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If Bacon were proved to have written Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, would mankind be robbed of one of those illusions which are necessary to its happiness and welfare? If so, we have a good excuse for browbeating the poor Baconians. But it isn't so, really and truly. Suppose that one fine morning, Mr.
Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast LITERARY aim. They must take his alternative to be "some sorry bookmaker, OR a pioneer in that mine of truth," as meaning that he would either be the literary hack of a company of players, OR the founder of a regenerating philosophy.
But, certainly, this amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention his severe "study and meditation" on science. All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis, do not exhaust his exercises. To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare's company, and the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets.
No witnesses are called for the Baconians, though all the writings of the great philosopher were put in for what they were worth. But it has done nothing of the kind.
Russell is Judge Willis's joke, it will convert no Baconians any more than Dean Sherlock's once celebrated Trial of the Witnesses compels belief in the Resurrection. The question in reality is a compound one. Did Shakespeare write the plays? If yes, the matter is at rest. If no who did? If an author can be found Bacon or anyone else well and good.
All this, and much more of the same sort, we must steadfastly believe before we can be Baconians, for only by believing these doctrines can we get rid of Ben Jonson's testimony to the authorship of Will Shakspere, Gent. Let us now examine a miracle and mystery in which the Baconians find nothing strange; nothing that is not perfectly normal.
The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic dicta a world of knowledge of a kind then "in widest commonalty spread," but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore seems recondite learning. They would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence, Venice, and Rome. Actors visited Denmark and Germany.
The evidence for such a sunken continent Henriot had skimmed it too in years gone by she made bewilderingly complete. He had heard Baconians demolish Shakespeare with an array of evidence equally overwhelming. It catches the imagination though not the mind. Yet out of her facts, as she presented them, grew a strange likelihood.
The Baconians do not quite understand, or, at least, keep steadily before their minds, one immense difference between the Elizabethan age and later times.
Moreover Jonson, while desiring that Shakespeare might "shine forth" again and cheer the drooping stage, added, "Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like Night, And despairs day, but for thy volume's light," that is the Folio of 1623. Ben did not weave the amazing tissue of involved and contradictory falsities attributed to him by Baconians.
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