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Five or six threadbare scholars would have sat down at a long table in a tavern room, and, after their manner, dashed off a Comedy of Errors on the real and the false playwright. Baconians never seem to think of the mechanical difficulties in their assumed literary hoax. If Will, like the old Hermit of Prague who never saw pen and ink, could not even write, the hoax was a physical impossibility.
Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it IS difficult to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects of character which he could scarcely draw "from the life." I am willing to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited give the honour to the actor, "who prepared the plays for the stage."
The allusions can prove no more than that, by his contemporaries, Shakespeare was believed to be the poet, which is impossible if he were a mere rustic ignoramus, as the Baconians aver. The University wits laugh at Shakespeare, not an university man, as the favourite poet, in his Venus and Adonis, of a silly braggart pretender to literature, Gullio.
As we shall see later, while Baconians urge without any evidence that Bacon himself edited, or gave to Ben Jonson the duty of editing, the first collected edition , the work has been done in an indescribably negligent and reckless manner, and, as Mr.
The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of their own misappreciation of the literary and social conditions of Shakespeare's time. That world could not possibly appreciate his works as we do; the world, till 1623, possessed only a portion of his plays in cheap pamphlets, in several of these his text was mangled and in places unintelligible.
But all this rests on simple ignoring of the nature of poetic composition. The folk-origin of ballads and the multiple authorship of epics are heresies worse than the futilities of the Baconians; at any rate, they are based on the same resolute omission, and build on it a wilder fantasy. They omit to consider what poetry is.
Whoever wrote the play certainly had read the Statutes of the Realm for the year 1285, but so far as I am aware, the Baconians have not yet called attention to this.
It was the occasion of the presentation to the Federal Government of the Petherick Library, and I went over to sign and to witness the splendid deed of gift. I have left almost to the last of the account of my English visit all mention of the Baconians I met and from whom I gained valuable information in corroboration of the Baconian authorship.
The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood. The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the Folio appears to be impenetrable.
I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians insist; if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was at a Latin school. I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the author of the plays must have possessed in youth.
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