UNTRODDEN FIELDS.

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possible for any one. The student who seeks to define the relation that exists between Bacon's prose and Shakespeare's poetry enters on a quest which has no terminus. Every fresh reading in either group of writings brings out new points of comparison, new features of resemblance. My primary object is to show what a vast and neglected quarry of Shakespearean comment is to be found in Bacon's prose works, and to present some striking illustrations of these "Bakespeare" studies. If this is part of the Baconian polemic it is still more a contribution to Shakespeare study. I wish also to show that this educational field is much larger than has been hitherto supposed; that Shakespearian poetry and Baconian philosophy are to be found in unsuspected localities-that our controversy is not a barren wrangle about names and persons, but a rich and fruitful excursion into the choicest plains of literature, a country worthy of investigation on its own account, and involving other issues than those of authorship, or patent rights in special literary property.

Before, however, entering on these scattered studies, it may be well to exhibit some features of that prima facie case which is so strangely invisible to eminent Shakespeare scholars. Those who hold a brief for William Shakespeare, seem to me to hold in needless contempt such common-sense judgments as are easily apprehended by unlearned and non-critical readers. Indeed it seems to me that Carlyle's cynical estimate of the intellectual qualities of the human race is, in this case, far more applicable to learned critics than to the unlettered public.

ΙΟ

CHAPTER II.

PRESUMPTIVE EVIDENCE.

THE presumptive evidence belongs almost exclusively to the negative or Shakespearean side of the case. To prove a negative is proverbially difficult, consequently this it is which we are, as a rule, challenged to do. This also I think we can do; but it must be by indirect, not direct, proof-it must come as an inference from the positive proofs of the other, the affirmative side of the case. These negative presumptive evidences, however, are very strong, and may be not unreasonably thought to comply with the cornering and unreasonable demand that the negative should be proved.

I.—SHAKESPEARE'S PERSONAL HISTORY.

The mere enumeration of all that we know about William Shakspere, his family, his neighbours, his environments, his actual pursuits, supplies a large instalment of this evidence, especially when what we do not know, but ought to know, if he was the man he is represented to be, is added to what we do know.

William Shakspere when a boy certainly had no very considerable educational advantages. I do not mean in the matter of School Education; there is no positive proof that he had any. But he was not surrounded by cultivated people. John Shakspere, his father, signed his name by a mark. So did most of the aldermen and burgesses of the town. So did Shakspere's daughter, Judith, when she married, in 1616. It is not antecedently

THE EVOLUTION OF WILLIAM SHAKSPERE.

II

probable that Shakspere was better educated than his father and the leading men of his town. He marriedwith needful and discreditable haste--when he was 18. Before he was 21 he had a family-three children and a wife,—and his father's broken-down household to look after, and more or less to support and about this time he was apparently compelled to leave Stratford, his youthful frolics having brought him into trouble. This must have been the time when the true Shakespeare was studying diligently, and filling his mind with those vast stores of learning, classic, historic, legal, scientific,—which bore such splendid fruit in his after life.

The needy, struggling youth came to London about 1585, and no distinct traces of him are to be found till 1592. By that time he had become a fairly prosperous theatre manager. This was very creditable to him: he must have been a hardworking man of business; but it is not easy to imagine that he could have been also an unremitting student. There is something incompatible between the gifts which are required for commercial success, especially in young manhood, and those which achieve eminence in poetry and literature. The blank in Shakspere's life, which no research can fill up, occurs exactly where we might expect it to be. When a man is burrowing painfully from the depths of poverty and obscurity, trying perhaps to redeem his youthful faults and recover from the misfortunes they have brought, striving to reach the sunshine of opulence and worldly success, he is of necessity hidden from public view. He becomes visible when the process is completed. And by the nature of the result one may pretty safely infer the character of the toil he has undergone. If a needy, and probably deserving vagabond dives into the abyss of London life, lies perdu for a few years, and then emerges as a tolerably wealthy theatrical manager, you know that he must have gained some mastery of theatre business, he must have made himself a useful man in the green room, a skilful

organiser of players and stage effects,—he must have found out how to govern a troop of actors, reconciling their rival egotisms and utilising their special gifts; how to cater for a capricious public, and provide attractive entertainments. He would have little time for other pursuits—if a student at all his studies would be very practical, relating to matters of present and pressing interest. During this dark period he has been carving his own fortune, filling his pockets, not his mind; working for the present, not for the future. But it was exactly then that the plays began to appear. Some critics have even supposed that the twin plays, 2 and 3 Henry VI., saw the light about the same time as Shakspere's twins were born. Most confidently I submit that this personal history is not what might be expected of Shakespeare. I need not recapitulate here all the known facts about William Shakspere. I will only say that not the remotest trace of any connexion between him and learning can be found. His known occupations, apart from theatre business, were money lending, malt dealing, transactions in house and land property. He retired from the stage, and settled again in Stratford, about the year 1603—not seeking the society of cultivated persons, not choosing for his home any locality where books could be obtained to help him in the composition of the yet unwritten plays. His Will makes no reference to literary property, and no provision for the publication of the plays which first appeared seven years after his death. All that can be ascertained about William Shakspere leaves the biography of the poet of Shakespeare still unwritten, and does not supply one shred of explanation of the genesis of the plays.

The whole matter may be summed up in the eloquent words of Mr. Allanson Picton :-"A biography of Shakespeare, in any proper sense of the word is not only difficult; it is impossible. For the development of his character, the dawn of his powers, the pre-determining causes involved in genealogy, the influence of schools and

SHAKSPERE BIOGRAPHY IMPOSSIBLE.

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schoolmasters, of relatives, friends and social surroundings, are in this case almost entirely irrecoverable. He flashes suddenly upon us like the sun in the tropics, blazing with a light which drowns every feeling but one of dazzled admiration. And he sinks as suddenly into the blank night of death, with scarcely a trace of those private interests, personal conflicts, struggles with temptation, or domestic trials, which, like flying clouds, temper the glow, and lend a tenderness to the departure of the day in its more familiar course. This ignorance of all detail in the origin and shaping of our transcendent poet, makes us often contemplate him with the sort of unsatisfied longing that affects us in view of a portent of which neither science nor philosophy can give any account."

Both what is known about William Shakspere, and what is not known, supply the primâ facie evidence against the claim made for him which eminent Shakespeare students profess themselves unable to discover.

2.-Greene's "GROATSWORTH OF WIT."

It will be found that the contemporary allusions to Shakespeare-not excepting Ben Jonson's poem prefixed to the folio of 1623, have no bearing on the question of authorship. If any of them shew that the writer of the allusion supposed the Stratford townsman to be the author of Shakespeare, I do not care to dispute the fact. The question still remains-what ground, beyond rumour and title pages, had they for this opinion? and did they take any interest in the personal question at all? I do not intend to retrace the oft-trodden ground which Chettle and his contemporaries occupy. These matters have been sufficiently discussed by Mr. Appleton Morgan ("Shakespeare Myth "), Nathaniel Holmes ("The Authorship of Shakespeare "), and above all by Mr. Donnelly in the admirable exposition of the entire subject which forms the first volume of his, in other respects most unsatisfactory, book, "The Great Cryptogram." But there is one refer