be coincidental. Yet long before most of Shakespeare's plays
were written Marlowe was dead. Or was he? In 1931 Dr Gilbert
Slater had suggested that Marlowe was not killed, but lived to col-
laborate with Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Bacon, Raleigh and the Coun-
tess of Pembroke in the writing of the plays. Mr Hoffman turned to the
recently discovered contemporary documents describing the killing,
and found that Dr Slater was quite right. Any objective mind could see
that the coroner's report was a patent fraud.

After twenty years of patient research Mr Hoffman closed the last
gaps in his case for Marlowe, and published it. Shakespeare, of course,
was merely a semi-literate actor about whom we know next to nothing,
and whose death passed unnoticed. Yet Mr Hoffman himself offers a
startling piece of biographical information that has somehow escaped
all previous research. Apparently Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr John
Hall, noted in his Diary, 'My father-in-law died on Thursday.' His
reconstruction of events is as sensational as Ignatius Donnelly's crypto-
graphic revelations. We know that in 1593 Marlowe was arrested,
probably at the house of Thomas Walsingham, on a charge of atheism,
and released on bail, '1 h^n, according to the coroner's detailed report,
he was killed in a house in Deptford by one Ingram Frizer, acting in
self-defence. But what really happened, Mr Hoffman tells us, was this.
Thomas Walsingham, a wealthy and influential man, was not only
Marlowe's patron but also his lover, so that the young poet was faced
with the double charge of atheism and homosexuality. It was as much
as his life was worth; he must fly the country. But Walsingham has an
additional plan to make all sure. He talks to his creatures Ingram
Frizer and Nicholas Skeres, each of whom has 'an odorous reputation'.
They are to kill a man — any man — and will be well paid. The money
bag flashes on the table; its mouth spills sovereigns, and the two bullies
pocket the first instalment of their pay. Meanwhile Marlowe packs his
books — his Holinshed, his Halle, his Ovid, Seneca and Virgil, says
good-bye to his lover, and on the night of the 29th reaches Dover in
disguise. The morning of the 30th dawns. Frizer and Skeres are at
Deptford. They see a likely looking victim, probably a foreign sailor
who wants a woman. They entice him inside a house, and when all are
drunk stab him to death. The next day he is buried in an unknown
grave as Christopher Marlowe. Walsingham bribes the coroner, who
writes his false report, and Frizer is freed. Meanwhile, 'the figure on
the Channel ship watches the tender outlines of the French coast as
they emerge out of the morning mist, purple and gold in the rising
sun. . . .'

Marlowe had left the manuscript of his recently written 'epic poem
Venus and Adonis' with his lover, as he tells us in Sonnet 48 :

How careful was I, when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust.

Soon afterwards it was published, the first work to bear the name of
Shakespeare. Walsingham had lost no time. He had made the round
of the London theatres and discovered 'a steady, not too imaginative'
actor, who would lend his name to anything for money. And so began
the flow of wonderful poems and plays that Marlowe wrote in exile,
and Walsingham published under the name of Shakespeare — some of
them at least, for some were issued anonymously, others only in the
folio. Of course Walsingham did not part with the original manuscripts,
but kept them for sentimental and security reasons, and had them
copied for distribution to the theatres. There is evidence for this in the
fact that in his will he left forty shillings to a scrivener.

From France Marlowe must have gone to Italy, where he picked up
the staggering knowledge of that country revealed in the plays. He was
a reformed character, a lonely exile doing penance for his sinful pride,
and the Sonnets^ transposed into a probable order of succession, reveal,
as we should expect, his story:

How heavy do I journey on the way . . .
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind,

and so on. When published, they were of course dedicated to his lover,
'Mr. W. H.'— Walsing-Ham.

There is no lack of further proof, if further proof be needed, that
Marlowe was Shakespeare. There is, for example, that amazing play
As Tou Like It. Touchstone, of course, is Marlowe, and William the
rustic actor. But what is the significance of that enigmatic character,
Sir Oliver Martext? It is through his name that Marlowe chose to
reveal the secret of his authorship: Martext, Mar-text, or in full, Mar-
lowe's-text.

There remains the conclusive, scientific proof. Some seventy years
ago Dr T. C. Mendenhall, an American professor who must have
heard of Furnivall and Fleay, counted each letter of every word in the
representative works of half a dozen authors, from Percy Shelley to
John Stuart Mill. From these figures, computed to the minutest deci-
mal, he was able to construct graphs showing their peculiarities of style
and the average length of words in their vocabularies. Some time later
a wealthy Baconian commissioned him to test the works of Bacon and
Shakespeare by his mechanical method. Women, hired for the research,
counted 200,000 words from Bacon, 75,000 from Jonson, 400,000
from Shakespeare, all the words in Marlowe's plays, and over a million
more from other authors. Then the professor began to plot the charac-
teristic curves of Bacon and Shakespeare. 'He didn't have to finish the
job. A single glance ruled out any possibility of similitude.' Shake-
speare's average word was one of four letters, a length that Dr Men-
denhall had never met with before. Bacon's was considerably longer.
But then came a sensational discovery. The characteristic curve of
Marlowe agreed with Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare agreed with
himself.

The Stratfordians are now driven behind their last rampart of belief,
the folio. But Mr Hoffman has no difficulty in overrunning this and
scattering the defenders. Anyway, its authority has always been
doubted; Sir Thomas 'Hamner', for example, disavowed The Two
Gentlemen of Verona. The truth is, of course, that Walsingham sup-
plied the manuscripts and financed the publication. Heminge and Con-
dell, grocer and publican, had nothing to do with the volume. The
Dedication and Preface to which they lent their names, for a con-
sideration, were almost certainly written by one of the syndicate of
publishers, Edward Blount, Marlowe's friend. Although the Preface is
a tissue of lies, the offence of Blount, whose aim was to stimulate sales,
is understandable. As for Jonson's elegy on 'My beloved the author
Mr William Shakespeare', it was 'made to order — for money . . . Jon-
son would have written anything for money.' Mr Hoffman quotes
Jonson's severely critical estimate of Shakespeare, but it is a pity that
he failed to notice the lines, 'I lov'd the man, and do honour his
memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. He was (indeed)
honest, and of an open, and free nature, had an excellent Phantsie;
brave notions, and gentle expressions.' Perhaps, however, they are not
relevant to the argument, which leads us to the conclusion that 'if
anything, the First Folio is a compelling reason for denying Shake-
speare's authorship of it, and for affirming Christopher Marlowe's.'

The final proof would be the discovery of Marlowe's manuscripts.
Perhaps Walsingham carried his lover's written works to the grave. On
May I st, 1956, his tomb at Chislehurst, Kent, was opened. There was
nothing but sand. That, of course, does not affect the case for Mar-
lowe's authorship. The manuscripts may still turn up among the
Walsingham papers.

A hundred years ago, even seventy or sixty years ago, there was
some excuse for wondering how the romantic and sentimentalised con-
ception of Shakespeare as an inspired but virtually uneducated peasant
could be reconciled with the extravagant claims made for the know-
ledge and learning displayed in his work. To-day there is no excuse for
posing such a paradox. Modern scholarship has revealed Shakespeare as
a man of no great learning, but as a genius with a sound grammar
school education, who went to London where his higher education
was among the poets and wits of the theatre, the Inns of Court and the
Courr of Elizabeth and James itself. There is no more reason to believe
that he was incapable of writing the works published in his name than
there is to believe that Jonson, Keats and Hardy, all of whom were the
sons of working men and left school at sixteen, were incapable of writ-
ing theirs. Anti-Stratfordians, of whatever sect, all start from the pre-
mise, uncritically accepted, that Shakespeare was a semi-literate rustic
who could do little more than con an actor's part and write his own
name, if he could do even that. Such a premise is merely a distortion of
a long-obsolete view that attributed too little culture to the man and
too much to the plays.

Why people should still persevere in this antiquated pastime of bard-
baiting and bard-questing is matter for a psychologist and a May
morning. Some, the hard core of the movement, probably see them-
selves as the champions of an unrecognised, or insufficiently recognised,
genius — Bacon, Derby, Oxford, the Countess of Pembroke, or who-
ever takes their fancy — against the Stratford impostor. They must have
a cause to which they can attach themselves, one for which they can
fight, and even the most intelligent people may be carried away by this
irrational compulsion. Others, though not so many to-day as formerly,
may be impelled by snobbery, a blind refusal to admit that a provincial
grammar school boy should be the national poet of England. Others
again may find it an easy way to publicity and even celebrity of a sort.
It would, for example, be no very difficult task to cook up a case for
James I as the author of the plays — no doubt it has already been done.
After all, James was a writer; he was notoriously fond of young men
like the 'lovely boy' of the Sonnets ; Stuart, like Shakespeare, begins
with an S; then there is the 'marvellous falorous' Captain Jamy in
Henry V, and another most satisfactory self-portrait in Macbeth^ while
Hamlet is a very palpable hit at James's rival brother-in-law, Christian
IV of Denmark. Touchstone, of course, is James, 'the wisest fool in
Christendom'. . . . One is almost tempted to begin on the anagrams
and parallel passages. Which offers us another reason. A man must have
a hobby, and what more fascinating hobby for a winter's evening than
the ingenious game of tracing in the plays an Elizabethan-Jacobean
hand other than Shakespeare's? If Sir Thomas Hanmer had been alive
to-day it is a hobby that he would almost certainly have preferred to
the more exacting pastime of editing the plays, one that would give
even more scope for his celebrated intuition. But for the great majority
of professed anti-Stratfordians the whole business can be no more than
a joke; they cannot seriously believe the frivolous fantasies that they
write and read in their peculiar publications.>>
-------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer

[ArtNea...@germanymail.com]

> guilty of the very vice of which they had accused the...

Art n

[marco]

> > 'Men of great intelligence in other matters...

.