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There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym of an ignorant actor. You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do. Argument is unavailing. I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter to Cecil.
It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the "Anti-Willians" in a shape which will satisfy them. The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible. I can only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to understand them.
In such a case, he would not write for Henslowe's pittance. He had a better market. The plays, whether written by himself, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, were at his disposal, and he did not dispose of them to Henslowe, wherefore Henslowe cannot mention him in his accounts. That is all. Even Baconians insist that he was an actor. "How strange, how more than strange," cries Mr.
The evidence of Ben Jonson and the rest can only prove that professed playwrights and actors, who knew Will both on and off the stage, saw nothing in him not compatible with his work. Had he been the kind of letterless country fellow, or bookless fellow whom the Baconians and Mr.
The activities of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man's mind and heart, especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older.
All this lore to Shakespeare is "impossible" he could not read, say some Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none; on these points I have said my say.
The omniscient Baconians know that all the early works ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a man of, say thirty- -who WAS no more, and KNEW no more, than they know that the actor was and knew; and as for "Genius," it cannot work miracles. Genius "bestows upon no one a knowledge of facts," "Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned."
The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and are noted even in short educational histories of English literature. Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls, to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly's plays, and read the poems of the time.
He must now mean Will, now the Great Unknown, and now both at once. Yet I have proved that Ben was the least consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion, and on his humour at the moment. This is a commonplace of literary history. The Baconians do not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows it, ignores it, and bases his argument on facts which may be unknown to his readers.
But if he does not, "I hold no brief for the Baconians," he says, how is all this passage on Ben's visits to Bacon concerned with the subject in hand? These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben's laudations of Bacon, by name, in his Discoveries. The first is entirely confined to praise of Bacon as an orator.
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