CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
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 Class of '31; M.A. '32 
 
 Endowment 
 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 924 070 375 104 
 
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 the Cornell University Library. 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924070375104 
 
THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
THE 
 BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 A CONFUTATION 
 
 BY 
 J. M. ROBERTSON M.P. 
 
 DO TOU THINK SO 7 ARE YOU IN 
 
 THAT GOOD HERESY, I MEAN OPINION ? 
 Ben y»nuiif Tht Sad S/ief/ttrJ^ tAel i, Sc. ii 
 
 a HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED fig 
 ARUNDEL PLACE HAYMARKET LQNDON SW 
 
 MCMXIII 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THIS treatise was in large part compiled some 
 years ago, under the shock of the revelation 
 that Mark Twain had died a " Bacon-Shake- 
 spearean." Laid aside mider a misgiving that 
 the drudgery it involved had not been worth while, it 
 has been finished, by way of a holiday task, at the instance 
 of a friend somewhat (Usturbed by Baconian solicitings. 
 It is finally published with a hope not merely of checking 
 in some degree the spread of the Baconian fantasy, but 
 of stimulating to some small extent the revival of scientific 
 Shakespearean criticism. Any close reader of the Baco- 
 nian literature will recognise that its doctrine flourishes 
 mainly on the unsunned sides of the Shakespeare problem. 
 If only the specialists had done their proper work of 
 discriminating between the genuine and the alien in the 
 Shakespeare plays, much of the Baconian polemic would 
 have been impossible, if indeed it could have proceeded 
 at all. What we latterly get from the professed historians 
 of English literature is mostly " cathedral " declamation, 
 somewhat analogous to much of the Baconian asseveration. 
 It has been a question for me how far the confutation 
 of Baconian fallacies may usefully be carried. The 
 Baconian case constantly tends to new exorbitances of 
 nonsense, as when Sir Edwin Duming-Lawrence intimates 
 that Bacon did the authorised version of the Bible, and 
 Mr. Parker Woodward, with calm confidence, intimates 
 that Bacon also wrote Lilly's Euphues, Spenser's poems; 
 Puttenham's Arte of English Poesy, all the works of 
 Thomas Nashe, all the works and plays of Greene, Peele, 
 Kyd, and Marlowe, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 and I know not what else. Many of these claims, indeed, 
 were made years before ; but they seem to recur sponta- 
 neously. When Mr. Woodward is at a loss for a pretext 
 for any such attribution, he alleges a statement by Bacon 
 in a " cipher." I have drawn the line at ciphers, which 
 are rejected even by leading Baconians such as Dr. 
 Theobald and Lord Penzance ; and I have likewise put 
 aside all the extra-Shakespearean attributions. It seems 
 sufficient to call the attention of the reader to them, and 
 to point out to what the Baconian theory conmionly 
 c£irries its devotees. 
 
 It may be argued, on this, that they reason on their 
 wildest propositions very much as they do on their 
 primary doctrine; and that Dr. R. M. Theobald, on 
 whose " classical " and other fallacies I have spent some 
 time, is quite as sure about what he calls " the Marlowe 
 branch of our theory " as about the Shakespearean. I 
 can but answer that I have been astonished to see qviite 
 intelligent men, for lack of knowledge of Elizabethan 
 literature, deluded by the Bacon-Shakespeare case, and 
 by the misinformation supplied to them by orthodox 
 Shakespeareans ; and I have been willing to take some 
 trouble to prevent the spread of such error, which goes 
 on without regard to the lengths of further extravagance 
 attained by the Baconians. But I am not concerned 
 to spend time over people who can believe that Bacon 
 wrote the entire Elizabethan drama, the English Bible, 
 and Spenser, Montaigne. Nashe, and Burton to boot. 
 Non ragioniam di lor. 
 
 But, once more, all this divagation has been made 
 possible by the old fashion of contemplating Shakespeare 
 tn vacuo, and as a miracle at that. As a good critic put 
 It a generation ago : " Even he must be partly inter- 
 preted by his age. We cannot duly appreciate his position 
 without careful study of this whole chapter of literaiy 
 irVi ^^^ ^^ ^^ acquainted with the soU from 
 
 which he grew, and with the other products which that 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Vll 
 
 soil was capable of bearing, he remains, not marvellous 
 merely, but prodigious. If he be regarded after the fashion 
 of the last generation but one, as a lusus natune, out of 
 relation to the ordinary laws of human development, 
 he loses his interest for us as a human being ; his actual 
 bodily existence, which has little enough of the substance 
 imparted by the biographer, becomes altogether shadowy 
 and m5rthical : we fall an easy prey to some ' Baconian 
 hypothesis ' about the authorship of his plays, and take 
 a £mal leave, so far as he is concerned, of criticism and 
 common sense,"* 
 
 It may be, then; that a discussion which involves a 
 constant apphcation of the comparative method will be 
 serviceable to genuine Shakespeare-study, whatever it 
 may avail in the way of averting further lapses into 
 Baconianism. I have been encouraged to complete my 
 task — ^in so far as it can be said to be completed — by the 
 declaration of Mr. Charles Crawford : "It seems to me 
 that scholars are making a big mistake in allowing this 
 ' question to assume such serious proportions."* Mr. 
 Crawford has himself done so much to clear it up that I 
 am moved respectfully to reproach him for not doing 
 the whole of the work. Di£Eering from him upon only 
 one serious issue in matters Shakespearean — ^the author- 
 ship of Titus Andronicus — I realise none the less the 
 fulness and exactness of his Elizabethan learning, by 
 which I have here profited^ 
 
 The task, indeed, is one that should have been tmder- 
 taken by a small company of scholars. A few leisured 
 and vigilant readers together could in a short time have 
 compiled a much fuller refutation than the following; 
 and might incidentally have done a much greater service 
 to Shakespeare scholarship than is possible to one who 
 lacks due leisure even if he had scholarly qxialifications. 
 
 1 G. C. Macaulay, Francis Beaumont .■ A Critical Study, 1883, p.5. 
 • Preamble to essay on " The Bacon-Shakespeare Question " 
 in Collectanea, Second Series, Stiatford-on-Avon, 1907. 
 
VUl 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 If a study which for me has necessarily been subsidiary 
 could yield, with the help of such previous workers as 
 Mr. Crawford and Judge Willis, and some recent editors 
 of plajrs, what I think to be a fair sufficiency of refutation 
 of the Baconian case on all its lines, much more efficiently 
 might the work have been done by scholars who have 
 been able to devote their lives to matters of philology 
 and literary history. 
 
 Such scholars have not thought it worth while. I 
 still hope, however, that some of them may be moved 
 to carry out anew the scholarly annotation of Shake- 
 speare's text. Nothing has ever made up for the turning 
 away of Farmer from the task which he was so uniquely 
 fitted to perform. His brief Essay on the Learning 
 OF Shakespeare remains an umnatched performance in 
 its kind, after a century and a half. At its close he made 
 a half-promise to extract more elucidatory matter from 
 " the chaos of papers " from which he had compiled the 
 essay ; but the unkind fates set him to other work ; and 
 no man of quite equal scholarly opulence, perhaps, has 
 put his hand to the task since. The multifarious erudi- 
 tion for which he half apologised is, as he said, " the read- 
 ing necessary for a comment on Shakespeare " ; and 
 much of his ivas buried with him. But half a dozen 
 specialists of to-day, including some of the most competent 
 of recent Shakespearean editors, if they would put their 
 heads together, could give us such annotation as was 
 never compassed by the old variorvmi men. And then, 
 mayhap, they or another company might give us that 
 annotated edition of Spenser, the lack of which is a 
 standing scandal to English scholarship. 
 
 Since this book was put in the hands of the printers; 
 there has appeared the posthumous work of the late 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great 
 Unknown. Very naturally, a number of Mr. Lang's 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 arguments coincide with mine, and I am heartily glad 
 to have such support. To the general argument of my 
 friend Mr. Greenwood, in my opinion the most consiim- 
 mate paralogism in the literature of biography, he seems 
 to me to have supplied a very complete rebuttal, by 
 simple analj^is of its steps. Incidentally, by reproduc- 
 ing Dugdale's version of the Carew monimient in Stratford 
 Church and confronting it with a photograph of the 
 actual monument, he has exploded the small mystery 
 built up by Mr. Greenwood out of the difference between 
 the actual Shakespeare mommient and Dugdale's repre- 
 sentation of it in 1656. In igo8 I urged upon my friend 
 a solution of his mystery which can now, I think, be 
 seen to be the true one. Dugdale, it is pretty evident, 
 was in the habit of making slight and rude outline sketches 
 of the monuments he saw, and these were afterwards 
 elaborated for him by a professional draughtsman, who 
 took a large licence. There was no support for either 
 the Baconian or the " Great Unknown " hypothesis in 
 the Dugdale mystery at best ; and even the mystery is 
 now disposed of. 
 
 Mr. Lang, unfortunately, was "bluffed" by the as- 
 severations of the lawyers as to the " law " in the plays. 
 Had he applied comparative tests to that part of the 
 problem he would have discovered what, I trust, is made 
 clear in the following pages — ^that Shakespeare had no 
 more law than half a dozen other Elizabethan dramatists 
 who were not lawyers ; and would so have exploded that 
 "mystery" also instead of facing it with tentative 
 h3^otheses. 
 
 Somewhat unexpectedly, again, Mr. Lang has touched 
 but lightly on a part of the problem upon which one 
 would have expected him to enlarge — ^the thesis as to the 
 " classical scholarship " in the plays — contenting himself 
 with commenting on the self-contradictions of the late 
 Mr. Churton Collins, and generally denying that the 
 thesis squares with the facts. In this coimection, how- 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 ever, he has fallen into supererogatory error, which I 
 am constrained to point out, as it partly concerns myself. 
 
 So arbitrary is taste in these matters [he writes] that Mr. Collins, 
 like Mr. Grant White, but independently; finds Shakespeare 
 putting a thought from the Alcibiades I of Plato into the mouth 
 of Achilles in Troilus and Cr£SSida, while Mr. J. M. Robertson 
 suggests that the borrowing is from Seneca — ^where Mr. Collins 
 does not find " the smallest parallel." Mr. Collins is certainly 
 right : the author of Troilus makes Ulysses quote Plato as " the 
 author of" a remark, and makes Achilles take up the quotation, 
 which Ulysses goes on to criticise, i 
 
 As Mr. Lang did not live to revise his proofs, it must 
 suffice to state the facts, without protest. 
 
 If he had read with attention the second edition of my 
 Montaigne and Shakespeare, which he reviewed on 
 its appearance, he would have noted my exposure of 
 Mr. Collins's blunder.* I had not referred the lines of 
 Achilles to Seneca: my reference was to the lines of 
 Ulysses. Mr. Collins, professing to cite the entire passage, 
 elided the relevant lines of Ulysses, and made Ulysses 
 mention of " a strange fellow's " writing apply to the 
 speech which Achilles makes in reply. That I never 
 referred to Seneca. I did incidentally point out that 
 the whole reference to Plato is gratuitous, seeing that 
 the argument about the inability of the eye to see itself, 
 which is the gist of the passage, had appeared already in 
 Julius C^sar, in which connection the conunentators 
 long ago traced it to the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John 
 Davies, where, as I had further pointed out, there is 
 found also the phrase. " spirit of sense," used in the 
 passage m Troilus. At the same time, I had shown 
 
 if* t^^ " ^^® " P^^S® °"glit sJso be traced to Cicero. 
 who had given the idea common currency. The primary 
 speech of Ulysses, which I had shown to be traceable to 
 both Seneca and Cicero, has nothing to do with the item 
 about the eye not seeing itself, put by the dramatist in 
 ' Work cited, p. 74. 2 Work cited, p. 97 sq. 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 the mouth of Achilles. Mr. Collins had hopelessly 
 blundered over the matter he argued ; and Mr. Lang, 
 unwatchfully following him, has given a gratTiitous 
 advantage to the very Baconian thesis he was countering. 
 The alleged reproduction of Plato in Troilus, claimed 
 by two strong " Stratfordians," is one of the stock themes 
 of the " anti-Stratfordians." The reader will find it 
 fully dealt with in my book above cited, and hereinafter. 
 
 The final words quoted above from Mr. Lang are so 
 completely astray that they shoiild have been deleted 
 by those who edited his MS. The author of Troilus 
 assuredly does not " make Ulysses quote Plato as * the 
 author ' of a remark " ; neither does he make " Achilles 
 take up the quotation." Plato is never once mentioned 
 in the Shakespeare plays. Achilles in the play meets 
 the philosopheme "quoted" by Ulysses with another 
 and a different philosopheme, which Mr. Collins and Mr. 
 Grant White insisted upon ascribing to Plato, widiout 
 accounting for its previous appearance in Julius Cjesar. 
 
 These critical misadventures on the part of three strong 
 "Stratfordians" are "chastening," as the phrase goes. 
 The academics err on classical matters even as the lawyers 
 err about the law in the pla}^ : evidently we are all apt 
 to trip. One can but say, with Frederick, that "the 
 best general is he who mak^ fewest mistakes " ; adding 
 that mistakes differ in degree of fatality. It is the object 
 of this treatise to show that the ndstakes alike of the 
 Baconians and of the mainly negative "anti-Strat- 
 fordians " are irredeemable. My friend Mr. Greenwood; 
 who is so Draconic towards every over-strong inference, 
 every " doubtless " and every " certainly " of the " Strat- 
 fordians," has built his own case^ mainly on current 
 propositions concerning the " law " and " scholarship " 
 of the plays to which he had never applied the slightest 
 comparative criticism, takmg them without question 
 from writers whose Stratfordian orthodoxy should have 
 1 See The Shakespeare Problem Re-stated, 1908. 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 vetoed his faith in these as in their other theories. And, 
 inexorable towards all defects of biographical evidence 
 for the main tradition, he maintains for his own part a 
 hypothesis which is not only unsupported by a ^ain of 
 evidence but is in constant and deadly conflict with the 
 very arguments by which he seeks to disallow the claims 
 of the Stratford actor. So much has been shown by Mr. 
 Lang ; and will, I think, be shown independently in the 
 follovdng pages. If they, in turn, should be found to 
 evolve any equipollent fallacy, let it be shown. If not, 
 the candid reader will presumably rate at their true 
 weight the mistakes of detail from which such a treatise 
 cannot conceivably be free. 
 
 The deficiency which I recognise in it is the incomplete- 
 ness of its survey of the literary field that should be 
 covered. For lack of leisure, I have had to leave un- 
 collated at least a^core of books that I had noted for re- 
 perusal in this coimection. One cannot remember all 
 the allusions and the vocabulary of old books that one 
 had read without any special note-taking : they must 
 be re-read for an argument which turns largely on vocabu- 
 lary and allusion. Still, I am fain to think that the 
 confutation undertaken has been substantially made 
 out ; and if its incompleteness at many points is noted 
 by any more leisured reader, I trust he will make good 
 the d^ciency.^ 
 
 Christmas Week, 1912. 
 
 W 1 Since the above lines were written, I have read, in the 
 enforced leisure of a brief illness. Canon Beeching's little book, 
 WiUiatn Shakespeare : Player, Playmaker, and Poet : a Reply to 
 Mr. George Greenwood (1908), in which, as in Mr. Lang's volume. 
 I find some of my " points " already made, with many others to 
 boot. All this consensus of argument among independent 
 writers will, I think, impress the open-minded reader, as it has 
 done me. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 
 
 The Status of " Heresy " : Soarces of the Baconian bias : Its 
 extiemer forms : Ciphers : Sir £. Duming Lawrence on 
 " Honorificabilitudinitatibus " : Rational forms of the debate : 
 Inadequacy of literary taste as arbitrator : Need for evidence 
 and ratiocination. pp. i-io 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE POSITION OF MARK TWAIN 
 
 English origin of Baconian theory : American developments : 
 Mark Twain's theses : The supposed contemporary disbelief 
 in Shakespeare's authorship a chimera : The literary testis 
 monies, before and after 1616 : Scantiness of all biographical 
 record of men of letters in Shakespeare's age : The Puritan 
 attitude towards him in Stratford : Biographical records 
 of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molidre. pp. 1 1-30 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS IN SHAKESPEARE : LORD 
 
 CAMPBELL'S CASE 
 
 The thesis as to the legal knowledge shown in the plays : Its 
 " orthodox " origin and development : Mark Twain's un- 
 questioning acceptance : Test questions, neither put, nor 
 answered by Baconians : Mr. Greenwood's acceptance of 
 idolatrous theses as to the plajrs : His rejection of Mr. Collins's 
 proofs of " law " in Titus : His acceptance of Lord Campbell's 
 final dicta from Lord Penzance without scrutiny : Campbell's 
 contradictory positions : his errors as to biographical data : 
 Conflict of criticism among the legalists : Campbell's points 
 taken seriatim. PP- 31-95 
 
 xiii 
 
xiv CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY : MR. GRANT WHITE'S 
 
 CASE 
 
 Grant White an anti-Baconian : His extravagant development 
 of the legalist view : His list of technical terms in the plays : 
 Ascribes to the plays a term not to be found there : His philo- 
 logical blunder as to " purchase " : The word traced from 
 Chaucer to Warburton. pp. 96-1 16 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY I MR. RUSHTON ; 
 SENATOR DAVIS; MR. CASTLE 
 
 § I. Rushton 
 
 Mr. Rushton's priority to Campbell : His argument from use of 
 legal rn^vimg : His failure to collate other Elizabethan 
 dramatists. 
 
 §2. Davis 
 
 Laxity of ihe argument of Senator Davis : Alternately strict and 
 reckless in certificating legal use of terms : His ascription 
 of " forensic " character to trial in the Merchant met by 
 comparison of trial scene in Jonson : Ascribes Sir John 
 OldcasUe to Shakespeare on legal grounds : Consequences from 
 this ascription. 
 
 §3. Castle 
 
 Position of Mr. Castle : Theory of " legal " and " non-legal " 
 ■piays : Shakespeare occasionally " assisted " by a lawyer, 
 probably Bacon : His blunder as to " colour " : The word 
 traced in previous English literature : Self-contradiction as 
 to Measure for Measure : Fiasco as to " Escalus " : Failure to 
 collate other dramatists : Ignorance as to Elizabethan 
 phraseology : Heedless acceptance of literary thesis of Mr. 
 Donnelly : General laxity of procedure of the legalists on the 
 literary side. pp. 1 17-139 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 LITIGATION AND LEGALISM IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND 
 
 Nashe on contemporary litigiousness : Chapman on the law's 
 delajrs : Roger Hutchinson on litigation : Latimer on foolish 
 
CONTENTS XV 
 
 litigiousness and unjust judges : Illustration from a play : 
 Mr. Hubert Hall's picture of Elizabethan life : Arrest for 
 debt in the drama : Use of maxims and legal terms in 
 dialogue : Law courts at Stratford : Drayton's picture of a 
 tried ; Litigiousness of John Shakespeare : Question as to his 
 impecuniosity : Theory of recusancy : Shakespeeire's juvenile 
 experience : Talk of courts and trials on the stage and in the 
 pulpits : Legal procedure in plays and even in poems and 
 pamphlets : Nashe : Greene : Spenser : Trial scenes in plays : 
 Jonson : Chapman and Rowley : Dekker : Webster : 
 Greene and Lodge : Massinger : Webster's Devil's Law Case : 
 Mr. Greenwood's denial of its " legal " quality : Comparison 
 with trial scene in the Merchant : Webster's Appius and 
 Virginia : Jonson's Magnetic Lady : Legalism in the theo- 
 logians : Mr. Greenwood's dilemma : His withdrawal from 
 the original position : Disclaims founding on use of legal 
 terms : Has nothing else to found on : His error as to Mr. 
 Devecmon and Senator Davis : Confuted by his own 
 criticisms : Mr. Devecmon's error as to " statutes." 
 
 pp. 140-177 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP OF THE PLAYS 
 
 §1. Lord Penzance and Mr. Donnelly 
 
 The " classical " fallacy on all fours with the " legalist " : In- 
 complete induction in both cases : Method and inconsistency 
 of Prof. Churton Collins : Ignoring of English precedents : 
 Diffusion of common classical knowledge by Interludes and 
 homiletic literature : Persistence of the " classical " view : 
 Farmer's confutation : Revival of the thesis by anti-Baco- 
 nians, giving the Baconians a main part of their case : Pro- 
 cedureof Lord Penzance : HisdiscipleshiptoMr.Donnelly.who 
 had no classical scholarship : Authorship of the Henry VI 
 plays : Grant White's blunder as to Bentley and the " Gardens 
 of Adonis " : Solution of the confusion : A common classical 
 adage treated as a rarity of scholarship : A second Platonic 
 mare's nest : Blunders and oversights of Prof. Collins and 
 Grant White : Alleged scholarship of the Roman plays : 
 Their real lack of scholarship. 
 
 §2. Mr. G. G. Greenwood 
 
 Mr. Greenwood's treatment of the problem : Scraps of possible 
 reminiscence treated as proofs of wide classical knowledge : 
 His acceptance of Prof. Collins's case : Question of the circu- 
 
 b 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 lation of MS. translations : Problem of the Comedy of Errors : 
 The critical solution : Mr. Greenwood's presentment of the 
 author's positions. 
 
 §3. Dr. R. M. Theobald. 
 
 Dr. Theobald's positions : His " classic " allusions exposed seria- 
 tim : His fined admission of " probable use of translations." 
 
 §4. Mr. W. Theobald 
 
 Mr. Theobald's forensic procedure : Logical suicide : Failure to 
 understand Farmer : A collector of mares' nests : His 
 " classic allusions " dealt with seriatim : His citation of 
 Georg Brandes on Othello — ^Alleged use of Bemi and Ariosto : 
 Brandes' unwarranted inferences : His acceptance of the 
 legalist view : His repudiation of the Baconian theory : 
 Grant White's denunciation of it. pp. 178-252 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM CXASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP : 
 
 ii. DR. R. M. Theobald's list of words 
 
 §1. Dr. Theobald's claim and undertaking : Partial anticipation 
 of his claim by Hallam : Hallam's oversights : Mr. Greenwood's 
 unqualified acceptance of Hallam's qualified claim : The de- 
 velopment of Latin vocabulary in Elizabethan English : 
 Possibility of contributions by Shakespeare : Need for 
 competent scrutiny of the claim : Neologism in the drama : 
 Attitude of scholars to neologism : Cheke : Ascham : Caesar : 
 Favorinus : Practice of Spenser : Attitude of Sidney : 
 Practice of Sir T. More : Latinism in Latimer, Bale, and 
 Hutchinson : Tyndale on the revival of scholarehip : Ascham 
 and Elyot : Foxe's preference for Latin : Style of Hooker and 
 Bacon : General acquaintance with Latinic terms : Dr. 
 Theobald's ignorance of pre-Shakespearean English : His 
 slight and fallacious use of the Oxford Dictionary : Mr. 
 Harold Bayley's misconception : Dr. Theobald's preliminary 
 instances of " new words " : His citations a series of fiascos. 
 
 §2. Confutation of his chapter on " Shakespeare's Classic 
 Ihction " by Judge Willis : Preliminary instances of alleged 
 phrase-coinage by Bacon : Dr. Theobald's list dealt with 
 seriatim : Complete coUapse of his case.. pp 253-375 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE IN SHAKESPEARE AND BACON 
 
 §1. The Evidential Problem 
 
 Effect of parallelisms on readers not versed in Elizabethaji litera- 
 ture : Dr. Theobald's praise of Mr. Donnelly's performance : 
 More rational attitude of Judge Holmes : Mr. Donnelly's 
 ignorance of Elizabethan literature : Dr. Theobald's paralo- 
 gism as to " cumulative evidence " : Mr. Crawford's con- 
 futation of Mrs. Pott : Coincidences between Bacon and 
 Jonson. 
 
 §2. Lord Penzance and Mr. Donnelly 
 
 Lord Penzance's ignorance of Elizabethan literature : Mr. Don- 
 nelly : His first samples of coincidence : " Eager " and 
 " thicken " ; " troublers of the world." " top," " eternize." 
 " quintessence," " gravelled " : Real instances of cop3dng 
 of phrase in Elizabethan letters : Only a special proclivity to 
 a universal practice : Practice of Nashe : Marlowe : Greene : 
 Peele : Chapman : Shakespeare's cop3rings : Poetical imitation 
 in general : Drajrton and Spenser : Imitations of Shakespeare 
 by Webster, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, and 
 He3rwood : Shakespeare and Montaigne : Common tags : 
 Shakespeare's retention of previous writing in recast plays : 
 Absurdity of general inference of identity of authorship : 
 Real instances of alien or divided authorship : Mr. Donnelly's 
 parallels wholly uncritical : His use of the pseudo-Baconian 
 essay Of Death : His trivial parallels of phrase : Seven more 
 significant parallels exposed : Twenty-one of his instances of 
 word-coincidence, from " ape " to " wilderness." dealt with by 
 the comparative method. PP-376-432 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE : 
 ii. DR. R. M. THEOBALD 
 
 Dr. Theobald's argument from coincidence to identity : His 
 principal instance : Univeisalitylof plagiarism in Shakespeare's 
 day : Jonson and Bacon : Dr. Theobald's ignorance of 
 Elizabethan literature : His attempt to reply to Judge Willis : 
 Forty of his instances dealt with seriatim : Samples of the 
 futility of the remainder : His blunder as to terms of assevera- 
 tion : His argument as to " muck " : His blunder as to 
 Solamen miseris. PP- 433-482 
 
jviii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PROSE STYLE IN SHAKESPEARE AND BACON 
 
 Style a personal characteristic : Shakespeare not a great prose- 
 writer : Best prose and best verse never produced by one 
 writer : Shakespeare's originality in verse : Development 
 of English prose from Chaucer : Tudor prose : Hooper : Nashe : 
 Jonson : Bacon : Series of samples of Shakespeare's prose : 
 Its unvarying structure : The contrast of his verse : Trans- 
 muting power of rhythm : Samples of Bacon's prose : Its 
 entirely different structure : Many differences in vocabulary at 
 once apparent : Bacon's prose style masterly but homogeneous 
 like Shakespeare's : His potency as a leader of thought : Mon- 
 strosity of the theory that both styles are his. pp. 483-S 10 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE VOCABXJLARIES OF SHAKESPEARE AND BACON 
 
 Alleged range of Shakespeare's vocabulary : Failure of the 
 Baconians to compare the vocabularies : The divergence 
 much wider than might have been expected : Illustrated 
 by a fair test selection of pages from Bacon : Surprisingly 
 large number of ordinary words not found in Shakespeare : 
 Words only once used : Ill-supported character of the claim 
 for his exceptional range : Impossibility of explaining Bacon's 
 failure to use in the Plays, if his, many words habitually used 
 by him in his signed writings : Significant differences in 
 flexions, scansions, and spellings of the same word : The 
 two men's literary outfits substantially different : The 
 allegations of Mr. Bompas as to vocabulary, &c. : Thousands 
 of Bacon's words not in Shakespeare : Shakespeare's mastery 
 of expression not a matter of wide vocabulary : Monstrosity 
 of the Baconiam theory once more realised. pp. 5 1 1-524 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF SHAKESPEARE AND BACON 
 
 Bacon's main preoccupations : professional, political, didactic and 
 scientific : His propagandist aspirations supreme : Their utter 
 incompatibility with his alleged playwriting : Their complete 
 exclusion from the Plays : Points of contact slight and rare : 
 Fundamental difference of Shakespeare's attitude : Beicon's 
 alleged leaning to dramatic methods : Complete misconception 
 
CONTENTS xix 
 
 of his meaning by Baconians : Bacon entirely opposed to the 
 dramatic methods of his time : His ideals wholly didactic : 
 Testimony of Taylor, the Water-Poet : Proof of Bacon's 
 complete aloofness from the theatre : His conviction of the 
 coming " bankruptcy " of modem languages : Impossibility 
 of explaining his devotion of his time to playwriting. 
 
 pp. 525-537 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 EXTERNAL AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE : LIVES AND 
 PERSONALITIES 
 
 §1. The a priori view of the training and culture of a great 
 dramatic poet : Real effects of exact biography : Need to 
 study actual lives of men of genius : Emerson's a priori 
 attitude : Common acquiescence in it. 
 
 §2. Argument from the dramatist's apparent " indifference " 
 to the preservation of his work : Its fallacy : Rational view 
 of the problem : The authorised and unauthorised quartos : 
 Mr. Pollard's demonstration : Shakespeare's position as an 
 adapter and rewriter of other men's work : His course the 
 natural one : Suicidal character of the Baconian theory at 
 this as at other points : Bacon's " indifference " to the 
 preservation of the Plays. 
 
 §3. implications of the fact that most of the Pla3rs are based on 
 previous work : The adapter necessarily in habitual associa- 
 tion with the theatre : Mr. Greenwood's theory in the same 
 dilemma with the Baconian : Antipodal antithesis between 
 Bacon's personality and the sympathies shown in the 
 Plays : Baconian misgivings on the subject : Question to be 
 determined by other arguments. 
 
 §4. The " culture " problem : Mr. Greenwood on Shakespeare's 
 science : Shakespeare not a scientific student : Mr. Greenwood's 
 argument as to Venus and Adonis : Its fallacy : Test cases 
 of poetic culture : Keats : Shakespeare's schooling : Weakness 
 of traditional assumptions : Shakespeare's special culture as 
 an actor : Mr. Greenwood's exaggeration of the classical 
 culture in the Venus : Its culture-basis slight : Range of 
 reading open to Shakespeare in English : Culture of Taylor 
 the Water-Poet : Effects of classical culture in the case of 
 other dramatists : Not the source of Shakespeare's superiority: 
 The Venus a " modem " piece of work : Shakespeare and 
 Southampton. 
 
 §5. Mr. Greenwood's treatment of Jonson's testimony : Fallacy 
 of his method : Jonson and Donne : Jonson's criticisms are 
 testimonies : Jonson on Dciniel and Marston : The " who ' 
 
XX CONTENTS 
 
 argument : Mr. Greenwood's treatment of Jonson's paragraph 
 in the Discoveries : Dr. Meier's fantasy : The question of 
 Shakespeare's speed in composition : Jonson inconsistent 
 as critic : TJiis no invalidation of his personal testimony. 
 
 §6. Jonson's Scriptorum Catalogus : The " mystery " of the Ode to 
 Bacon : Jonson's repetition of phrase in praising Bacon and 
 Shakespeare : Similar repetitions by him elsewhere : CoUapse 
 of Mr. Greenwood's main hjrpothesis : The charge against the 
 actor-partners. 
 
 §7. Other negative items in Mr. Greenwood's case : His chapter 
 on " The Silence of Philip Henslowe " : Its complete collapse 
 on scrutiny : The Diary not examined by Mr. Greenwood : 
 Shakespeare may or may not have " written for Henslowe " : 
 No pajmients to playwrights by Henslowe noted before 1 597 : 
 The cavils of Judge Stotsenburg : Mr. Greenwood's treat- 
 ment of the testimony of Heywood. 
 
 §8. The arguments from Shake3peare's bequest to his wife : And 
 from his handwriting : Nugatoriness of both arguments : 
 The will of Bacon : The will of Daniel : Shakespeare's signa- 
 tures : The script : Literary and other handwriting and 
 signatures : The non-education of Shakespeare's daughters : 
 Milton and his daughters : Postscript on Shakespeare as a 
 " hard creditor." pp. 538-582 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 The Baconian procedure contrasted with Bacon's prescriptions of 
 scientific methods : Utter disregard of them by the 
 " Baconians " : Their fallacies, however, are but examples of 
 fallacy in general : Campbell's nonsense of the same order : 
 Dr. Theobald's self-revelation : Other chimeras to hand, and 
 likely to ensue : Professor Demblon's ascription of the plays 
 to Lord Rutland : His theory absolutely destitute of evidence : 
 Annexes the negative case of the Baconians, and simply puts 
 Bacon aside : M. Demblon's self-certification : The question 
 of the " uncultured poet " : Irrelevances of M. Demblon : The 
 test-case of Balzac : Assumption of all the antis that the 
 Plays could easily be a by-product of an otherwise busy 
 man's life : Bad record of judges on the Shakespeare problem : 
 Variant theories : Judge Stotsenburg's : Why not Queen 
 EUzabeth : The rebound of idolatry : Baconian virulence and 
 unscrupulousness of imputation : Utility of a rational 
 mvestigation. pp. 583-595 
 
 Indexes __ ,„^ f-^„ 
 
 pp. 590-012 
 
THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 
 
 IT is to be hoped that the term " heresy " will not 
 be resented by those to whom it may here apply. 
 The present writer, being himself open to indict- 
 ment for serious heresy in more than one field of 
 doctrine, is not likely to employ it as an aspersion. A 
 heresy is but a mode of opinion, the word having originally 
 meant a sect ; and it serves conveniently to specify a 
 dissent from an opinion or belief normally held. It is 
 a heresy, for instance, to hold that the " Rokeby Venus " 
 is not the work of Velasquez ; and that heresy the present 
 writer inclines to share, being indeed prone to give a 
 hearing to heresy of all kinds. But a heresy, to start 
 with, is an opinion like another, as likely to be wrong 
 as right ; and the beUef that the " pla}^ of Shakespeare " 
 were written by Bacon is to be termed a heresy until it 
 can establish itself. 
 
 That it has never done so for careful students is put 
 by many of these as a reason for ignoring it ; and some 
 will doubtless pronounce the present examination a 
 waste of time. But there is, I find, a surprisingly large 
 sprinkling of intelligent people who, without any studious 
 examination, have either accepted the Baconian theory 
 or taken up a non-committal " anti-Stratfordian " posi- 
 tion on the score of difficulties which they find in the 
 " orthodox " case, as put by both sides. Such readers 
 I take to be victims of misinformation ; and I think that 
 
 I A 
 
2 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 their perplexity can, in many instances, be removed. 
 But their trouble is caused, to begin with, by the reitera- 
 tion of " orthodox " errors, to which the doubters give 
 harbourage, and of which the Baconians make their 
 capital. If one side were wholly scientific, and the other 
 wholly the reverse, the conscious " expert " might do 
 well perhaps merely to shrug his shoulders. But opinion 
 is not so distributed. It is very doubtful whether the 
 Baconian theory would ever have been framed had not 
 the idolatrous Shakespeareans set up a visionary figure 
 of the Master. Broadly speaking, all error is consan- 
 guineous. Baconians have not invented a new way of 
 being mistaken. 
 
 Some there are, certainly, who are not open to correc- 
 tion. I have small hope of converting a believer in any 
 of the hundred-and-one ciphers by which Bacon is alleged 
 to have inserted in the plays and in the prefatory verses 
 to the foUo a multitude of grotesque " revelations " of 
 what, if he had any occasion to, he could have sanely 
 established by sealed documents, to be opened at any 
 specified time. The cipher-mongers as a rule destroy 
 their case in advance by arguing that Bacon's " secret " 
 was known not only to Ben Jonson and other friends, 
 but to Shakespeare's partners — as indeed it must have 
 been if such secret there were. It is this open secret that 
 Bacon is declared to have embedded in a series of ciphers 
 the concoction of any one of which would have been a 
 task outside of rational contemplation on the part of 
 any poet or dramatist. The man who took incalculable 
 pains to get at the minds of his contemporaries and 
 posterity in his avowed works is represented as spending 
 an immensity of time and trouble in fantastically con- 
 triving ciphers which were never to be suspected by 
 any reader till Mr, Ignatius Donnelly professed to 
 discover one of them. The Baconians, I believe, have 
 now abandoned Mr. Donnelly's egregious cryptogram 
 as Hghtly as many of them adopted it; but new 
 
THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 3 
 
 ciphers are forthcoming from their camp every few 
 years. 
 
 The latest is that set forth by Sir Edwin Duming- 
 Lawrence in his munificently produced volimie entitled 
 Bacon is Shakespeare (1910). One of the clues which 
 he presents with the utmost confidence is the anagram 
 he evolves from the monster-word " HonorificabiUtudi- 
 nitatibus" in Love's Labour's Lost (v, 1). This he 
 knows to be an old byword among grammarians ; but, 
 finding he can anagrammatise it into Hi ludi F. Baconis 
 nati tuiti orhi : " These plays F. Bacon's offspring are 
 preserved to the world" — a portent of Latin that vies 
 with the original prodigy, and an unspeakable " hexa- 
 meter" like that, to boot — ^he goes about to show that 
 Bacon inserted it in the original play for the conveyance 
 of his secret to posterity, and expressly arranged the 
 paging of the f oUo and the place of the word in the page 
 so as to give by the numbers a clue to the coming inter- 
 preter. That is to say, the allusion to Hi ktdi, " these 
 plays," (i) was put in one play before there were any 
 other plays to claim ; (2) was duly printed in the quarto 
 of 159J5 with the same intention ; and (3) was circum- 
 spectly reproduced in the foUo with a Pythagorean 
 machinery of cross-numbering of lines and pages which 
 must have cost inconceivable trouble to arrange, supposing 
 it to have been possible. And Bacon, who always latin- 
 ized his name Bacotius, is here made to put it as Baco. 
 
 All the while the mystery-making author is to be 
 regarded as having left uncorrected the grossest errors 
 of the press found in the quarto on the very page in ques- 
 tion. To the first long speech of the Pedagogue on that 
 page the Curate answers, " Laus deo, hem inteUigo " ; 
 and the Pedagogue rejoins, " Borne boon for boon prescian, 
 a little scratched, 'twill serve." This verbal mess, which 
 reappears in the folio, has been reduced to meaning in 
 two ways. The earlier editors, in their enterprising 
 fashion, made the Curate say " bone " instead of bene. 
 
4 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and made the Pedagogue reply, " Hum, bone for bene ; 
 Priscian, a little scratched," which would pass very well. 
 But there is the less adventurous solution of the reading 
 latterly adopted, " Bon, Bon, fort bon : Priscian, a little 
 scratched," which takes fewer liberties with the text, 
 while doing nothing to explain the closing phrase. Which- 
 ever emendation be right, the original "Borne boon for 
 boon " is unintelligible gibberish, which no critical reader 
 can beUeve to have been written by the dramatist, who- 
 ever he was. But this gibberish was left unremedied 
 by " Baco," on the Baconian view, when he was taking 
 incredible pains to arrange the folio page in an arith- 
 metical puzzle ; and Sir Edwin, xmdistmrbed by the 
 gibberish, but agreeing to read " Priscian " for " prescian," 
 actually proceeds to explain that the grammarian's name 
 is introduced for the purpose of expressing a humorous 
 disregard of his dictmn that the letter / is a mute ! In 
 Sir Edwin's incomparable anagram-hexameter " F " is 
 to be sounded " efE " : hence the alleged avowal by the 
 anagrammatist of an intention to strain the grammarian's 
 code. In point of fact, be it observed, the anagram- 
 word has not at this point of the action been uttered : 
 it occiu^ eleven lines later, after the entrance of the 
 Braggart and the Boy; and it is then uttered by the 
 Clown, who was not present when the Pedagogue alluded 
 to Priscian. 
 
 It is impossible to guess how many or what order of 
 readers will either assent to this " revelation " or keep 
 their countenances over it; but I am quite sure that 
 Sir Edwin will never give it up. And when I point out to 
 him that " Honorificabilitudinitatibus " occurs in Nashe's 
 Lenten Stuff (1599), on line seven of Signature D, and 
 is to be found on the thirty-third line of page 176 of the 
 third volume of Mr. McKerrow's edition of Nashe's works 
 (1904), he will, I expect, at once proceed to prove that 
 Bacon had somehow arranged these things also for the 
 revelation of the fact that he wrote The Praise of the 
 
THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 5 
 
 Red Herring. 1 For Sir Edwin is satisfied that Bacon 
 " caused to be issued " the Palladis Tamia : Wit's 
 Treasury which is "attributed to Francis Meres"; 
 and further, as he once informed me, believes Bacon to 
 have written Montaigne's Essays in the original French — 
 here improving on Mr. Donnelly, who regarded Florio's 
 translation as the original, and ascribed that to Bacon. 
 Latterly, he has proclaimed to a staring world that 
 Bacon is the translator of the Authorised version of the 
 Bible ; and I make no doubt that he has embraced Dr, 
 R. M. Theobald's demonstration that Bacon wrote 
 Marlowe — not to mention the rest of the Elizabethan 
 playwrights. 
 
 Now, Sir Edwin, like Dr. Theobald, is a learned man, 
 which Mr. Donnelly was not, and the fact that the Baconian 
 theory can lead both learned and unlearned men to such 
 weird conclusions might be held sufficient to warn off 
 ordinary folk from taking the first step. If, however, 
 I can forecast the future with any safety from my know- 
 ledge of the Baconian movement, the common run of 
 Baconians will go on as before, some believing that Bacon 
 wrote most of the Elizabethan drama, Spenser, Nashe; 
 Montaigne and Burton ; and some drawing the line at 
 Shakespeare ; while the anti-Stratf ordians will continue 
 simply to disparage the " Stratford actor " or " rustic," 
 denjmig responsibility for Baconian doings. All that 
 one can hope to do is to arrest a minority on their path 
 of mounting credence, by confronting them with some 
 evidence at least as valid as that on which they decided 
 
 t This, I find, is actually claimed by Mr. Parker Woodward, 
 who sees decisive proof in the fact that Nashe, like Bacon, girds 
 at Ramus. (Have with you to Saffron Walden : Works, ed. 
 McKerrow, iii, 136.) To this I may add, for Sir Edwin's edifica- 
 tion, that Nashe, like Bacon, rejects the doctrine of Copernicus 
 {Id. p. 94), and uses the " Baconian " phrase, Veritas temporis 
 filia {Id. p. 29). For a Baconian nothing more can be needed 
 to prove that Bacon wrote Nashe. The trouble is that Shake- 
 speare does none of the things in question. 
 
6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 to take the Baconian turning. It was by garbled and 
 erroneous information that they were first set agoing ; 
 fuller and more accurate information may turn 
 
 them. 
 
 From the point of view of an ordinary Shakespearean 
 scholar, the Baconian opinion is an extravagant hallucina- 
 tion. But he will perhaps admit, on reflection, that all 
 of us are likely to be under some hallucinations on points 
 of past history. If, as most of us frequently discover; 
 we can be seriously misled by accepting current state- 
 ments about contemporary matters, it is broadly in- 
 conceivable that we are not at times much misled by 
 remote evidence about matters on which we are of neces- 
 sity scantily informed. And the Baconian opinion— 
 the wilder extravagances apart — is in my opinion a 
 hallucination actually derivable and derived from opinions 
 promulgated by some good Shakespearean scholars who 
 scout the other. If this judgment should be made good in 
 the course of our inquiry, the gain may even extend beyond 
 the plucking of some brands from the Baconian bonfire. 
 For the true humanist, all divagations of belief should as 
 such possess some interest ; and the variety of grounds 
 on which my " anti-Stratfordian " friends of all shades 
 have reached their negation have seemed to me quite 
 noteworthy. One of the most entertaining cases is that 
 of my friend X, an acutely intelligent barrister of foreign 
 parentage, who learned English as a foreigner, and 
 mEistered it with an enviable perfection. Coming into 
 our Uterature as an observant tourist, so to speak, he 
 met with the mountainous work of Mr. Donnelly, and, 
 studying it with the impartiality of an entire stranger, 
 decided that Mr. Doimelly had made out his case. Later 
 he chanced to meet with Bacon's Essays, which he read 
 with the same cheerful detachment, reaching the quite 
 unexpected conclusion that the main who wrote " such 
 commonplace stufi" as the Essays could never have 
 written the plays; though, on the other hand, the 
 
THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 7 
 
 explorer still found it incredible that the plays could 
 have been written by " the Stratford actor." If he 
 should follow the present inquiry, his pronouncement 
 upon it will not be among the least interesting to the 
 author. 
 
 "Whatever may be the utility of the discussion, it is 
 in any case inevitable, and it may as well be gone about 
 systematically. Issue has already been joined with the 
 Baconians by defenders of the ordinary belief ; and some 
 have done it with a competence to which I gladly bear 
 testimony./ To say nothing of the many essays which 
 have appeared in the reviews, such a study as that 
 of Mr. Charles Crawford on "The Bacon-Shakespeare 
 Question," originally published in Notes and Queries, 
 and reprinted in his Collectanea, * needs only, I believe, 
 a wider circulation to make it a fountain of healing to 
 many distracted inquirers. If the present treatise should 
 do much less for the elucidation of other points at issue 
 than Mr. Crawford has done for those with which he 
 specially deals, it may still be well worth producing. 
 The wider field that has to be traversed cannot weU be 
 here explored with such fulness of relevant learning as 
 his ; but the extension of the survey may still be usefully 
 attempted. 
 
 And indeed, if the question is to be discussed at all, 
 it had better be dealt with concretely, in detail, and 
 comprehensively, by the methods of argument which 
 establish or overthrow theories in other provinces of 
 inquiry. Individual students may quite fitly dismiss 
 the Baconian theory on the strength of their literary 
 perception that the works of Bacon and the plays of 
 Shakespeare are the production of two utterly different. 
 personaKties, whose ways of handhng language— to 
 mention nothing else— axe about as different as the ways, 
 say of Herbert Spencer and Charles Lamb. To those 
 of us who have lived long in the society of the Plays and 
 1 Stratford-on-Avon, 1906-7, 2 vols. 
 
8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the Works separately, the failure to recognise this pro- 
 found difference is always perplexing. But since it lies 
 on the face of the debate that such perception is in- 
 communicable, there is nothing to be gained by asseverat- 
 ing the difference. For here again, if we staJce our case 
 on our literary sense, we shall find the claim to be two- 
 edged. I at least am conscious of no great aid from the 
 support, on that issue, of a Shakespearean who has no 
 misgivings about the real authorship of certain of the 
 plays and portions of others. If I diverge from my allies 
 there, the " literary " sense is a precarious guide ; and 
 indeed, I find critics whose confidence in their literary 
 sense is of the most complacent and aggressive kind, 
 passing what seem to me very ill-founded opinions on 
 these matters. 
 
 The literary sense, then, cannot well be arbitrator in 
 our dispute ; and while each may fitly rely upon his own, 
 there is nothing to be settled by citing it as a decisive 
 witness in this trial, though it will be found cited as an 
 "expert" on both sides. We must proceed rather to 
 operate on the general sense of evidence ; and it is perhaps 
 possible to present the case a little more judicially than 
 it has sometimes been put in the past. Thus far, it has 
 been often debated on both sides with heat enough to 
 set up an ample suggestion of odium theologicum, though 
 on both sides it has been at times handled with amenity. 
 For a time, the " orthodox " were apt to be the more 
 provocative in their language, ^ resenting as they often 
 did the lack of scholarly and critical preparation on the 
 part of the heretics. It is the fact, I think, that no expert 
 in Elizabethan literature, indeed no good scholar in 
 English literature, has ever held the heresy. Many 
 
 1 The first explicit Bacon-Shakespeaxe treatise, the Bacon 
 and Shakespeare of WiUiam Heniy Smith (1856), was promptly 
 rephed to m a book entitled William Shakespeare not an Impostor 
 
 By an English Critic " (1857), in which the appearance of Smith's 
 booklet was declared to be " to the eternal disgrace of English 
 
THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 9 
 
 " Baconians " know little even about Bacon ; those who 
 have gone at all fully into his work or that of his contem- 
 poraries seem always to have read ad hoc ; and few have 
 even done much in that way. Those who do, seem unable 
 to stop short of attributing to Bacon the authorship of every 
 book in which they find a phrase or idea used in common 
 with Bacon. But whatever inadequacy of survey or 
 fallacy of reasoning may be noted among the Baconians 
 is to be partly matched in the writings of " orthodox " 
 ^persons who have expressly discussed either the Baconian 
 heresy or some other important problem of Shakespearean 
 criticism. To me, at least, some of the most accompUshed 
 of " orthodox " Shakespearean scholars seem to be very 
 far astray in their conclusions at highly important points. 
 I am therefore not disposed to cast at the Baconians in 
 general, or at any one in particular, epithets which might 
 in my opinion be fairly retorted on some of my allies in 
 the present dispute. Rather I would deprecate the use 
 of the argumentum ad hominem on both sides in a debate 
 where, in any case, it can advantage neither. Both sides 
 have resorted to it freely. Baconians, with every reason 
 to conciliate the normal Shakespearean, hardly ever 
 contrive, latterly, to abstain long from hard flings at the 
 " Stratford actor," the blackening of whose character 
 they seem to think part of the disproof of his authorship 
 of the plays pubUshed in his name ; and the orthodox 
 Shakespeareans, in turn, seem unable to forego retaliations 
 on the assailants, whether or not they abstain from 
 countervailing attacks on the variously vulnerable reputa- 
 tion of Bacon. Even the mere " anti-Stratfordians," 
 so ably represented by my friend Mr. G. G. Greenwood; 
 apparently cannot conduct their case without a manifold 
 impeachment of a man of whom, they confess, we know 
 but little. A constant cross-fire of personalities between 
 the two — or three-^-camps is thus generated, and the 
 most competent antagonists of the Baconian theory do 
 not disguise their contempt for its exponents in general. 
 
10 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 though even expressly justified contempt is notoriously 
 provocative rather than persuasive. 
 
 In view of it all, a professed partisan of the " orthodox " 
 cause can hardly hope to escape giving at times the usual 
 kind of offence. But at least he may try — try, that is, 
 to bring his criticism to bear, whether or not severely; 
 on positions and argimients, and to treat antagonists 
 as producers of arguments, good or bad. Realising the 
 logical nullity of Mark Twain's happiest shots at the 
 Stratford bust, and at the tombstone verses, he may 
 abstain, not only from responsive shots at the verses and 
 the effigies and the character of Bacon, but from extra- 
 judicial conunent on the personal demerits of those 
 whose argtmients he rebuts. And he had better so refrain . 
 For there has been, as aforesaid, much untenable argu- 
 ment on the " orthodox " side, both positive and nega- 
 tive, whatever may be the quality of the reasoning on 
 the other ; and, indeed, it will be strange if there be not 
 some logical or material imperfections in the present 
 treatise. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 
 
 ENGLISHMEN are wont, with small justification; 
 to lay Bacon-Shakespearism at the door of 
 " America." It was in point of fact first clearly 
 propoimded in England/ and has been nour- 
 ished from the start on the dicta of " orthodox " English 
 
 1 In Hawthorne's laboured and clouded preface to Delia 
 Bacon's Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857). 
 where the Baconian theory is only vaguely to be inferred from 
 the mass of declamation which constitutes the book, the novelist 
 states that " A single article from her pen, purporting to be the 
 first of a series, appeared in an American magazine," naively 
 adding that " An English writer (in a ' Letter to the Earl of 
 Ellesmere ' published within a few months past) has thought it 
 not inconsistent with the fair-play on which his country prides 
 itself, to take to himself this lady's theory, and favour the public 
 with it as his own original conception, without allusion to the 
 author's private claim." This appears to assert that Miss Bacon 
 had definitely stated the Bacon-Shakespearc theory before 1857 ; 
 since the angry allusion is to William Henry Smith's Bacon and 
 Shakespeare : an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and 
 Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth (1856). Smith, however, 
 at once wrote to Hawthorne protesting that he had known 
 nothing whatever of Miss Bacon's magazine article, and that 
 on reading it over, he thought it preposterous to suggest that 
 he had thence derived his theory of Bacon's authorship of the 
 plaj^, which he could prove he had held for upwards of twenty 
 years. Hawthorne thereupon wrote a letter of retractation and 
 apology, and both are printed by Smith in his second edition 
 (1857). Smith had in fact propounded the Batonian theory 
 wiii an explicitness and circumstantiality of which there is no 
 trace in Delia Bacon's bulky book. It was after he had started 
 the battle that Judge Nathaniel Holmes built up an " American 
 School " on the same lines. But even before Smith's book, as 
 Holmes has noted, there appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh 
 Journal, Aug. 5, 1852, an article entitled " Who Wrote 
 
 II 
 
12 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 devotees who had either never heard of the Baconian 
 heresy or regarded it as beneath contempt; and the 
 avowed heretics have latterly seemed to swarm, or at 
 least to hive, as actively in England as in the States. 
 But since the publication of Mark Twain's Is Shake- 
 speare Dead ? the cult bids fair to become predominantly 
 an American movement, like " Christian Science." 
 
 To a Briton, however, who knows it to be all a woeful 
 mistake, there is no comfort in this. Error is as inevitable 
 in its reactions as depression in trade ; and the brother- 
 hood of culture can no more than that of science recognise 
 tribal divisions. We claim to cherish Mark Twain " on 
 this side " with a special regard, and it is the possession 
 of a full share in that bias that proximately moves the 
 present writer to lift up a systematic testimony " on the 
 other side " in what Mark Twain has called the " Bacon- 
 Shakespeare scufiBle." The thing has become serious 
 since he entered the fray. 
 
 Mark Twain's championship of the Baconian theory, 
 or at least of the " anti-Stratford " thesis, gives to the 
 antis a dangerous advantage.^ He is apt to win the 
 laughers — a thing not before to be apprehended from 
 Baconian propaganda ; and his influence in that way is 
 probably even mere potent since his death. And no 
 man is likely to seek to meet him with his special weapons. 
 The fim of Is Shakespeare Dead ? is nearly as good 
 as it had need be. But, as usual, the serious purpose or 
 purport of its author is perfectly clear ; and he is likely, 
 as usual, to have fortified or induced a serious belief by 
 his fun where he so wished. It is accordingly justifiable 
 to take his statement of the case as specially important, 
 if not typical, and, by controverting it, to supply an up- 
 to-date introduction to the whole dispute. If the process 
 involves some serious strictures on a beloved author's 
 
 Shakespeare ? " in which it was argued that the actor could not 
 have written the plays. (Nathaniel Holmes, The Authorship of 
 Shakespeare, 3rd ed. 1875, App. p. 605.) 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 13 
 
 wilful way of handling a complex problem, it cannot be 
 helped : the master of thirty legions in the order of 
 hiimour must just take his chances in a literary war in 
 which he was the challenger. Against one form of 
 hostility he is secure : against Mark Twain on no score 
 can any man bear malice. 
 
 Mark Twain's anti-Shakespearean case condenses into 
 these two main theses : 
 
 1. Shakespeare was of no account in Stratford-on- 
 Avon in his lifetime ; was utterly forgotten there from 
 the moment of his death ; and was therefore as a person- 
 ality wholly incommensurate with the vast achievement 
 of the plajrs. 
 
 2. " The " plays are saturated with an exact, technical 
 knowledge of law, which the Stratford actor cannot 
 conceivably have possessed. On this thesis Mark Twain 
 is willing to stake the whole question : for him it is a 
 " crucial instance." 
 
 Other contentions arise in the course of the exposition, 
 but these are the main fighting points. And as the first 
 is Mark Twain's special contribution to the debate, and 
 may be much more briefly dealt with than the second, 
 it may be well to give it primary attention. A clearing- 
 up of this issue may indeed promote a better understanding 
 of others. 
 
 Both theses are formulated, as it happens, without even 
 a glance at the contrary case, and the first with an almost 
 burlesque extravagance. While making hard play against 
 the biographers because they have tried to fill in by more 
 or less reasonable conjecture the outlines given them by 
 the few precise data we possess concerning Shakespeare, 
 the Baconian thus sets out on his own course : 
 
 When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions 
 attributed to him as author had been before the London world 
 and in high favour for twenty-four years. Yet his death was 
 not an event. It made no stir, it attracted no attention. Ap- 
 parently his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a 
 ceUbraUd poet had passed from their midst. Perhaps they knew a 
 
14 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him 
 as the author of his works. « We are justified in assuming " this. 
 His death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford. 
 ... He had spent the last five or six years of his life there, 
 diligently trading in every big and little thing that had money in it ; 
 so we are compelled to assume that many of the folks there in 
 those said latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight 
 and hearsay. But not as a celebrity ? Apparently not. For 
 everybody soon forgot to remember any contact with him or 
 any incident connected with him. 
 
 If the biographers of Shakespeare had done theu: 
 conjecturing in this fashion they would indeed have given 
 scope for jest. We have here a series not of rational 
 conjectures, but of wild positive assertions, for none of 
 which, save where a known fact is grossly exaggerated 
 for the sake of the argument, is there the slightest ground, 
 and which singly and collectively do not even approximate 
 to decent plausibiUty. Supposing Shakespeare to have 
 been the merest actor, or the " illiterate clown " of Sir 
 Edwin Duming-Lawrence's amiable fancy, the chances 
 are that he would be remembered by his neighbours as 
 most ordinary people are. Nobody has the sUghtest 
 right to say that they soon " forgot to remember any 
 contact with him or incident connected with him," or 
 that he was not known to any one of them as a celebrity. 
 How could the epitaph in the parish church remain 
 unknown to everybody in the place ? On the other hand, 
 supposmg the literary world and the neighbours to have 
 known and appreciated the plays, and yet to have regarded 
 Shakespeare as a man of no account (and this appears 
 to be the point of the argument before us), we are to infer 
 that it was in Shakespeare's day a matter of common 
 notoriety that the plays were the work of some one else, 
 presumptively the Lord Chancellor, Viscount of St. 
 Albans. Over such a proposition it is difficult to be 
 serious ; and yet this or nothing is the argument in hand. 
 
 And this impossible hypothesis, as it happens, Mark 
 Twain has taken over from my friend Mr. Greenwood, 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 15 
 
 with the sole difference that while Mark makes Bacon 
 the author, Mr. Greenwood names nobody, stipulating 
 only for a lawyer. In a case which trades so constantly 
 on the alleged difficulties of the orthodox view, it is 
 important to realise at the outset the absolutely mortal 
 difficulties of the objectors. Mr. Greenwood knows, 
 though Mark Twain did not, the more or less continuous 
 series of testimonies to the literary repute of William 
 Shakespeare, from Meres onwards. When, then, and 
 to whom, did the alleged spuriousness of the actor's 
 claim become known ? Mr. Greenwood,^ greatly daring, 
 selects Spenser as a poet about whose life we are much 
 better informed than we are concerning Shakespeare's. 
 It is a sufficiently untenable position, as will be shown 
 a little later ; but it is clezir that for Mr. Greenwood the 
 strongest point in it is Camden's statement that when 
 Spenser died, " contemporary poets thronged to his 
 funeral and cast their elegies and the pens that wrote 
 them into the tomb " ; whereas nothing of the sort 
 happened at Shakespeare's [or " Shakspere's "] death. 
 " Look upon this picture," writes Mr. Greenwood " — 
 " and on that. What a contrast ! " Mr. Greenwood 
 maintains a poUtic silence as to the dispute over Ben 
 Jonson's two conflicting statements that Spenser " died 
 for lack of bread," and that he refused Essex's gift of 
 twenty pieces, sa3dng he had no time to spend them. 
 But let that pass. The question is as to Mr. Greenwood's 
 implication concerning " Shakspere." 
 
 In the concluding part of his chapter on " The Later 
 Life and Death of Shakespeare," Mr. Greenwood develops 
 his case. He takes it for granted that the epitaph on 
 the tomb was really written by " Shakspere," the actor, 
 and cannot have been the work of Shakespeare, the 
 dramatist. The argument is in parts so iacoherent that 
 I cannot be sure of its drift. " Another extraordinary 
 fact in this amazing life," writes Mr. Greenwood (p. 199), 
 1 The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. S3- 
 
i6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 " is that with the exception of the Plays, and Venus and 
 Adonis, and the Lucrece and the Sonnets, and that 
 puzzle-poem. The Phcenix and the Turtle, Shakespeare 
 appears to have written nothing, unless we are to accept the 
 above-mentioned doggerels as his indeed ! If ' Shake- 
 speare' was but a nom de plume this need not excite 
 surprise. . . ." " With the exception of . . . ! " Mr. 
 Greenwood seems to mean that the man who wrote the 
 Plays and Poems must (for some occult reason) have 
 written many other things ; ^ and that these other things 
 are presmnably extant over another man's signature. 
 Yet he makes no attempt whatever to identify the man. 
 
 Of such reasoning I can make nothing ; and I must 
 therefore confine myself to the portion of the argument 
 that is inteUigible. It develops the innuendo put in the 
 previous contrast of Shakespeare's and Spenser's ftmerals. 
 " Surely," he writes (p. 200), " when this great poet died 
 there was a great burst of lamentation, a great concert 
 of praise ! Surely all his brother minstrels who survived 
 him vied with each other to write his elegy. Alas ! 
 Again silence — the silence that can be felt. ... It was 
 not tiU seven years after the death of Shakspere that 
 '. Shakespeare's ' elegy was written by . . . Ben Jonson." 
 
 I hesitate to press upon my friend's notice the simple 
 fact that whereas Spenser died tragically in London, after 
 being tragically driven out of Ireland, and thus couM 
 have a distinguished funeral, " Shakspere " died, appa- 
 rently after a short illness, in comfortable drcvm^tances; 
 at Stratf ord-on-Avon ; and that in the then state of 
 means of communication his Uterary friends could not 
 very well attend his funeral. These facts, which seem 
 to me to collapse his dramatic contrast, must have been 
 present to his mind. His argument seems to be that the 
 non-pubUcation of elegies by friends proves that " Shak- 
 
 1 Does Mr. Greenwood deny the hall-mark of the sonnet to 
 Florio, prefixed to the First Frutes ? And is he quite sure about 
 the Lover's Complaint ? 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 17 
 
 spere " was held at his death to be of no Uterary account — 
 though he has omitted to say what became of the elegies 
 said to have been written on Spenser.^ What then does 
 he make of the poems that were written for the Folio in 
 1623 ? And of Ben Jonson's mention of Shakespeare 
 in 1619 to Drummond ? In another chapter he professes 
 to find it inexpUcable that in talk with Drummond Ben 
 should say that I' ' Shakespeare wanted art,' when he was 
 to give him such praise later " ; but as regards the problem 
 of testimonies that is mere trifling. The fact stands out 
 that Ben spoke of " Shakespeare " to Drummond as a 
 faulty poet, but still a poet. Mr. Greenwood is arguing 
 that " Shakspere " was no poet at all ; and that at the 
 time of his death this was generally known to literary men. 
 Now, in his later panegyrical poem and in his Discoveries 
 Ben Jonson identifies " Shakspere," the Stratford actor, 
 with " Shakespeare," the dramatist — a writer with faults 
 of art, but a great genius. Does Mr. Greenwood then 
 mean to suggest that Ben at the actor's death — and this 
 in common with all his literary contemporaries — ^thought 
 the actor a literary fraud, and later reverted to the other 
 view ? If so, what explanation of his nightmare does 
 Mr. Greenwood offer ? If not, what point is there in the 
 argument from Ben's silence at " Shakspere 's " death ? 
 And what about all the other men, first " silent " and 
 later panegyrical ? Was it a universal conspiracy, or 
 a twice enacted mystification ? 
 
 I decline at this point to go into the side issues as to 
 Jonson's diverging criticisms of Shakespeare. Knowing 
 that many men of letters — e.g. Carlyle on Emerson; 
 Tennyson, Dickens, and Browning — ^have talked and 
 written in diverging strains of their literary friends — I 
 
 1 If buried without being copied, they were probably well 
 interred. It is not quite inconceivable that such a poet as 
 Shakespeare, after reading Spenser's Astrophel and the other 
 dirges over Sidney, might say to his friends, with regard to his 
 own latter end. " No elegies, by request ! " 
 
 B 
 
i8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 am not in the least puzzled by the moods of so moody 
 a man as Jonson. On the other hand, I claim that any- 
 body putting forward such an amazing argument as Mr, 
 Greenwood's, above summarised, is bound to bring it 
 into some appearance of rationality if he desires it to be 
 seriously considered; and I confess I cannot see how 
 he is ever to do so. The thesis he has propounded by 
 implication is the most hopeless of literary chimeras 
 — a riddle beside which all the anomalies he discovers 
 in the " Shakespeare Problem " are trifles. And this 
 chimera it is that Mark Twain complacently adopts, and 
 embodies in his " anti-Stratfordian " argument. 
 
 Leaving it standing in its naked insanity, we can but 
 turn to the remainder of the exposition, and criticise that 
 on its merits. It is sufficiently fantastic with the chimera 
 left out. Mark Twain's statements are those of a man of 
 letters who ostensibly knew substantially nothing of the 
 conditions of Uterary life in Elizabethan England, and 
 who yet assmned that he knew it in virtue of his knowledge 
 of the modem United States. This is the kind of trouble 
 that faces us all through the Baconian controversy. The 
 Baconians are often studious, and, in some matters, 
 well-informed people : unfortunately they do not acquire 
 the information that is relevant to this discussion. Mark 
 writes that " For seven years after Shakespeare's death 
 nobody seems to have been interested in him." What 
 is here meant by " seems " ? That there was no bio- 
 graphy pubUshed ? That was not the usage of the time. 
 And there were positively no newspapers to deal with 
 such matters, But who wrote the lines of the epitaph 
 commemorating the Shakespeare "with whom quick 
 nature died ? " Certainly a man of culture, improbably 
 a Stratfordian. When they were written we know not ; 
 but it was inferribly before 1623, when we know the bust 
 to have been in place. 
 
 "Then," writes Mark, "the qmrto was published." 
 Such a blunder could not have been made by a properly 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 19 
 
 informed student. " Ben Jonson," he goes on, " awoke 
 out of his long indifference." In no other controversy, 
 surely, could such an assertion have been so advanced. 
 No man has the faintest right to say, on the bare ground 
 of his not having published an elegy, that Jonson had 
 shown indifference to the death of the man whom he tells 
 us he had loved. " Then," continues our investigator, 
 " silence fell again. For sixty years. Then inquiries 
 into Shakespeare's life began to be made of Stratfordians." 
 It, is difficult to be siue as to what is here meant. 
 Mark Twain expUcitly asserts an absolute " silence " in the 
 way of printed allusions to Shakespeare over a period 
 of sixty years. But he was following Mr. Greenwood, who 
 is of course aware of the many hterary allusions to 
 Shakespeare in the period in question. Mr. Greenwood's 
 case is * that allusions to the work of Shakespeare have 
 no evidential force inasmuch as they do not say " who " 
 he was — a kind of test which would reduce to nullity 
 most of the literary allusions in all Uterature. One can 
 but note the self-stultifying character of the argument, 
 for the purposes either of Mark Twain or of Mr. Green- 
 wood. If in a long series of allusions to Shakespeare 
 there is no specification or designation of the man, the 
 only inference rationally to be drawn so far is that nobody 
 had ever hinted a doubt of the genuineness of his claims. 
 Had any such doubt been current, we might look for 
 either a qualif3dng " whosoever he was " or a positive 
 claim for the " swan of Avon." The complete absence of 
 any questioning is obviously a very strong proof that 
 no questioning ever took place. Simple references to 
 Shakespeare have exactly the force of simple references to 
 Chaucer or Spenser : they signify that only one poet so 
 named was known ; and that no outside claimant to the 
 honours of the name had ever been heard of. 
 
 But, as it happens, the post-Shakespearean allusions 
 do often point to an unlearned poet, and exclude a 
 » Shakespeare Problem Restated, 1908, ch. xi. 
 
20 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 learned one. Let us follow the series. Ben Jonson; 
 as aforesaid, was discussing Shakespeare with Drummond 
 in or about 1619. In 1620 John Taylor wrote ^ that 
 " Spencer and Shakespeare did in art excel " ; and it 
 is a scholarly and not an ignorant " conjecture " 
 that the anonymous lines " On the Time-Poets " re- 
 printed in the Choyce Drollery in 1656, naming " Ben 
 . . . fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense, . . . in- 
 genio'us Shakespeare . . . Massinger . . . Chapman," were 
 written between 1620 and 1626. To the Folio of 1623 
 there are prefixed not only the noble eulogy by Jonson; 
 but others as high pitched, by Hugh Holland, Leonard 
 Digges, and I.M. ; and the fine epitaph by William Basse; 
 referred to in Jonson's memorial, is assigned to 1622. It 
 was in 1627, again, that Drayton published his lines : 
 
 Shakespeare, thou hadst as smooth a comic vein. 
 Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain 
 As strong conception and as clear a rage 
 As any one that traffick'd with the stage ; 
 
 Cowley's passing allusion to Shakespeare's plays was 
 made between 1628 and 1631 ; and Ben Jonson's para- 
 graph with the phrase, " I loved the man, and do honour 
 his memory, on this side Idolatry, as much as any," 
 published in his Timber : or Discoveries in 1641, is 
 to be dated between 1630 and 1637. Milton's eulogium; 
 prefixed to the second FoUo, 1632, appeared again in 1640 
 and in 1645, and in the edition of his poems of the latter 
 year it is dated 1630. In the last-named year appeared 
 A Banquet of Jests, in which (No. 259) there is an allu- 
 sion to " Stratford upon Avon, a Towne most remarkable 
 for the birth of famous WiUiam Shakespeare"; and 
 Milton's lines on " sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child," 
 m L' Allegro, are to be dated between 1632 and 1638. 
 To the second FoUo. of which, evidently, Mark Twain 
 knew nothing, are further prefixed the glowing panegyric 
 verses of I.M.S. and the anonymous lines "upon the 
 » The Praise of Hemp-Seed, 1620. p. 26. 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 21 
 
 effigies of my worthy friend the Author, Master William 
 Shakespeare and his Workes " ; and in the same year 
 Shakespeare is named with Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, 
 and Fletcher in the commendatory verses of Sir Aston 
 Cokaine prefixed to Massinger's Emperor of the East. 
 In WiUiam Habington's Castara, 1634, appear the lines 
 " To a Friend," praising a wine of which 
 
 should Prynne 
 Drink but a plenteous glass, he would begin 
 A health to Shakespeare's ghost ; 
 
 and the famous eulogium passed on Shakespeare by Hales 
 of Eton, though only traditionally preserved, is reasonably 
 to be dated before 1633. That testimony, to be siure, is 
 ill-docimiented ; but in 1635 we have Heywood's mention 
 of " mellifluous Shakespeare " in The Hierarchie of 
 THE Blessed Angells ; and the three allusions to Shake- 
 speare by Suckling in his posthumous Fragmenta Aurea, 
 pubhshed in 1646, that in his comedy The Goblins, 
 in the same volume, and those in his letters, are to be 
 dated between 1636 and 1641. 
 
 In JoNSONUS ViRBius, published in 1638, there are 
 praises of Shakespeare by Jasper Mayne, Owen Feltham, 
 Richard West, H. Ramsay, and T. Terrent ; and in the 
 same year appeared Sir WiUiam Davenant's Madagascar, 
 WITH Other Poems, containing his Ode " In Remem- 
 brance of Master William Shakespeare." Then in 1640 
 comes the edition of the Poems, to which are prefixed the 
 preface of John Benson, the laudatory poem on " lofty 
 Shakespeare " by John Warren, and the well-known lines 
 of Eeonard Digges on " never-d3ang Shakespeare," where- 
 to is appended the anonymous " Elegy on the death of 
 that famous Writer and Actor, Mr. William Shakespeare," 
 which is to be dated 1637 or earlier, since it speaks of Ben 
 Jonson as living. To 1638 belong the lines of James 
 Mervyn, naming " Beamnont, Fletcher, Shakespeare, and 
 a train of glorious poets " ; and to 1639 the eulogy of 
 Thomas Bancroft in his Two Bookes of Epigrammes 
 
22 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and that of the anonjonous quatrain in Witts Reserva- 
 tions. 
 
 And so the stream of testimony goes on through the 
 century — all this independently of mere references to and 
 imitations of the plays. There is no difficulty in ascertain- 
 ing these testimonies : they are all duly collected for the 
 students of Shakespeare by Dr. Ingleby in his Shake- 
 speare's Centurie of Prayse, of 1874, which has been 
 repeatedly reprinted since ; and again in Mr. C. E. 
 Hughes' compilation. The Praise of Shakespeare (1904). 
 Yet of all this commemoration Mark Twain ostensibly 
 knew nothing : he writes confidently of a " silence " of 
 " sixty " years after the printing of the Folio, which he 
 calls a quarto. It is a distressing spectacle. For, if he 
 merely meant that the literary allusions to Shakespeare 
 during sixty years after his death convey no specification 
 of the man, but are simply praises of the work, he still 
 betrays an entire inacquaintance with the record. The 
 allusions do repeatedly indicate Shakespeare the actor ; 
 some profess personal acqujiintance with him ; yet others 
 are applicable only to an imleamed poet. Jonson, 
 Drayton, and Milton, to say nothing of Digges, all 
 indicate the knowledge that the poet was not a scholar. 
 Heywood, who must have known much of Shakespeare the 
 man, calls him "mellifluous," even as Milton had 
 spoken of his " native wood-notes wild," and as Webster, 
 in his lifetime, had praised his " right happy and copious 
 industry." All these testimonies significantly exclude 
 any hint of " learning," and cannot sanely be supposed to 
 hint at any " concealed author " whatever. 
 
 It is thus mere wilful m5rth-mongering to pretend that 
 any one of the references under notice leaves the sUghtest 
 opening for the notion that Shakespeare was for a moment 
 suspected to be but the mask of another man. All the 
 later testimonies plainly proceed upon a universal ac- 
 ceptance. The Shakespeare of the later eulogies is just 
 Ben Jonson's Shakespeare, the actor, the man of Stratford- 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 23 
 
 on-Avon. If it be still complained that they convey no 
 " gossip," no stories or reminiscences of the man, one can 
 but ask how much personal reminiscence we find of 
 He5rwrood, Dekker, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, Kyd, Nashe ; 
 of Spenser, the laurelled poet ; nay, even of Ben Jonson, 
 the foremost and most personally remembered man of 
 letters in that age ; and of Bacon himself, who Uved in the 
 eye of the court and the nation as well as of the men of 
 letters ? Save for the published observations of Rawley, 
 his chaplain, how much should we have known of him in 
 his simple capacity of man of letters ? How much did 
 Fulke Greville tell of the private life of Sidney ? When 
 will the "antis " realise that in Bacon's day the age of 
 modern biography had not begun ? 
 
 Sparing comment, we turn to Mark Twain's handling of 
 his theorem that after sixty years " inquiries into Shake- 
 speare's Stratford life began to be made by Stratfordians." 
 He asks : " Has it ever happened before— or since — ^that 
 a celebrated person who had spent exactly half of a fairly 
 long life in the village where he was bom and reared, was 
 able to slip out of this world and leave that village voiceless 
 and gossipless behind him — utterly voiceless, utterly gossip- 
 less ? And permanently so ? " This is really as bad as 
 what went before. To assume AhaX. there was no gossip 
 in Stratford about Shakespeare after his death, because 
 none of it has been preserved, is to bring into the Baconian 
 propaganda a new exorbitance of absurdity. When 
 Mark Twain goes on to tell how his own name and.fame 
 have been preserved to his own knowledge, in the village 
 of Hannibal, Missouri, in an age and a land of newspapers 
 and newspaper readers, of cheap books and universal 
 literary comment, in a coimtry where every one is taught 
 to read and books are printed by the biUion, he does but 
 show that he has -never even tried to realise what Eliza- 
 bethan life in England was Uke. Yet he knew, for he 
 has said as much, that the people of Stratford in Shake- 
 speare's day were mostly illiterates. The more reason, 
 
24 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 surely, to expect that they would not publish reminh 
 cences of a man of letters. 
 
 If such a wit as Mark Twain's could so divagate, ther 
 must be many who wander after him ; and perhaps th 
 best way to call up for them some idea of the relevan 
 facts is to note briefly how little has been preserved c 
 biographical detail concerning the general run of th 
 English poets and dramatists of Shatespeare's age. Af te 
 noting such matters they may begin to realise how entire! 
 beside the case is Mark Twain's argument. 
 
 1. John Lilly was one of the most famous Englisl 
 men-of-letters of his day, yet we know not the place o 
 the date of his birth. We have extant letters of hi 
 writing, and know him to have been a university man ani 
 a member of Parliament ; but fifty years ago an edito 
 could say that beyond his writings " we know thre 
 facts only, that he was a little man, was married, am 
 was fond of tobacco." ^ The date and place of his deati 
 are gathered only from entries which may refer to anothe 
 man ; and we cannot clearly tell how he subsisted. 
 
 2. Thomas Dekker was one of the most popular of th 
 Elizabethan dramatists, but " the outline of his life i 
 indeed singularly blank. We do not know exactly whe 
 he was bom, or where j there is scarcely any clue to th 
 important period of his youth, and his early struggles a 
 a poet and playwright : we do not even know when h 
 died."" 
 
 3. Thomas Heywood, by his own account, had eithc 
 " an entire hand or at least a main finger " in two hundre 
 and twenty dramas ; and he published twenty-four ; y€ 
 we know not his birthplace. He " was a Lincolnshii 
 man, presumably of good family," says Mr. Symond; 
 
 1 Memoir by Fairholt, prefixed to Lilly's Works in "iibrai 
 of Old Authors." 
 
 2 Memoir by E. Rhys, prefixed to the " Mermaid " edition < 
 Dekker's Plays. Dekker tells, however, that he was bom i 
 London. 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 25 
 
 " though I cannot find that the Visitations of that county 
 record any pedigree of his name." He was a Cambridge 
 University man ; he began to write for the stage in 1596, 
 and in 1598 he was an actor and sharer in Henslowe's 
 company. "Little else is known about his Ufe; and though 
 it is certain that he lived to a ripe age, we are ignorant 
 of the date of his death." ^ 
 
 4. Thomas Kyd was the author of some of the best- 
 known plays of his age : in at least four contemporary 
 plaj^ mention is made of his Jeronymo. By a rare 
 chance, the entry of his baptism has lately been dis- 
 covered, and his parentage has thus been traced : we 
 know too, from recent research, not from contemporary 
 mention, that he was sent to the Merchant Taylors' 
 School. " But between 1565 and 1589 history is entirely 
 silent about him." We know from oflficial documents, 
 never published till our own time, that he was involved 
 in the " atheistic academy " associated with the name 
 of Raleigh ; but " henceforth we lose all trace of Kyd's 
 person. It is as a rule supposed that he died in 1594 or 
 1595 " ; all that is certain is that he died before 1601.' 
 
 5. Of the life of Ben Jonson we know more than of that 
 of any dramatist or poet of the Shakespearean age ; but 
 we have not the exact date or the place of his birth, 
 though we know it was in Westminster ; and we lack the 
 dates of his matriculation at Cambridge, of the length 
 of his stay, and of the time of his soldiering in Flanders. 
 All the biographical details we have of him will go into 
 small space. 
 
 6. But in the case of Spenser, the most illustrious poet 
 of his age, the lack of biography is most signal. Mr. 
 Greenwood's account contrasts pleasantly with that of 
 the biographers. "The Ufe of Spenser is wrapt in a 
 
 1 Symonds' Essay, prefixed to the " Mennaid " edition of 
 Hejrwood's Pla5rs. 
 a Professor J. Shick's preface to the " Temple " edition of The 
 
 Spanish Tragedy. 
 
26 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 similar obsciirity to that which hides from us his grea 
 predecessor Chaucer, and his still greater contemporar 
 Shakespeare. As in the case of Chaucer, our principj 
 external authorities are a few meagre entries in certai 
 ofl&cial documents, and such facts as may be gathere 
 from his works. The birth-year of each poet is detei 
 mined by inference. The circumstances in which eac 
 died are a matter of controversy." ^ " Of his parents 
 the only fact secured is that his mother's name wa 
 Elizabeth ; this appears from sonnet 74 " ; there is n 
 other trace, though he was highly connected on his father' 
 side. We infer that he was bom in 1552 ; we have it oi 
 his own testimony that he was bom in London, but w 
 know not in what part. Quite recently it has beei 
 discovered that he went to the Merchant Taylors 
 School ; and we trace him at Cambridge in 1569 ; bu 
 of the rest of his life up to that year we know nothini 
 whatever. 
 
 Here is a fair analogy to the case of Shakespeare. Bu 
 for the school and college entries we should know nothin] 
 of Spenser till he had reached manhood ; and we kno\ 
 Shakespeare's parentage and place of schooling wit] 
 certainty. We also know the name of his wife : we d( 
 not certainly know the surname of Spenser's, nor tb 
 names of his children. 
 
 7. Finally, let us take the case of Drake, one of thi 
 most famous Englishmen of Shakespeare's day. He wa 
 a national hero, and his ship. The Golden Hind, wa 
 treasured as long as she held together. Yet the researcl 
 of Professor Laughton has failed to establish either hi 
 parentage or the place of his birth.* The ascertainin] 
 of such data, in fact, when there was any obscurity abou 
 
 1 Prof. Hales' Memoir, prefixed to the "Globe" edition c 
 Spenser's Works. 
 
 * More recent research is understood to have established th 
 birthplace. But the fact of the long blank in English knowledg 
 on the subject bears out our case. 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 27 
 
 them, never preoccupied the Elizabethans even in the 
 case of their greatest celebrities. 
 
 Nevertheless it is not rationally to be supposed that 
 there was not current, in the age of Shakespeare and 
 Jonson, abundant gossip concerning all of these men; 
 alike in London and in the country places with which 
 they had been at all intimately connected. The contrary 
 is inconceivable : gossip is universal and irrepressible. 
 Of what else does the bulk of hmnan conversation ever 
 consist ? The residual Uterary fact is simply this, that 
 in the England of that time even the most famous poets 
 and men of action and the most popiilar dramatists were, 
 for lack of literacy and periodicals, not commemorated 
 as much less distinguished people are to-day. They 
 could not be. There were no journals in which to do it, 
 and the custom of writing biographies of writers or even 
 of heroes had hardly begun. 
 
 But as regards the poets and the dramatists in particular 
 
 there came into play a process of partial disrepute, which 
 
 could account only too easily for that absence of a cult 
 
 of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon which is the sole 
 
 residual fact in Mark Twain's argvunent under the head 
 
 of non-commemoration. When the antiquaries did begin 
 
 to seek for reminiscences of Shakespeare at his native 
 
 town two or more generations after his death they found 
 
 little to- record. But why? Mark Twain all along 
 
 absurdly subsumes the extreme Baconian explanation — 
 
 that Shakespeare's contemporaries knew that he was not 
 
 really a man of genius ; and that, by consequence, there 
 
 was a general inkling that the plays, recognised to be 
 
 works of genius, were the works of another man. This 
 
 theorem, which puts the Baconian theory in its most 
 
 entirely incredible form, has literally not a shred of 
 
 evidence to support it. There is abundant testimony 
 
 to the belief of the bookish and Uterary men that William 
 
 Shakespeare was a man of genius. This recognition 
 
 is prominent in Ben Jonson's talk even when he is 
 
28 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 carping ; it suffuses with fire his panegyric. But ever 
 expHcit testimony in his own day and among the nes 
 generation of readers recognises the dramatist-actor i 
 a man of rare powers ; there is never the shadow of 
 hint to the contrary. 
 
 On the other hand, there is not the slightest reason t 
 suppose that the average inhabitants of Stratford di 
 or could appreciate the plays as literature, all questions ( 
 authorship apart. If for most of them Shakespeare wa 
 not " a celebrity " it was because, first, many could nc 
 read ; and, secondly, because they tended to be puritan: 
 cal, and did not dream that stage plays could be grea 
 or serious matter. Many of them, in fact, wovdd regar 
 everjrthing connected with the " harlotry players " a 
 savouring of sin. As Halliwell-Phillipps sunMned up : 
 
 When the monument was first erected, there can, indeed, I 
 little doubt that most of the inhabitants of Stratford-on-Avoi 
 including the puritanical vicar, regarded it as the memorial « 
 one whose literary career had, to say the least, been painful] 
 useless to society. A like fanaticism no doubt pervaded n 
 insignificant section of Londoners ; but it was not sufficient] 
 dominant in the metropolis to restrain the continued popularit 
 of the works of the great dramatist.* 
 
 This is not a matter of mere " conjecture," legitimat 
 or other. There is solid evidence of the growth of Puritan 
 ism in Stratford-on-Avon as elsewhere in Shakespeare' 
 latter years. A rigorous bylaw against theatrical per 
 formances was passed by the town in 1612 ; and wh« 
 it was found that this could not well be enforced agains 
 players imder Court protection, resort was had to othe 
 devices ; for instance, that of the year 1622, when si: 
 shillings were " pay'd to the Kinges players for not play 
 ing in the hall." We know further that Shakespeare' 
 daughter, Mrs. Hall, entertained a Puritan preacher a 
 New Place, the town paying for his drink— a very tolerabl 
 deal of sack— while she presumably provided his food 
 Yet when her epitaph came to be written, after her deatl 
 1 Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, sth ed. p. 241. 
 
THE POSITIONS OF MARK TWAIN 29 
 
 in 1649, even the pious hand that composed it testified 
 that among the more cultured folk of Stratford the 
 memory and the fame of her father were still green : 
 
 Witty above her sexe, but that's not all : 
 Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall : 
 Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this 
 Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse. 
 
 This epitaph, apparently, was as unknown to Mark Twain 
 as all the rest of the evidence which confutes him. 
 
 To sum up, a playwright and actor was the last man 
 to be made a local hero in Stratf ord-on-Avon in the days 
 of deepening Puritanism. The not wholly undeserved 
 disrepute of the theatre affected all connected with it; 
 as we can already see in the Sonnets.^ A population at 
 once unlettered and fanatical could not conceivably 
 cherish the literary memory of the author of Romeo and 
 Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, Venus and Adonis 
 and The Rape of Lucrece ; though they must have 
 gossiped somewhat about his memory while his generation 
 lasted. But in the special circles outside, where literary 
 genius could be and was appreciated, while Puritanism 
 was doing its best and worst against free art, the name 
 of Shakespeare never ceased to be a word to conjure with ; 
 and the English avowals are more abundant than the 
 testimonies to the differing fame of Bacon himself, no 
 one ever indicating a suspicion that the Stratford actor 
 was not the great poet he was reputed to be. And even 
 in Stratford itself, as we have seen, three and thirty years 
 after Shakespeare's death, the quasi-Puritan composer 
 of the epitaph of his Puritan daughter takes for granted 
 the knowledge of all educated people that Shakespeare 
 was a man of intellectual distinction, whose daughter a 
 
 1 Even in France, long afterwards, it was told that two kins- 
 women of Molidre in the religious life — ^it may have been his 
 sister and his cousin — " blushed to recognise as a relative the 
 author of Tartujfe, and fasted on a fixed day every year to expiate 
 the misfortune of such a connection." Foumier, Etudes sur la 
 vie et fes ceuvres de Moliire, 1885, pp. 9-10. 
 
30 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Puritan woman might be proud to be, though his sole 
 fame was as a writer of poems and plays, and mayhap, 
 in some little degree, as an actor. 
 
 Thus the documentary identification of " the Stratford 
 actor " as the author of the plays, though not copious, is 
 perfectly valid, especially in view of the scantiness of 
 biographical record all round for the period. Those who 
 make much of the sparsity of exact traces of Shakespeare 
 might be led to pause in their propaganda if they realised 
 that for the birth, upbringing, and life of Cervantes, the 
 most famous writer of Spain, the record is just as scanty. 
 The enthusiastic devotion of Cervantes' coimtrymen has 
 failed to ascertain his parentage or his place of birth ; 
 and what we know of him has been preserved not by 
 biographical research among his contemporaries but by 
 the chance of his own statements and of non-biographical 
 documents. It is sometimes urged as a strange circum- 
 stance that there survives no known manuscript of 
 Shakespeare. But there siurvives no known manuscript 
 of Molidre; and concerning even that dramatist, who 
 lived so much nearer the age of biography, it is uncertain 
 whether he was or was not called to the Bar. The latter- 
 day biography of MoUdre, indeed, has been built up only 
 by a " miracle of investigation " * which has left openings 
 for endless disputes.* The argument from lack of early 
 biographical commemoration or research, in short, has 
 no weight whatever for the earlier part of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 The ground being thus cleared of the first section of Mark 
 Twain's imhappy mystification, we may proceed to the 
 somewhat lengthier task of disposing of the second, which, 
 however, is a mere repetition of an elaborate mystification 
 evolved by others and taken by him on trust. 
 
 1 The Recherches sur Moliire of Eudore Souli6, 1863. 
 
 * Cp. the Etudes sur la vie et les ceuvres de Moliire of Edouaid 
 Foumier, passim; the pr6face to that work by Auguste Vitu ; 
 and the AuUmr de Molidre of Auguste Baluffe, 1889, passim. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS IN 
 SHAKESPEARE : LORD CAMPBELL'S CASE 
 
 TAKING Mark Twain as the protagonist of the 
 Baconian case, we have found him rejecting 
 the normal view of the authorship of the 
 Shakespearean plays on the strength of a 
 series of gross errors as to the documentary evidence, and 
 an all-pervading misconception as to the conditions of 
 Elizabethan life. Protesting against the acceptance of 
 " conjecture ' ' as biographical material, he f oimded his own 
 case upon mere wild misstatement in matters of notorious 
 fact, followed up by an argument which on a little scrutiny 
 is found to be wholly irrelevant. When, however, the 
 whole case thus far is disposed of, the imabashed Baco- 
 nians are found confidently justif3dng their unexampled 
 " conjectvu-e " by a proposition or propositions in regard 
 to which they can claim the support of Shakespearean 
 scholars of good standing, — the general theorem, to wit, 
 that the author of the pla}rs in question was demonstrably 
 possessed of a deep and technically expert knowledge of 
 English law. 
 
 On the strength of this affirmation,xonfidently accepted 
 by him from others, Mark Twain embraced the " conjec- 
 ture " that Bacon wrote Venus and Adonis, The Mer- 
 chant OF Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Lear, 
 and all the rest of the plays. In his view " we are entitled 
 to assume " (even as Stratfordian biographers might put 
 it) that where lawyers profess to find legal expertise in 
 the plays they cannot be mistaken ; that only a lawyer 
 
 31 
 
32 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 therefore can have written them ; and that the lawyer 
 must have been Bacon. The foe of conjectures died 
 ostensibly in full reconcilement to the conjecture that 
 Hamlet was written by Bacon for a company of actof- 
 partners, all in the secret, after the trial of Essex and 
 while Bacon was scheming for the favour of King James ; 
 and that The Tempest, The Winter's Tale. Cymbeline, 
 and Henry VIII were written under similar conditions 
 of open secrecy by King James' Solicitor-General— the 
 last-named play just before his elevation to the Attorney- 
 Generalship. And it is expressly insisted on that while 
 thus carrying on a kind of authorship which he was deeply 
 concerned to keep secret. Sir Francis, either deliberately 
 or through inability to refrain from " talking shop," went 
 on garnishing the plays with a multitude of legal expres- 
 sions which to any trained ear must have betrayed theh 
 emanation from a legal sovu-ce, and which, be it observed, 
 he never introduces in his Essays. 
 
 To this extremity of conjecture we are exhorted tc 
 come on the bare authority, cited at third hand, of certair 
 pronoimcements by lawyers of high and other status 
 not one of whom had a fair knowledge of the Elizabethar 
 and Jacobean drama in general. In a dispute in whicl 
 the principle of mere authority is expressly sought t( 
 be overthrown, we are asked to let an inference from th( 
 dicta of one or two purely legal authorities reverse at s 
 stroke the whole structure of Shakespearean and Baconiai 
 biography. The authority of the great mass of Shake 
 spearean students is to go for nothing, whether as t( 
 biography or as to comparison of styles ; but the authority 
 of certain lawyers, and these of the " idolatrous " school 
 is to settle once for all the question whether the autho 
 of the plays had a professional knowledge of law. Thus 
 it may be said, is idolatry pursued by its Nemesis : th 
 Shakespeare-worshippers' habit of ascribing to the autho 
 of the plays every accomplishment in a superlative degre 
 is made a ground for taking away the Stratford actor' 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 33 
 
 kingdom and giving it to another. And the same sequence 
 occurs in respect of the ascription to the playwright of 
 a wide knowledge of the classics. The idolaters are in 
 efiect slain by their own lintel-stones. But for the non- 
 idolater all this concludes nothing. As simple student; 
 he asks : 
 
 1. What expressions, in which plays, prove the play- 
 wright to have had an incomparably exact knowledge 
 of law, possible only to a trained lawyer ? 
 
 2. Is it averred that the dramatic use of these expres- 
 sions has the effect of making personages speak out of 
 character, in respect of their being endowed with a legal 
 knowledge which they could not reasonably be supposed 
 to possess ? If so, is this admitted to be a detraction 
 from the dramatist's own artistic credit ? If, on the other 
 hand, his characterisation is not on this score called in 
 question, with what fitness can he be credited with 
 abnormal legal knowledge on the score of expressions 
 which can dramatically pass muster as " in character " ? 
 
 3. Is it claimed that such legal expressions do not occur 
 in the works of other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists 
 in similar quantity and quality ? Have the lawyers ever 
 faced this problem ? 
 
 4. How is it to be proved that the mere habit of haimting 
 law courts, common to multitudes in Shakespeare's day 
 as in ours, could not 3deld to a quick mind precisely the 
 amount of familiarity with legal terminology seen in the 
 plays ? 
 
 5. Is it true, as asserted by Lord Campbell and others, 
 that the Shakespearean handling of law terms and phrases 
 is constantly and impeccably correct ? 
 
 6. Does Bacon, in his non-legal works, make any such 
 play with legal terms and phrases ? 
 
 Every one of these six questions, to raise no others; 
 is vital to the issue which Mark Twain declares to be vital 
 to the problem of the authorship of the plays. And he 
 does not raise one of them ; does not even indicate that 
 
 c 
 
34 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 it has occurred to him that any one of them might be 
 raised. He simply cites on the legal question nine pages 
 of Mr. George Greenwood's able but ex 'parte treatise. 
 The Shakespeare Problem Restated, ascribing to that 
 a conclusiveness which is denied to any argvunentation 
 on the " Stratfordian " side, and there makes an end of 
 discussion on that issue, declared to be central. 
 
 Now, Mr. Greenwood, setting out to challenge the 
 whole "Stratford" tradition, and all the dogmatism 
 thereon accruing, has made out his own negative case 
 largely by means of the imcritical deliverances of men 
 who adhered uncritically to the tradition in question. 
 He has done this as regards the vital problem of the 
 classical learning said to be exhibited in the plays. Reject- 
 ing absolutely the late Mr. Churton Collins's verdict on 
 the main issue, he accepts without scrutiny Mr. Collins's 
 judgment on the primary point of the dramatist's learn- 
 ing. Yet it can be demonstrated that at every important 
 point Mr. Collins's judgment breaks down on analysis.^ 
 The author of the plays exhibits, on exact scrutiny, no 
 such learning as he ascribes to him. Ben Jonson's 
 ascription to Shakespeare of " small Latin and less 
 Greek," which Mr. Collins arbitrarily and illicitly sets 
 aside, turns out on close examination to be in perfect 
 accord with the internal evidence of the plays, after these 
 have been carefully considered with a view to the whole 
 problem of authenticity. If, then, evidence which, with 
 his own scholarly investigations, satisfies Mr. Greenwood 
 as to the plajnvright's learning, is foimd to be quite 
 inadequate, evidence which satisfies him as to the play- 
 wright's mastery of English law may turn out to be no 
 less inadequate, albeit he is himself a lawyer. 
 
 The thesis of the juristic knowledge of the dramatist, 
 long ago set up by Steevens and Malone, on the basis of 
 the " attorney's clerk " tradition, is specially insisted 
 
 1 See the present writer's Montaigne and Shakespeare, and 
 other Essays on Cognate Questions, 1909, per index. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 35 
 
 on by Mr. Churton Collins as part of his proof that Titus 
 Andronicus is a genuine Shakespearean work. Now 
 this, of all of " the " plays, has moved the largest number 
 of critics to reject it, on general grounds, as alien work ; 
 and an all-round survey of the problem is found to bear 
 out their conclusion. As to this, Mr. Greenwood is of 
 my opinion. So far as demonstration in such matters 
 can be said to be attainable, Titus is demonstrably the 
 work, in the main, of Peele and Greene, with portions 
 possibly by Kyd of Lodge or Marlowe.^ Its legal allu- 
 sions, then, tell of no legal knowledge on the part of the 
 author of Othello, Coriolanus, As You Like It, and 
 the imquestioned plays. Nor is this all. The legal 
 knowledge exhibited in the plays is foxmd to be assigned 
 by the lawyers mainly on the score of phrases which will 
 not in the least bear out their assertion. Mr. Greenwood 
 cites (from Lord Penzance) the astounding judgments 
 of Lord Chief Justice Campbell (afterwards Lord Chan- 
 cellor) without quoting, save in subsequent discussion 
 and in other connections, one specimen of the groimds 
 given by his lordship for them ; and Mark Twain there- 
 upon adopts without inquiry a verdict which, had he had 
 the grounds before him, he would, I believe, have regarded 
 as much better matter for jest than any of the themes he 
 has jested on — unless, indeed, he recognised in the Lord 
 Chancellor a fellow humorist. It is important to keep 
 in view from the outset the evolution of the argument ; 
 because Mr. Greenwood will be found ere long putting a 
 thesis which is only in appearance Campbell's, while 
 citing Campbell's pronoimcements in support of it. 
 Campbell goes about to prove his general proposition by 
 a series of items of evidence, consisting substantially of 
 legal phrases used in the plays. By that series of items 
 his general pronouncement must stand or faU. But 
 Mr. Greenwood at a certain stage of the debate in effect 
 
 * See the present writer's Did Shakespeare Write " Titus 
 Andronicus " ? 1905. 
 
36 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 repudiates the very grounds of Campbell's judgment 
 while asking us to accept that judgment as decisive. 
 
 §2 
 Let us first examine Lord Campbell's entire case, put 
 in the form of a letter to J. Payne Collier under the title 
 Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered 
 (1859) .\ This case, which Mark Twain had never seen, 
 and the tenuity of which no one could imagine from a 
 mere reading of Mr. Greenwood's extracts, made through 
 Lord Penzance, is framed, bad as it is, merely to support 
 the theory that Shakespeare may have been a clerk in a 
 country attorney's ofi&ce. 
 
 Great as is the knowledge of law which Shakespeare's writings 
 display, and familisir as he appears to have been with all its 
 forms and proceedings, the whole of this would easily be accounted 
 for if for some years he had occupied a desk in the office of a 
 country attorney in good business — attending sessions and 
 assizes — keeping leets and law days — and perhaps being sent 
 up to the metropolis in term time to conduct suits before the 
 Lord Chancellor or the superior courts of conmion law at West- 
 minster, according to the ancient practice of country attome}rs 
 who would not employ a London agent to divide their fees.* 
 
 And here, at the very outset, we have radical conflict 
 between the champions of the lawyer theory. " We 
 quite agree with Mr. Castle,"" writes Mr. Greenwood, 
 " that Shakespeare's legal knowledge is not what could 
 have been picked up in an attorney's office, but could 
 only have been learned by an actual attendeince at the 
 
 1 A year before, W. L. Rushton, then a law student, had pub- 
 lished Shakespeare a Lavayer (Liverpool, 1858) ; and Air. Jaggard 
 writes, in his Shakespeare Bibliography (p. 271), that " Lord 
 Campbell coolly plundered and plagiarised it a year later, in his 
 imitation work, entitled Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, 
 without the least acknowledgment." But Rushton also followed 
 Malone. Cp. Rushton's own Appendices to his brochure, Shake- 
 speare's Testamentary Language, 1869. 
 
 * Work cited, pp. 22-23. 
 
 » E. J. Castle, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene : A Study, 
 1897. PP- 8, 26. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 37 
 
 Courts, at a Pleader's in Chambers, and on circuit, or 
 by associating intimately with members of the Bench 
 and Bar."^ Mr. Greenwood is thus in conflict with his 
 chief witness, upon whose testimony have apparently 
 been built the opinions of nearly all the other witnesses 
 whom he cites. Further, Mr. Castle finds plenty of law 
 in plays in which Lord Campbell finds none ; no law at 
 all in plays in which Lord Campbell finds some; and 
 " laughable mistakes " where Lord Campbell declares 
 there is no deviation from strict legal accuracy. With 
 Mr. Castle we shall deal later : for the present we have 
 to follow the variegated reasoning of the Chief Justice. 
 
 It is significant of the texture of Campbell's argument 
 that after the explicit statement last cited from him he 
 finds in the plays a "wonderful" and "profoimd"" 
 knowledge of law — ^impl3dng that profundity in that 
 knowledge may be attained by a village attorney's clerk 
 in a few years. But still more staggering is the circum- 
 stance that after putting his whole case he writes : " Still 
 I must warn you (Collier) that I myself remain rather 
 sceptical. All that I can admit to you is that you may be 
 right, and that while there is weighty evidence for you there 
 is nothing conclusive against you."^ And he further 
 points out to CoUier : " You must likewise remember 
 that you require us implicitly to believe a fact which, 
 were it true, positive and irrefragable evidence in Shake- 
 speare's own handwriting might have been forthcoming 
 to establish. Not having been actually enrolled as an 
 attorney, neither the records of the local court at Stratford; 
 nor of the superior courts at Westminster, would present 
 his name as being concerned in any suits as an attorney ; 
 but it might have been reasonably expected that there 
 would have been deeds or wills witnessed by him still 
 extant ; — and after a very diligent search none such can 
 be discovered." 
 
 1 The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 31. 
 2 -P. 113. ' Pp. iro-ii. 
 
38 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Upon this caveat Mr. Greenwood expressly insists ; 
 and whereas Campbell's argument went solely to prove 
 possible clerkship, Mr. Greenwood turns his evidence to 
 the support of the thesis that the playwright must have 
 been a lawyer trained on a higher plane. He in turn 
 refuses to accept the Baconian theory ; whereas the 
 Baconians turn his and Campbell's arguments alike to 
 the support of that. Mr. Greenwood must have a lawyer, 
 but cannot accept Bacon, and can name no other. And 
 the whole theorem rests on the forensic if not insincere 
 reasoning of a judge who would have laughed the Baco- 
 nian theory to scorn. Campbell's argumentation, as he 
 himself observed, is "worthy of Serjeant Eitherside " ; 
 and still it is the sole or main f oimdation of his summing- 
 up or judgment, which constitutes Mr. Greenwood's case. 
 Lord Campbell had in fact been indulging in a forensic 
 exercise, using the language of exaggerated conviction 
 in the forensic manner, as a barrister would in a defence 
 of a clouded client before an ignorant jury. To make 
 clear the truth of this, it is necessary only to summarise 
 his argument. 
 
 It sets out by taking for granted (a) that Nashe's allu- 
 sion, in the epistle prefixed to Greene's Menaphon (1589), 
 to " shifting companions that . . . leave the trade of 
 noverint, whereto they were bom," must have referred 
 to Shakespeare, in respect of the further allusion to 
 Hamlet; and (6) that Greene, in respect of his later 
 " Shake-scene " fling, must be held to have been party 
 to the description of Shakespeare as a lawyer by trade. 
 Now, it has long been established to the satisfaction, I 
 thmk, of absolutely all Shakespearean scholars, that 
 Nashe's allusion is to Kyd, whose father was a law scrivener; 
 and who was in all probability the author of the old 
 Hamlet, upon which, by common consent (Campbell's 
 included), Shakespeare's play is founded. Lord Camp- 
 bell's preliminary case thus goes by the board at once : 
 the testimony of " two contemporaries .... who must 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 39 
 
 have known him [Shakespeare] well," with which he 
 presents Collier at the outset, is a myth of mistaken in- 
 ference. In passing, it may be noted that he is equally 
 astray (p. 25) in taking- Spenser's " pleasant Willy " to 
 be the dramatist. No scholar, at least, now agrees with 
 him. 
 
 The adherents of the lawyer theory should further note, 
 what Mr. Greenwood omits to mention, that Campbell 
 " entered " the following caveat : 
 
 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, 
 Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Timon of Athens. The Tempest, 
 King Richard II, King Henry V, King Henry VI, Part I ; 
 King Henry VI, Part II ; King Richard III, King Henry 
 VIII, Pericles of Tyre, and Titus Andronicus — ^fourteen of 
 the thirty-seven dramas generally attributed to Shakespeare, — 
 I find nothing that fairly bears upon this controversy. Of 
 course I had only to look for expressions and allusions that 
 must be supposed to come from one who has been a professional 
 lawyer. Amidst the seducing beauties of sentiment and language 
 through which I had to pick my way, I may have overlooked 
 various specimens of the article of which I was in quest, which 
 would have been accidentally valuable, although intrinsically 
 worthless. , 
 
 In this connection it should be noted (a) that the late 
 Professor Churton Collins foimd a long series of "im- 
 questionable " legal allusions in Titus Andronicus — 
 where it can hardly have been " seducing beauties of 
 sentiment " that prevented Campbell from seeing them ; 
 
 (b) that Mr. Greenwood in turn finds these allusions to 
 be " very ordinary expressions," which it is " ridiculous " 
 to ascribe to a trained lawyer, though they are just such 
 expressions as Campbell cites from other plays; and 
 
 (c) that while the Lord Chancellor finds only one passage 
 " with the juridical mark " upon it in Macbeth, Mr, 
 Castle, K.C., goes further, and denies that there is any 
 sign of legal.knowledge in that play at aU. Thus in both 
 early and late plays, in genuine and ungenuine alike, 
 the experts themselves confess to lack of evidence over 
 nearly forty per cent of the area involved. 
 
40 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Let us now take Lord Campbell's evidential passages 
 in detail. The mere presentment will probably suffice 
 to dispose of them for most readers, so utterly void are 
 they of justification for the thesis built upon them. 
 Comment is often entirely needless ; the one constant 
 difficulty is to believe that the judge is serious. 
 • I, In The Mekry Wives (ii, 2) Ford says his love was 
 
 Like a fair house built upon another man's ground ; so that 
 I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it. 
 
 Upon which Lord Campbell pronounces that " this shows 
 in Shakespeare a knowledge of the law of real property, 
 fwt generally possessed." It might suffice to answer that 
 such knowledge is to-day possessed by millions of laymen : 
 and that in the litigious days of Elizabeth it must have 
 been at least as common. But let the lawyer be answered 
 in legal form. In Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, 
 published in 1597, Hodge says (v, 2) : " The law's on our 
 side ; he that sows on another man's ground forfeits his 
 harvest." Hodge is a foreman shoemaker. Was Dekker 
 an attorney's clerk, or was Hodge talking in character 
 and sajdng what any shoemaker might ? Or was it a 
 lawyer who penned in Hejnvood's English Traveller 
 (iv, i) the lines : 
 
 Was not the money 
 Due to the usurer, took upon good ground 
 That proved well built upon ? We are no fools 
 That knew not what we did ? 
 
 Or is Chapman to be credited with a legal training because 
 he cites the legal maxim, Aedificium cedit solo in May- 
 Day (iii, 3) ? According to Mr. Rushton, this ^ is the 
 legal maxun imderlying the words of Ford, and not the 
 formula, Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad ccelum,^ cited 
 by CampbeU. 
 
 2. In Act IV of the same play, says Campbell, " Shake- 
 speare's head was so full of the recondite terms of the law 
 
 1 More strictly, Aedificatum solo solo cedit. 
 
 = Shakespeare's Legal Maxims, 1907, pp. 24-25. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 41 
 
 that he makes a lady . . . pour them out in a confidential 
 tite-d-tete conversation with another lady. ..." The 
 passages thus characterised are : 
 
 May we, with the warrant of womanhood and the witness of 
 a good conscience pursue him ? ... If the devil have him 
 not in fee simple, with fine and recovery, he will never, &c. 
 
 On Lord Campbell's principles, then, what inference 
 shall we draw from this piece of dialogue between wooer 
 and lady in one of Greene's stories ? — 
 
 Yet Madame (quoth he) when the debt is confest there re- 
 maineth some hope of recovery. . . . The debt being due, he 
 shall by constraint of law and his own confession (maugre his 
 face) be forced to make restitution. 
 
 Truth, Garydonius (quoth she), if he commence his action in 
 a right case, and the plea he puts in prove not imperfect. But yet 
 take this by the way, it is hard for that plaintiff to recover his 
 costs where the defendant, being judge, sets down the sentence. 
 The Card of Fancy, 1587 : Works, ed. Grosart, iv, 108. 
 
 The " debt " in question is one of unrequited love. 
 Shall we then pronounce that Greene wrote as he did 
 because " his head was full of the recondite terms of the 
 law " ? 
 
 And what, again, shall we say of the passage in Dekker's 
 Honest Whore (Pt. I, iv, i) in which Hippohto points 
 to the portrait of Infelice as 
 
 The copy of that obligation 
 
 Where my soul's bound in heavy penalties ; 
 
 and Bellafront replies : 
 
 She's dezid, you told me : she'll let fall her suit. 
 Must Dekker too be a lawyer ? The reader has already 
 begun, perhaps, to realise that lawyership is out of the 
 question. Greene was no lawyer. He wrote legalisms 
 as he wrote Euphuism, because it was a fashion of the 
 time ; and he did it, as we shall see later, to a far greater 
 extent, in the way of elaboration, than Shakespeare ever 
 did. Dekker and the other dramatists in general did the 
 same thing as Shakespeare. 
 
42 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Lord Campbell is here imputing lawyership on the score 
 of terms far less technical than many which occur in a 
 multitude of non-Shakespearean plays of the period. 
 When such expressions as " warrant " and " witness " 
 and " fee simple " are seriously asserted to come from a 
 head " full of recondite terms," it seems necessary to 
 explain that " warrant " was long before Shakespeare's 
 day a term in constant non-legal use (as in the colloquial 
 phrase, " I'll warrant you ") ; that the word occurs 
 many hundreds of times, alike in the literal and in the 
 metaphorical sense, in non-Shakespearean plays ; and 
 that " witness " was in the same case, being habitually 
 used in theological speech and in the common phrase 
 " God is my witness," to say nothing of plays. If the 
 use of such terms is proof of legal knowledge on the play- 
 wright's part, then such knowledge is clearly possessed 
 by Webster, who in Appius and Virginia has : 
 
 Show'd him his hand a witness 'gainst himself, (iii, i .) 
 
 By what command ? 
 By warrant of these men. {ib.) 
 
 By warrant of our favour, (iii, 2.) 
 
 Clown. . . . Though she have borrow 'd no money, yet she 
 is enter'd into bonds ; and though you may think her a woman 
 not sufficient, yet 'tis very like her bond will be taken. 
 
 First Servant. . . . What witness have they ? 
 
 Clown. Witness these fountains. . . . The Lord Appius hath 
 conmiitted her to ward. His warrant is out for her. (iv, i.) 
 Here's witness; most sufficient witness, (iv, 2.) 
 
 So we must infer a legal training on the playwright's 
 part when, in Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday (iv, 4), 
 Rose says to her lover : 
 
 Rose is thine own. To witness I speak truth. 
 Where thou appoint'st the place I'll meet with thee ; 
 
 as also when her father uses the same phrase in the next 
 scene ; again in Heywood's Woman Killed with Kind- 
 ness (iv, 3) when Mistress Frankford says to her lover, 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 43 
 
 " You plead custom " ; again in The Witch of Edmon- 
 ton (by Dekker, Rowley, and Ford) when Winnifred (i, 2) 
 speaks of her lover's promise 
 
 That never any change of love should cancel 
 The bonds in which we are to either bound 
 Of lasting truth ; 
 
 and yet again when Massinger, in The Fatal Dowry, 
 makes Beaumelle (iii, i) speak of " sufficient warrant " 
 in love-making, and Romont {ib.) deliver the line " Will 
 warrant and give privilege to his coimsels " ; to say 
 nothing of a judge's " You had not warrant for it " (v; 
 end). In the same play, as it happens, Romont says 
 " Bear witness " (iii, near end) ; Beaumelle says " To 
 witness my repentance " (iv, 3) ; and Charalois, " I ask 
 him for a witness " (iv, 2). AU three are non-legal cha- 
 racters, one a woman. Again in A New Way to Pay 
 Old Debts (iv, 2) we have Margaret's lines : 
 
 My vows, in that high office register'd, 
 Are faithful witnesses. 
 
 So, on Lord Campbell's principle, Massinger must have 
 been giving reckless rein to his legal knowledge. 
 
 Ben Jonson is similarly certificated, for in Every 
 Man in His Humour (i, i) we have : 
 
 You are his elder brother, and that title 
 Both gives and warrants your authority. 
 
 And though Justice Clement there talks of warrants by 
 professional right, the lay folk in the play say " I warrant 
 you " without scruple ; while Bobadill pleads that he had 
 a " warrant of the peace served " on him ; and Matthew 
 intimates that " we determine to make our amends by 
 law," and asks " the favour to procure a warrant." 
 " Warrants," in fact, swarm through the play. Which 
 clearly proves that Jonson must have been an attorney's 
 derk ! And between " warrant " and " witness " every 
 other Elizabethan dramatist would be in the same list. 
 As to the " fee simple " passage, we have first to put 
 
44 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the queries : (i) Was Shakespeare, or was he not, aiming 
 at a realistic effect in the play before us ? (2) Is it not 
 one of the most realistic of all he has written ? (3) Would 
 he then be likely to put in the mouth of one of his " merry 
 wives " language which to his audience would seem utteriy 
 out of character, and fit only for an attorney ? To answer 
 in the afi&rmative is at once to accuse the playwright of 
 utterly bad art, and to ignore the testimony of the great 
 mass of Elizabethan literature, sununed up in Mr. Hubert 
 Hall's generalization that " every man in these days was 
 up to a certain point his own lawyer ; that is, he was 
 well versed in all the technical forms and procedtire." * 
 But let us waive authority, here as elsewhere, and note 
 decisive data. Out of a score of parallels to such phrases 
 as "fee simple " and " fine and recovery " in other 
 dramatists and writers, it may here sufiice to note (i) in 
 Lilly's Mother Bombie (i, 2) : 
 
 A good evidence to prove the fee simple of your daughter's 
 foUy; 
 
 (2) in the old dialogue or quasi-interlude, Roye's Rede 
 Me and be not Wrothe (1528), one speaker's description 
 of the friars as 
 
 Fre coppy holders of hell 
 And fe fermers of purgatory, 
 
 Whittingham's rep. p. 72 ; 
 
 and (3) Thomas Nashe's second prefatory epistle to his 
 Strange News of the Intercepting Certain Letters 
 (1592), where Gabriel Harvey is told that he is " here 
 indited for an encroacher upon the fee simple of the 
 Latin." Are we to pronounce all three writers lawyers ? 
 
 3, In Measure for Measure (i, 2) when Mrs. Overdone 
 laments that places such as hers are to be put down; 
 Pompey says : " Fear not you, good coimsellors lack no 
 cUents." 2 Whereupon Lord Chancellor Campbell writes : 
 
 1 Society in the" Elizabethan Age, by Hubert Hall, of H.M. 
 Public Record Ofl&ce, 2nd ed. 1887, p. 141. 
 
 * It may be worth noting that the word " client " occurs only 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 45 
 
 " This comparison is not very flattering to the bar, but 
 it seems to show a familiarity with both the professions 
 alluded to." Upon these principles, what would his 
 lordship not have made of the remark of Justiniano in 
 Westward Ho (ii, i) : " Like comitry attorneys, we 
 are to shuffle up many matters in a forenoon " ? Dekker 
 and Webster, surely, must have been country attorneys ! 
 And what depths of legal experience must he not have 
 divined behind the suggestion of Webster and Rowley, 
 in A Cure for a Cuckold (iv, 3), that " long vacations 
 may make lawyers hungry " ! Or behind Jonson's 
 lines: 
 
 Or if thou hadst rather to the Strand down to fall, 
 'Gainst the lawyers dabbled from Westminster hall. 
 And mark how they cling with their clients together. 
 Like ivy to oak, so velvet to leather. 
 
 The Devil is an Ass, i, i. 
 
 Or in Dekker's passage about 
 
 the shaving of poor clients, especially by the attorneys' clerks 
 of your courts, and that's done by writing their bills of costs 
 upon cheverel. 
 
 Seven Deadly Sins of London, ed. Arber, c. 6, p. 40. 
 
 Or in the page on lawyers in Stubbes' Anatomie of 
 Abuses.* But we waste illustration over a contention 
 which belongs to the plane of farce. 
 
 The only other items offered from Measure for 
 Measure are (i) Elbow's downism, "I'll have mine 
 action of battery on thee " (ii, i) ; (2) the ironical reply 
 of Escalus suggesting an action for slander for a box on 
 the ear; and (3) Escalus' phrases : " my brother Angelo," 
 "my brother," "my brother justice" (iii, 2). This; 
 says the Lord Chancellor, " is so like the manner in which 
 one English judge designates and talks of another that 
 it countefiances the supposition that Shakespeare may 
 often, as an attorney's clerk, have been in the presence 
 
 thrice in all Shakespeare's plays, an odd fact if he were so obsessed 
 by lawyer-reminiscences as the legalists allege. 
 1 <:k>Ilier's Rep. p. 116. 
 
46 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of English judges " — as ten thousand laymen had been. 
 After this, there is an air of great self-restraint about the 
 suggestion that there is a " tinge " of legal terminology 
 in Isabella's speech to Angelo on the theme that 
 All the souls that were, were forfeit once. 
 
 4. " Fine and recovery " occurs again in the Comedy 
 OF Errors (ii, 2) ; and this time we are told that the 
 puns extracted from the terms " show the author to be 
 very familiar with some of the most abstruse proceedings 
 in English jurisprudence." The same deep knowledge 
 is doubtless to be credited to Nashe, who writes of " suing 
 the least action of recovery " and " a writ of Ejectione 
 firma." ^ And as " fine and recovery " is not ostensibly 
 a more abstruse conception than " livery and seisin," 
 which is mentioned by both Jonson and Webster, we are 
 once more led to extend to them the diploma of attorney- 
 ship so liberally bestowed on Shakespeare. " Fine," as 
 it happens, is a common figure in the drama of Shake- 
 speare's day. Bellafront in Dekker's Honest Whore 
 (Part II, iv, i) speaks of 
 
 an easy fine, 
 For which, me thought, I leased away my soul. 
 
 From Mall, in Porter's Two Angry Women of Abington 
 (iii, 2), we have : 
 
 Francis, my love's lease I do let to thee 
 
 Date of my life and time : what say'st thou to me ? 
 
 The ent'ring, fine, or income thou must pay. 
 
 There is nothing more technical in the Comedy of Errors. 
 
 5. In the last-named play (iv, 2) we have the line : 
 One that before the judgment carries poor souls to hell, 
 
 and the phrase, " 'rested on the case," upon which the 
 Lord Chancellor declares that " there we have a most 
 circumstantial and graphic account of an English arrest 
 on mesne process" ("before the judgment") " in an 
 action on the case." It seems necessary to explain that 
 * The Praise of the Red Herring, Works, iii, 157. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 47 
 
 Dromio's " before the judgment " has reference to the 
 theological " last day " ; and to suggest that the whole 
 effect of the latter part of the passage quoted turns upon 
 the naturalness of a serving-man's fumbling with two 
 legal tags, as serving-men and others constantly do 
 throughout the bulk of Elizabethan drama. What would 
 Lord Campbell have made, once more, of Mistress Honey- 
 suckle's speech in Westward Ho (ii, i) : 
 
 You have few citizens speak well of their wives behind their 
 backs ; but to their faces they'll cog worse and be more suppliant 
 than clients that sue in forma paper. 
 
 Dyce, who could not have dreamt of what a Lord Chief 
 Justice could attain to by the Ught of a comprehensive 
 ignorance of Elizabethan drama outside Shakespeare, 
 has upon this the note : " Our early dramatists have a 
 pleasure in making their characters miscall terms of law," 
 citing a similar instance from Rowley's When You See 
 Me You Know Me. Perhaps we may leave the point 
 at that. 
 
 6. Rosalind's gibe in As You Like It (i, 2) : " Be it 
 known imto all men by these presents," is cited for the 
 purpose of suggesting that it was " introduced in order 
 to show contempt for Nashe's criticism. ' ' To this theorem 
 is devoted a page of space. If we reply that Nashe's 
 criticism, as aforesaid, applies to Kyd, Lord Campbell's 
 successors will probably rejoin that on that view the 
 phrase under notice must be held to stand for the drsuna- 
 tist's tendency to talk law under any circumstances. It 
 may therefore be worth while to ask whether the same 
 theory is required to explain the passage in Cynthia's 
 Revels in which Jonson makes Amorphus read the 
 " bill " beginning, " Be it known to all that profess court- 
 ship, by these presents " : and again, whether it is further 
 required to explain the citation of 
 
 Sciant praesentes etfuiuri 
 Witeth and Witnesseth 
 That wonieth upon this erthe. 
 
48 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 in The Vision of Piers Plowman (ed, Wright, 1030-32) ; 
 or the phrase Noverint universi in Chapman's May-Day 
 (ii, I) ? 
 
 7. It is considerately admitted that the words " testa- 
 ment " and " banixupt," in Jaques' speech (ii, i), 
 " might be used by any man of observation " ; but it 
 is claimed that in Act iii, i, " a deep technical knowledge 
 of law is displayed." The sole proof is the single phrase : 
 
 Make an extent ^ upon his house and lands. 
 
 To this demonstration is added the assurance that in 
 Henry VIII (III, ii, 340) " we have an equally accurate 
 statement of the omnivorous nature of a writ of PrcBmu- 
 nire." As usual, there is nothing in the matter special to 
 Shakespeare, who, as it happens, uses the word Pnsmtt- 
 nire only once in all his plays. " Extent " occurs in the 
 pre-Shakespearean play Selimus, ascribed to Greene 
 (Sc. 1, 1. 21) : 
 
 Though on all the world we make extent ; 
 
 and in Greene's tract The Defence of Coney-Catching : 
 
 They have you in suit, and I doubt not will ere long have some 
 extent against your lands.* 
 
 Greene, as we shall see, has many legal phrases not found 
 in Shakespeare, and though no lawyer, uses them in a 
 more lawyerlike fashion. 
 
 The meaning of a Prcemunire, again, was presumably 
 quite well known to PhiUp Stubbes, who in his Anatomie 
 OF Abuses warns all men that he who supports stage- 
 plays " must needs incur the damage of premunire " ;' 
 as it was to Foxe the martyrologist,* and to Thomas 
 Nashe, who in Pierce Pennilesse's Supplication to 
 
 1 This word occurs in Tttus Aftdronicus, where Lord Campbell 
 had not noticed it. 
 
 ' Greene's Works, ed. Grosart, xi, 56. 
 
 » i.e. of damnation. Anatomie of Abuses, 1583, Collier's Rep. 
 p. 140. 
 
 4 Acts and Monuments, Cattley's ed. 1841, i. 25. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 49 
 
 THE DiVELL 1 suggests to that potentate that he might 
 " make extent upon the soxils of a number of tmcharitable 
 cormorants" who have "incurred the danger of a 
 Pramunire with meddUng with matters that properly 
 concern your own person." Again, in Christ's Teares 
 OVER Jerusalem « there is the phrase, " O pride, of all 
 heaven-relapsing prsemunires the most fearful"; and 
 yet again in The Unfortunate Traveller : 
 
 lamenting my Jewish Praemunire that body and goods I 
 should light into the hands of such a cursed generation.* 
 
 In the same tale we again have "to extend upon," 
 meaning " to make extent upon " ; and in Massinger's 
 plaj^ the phrase occurs repeatedly : 
 
 There lives a foolish creature 
 Called an under-shetifE, who, being well paid, will serve 
 An extent on lords or lowns' lands. 
 
 The City Madam, v, 2. 
 When 
 This manor is extended to my use : 
 You'll speak in a humbler key. 
 A New Way to Pay Old Debts, v, near middle. 
 
 The meaning of " extent " and the nature of a writ of 
 
 Praemunire were in fact matters of common knowledge 
 
 in Elizabethan days, and had been so long before her 
 
 reign. In the Beggar's Petition against Popery, 
 
 presented to Henry VIII in 1538, it is remarked that 
 
 " Had not Richard Himne commenced an action of 
 
 Pnemunire against a priest, he had yet been alive, and 
 
 no heretick at all, but an honest man." * The procedure 
 
 of " extent " was at least equally familiar, and both 
 
 terms were certainly understood by the writers who so 
 
 often allude to them. If Lord Campbell had fomid in 
 
 Shakespeare the lines : 
 
 If I were a justice, besides the trouble, 
 I might, or out of wilfulness or error, 
 
 1 Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 165. 
 
 2 Ed. cited, ii, 80. ' Ed. cited, ii, 305. 
 « Rep. in Harl. Misc. ed. 1808, i, 222, also p. 224. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Run myself finely into a praemunire. 
 And so become a prey to the informer — 
 
 spoken by Sir GUes Overreach in Massinger's A New Way 
 TO Pay Old Debts (ii, i), or the phrase " That's a shrewd 
 premunire," in the same playwright's The Old Law 
 (v, near end) ; or Jonson's lines 
 
 Lest what I have done to them, and against law. 
 Be a praemunire, 
 
 {The Staple of News, v, 2, end); 
 
 he would not have hesitated to pronounce that they 
 showed a practical knowledge of the operation of the kind 
 of writ in question. Yet no biographer has ever hinted 
 that either Massinger or Jonson was a lawyer. 
 
 8. The phrase of Rosalind in As You Like It (iii, 2) 
 about lawyers " sleeping between term and tenn " is 
 formally produced as showing that Shakespeare " was 
 well acquainted with lawyers themselves and the vicissitudes 
 of their lives " ! With what zest, then, would his lordship 
 have cited, if he could, the saying of Sanitonella in 
 Webster's The Devil's Law Case, that " no proctor 
 in the term-time be tolerated to go to the tavern above 
 six times i' the forenoon ! " Must not Webster have been 
 a lawyer ? 
 
 9. Concerning Rosalind's jest in As You Like It (iv, i), 
 " die by attorney," we learn that Shakespeare gives us 
 the true legal meaning of the word ' attorney,' viz. 
 representative or deputy." It will perhaps be equally 
 edifjdng to mention that Ben Jonson exhibits the same 
 recondite learning in The Alchemist (ii, i) : 
 
 Face. You'll meet the captain's worship ? 
 Surly. Sir, I will — ^But by attorney ; 
 
 and again in Cynthia's Revels (v, 3, Palinode), in the 
 phrase " making love by attorney." And Webster and 
 Dekker, once more, jointly lay themselves open to sus- 
 picion of deep legal knowledge when they make Mistress 
 Tenterhook say in Westward Ho (iii, i) : 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 51 
 
 When they owe money in the city once, they deal with their 
 lawyers by attorney, follow the court, though the court do them 
 not the grace to allow them their diet. 
 
 10. Finally, it is explained that Shakespeare again 
 evinces his love for legal phraseology and imagery " by 
 making Rosalind say, ' Well, Time is the old Justice that 
 examines all such offenders, and let Time try.' " By the 
 same test, it must have been a writer steeped in legal 
 experience who made Hammon in The Shoemaker's 
 Holiday (iv, i) woo Jane with the demand : 
 
 Say judge, what is they sentence, life or death ? 
 Mercy or cruelty lies in thy breath. 
 
 So that Dekker mtist have been a lawyer, unless, indeed, 
 he has unconsciously revealed his avocation in the phrase, 
 " that lean tawny-faced tobacconist Death, that tinns 
 all into smoke " (Old Fortunatus ? i, i). If he were 
 not a tobacconist, he must needs have been a lawyer, 
 since he makes the Duke in The Honest Whore (Part I, 
 i, i) teU Hippolito : 
 
 For why. Death's hand hath sued a strict divorce 
 'Twixt her and thee. 
 
 Apparently the Lord Chief Justice would see a passion 
 for legal phraseology in a modem allusion to " the bar 
 of public opinion," to say nothing of the saw, " Time 
 tries all," or " Time and truth try all," as Porter has it 
 in The Two Angry Women of Abington (iv, 3). In 
 point of fact the learned judge sees legal preoccupation in 
 
 11. Troilus and Cressida, (iv, 5) : 
 
 That old common arbitrator. Time. 
 
 By parity of reasoning, Nashe was a lawyer, inasmuch as 
 he wrote " Let Antiquity be Arbiter " ; * and again : 
 " Judge the world, judge the highest comts of appeal 
 from the miscarried world's judgment, Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, wherein I have trespassed . . . " ; * and yet again 
 
 1 Anatomie of Absurdity : Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 16. 
 
 2 Four Letters Confuted, vol. cited, p. 302. 
 
52 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 when he tells his antagonist, " All is ink cast away : : you 
 recover no costs and no charges." By the same reason- 
 ing, too, it was a lawyer who described the sun as " in- 
 different arbiter between the night and the day " in the 
 first sentence of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia ; and another 
 who spoke of " Natmre's Sergeant (that is Order) " in 
 the Faerie Queene (B. VII, c. vii, 4). And what shall 
 we say of the Reverend Philip Stubbes, who writes of 
 " the high justice-of-the-peace, Christ Jesus " ?^ 
 
 12. Dealing with Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado 
 About Nothing, the Lord Chancellor concludes that 
 " the dramatist seems himself to have been well ac- 
 quainted with the terms and distinctions of our criminal 
 code, or he could not have rendered the blunders of the 
 parish officers so absurd and laughable" — absmrd and 
 laughable, that is, to an audience who in the terms of the 
 argument could not appreciate the absurdity, being them- 
 selves devoid of the alleged " profound legal knowledge " 
 of the dramatist. Thus can a judge reason. His further 
 remark that in the line 
 
 Keep your fellows' counsel and your own, 
 
 " Dogberry uses the very words of the oath administered 
 by the Judge's marshal to the grand jiny at the present 
 day," needs no comment. Does it require a lay mind 
 to realise that the words must then have been known to 
 myriads of laymen ? 
 
 13. On the speech of Don Adriano in Love's Labour's 
 Lost (i, i) beginning " Then for the place where," and 
 ending " a man of good repute, carriage, bearing and 
 estimation," we have this pronouncement : " The gifted 
 Shakespeare might perhaps have been capable, by intui- 
 tion, (!) of thus imitating the conveyancer's jargon ; but 
 no ordinary man could have hit it off so exactly, without 
 having engrossed in an attorney's office." 
 
 When therefore Puntarvole in Ben Jonson's Every 
 » Anatomie of Abuses. 1583. CoUier's Rep. p. 171. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 53 
 
 Man out of his Humour (iv. 4) begs the notary to draw 
 the indentures, and gives directions, we know what to 
 think. There are scores of lines such as these : 
 
 That, after the receipt of his money, he shall neither in his 
 own person nor any other, either by direct or indirect means, 
 as magic, witchcraft, or other exotic arts, attempt, practise or 
 complot ansrthing to the prejudice of me, my dog or my cat ; 
 neither shall I use the help of any such sorceries or enchantments, 
 as unctions to make our skins impenetrable, or travel invisible 
 by virtue of a powder, or a ring, or to hang any three-forked 
 chains about my dog's neck, secretly conveyed into his collar ; 
 but that all be performed sincerely, without fraud or imposture. 
 
 Clearly, Ben must have " engrossed in an attorney's 
 office," unless, indeed. Bacon wrote Ben's plays as well 
 as Shakespeare's, as not a few Baconians aver. 
 
 14. This, be it observed, is the sole example cited 
 from that which passes for Shakespeare's earliest comedy; 
 in which, if ever, the proclivity of the " attorney's clerk " 
 to legal phraseology on his own accoimt should have 
 asserted itself. And from a comedy which is perhaps as 
 early, and in any case is among the three or four earliest. 
 Lord Campbell is again able to cite only one instance of 
 legal phraseology : 
 
 According to our law 
 Immediately provided in that case. 
 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, i, i. 
 
 On this Steevens had long ago observed, citing the 
 attomey-derk's tradition, that " the line before us has 
 an undoubted smack of legal cormnonplace. Poetry 
 disclaims it." That is to say, the young poet was so 
 much of an attorney's clerk as to obtrude his office 
 reminiscences where poetry would have been more 
 appropriate. As it happens, the whole speech of Egeus 
 in which the line occurs is prosaic ; and once more the 
 question arises whether the dramatist is or is not making 
 one of his characters speak out of character. Lord 
 Campbell, never asking the question, naively confesses that 
 " the prosaic formula runs : ' In such case made and 
 
54 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 provided.' " Then the attorney's clerk is not true to his 
 ofl&ce reminiscences. But his lordship explains that the 
 precise formula " would not have stood in the verse " — as 
 if Shakespeare could not have made one line end with 
 " in such case ' ' and the next begin, " Made and provided " ! 
 And Mr. Grant White, carried away by Lord Campbell's 
 simple prosodical argument, writes of Egeus' speech that 
 " He pleads the statute ; and the words run off his tongue 
 in heroic verse as if he were reading them from a paper." ^ 
 The process of self-confusion has here become curiously 
 interesting. Lord Campbell admits the legal phrase to 
 be laxly used, but pleads the tranmiels of the verse : 
 Mr. White argues that the words nm " in heroic verse, 
 as if he were reading them from a paper" — when the 
 whole speech of Egeus is in the same sort of verse, and 
 any line might equally be said to run as if read from a 
 paper. The simple fact is that the dramatist has put 
 in the mouth of a lay citizen one of those more or less 
 loosely used legal tags which are to be foimd in almost 
 every play of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. In an 
 argument which undertakes to prove " profoimd legal 
 knowledge," this rag of evidence is thus manipulated 
 with a solenmity that transcends burlesque. If Shake- 
 speare's legal knowledge is to be thus proved, what 
 diploma can be refused to the authors of such lines as 
 these : 
 
 How ! strike a justice of peace ! 'tis petty treason 
 Edwardi quinto : but that you are my friend, 
 I would commit you without baU or mainprize. 
 
 Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, iii, 2. 
 Nor bond, nor bill, nor bare acknowledgment. 
 
 Id. V, i. 
 We may put off a commission : you shall find it 
 Henrici decimo quarto. id, i, 3. 
 
 Well, if you'll save me harmless, and put me under covert barn 
 ( = baron), I am content to please you. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part I, iii, 2. 
 1 Memoir of Shakespeare in 1865 ed. of Works, i, p. xlvi. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 55 
 
 Citizens' sons cind heirs are free of the house by their father's copy. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, v, 2. 
 Return your habeas corpus : here's a certiorari for your precedendo, 
 
 Peele, Edward I, ed. Dyce, p. 382 
 
 They'll make a solemn deed of gift of themselves, you shall see. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, i, i. 
 
 15. In The Merchant of Venice (i. 3 ; ii. 8), we are 
 assured, " Antonio's bond to Shylock is prepared and 
 talked about according to all the forms observed in an 
 English attorney's ofl&ce. The distinction between a 
 ' single bill ' and a ' bond with a condition ' is clearly 
 referred to ; and punctual payment is expressed in the 
 technical phrase, * Let good Antonio keep his day.' " By 
 which token Dekker and Webster were probably attorneys' 
 clerks, because they make Monopoly in Westward Ho 
 (i, 2), when told that he has forfeited his bond, reply 
 " I'll pay him fore's day " ; and again, in Dekker's 
 The Honest Whore (i. 2) Fustigo protests : "By this 
 hand, I'll discharge at my day." 
 
 Heywood's legal experience must be even greater, 
 for he is thus technical at least four times — thrice in one 
 play ; 
 
 Like debtors, such as would not break their day. 
 
 The English Traveller, iii, i . 
 Broke our day. lb. iii, 2. 
 
 Break his day. lb. 
 
 I'll hold my day. 
 
 A Woman Killed with Kindness, i, i. 
 
 Yet again, Dekker in his tract The Seven Deadly 
 Sins of London (1606), says of his first type-character, 
 " the politic bankrupt," that " he will be sure to keep 
 his days of payment more truly than lawyers keep their 
 terms " ; and Jonson in The Alchemist (iii, 2) has : 
 " take the start of bonds broke but one day." And, yet 
 again, Nashe in Pierce Penilesse says of Gabriel Harvey's 
 astrological brother that " his astronomy broke his day 
 with his creditors." {Works, i, 196-97.) 
 
56 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Sooth to say, the phrase had been current among the 
 laity in the time of Langland, who (Piers Plowman, 
 2961 sq.) makes Coveteise tell how he seized the manor 
 of a borrower "if he his day breke." And it would 
 seem to have been no less familiar in the time of Caxton, 
 since in the Morte Darthur we read " How that Sir 
 Palomides kept his day for to have foughten " (Title of 
 c. 88 of B. x). These trade secrets will out, somehow ! 
 Sir John Fortescue avows, about 1475, that the King's 
 creditors " defame his highness off mysgovemance, and 
 defaute of kepynge of days " (Governance of England; 
 ch. v). Even the preachers knew about it. Roger 
 Hutchinson in a sermon (c. 1550) mentions that "the 
 defendant's office is, when he is summoned or cited, to 
 appear at his day " (Second Sermon Of Oppression, &c.; 
 Parker Soc. ed. of Works, p. 332) . 
 
 In The Merchant of Venice however, " it appears 
 further," by iii, 2, " that Antonio has been arrested on 
 mesne process." The action for a pound of flesh, then, is 
 dramatised by an English attorney's clerk (if not by 
 Bacon) in the light of his professional knowledge ; and 
 we are further told : " Antonio is made to confess that 
 Shylock is entitled to the pound of flesh according to the 
 plain meaning of the bond and condition, and the rigid 
 strictness of the common law of England : 
 
 Saiarino. I am sure the Duke 
 Will never grant this forfeiture to hold. 
 
 Antonio. The Duke cannot deny the course of law. 
 
 " All this has a strong odour of Westminster Hall." 
 Since the Duke, as represented by Portia, after putting 
 other " English " arguments does disallow the forfeiture 
 as a criminal device, two contradictory views are thus 
 alike homologated by the Lord Chief Justice as " strict 
 English law." And it would appear to follow that the 
 Italian noveUsts from whom the tale is derived had the 
 same " profound legal training " as shines forth in the 
 drama. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 57 
 
 The trial, further, is " duly conducted according to 
 the strict forms of legal procedure." That is to say, it 
 was in the strict fashion of Westminster Hall (i) to let the 
 Duke of Venice (who later announces that (2) he is going 
 to " dismiss the court " failing the arrival of Bellarioof 
 Padua, " a learned doctor " whom he has " sent for to 
 determine this "), begin (3) to abuse the plaintifE to the 
 defendant before the case has been stated on either side. 
 Portia is described (4) as " the Podesta or judge called in 
 to act under the authority of the Doge " (which she is 
 not), so that Bellario would on that theory take the same 
 status. (5) Nevertheless the proceedings begin as afore- 
 said in Bellario's absence. The Podesta theory, by the 
 way, is illuminated by the fact that at the close of the 
 proceedings the Duke (6) exhorts Antonio to reward 
 Portia, i.e. the judge. 
 
 The business having been started by the Duke as 
 aforesaid, (7) Shylock deUvers in reply a psychological 
 essay, and (8) Bassanio intervenes with invective in 
 the capacity of a friend of the defendant, who (g) in 
 turn conveys his opinion of the plaintiff's character. After 
 (10) this Mghly professional discussion has been further 
 continued, (11) Nerissa, " dressed as a lawyer's clerk," 
 in strict Westminster Hall style presents a letter to the 
 Duke ; and (12) Bassanio, Shylock and Gratiano exchange 
 amenities. (13) The letter is then read out by the Duke; 
 with scrupulous attention to legal forms. It announces 
 
 (14) that Bellario, the " PodestJl," being ill, appoints 
 a " yoimg doctor " from Rome as his substitute; the 
 Duke of Venice concurring as in duty bound; though 
 
 (15) he thoughtf tilly inquires whether the substitute knows 
 anjkhing about the case. (16) He is assiired that the 
 substitute knows all about it — before having heard any- 
 thing from the parties. (17) Portia, dressed as " a 
 doctor of laws," then discusses moral issues with Shylock 
 in a fashion which illustrates her profound acquaintance 
 with Westminster Hall usage, the plaintiff (18) alter- 
 
58 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 nately retorting and applauding, in Westminster Hall 
 fashion. Portia's line is (19) to urge the plaintiff to 
 accept thrice his debt, knowing all the while that it is 
 because of his refusal to do so that the case is in court. 
 On his refusal (20) she admits that he may " lawfuUy " 
 have his pound of flesh, and (21) advises Antonio to 
 prepare for the operation there and then, at the hands of 
 the plaintiff, as was the wont at Westminster Hall. 
 Incidentally {22) she intervenes in the conversation 
 between Bassanio and Antonio with a jest — ^here, cer- 
 tainly, conforming to English legal usage— and Nerissa 
 follows suit, ostensibly as clerk to the court ; whereupon 
 the plaintiff (23) rebukes the court for wasting time. 
 
 (24) The court then develops the interesting legal theory 
 that flesh does not, according to the vulgar notion, contain 
 or include blood, and warns the plaintiff accordingly. 
 
 (25) In reply to him, the court courageously alleges that 
 an Act to that effect is in existence ; proceeding further 
 
 (26) to aver that the plaintiff must exact the whole 
 penalty due under his bond, and will himself incur the 
 capital penalty if he takes more or less. (27) Having 
 thus already, in effect, non-suited the plaintiff, the court 
 unexpectedly does it afresh, intimating that he has all 
 along lain under the capital penalty, inasmuch as the 
 laws of Venice — of which the Venetian authorities and 
 public appear to have no knowledge — define his entire 
 proceedings as homicidal ; and further (28) that the 
 same occult code awards half of his property to the 
 defendant, and the other half to " the privy coffer of 
 the State," whose interests have been so indifferently 
 represented by the Duke. 
 
 The plaintiff is now advised to throw himself on the 
 mercy of the Crown, which he contumaciously fails to 
 do ; but the Crown, now getting a word in, spontaneously 
 remits the death penalty, and (having apparently some 
 doubts as to the revelation just made concerning its fiscal 
 privileges) suggests a substantial remission of the pecuniary 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 59 
 
 penalty so far as the State is concerned. (29) The 
 defendant, however, intervenes with a somewhat obscure 
 proposal that, he retaining his half of the plaintiff's 
 property, the plaintiff shall " let me have the other half 
 in use, to render it upon his death " to plaintiff's son- 
 in-law ; adding, " Two things provided more," to wit, 
 {a) that "for this favour" plaintiff shall turn Christian, 
 and (6) " record a deed of gift, here in the court, of all he 
 dies possessed," to his son-in-law and daughter. Defen- 
 dant has justifiably taken for granted the assent of the 
 court and Crown, which latter (30) accommodatingly 
 intimates that plaintiff's pardon will be " recanted " if 
 he does not do as he is told. (31) With the same business- 
 like promptitude the plaintiff assents, and the court 
 directs the clerk to " draw up a deed of gift." (32) The 
 plaintiff is nevertheless allowed to withdraw, directing 
 that the deed be " sent after him " ; whereupon the 
 Crown invites the court to dinner; adding, when the 
 learned judge pleads lack of time, its celebrated 
 suggestion to the defendant, to see that the judge 
 is well paid. The courthouse then becomes the scene 
 of domestic amenities, according to Westminster Hall 
 practice. 
 
 And this " trial," we are told by a Lord Chief Justice, 
 later Lord Chancellor, " is dxily conducted according to 
 the strict forms of legal procedure," whence arises a 
 highly strengthened presumption that the dramatist was 
 a practised attorney's clerk. His lordship brilUantly 
 concludes with the reflection that Gratiano's speech : 
 
 In christening thou shalt have two godfathers. 
 Had I been judge, thou shonldst have hjid ten more. 
 To bring thee to the gallows, not the font, 
 
 is " an ebvillition which might be expected from an 
 English lawyer." 
 
 I should expect further ebullitions from any lawyer 
 who should chance to peruse Lord Campbell's pages. 
 It is not too much to say that, apart from downright 
 
6o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Baconism, the theorem before us is the worst nonsense 
 that has ever been penned in Shakespearean discussion, 
 which is sajTing a good deal. I leave it to the lawyers 
 to decide whether or not his lordship was writing with 
 his tongue in his cheek ; and I invite Mr. Greenwood to 
 say on what critical principles he makes use of such a 
 critic's declaration that " to Shakespeare's law, lavishly 
 as he expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill 
 of exceptions, nor writ of error." " There is nothing so 
 dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of 
 the craft, to tamper with our freemasonry." It would 
 appear that there are still more dangerous undertakings 
 open to lawyers. 
 
 It may be worth noting in this connection that, as a 
 legal friend of mine has put it, whosoever wrote the 
 trial scene in The Merchakt of Venice, it cannot have 
 been Bacon, the equity lawyer. Mr. Devecmon and other 
 lawyers have been so struck by the disregard of equity 
 in Portia's nilings as to be unable to refrain from severe 
 censure of Shakespeare's conception of justice. They 
 in turn, in their revolt against the entire lack of true 
 legal feeling in the play, have perhaps grown blind, by 
 reaction, to the moral enormity of Shylock's position. 
 An equity lawyer, I suppose, wotild have set aside alike 
 Portia's " blood " argument and Shylock's " bond " argu- 
 ment, and given simple decree for payment of the debt. 
 We can imagine what Bacon would have thought of the 
 theorem that if A lends money on condition of being 
 allowed to cut off half a newly killed pig belonging to B, 
 he cannot be permitted to cut off less than half, and is 
 precluded from taking any blood. But whatever the 
 equity lawyer might decide on the final merits, the play- 
 wright has in view an audience who — to say nothing of 
 their primary prejudice against the Jew— were at least 
 justified in regarding Shylock as a miscreant m the matter 
 of the pound of flesh. And it is the utterly unlawyer- 
 like punishment of the miscreant for his intentions that 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 6i 
 
 finally makes the legalist theory so completely prepos- 
 terous in regard to this particular play. 
 
 As regards Shakespeare's moral outlook in the matter, 
 it may suffice to remind the reader of the existence of 
 an older play, referred to by Stephen Gosson in his 
 School of Abuse (1579). on the subject of the caskets 
 and the Jewish usurer's bond; and to suggest that 
 Shakespeare, who has done so much to humanise the 
 figure of the hated Jew in other respects, probably 
 stopped short of the vengeance meted out in the older 
 drama. 
 
 16. Portia's phrase (V, i, 298), 
 
 Charge us there upon inter'gatories, 
 
 is justly alleged to contain a " palpable allusion to English 
 legal procedure." It does; and so do the four other 
 instances of the word in the plays. And so does Ariosto's 
 
 What should move you 
 
 Put forth that harsh inter'gatory ? 
 
 in Webster's The Devil's Law Case (ii, 3). And so does 
 Gelaia's "Slight; he has me upon interrogatories," in 
 Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (iv, i). And so does 
 Andelocia's phrase in Dekker's Old Fortunatus (iv, 
 end) : " Are you created constable ? You stand so 
 much upon interrogatories." And so does Black Will's 
 " You were best swear me on the inter'gat'ries," in 
 Arben of Feversham (III, vi, 6). And so do Nashe's 
 phrases : " Let me deal with him for it by interro- 
 gatories " (First Part of Pasquil's Apologie : Works, 
 i, 115), and " Pilate's interrogatory ministered tmto him 
 was. Art thou the King of the Jews ? " {lb. p. 129.) 
 
 And so does the question, " What are you, sir, that deal 
 thus with me by interrogatories, as if I were some run- 
 away ? " in Greene's Menaphon (Arber's rep. p. 57). 
 What then ? Were these writers all lawyers ? 
 
 17. The servant's phrase, " present her at the leet, 
 because," &c.; in the Induction to The Taming of 
 
62 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 THE Shrew, is alleged to betray an " intimate knowledge 
 of the matters which may be prosecuted as offences 
 before the Court Leet, the lowest court of criminal 
 judicature in England." It shows exactly such know- 
 ledge as was, in the terms of the case, necessarily possessed 
 in every alehouse in England ; otherwise Sly is presented 
 as a tinker impossibly learned in the law. An even wider 
 range of legal knowledge of the same order, as it happens, 
 is exhibited by Justice Overdo in Ben Jonson's Bartholo- 
 mew Fair (ii, i). What is the inference there ? 
 
 i8. Because Tranio in the Taming of the Shrew (i, 2) 
 remarks that 
 
 adversaries in law 
 Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends, 
 
 the Lord Chief Justice is moved to observe that the 
 dramatist " had been accustomed to see the contending 
 counsel, when the trial is over, or suspended, on very 
 familiar and friendly terms with each other." 'Tis like ! 
 Ten thousand laymen have noted as much ; and a 
 himdred popular tales have been cmrent from time 
 immemorial which convey the fact from generation to 
 generation. Similar lore, to a layman's thinking, pre- 
 smnptively imderlay the remark put by Dekker and 
 Webster in the mouth of Mistress Justiniano in West- 
 ward Ho (i, 1), to the effect that she sleeps " as quietly 
 as a client having great business with lawyers." But if 
 that had been said in a Shakespearean play, what depth 
 of legal experience would Lord Campbell not have found 
 in it ! What would he not have made, again, of the lines : 
 
 The man of law. 
 Whose honeyed hopes the credulous clients draw. 
 As bees by tinkling basins, 
 
 in the Witch of Edmonton (iv, i), by Dekker, Ford, and 
 Rowley ; or of the phrase, " They'll hold no more than a 
 lawyer's conscience " in Dekker's Match Me in London 
 (Act i, end). If he had only read The Devil's Law 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 63 
 
 Case (v, 2), he would perhaps have been content to stake 
 his whole thesis upon one sentence of Sanitonella : 
 
 You have lawyers take their clients' fees, and their backs are 
 no sooner turned but they call them fools and laugh at them. 
 
 For Sanitonella is actually a lawyer's clerk ; and it 
 clearly follows that the dramatist must have been one ! 
 
 ig. Whereas Katherine in the same play (ii, i) says; 
 "You crow too like a craven," we are seriously assured that 
 the playwright " shows that he was acquainted with the 
 law for regulating trials by battle " between champions; 
 one of which had been fought in Tothill Fields before the 
 judges of the Gjurt of Common Pleas in the reign of 
 Elizabeth, because " all lawyers " know that " craven " 
 is " the word spoken by a champion who acknowledged 
 that he was beaten, and declared that he would fight no 
 more ; whereupon judgment was immediately given 
 against the side which he supported.and he bore the in- 
 famous name of craven for the rest of his days." " We 
 have like evidence in Hamlet (iv, 4)," adds his lordship, 
 " of Shakespeare's acquaintance with the legal meaning 
 of this word," inasmuch as Hamlet has the phrase, " some 
 craven scruple." 
 
 I invite Mr. Greenwood's critical attention to the 
 rubbish upon which he has been building his case. He 
 is, I know, the last man that would attend a' cockfight ; 
 but he will perhaps admit that cockfighters called a timid 
 cock a craven without possessing the lore of " all lawyers " 
 as to the nomenclature of trial by battle— concerning 
 which, more anon. He will also, I think, grant me that 
 Shakespeare did not write The Taming of the Shrew; 
 the "profound" legal learning of which play must 
 accordingly be credited in some other quarter. 
 
 20. Lord Campbell gives three pages to the proposition 
 that the bare plot of All's Well, as regards the legal 
 position of Bertram, is proof " that Shakespeare had an 
 accurate knowledge of the law of England respecting . . . 
 
64 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 tenure in chivalry " and " wardship of minors." The 
 warckhip of Bertram, we are told, " Shakespeare drew from 
 his own knowledge of the common law of England, which 
 was in full force in the reign of Elizabeth." That 
 is to say, the alleged knowledge must have been common 
 to the multitude, since there is not a word of technicalities 
 in the play. And after all we learn, in a foot-note, that 
 " according to Littleton it is doubtful whether Bertram 
 . . . might not have refused to marry Helena on the 
 ground that she was not of noble descent." 
 
 21. The profundity and accuracy of legal knowledge 
 exhibited in the Winter's Tale is vouched for (a) by the 
 fact that Hermione mentions, (i, 2), "a piece of English 
 law procedure which . . . could hardly be known to any 
 except lawyers, or those who had themselves actually been 
 m prison on a criminal charge — that, whether guilty or 
 innocent, the prisoner was liable to pay a fine on his 
 liberation." Lord Campbell appears to have asstmied that 
 released prisoners would keep this strange circmnstance 
 to themselves as a dark secret. Mr. Greenwood will 
 probably admit that it was likely to be known to Ben 
 Jonson (who had been twice in prison, and may have 
 revealed his occult knowledge to Shakespeare) ; to 
 Marston and Dekker, who had also been in jail ; and to 
 Greene and Nashe, to say nothing of certain thousands of 
 other Elizabethans ! Lest, however, he or his Baconian 
 friends should refuse to grant that anybody but a lawyer 
 was likely to disclose the mystic secret in a play, it may 
 be well to cite Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kind- 
 ness, where it is thoughtlessly revealed thrice over : 
 
 Prison Keeper. Dischargey our fees and you are then at 
 
 freedom. 
 Sir Charles. Here, Master Keeper, take the poor remainder 
 Of aU the wealth I have. . . . 
 
 (Act ii, 2). 
 Prison Keeper. . . . You are not left so much indebted to us 
 As for your fees : all is discharged, all paid. 
 
 (Act iv. Scene 2). 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 65 
 
 In the same scene, when Sir Charles discovers that he is 
 released by his enemy Acton, he cries, " Hale me back ! " 
 and concludes : 
 
 I am not free : I go but under bail ; 
 to which the keeper replies : 
 
 My charge is done. Sir, now I have my fees 
 As we get little, we will nothing leese [lose]. 
 
 Yet again, in Part II of his King Edward the Fourth 
 (Pearson's ed. i, 139) Heywood proclaims the usage 
 which Lord Campbell thinks could have been known only 
 to lawyers or ex-prisoners. Jane Shore, securing the 
 pardon of the prisoners for piracy, about to be hanged, 
 says to the officer : 
 
 You must discharge them, paying of their fees 
 Which, for I fear their store is very small, 
 I will defray. 
 
 And if this be not enough, we have yet another revelation 
 in Dekker's The Wonder of a Kingdom (iv, i) : 
 
 Gentile. Go and release ^im 
 Send him home presently, and pay his fees. 
 
 If Lord Campbell and Mr. Greenwood had but handled 
 this case as they would have done a legal one, and taken 
 a little trouble to discover precedents, they and their 
 readers might have been saved the construction and 
 demolition of a legal house of cards. That which Lord 
 Campbell thinks could hardly have been known to any 
 but lawyers and prisoners was known to every spectator, 
 and is Imown to every reader, of Hej^wood's best play, to 
 say nothing of ordinary means of knowledge. 
 
 22. With a supreme effort of candom:. Lord Campbell 
 admits that the indictment of Hermione (iii, 2) " is not 
 altogether according to English legal form, and might be 
 held insufficient on a writ of error." But he comforts him- 
 self with the reflection (6) that " we lawyers cannot but 
 wonder at seeing it so near perfection in charging the 
 
 £ 
 
66 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 treason, and alleging the overt act committed by her 
 contrary to the faith and allegiance of a true subject." 
 
 With what wonder, then, must the lawyers read the 
 indictment of Crispinus and Fannius in Jonson's Poet- 
 aster (v, i), where the technicalities are to Shakespeare's 
 as three to one 1 The culprits there are " jointly and 
 severally indicted and here presently to be arraigned " as 
 having acted " contrary to the peace of our liege lord, 
 Augustus Caesar, his crown and dignity," and " mutually 
 conspired and plotted at sundry times, as by several 
 means, and in simdry places, for the better accompUshing 
 yom* base and envious purpose. . . ." Mere clerkship 
 in an attorney's ofl&ce, surely, could not yield such pro- 
 fundity of legal learning ! The Poetaster, like the 
 rest of the Elizabethan drama, must be by Bacon ! 
 
 And only the same hand, siurely, could have penned the 
 " wonderful " indictment of Guildford and Lady Jane 
 in the Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, by 
 Dekker and Webster, where the culprits are " here in- 
 dicted by the names of Guilford Dudley, Lord Dudley; 
 Jane Grey, Lady Jane Grey, of capital and high treason 
 against our most sovereign lady the Queen's majesty," 
 for having " sought to procure unto yomrselves the royalty 
 of the crown of England, to the disinheriting of our now 
 sovereign lady the queen's majesty," and "manifestly 
 adorned yourselves with the state's garland imperial," 
 and so forth. And only a lawyer, clearly, could have 
 made Norfolk order that the accused shall " directly plead 
 unto the indictment." 
 
 Returning to Lord Campbell; we learn (c) that Cleo- 
 menes and Dion " are sworn to the genmneness of the 
 document they produce almost in the very words now used 
 by the Lord Chancellor when an of&cer presents at the bar 
 of the House of Lords the copy of a record of a court of 
 justice." Which completes the case for the Winter's 
 Tale and the Comedies. 
 
 23. Coming to the Histories, our jurist notes that the 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 67 
 
 English history plays contain fewer "legalisms" than 
 "might have been expected," and that there are more 
 in the foreign plays. He recalls, however, that in the 
 history plays Shakespeare was working upon f oimdations 
 already laid by other men who had no " technical know- 
 ledge " of the recondite kind we have just been consider- 
 ing. And after all, we find that in King John's speech 
 to Robert Faulconbridge, beginning : 
 
 Sirrah, your brother is legitimate, 
 
 we have the " true doctrine. Pater est quern nuptia denion- 
 strant." Unhappily, the author or authors of the older 
 play. The Troublesome Raigne of King John (whom 
 I take to be mainly Marlowe and Greene), though neces- 
 sarily devoid of technical knowledge, had been incon- 
 siderate enough to develop the argmnent more fully and 
 with more use of technical terms than Shakespeare has 
 done. When, accordingly, it is further argued that the 
 
 line (ii, i). 
 
 As seal to this indenture of my love, 
 
 "might come naturally from an attorney's clerk," we 
 can but remark that the metaphor in question seems to 
 have come naturally to most of the poets and dramatists 
 of Elizabethan England. Take fifteen instances out of 
 
 a hundred : 
 
 Be this day 
 My last of bounty to a wretch ingrate ; 
 But unto thee a new indenture sealed 
 Of an affection fixed and permanent. 
 
 Hejnvood, The English Traveller, i, 2. 
 
 Not till my pardon's sealed. lb. iv, 6. 
 
 Mary. Yes sir ; a^bond fast sealed with solemn oaths. 
 Subscribed unto, as I thought, with your soul ; 
 Delivered as your deed in sight of Heaven : 
 Is this bond cancelled : have you forgot me ? 
 
 Middleton, The Roaring Girl, i, i. 
 He and I 
 Have sealed two bonds of friendship. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part I, i, i. 
 
68 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Then with thy lips seal up this new-made match. 
 
 Arden oj Fever sham. III, v, 150. 
 
 Francis. Bid her come seal the bargain with a kiss. 
 Mall. To make love's patent with my seal of arms. 
 
 The Two Angry Women of Abington, iii, 2. 
 
 And have his lips seal'd up. 
 Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, Induction. 
 
 Seal it with thy blood, {twice) 
 
 Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton, ii, i. 
 
 the tragedy. 
 Though it be seal'd and honour 'd with the blood 
 Both of the Portugal and barbarous Moor. 
 
 Peele. The Battle of Alcazar, iv, 2. 
 
 Join you with me to seal this promise true 
 That she be mine, as I to her am true. . . . 
 First Four but say, next Four their saying seal 
 But you must pay the gage of promised weal. 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia, b. iii. 
 
 I seal your charter-patent with my thumbs. 
 
 Greene, Eclogue in Menaphon, end. 
 You all fixt 
 
 Your hands and seals to an indenture drawn 
 By such a day to kill me. 
 
 Dekker, Match Me in London, 
 Act iv. Pearson's ed. iv, 200. 
 
 I'll bear him such a present. 
 Such an acquittance for the knight to seal. 
 As will amaze his senses. 
 
 Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, v, i, 
 I seal you my dear brother, her my wife. lb. 
 
 Or seal our resolution with our lives. 
 
 He3rwood. First Part of Edward IV. 
 Pearson's Heywood, i, 14. 
 I seal myself thine own with both my hands 
 In this tiue deed of gift. 
 
 Blurt, Master-Constable, 1602, v, 3. 
 
 It is edif3dng to know, in the same connection, that 
 Bishop Wordsworth found in Shakespeare's metaphorical 
 use of " seal " a proof of his study of the Bible.^ 
 
 1 On Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible, 2nd ed. 
 1864, p. 333. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 69 
 
 As there is no more " law " in King John, our jurist 
 fills a page by demonstrating that his author " spumed 
 the ultramontane pretensions of the Pope." It is even so. 
 
 24.;v A brighter prospect opens for the Baconian when 
 we reach King Henry IV, Part I, for there (iii, i) " the 
 partition of England and Wales " is carried out " in as 
 derk-like, attorney-like fashion as if it had been the 
 partition of a manor between joint tenants, tenants in 
 common, or coparceners." All this because Mortimer 
 has the lines 
 
 And our indentures tripartite are drawn, 
 Which, being sealed interchangeably. . . . 
 
 " It may well be imagined," says the learned judge; 
 " that . . . Shakespeare was recollecting how he had 
 seen a deed of partition tripartite drawn and executed 
 in his master's office at Stratford " — though in the critic's 
 opinion he probably was never in any attorney's office ! 
 And when Hotspur asks : " Are the indentures drawn ? " 
 he shows that he " fully vmderstood this conveyancing 
 proceeding." By the same reasoning, Dekker knew £is 
 much when he wrote the lines last above cited from him ; 
 and Greene and Lodge may well be imagined to be draw- 
 ing on office reminiscences when they made the Usurer 
 in A Looking Glass for London say to his victim : 
 " Have you not a counterpane of your obligation ? " 
 thus making their personage " fully imderstand " what 
 only lawyers could know! And, once again, we find 
 that Ben Jonson's plays must have been written by a 
 trained lawyer, inasmuch as he not only has : 
 
 Here determines the indenture tripartite 
 'Twixt Subtle. Dol, and Face. 
 
 in The Alchemist (v, 2), but makes the scrivener in the 
 Induction to Bartholomew Fair present a full-drawn 
 " indenture ' '—of which the Bookholder gets the " counter- 
 pane "—in strict quasi-legal form, between the spectators 
 and the author. As the document nms to over a hundred 
 
70 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 lines, the claims for Shakespeare's legal training would seem 
 to be at this point as dust in the balance. The only question 
 open on the juristic principles under notice is, whether 
 Jonson was an attorney's clerk or Bacon's amanuensis ! 
 
 And the problem does not end with the dramatists. 
 Bishop Hooper, the jmityr, in a long passage of legalist 
 theology quoted hereinafter (ch, vi), speaks of a contract 
 " confirmed with obligations sealed interchangeably." 
 Hooper is known to have been a monk before he became 
 a Protestant preacher. Is it to be inferred that he had 
 also been a lawyer's clerk ? 
 
 25. Our jurist adds : " Shakespeare may have been 
 taught that ' livery of seisin ' was not necessary to a deed 
 of partition, or he would have probably directed this ceremony 
 to complete the title." Such modesty of statement should 
 be fitly acknowledged. But the judge is more assured 
 in noting that " so fond was Shakespeare of law terms " 
 that he makes Henry IV use (iii, 2) the " forced and harsh " 
 figure, " Enfeoff' d himself to popularity." Upon this 
 we have a copy of Malone's note on the passage, but not 
 of Steevens's mention that in the old comedy of Wily 
 Beguiled there is the phrase : "I protested to enfeoff e 
 her in forty potmds a year." When Shakespeare uses 
 a legal term in a strained sense, such as probably would 
 never suggest itself to a lawyer, he is held to exhibit his 
 profoimd and accurate legal knowledge. When; then, 
 Serlsby in Greene's Friar Bacon (sc. 10) says : 
 
 I am the lands-lord, keeper, of thy holds ; 
 By copy all thy living lies in me ; 
 Laxfield did never see me raise my dues ; 
 I will enfeoff fair Margaret in all, 
 
 it merely proves that Greene had " no technical know- 
 ledge." In point of fact, the " forced and harsh " use 
 of this very term occurs often in Nashe : 
 
 Might the name of the Church infeofEe them in the kingdom 
 of Christ. . . . 
 
 The A natomie of A bsurditie, 1 589. Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 22. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 71 
 
 A kind of verse it is he hath been exifeoft in from his minoritie. 
 Ep. Ded. to Have with You to Saffron Waldon, Works, iii, 7. 
 
 I . . . enfeofe thee with indefinite blessedness — 
 
 Christ's Teares over Jerusalem, ed. cited, ii, 32. 
 
 — ^in a fashion which indicates that it was a trick of speech 
 of the period, analogous to that of the phrase, " Shall I 
 contract myself to wisdom's love ? " in Dekker's Old 
 FoRTUNATUs (i, i). The words " feoffee " and " feoff- 
 ment " occur again in the legal sense many times in 
 two acts of Jonson's play. The Devil is an Ass. It is 
 thus abundantly evident that both the normal and the 
 abnormal use of such legal terms were common in Eliza- 
 bethan phraseology. Yet because Hotspur in i Henry IV 
 (iv, 3) simply tells how Henry on a historic occasion said 
 he came to " sue his livery " when he actually did so; 
 we are asked to believe that Shakespeare's language is 
 determined by his special legal training. What inference 
 then shall we draw when Ben Jonson in The Staple of 
 News (i, i) makes Pennyboy junior declare, 
 
 I'll sue out no man's livery but mine own — ? 
 
 Are we to be told here also that Jonson exhibits lack of 
 a technical knowledge which Shakespeare possessed ? 
 
 26. Whereas some have argued that the conversation 
 between Falstafi and the Chief Justice does not exhibit 
 a close observation of the manner of speech of judges. 
 Lord Campbell demonstrates that Lord Chancellor 
 Jeffreys once actually did talk of la5dng a man " by the 
 heels." He further delivers the judgment that the 
 author who made Falstaff talk of " the wearing out of 
 six fashions, which is four terms, or two actions," " must 
 have been early initiated in the mysteries of terms and 
 actions." So, it appears, was Greene, who in James IV 
 (iii, 3) makes Andrew say that " dead " is " a terrible 
 word at the latter end of a sessions," and further makes 
 the Divine (v, 4) complain that the lawyers " delay your 
 common pleas for years. ' ' And so must have been Dekker 
 
72 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and Webster, since they make Justiniano in Westwaei 
 Ho speak of " the motion in law that stays for a da] 
 of hearing"; and Dekker in If This be not a Gooi 
 Play, the Devil is in It (ed, Pearson, iii, p. 274) make 
 Octavio say : 
 
 Yet term time all the year ! 
 A good strong lawsuit cannot now cost dear ; 
 
 and again in The Honest Whore (Part I, iv, 2) make: 
 Fustigo reflect : "I could have mine action of batter] 
 against him, but we may haps be both dead and rotter 
 before the lawyers would end it " ; and yet again makei 
 Doll in Northward Ho (i, 3) protest : " I'm as melan 
 choly now as Fleet Street in a long vacation ; . . . s( 
 soon as ever term begins I'll change my lodging." Ai 
 for He5nvood, he once more betrays his lawyership in Thi 
 English Traveller (iii, 3) : 
 
 Besides, 'tis term. 
 And lawyers must be followed ; seldom at home. 
 And scarcely then at leisure. 
 
 Lord Campbell, it would appear, had not mastered th( 
 simple fact, which lies on the face of a hundred Eliza- 
 bethan books dealing with contemporary life, that th( 
 " terms " of the law-courts were then a normal way oi 
 dividing time, as we now commonly divide it by th( 
 seasons. The reader, however, can now understand thai 
 when Nashe writes : " My clue is spun ; the term is a1 
 an end ; wherefore I will end and make vacation " (Havi 
 WITH You TO Saffron Walden ; Works, iii, 136) h( 
 is really not giving any proof of legal experience ; bul 
 is simply using the every-day language of the period 
 as he does when, at the close of the pamphlet, he says h( 
 will " keep back till the next term " his further scolding. 
 
 27. Pistol's " absque hoc " (v, 5) is of course cited a; 
 " remarkable," that being " an expression used, when th( 
 record was in Latin, by special pleaders in introducmj 
 a special traverse or negation of a positive material allega 
 tion on the other side, and so framing an issue of fad 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 73 
 
 for the determination of the jury." So that Shakespeare; 
 whose genius is subsumed throughout the inquiry, was 
 really incapable of drawing the character of the swaggerer 
 Pistol without falsifjdng it by making him utter phrases 
 which were within the ken only of trained lawyers, and 
 which he could never have heard even as scraps and 
 tags! Similarly, when Heywood in The Fair Maid 
 OF THE West (i, 5) makes a tavern drawer say : " It 
 is the commonest thing that can be, for these captains 
 to score and to score ; but when the scores are to be paid; 
 non est inventus," he must be held to have bewildered 
 his audience by putting in a tapster's mouth a Latin 
 phrase possible only to lawyers. It really seems saner 
 to suppose that tags of law Latin were common ciurency. 
 
 28. Our jurist reaches his high-water mark in the 
 Henry VI pla}^, where Dick's proposal (2 H. VI, iv, 2), 
 " let's kill all the lawyers," and Jack Cade's allusions to 
 parchment and beeswax, show " a familiarity with the 
 law and its proceedings which strongly indicates that the 
 author must have had some professional practice or educa- 
 tion as a lawyer." And on the sentencing of the Clerk 
 of Chatham, who could " make obligations and write 
 court hand," and always signed his name instead of 
 making his mark, the Lord Chancellor pens this reflection 
 (italics his) : " Surely Shakespeare must have been 
 employed to write deeds on parchment in court hand, and 
 to apply the wax to them in the form of seals : one does 
 not understand how he should, on any other theory of 
 his bringing up, have been acquainted with these details." 
 Over this nonsense one's only doubt is as to whether the 
 writer can have penned it with any consciousness of its 
 purport ; or whether he was deliberately farcing. It 
 seems incredible that it should be necessary to mention 
 that the parchment, beeswax, and seal, and the scene 
 with the Clerk of Chatham, are all in the First Part of 
 the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York 
 AND Lancaster, which was no more written by Shake- 
 
74 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 speare than by Lord Campbell. But the argument before 
 us is part of the case upon which Lord Campbell founds 
 his deUverance as to the profound legal knowledge ex- 
 hibited in Shakespeare's plays, upon which bare deUver- 
 ance Mr. Greenwood in turn mainly rests his case, which 
 convinced Maik Twain ! 
 
 29. Of course we are next told that the indictment of 
 Lord Say (iv, 7) was drawn by " no inexperienced hand," 
 inasmuch as it contains the burlesque phrase " contrary 
 to the king, his crown and dignity," and the further 
 legal phrase, " such abominable words as no Christian 
 ear can endure to hear," which are the equivalent of 
 "inter Christianas non nominand'." 
 
 It is quite certain that the drawer of this indictment must 
 have had some acquaintance with " The Crown Circuit Com- 
 panion," and must have had a full and accurate knowledge of 
 that rather obscure and intricate subject — " Felony and Benefit 
 of Clergy." ! 
 
 Cade's proclamation, which follows, we are as gravely 
 told, " deals with still more recondite heads of juris- 
 prudence." Thus it runs : 
 
 The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his 
 shoxilders unless he pay me tribute : there shall not a maid be 
 married but she shall pay me her maidenhead ere they have it. 
 Men shall hold of me in capite ; and we charge and command 
 that their wives be as free as heart can wish or tongue can tell. 
 
 " Strange to say," writes the jurist, " this phrase, or one 
 almost identically the same, 'as free as tongue can speak 
 or heart can think,' is feudal, and was known to the 
 ancient laws of England." Ergo, only a trained lawyer 
 can have heard of it ! Nashe, as it happens, is incon- 
 siderate enough to employ the phrase in his Have with 
 You TO Saffron Walden f^V^orks, ed. cited, iii, 33). But 
 that is a trifle. Once more, it appears, we must point 
 out that " against the king's crown and dignity," and 
 the " abominable words as no Christian ear is able to 
 endure to hear it," and the edifying lines on the " still 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 75 
 
 more recondite heads of jurisprudence " which Lord 
 Campbell describes as "legislation on the mercheta 
 muUerum," are all in the First Part of the Contention, 
 where, instead of " heart can wish," we have the profes- 
 sionally accurate "heart can think." What does Mr. 
 Greenwood think of it all ? 
 
 30. At a bound we pass from i Henry VI to Troilus 
 AND Cressida, where, as we might have expected, 
 Pandarus' phrases (iii, 2) " a kiss in fee-farm " and " in 
 witness the parties interchangeably " are solemnly cited, 
 with the comment that the latter phrase is the " exact 
 form of the testatum clause in an indenture " — " in witness 
 whereof the parties interchangeably have hereto set their 
 hands and seals " ; whereas the word " whereof " has been 
 left out. Then we are reminded of the " seals of love " 
 in the song in Measure for Measure and the " sweet 
 seals " in Venus and Adonis, which are once more 
 imphcitly declared to be the Ijnical expressions of an 
 attorney's clerk. It would seem again necessary to 
 vindicate the poethood of the poet against his legalist 
 idolaters by pointing out that this too is a poetic common- 
 place of the time : 
 
 Sweet lady, seal my pardon with a kiss. 
 
 Dekker, The Wonder of a Kingdom, iv, end. 
 
 Seal me a pardon 
 In a chaste turtle's kiss. 
 
 Randolph, The Jealous Lovers, i, 7. 
 I had taught 
 Our lips ere this, to seal the happy mixture 
 Made of our souls. 
 
 Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, i, i. 
 Thus I seal it (kisses her). 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Monsieur Thomas, v, 10. 
 My lips . . . seal my duty. 
 
 Massinger, The Picture, iv, i. 
 Our bargain thus I seal. (He kisses her.) 
 Hejrwood. The Brazen Age. Pearson's Heywood, iii, 215. 
 
 31. In Lear, naturally, the Fool's phrase (i, 4), " 'tis 
 like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer," is held " to show 
 
76 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 that Shakespeare had frequently been present at trials in 
 courts of justice, and now speaks from his recollection." 
 Dekker and Webster, evidently, must have had the S£une 
 recondite training, inasmuch as Mistress Birdlime in 
 their Westward Ho (ii, 2) sajTs, " I spake to her, as 
 clients do to lawyers without money, to no piu^wse." 
 
 32, Gloucester's phrase (ii, 1), " I'll work the means 
 to make thee capable," is characterised as " a remarkable 
 example of Shakespeare's use of technical legal phrase- 
 ology," inasmuch as " capable " is the technical formula 
 for " capable of inheriting." " It is only a lawyer who 
 would express the idea " so. So that, once more, Chap- 
 man must have been a lawyer, since he makes Almanzor 
 in Revenge for Honour (iv, i) tell his son Abilqualit 
 that he is " deprived of being capable of this empire " ; 
 Heywood must have been a lawyer, since he puts this 
 very term " capable " in the same special sense in the 
 mouth of the vintner's apprentice, Clem, in The Fair 
 Maid of the West (v, 2) : 
 
 Please your majesty, I see all men are not capable of honour : 
 what he refuseth, may it please you to bestow on me ; 
 
 and Massinger must have been a lawyer, since he has the 
 phrase in an edict (Old Law, v, i), " no son and heir shall 
 be held capable of his inheritance . . . unless. . . ." 
 And Heywood, Chapman, Massinger, and Shakespeare 
 stand alike convicted — if there be any validity whatever 
 in the legalist argument— of at once putting their cha- 
 racters out of drawing and bewildering their audiences 
 by making their non-legal personages use terms which 
 none but lawyers could xmderstand ! It may suffice to 
 mention that the terms "capable" and "incapable" 
 are used in More's History of Richard III (Murray's 
 rep. pp. 194, ig5) with reference to the succession to the 
 crown, that they occur in the chronicles, and that they 
 must have been used in all men's common talk for many 
 generations. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 'j'j 
 
 33. The words of Cornwall to Edmund, " Seek out 
 where thy father is, that he may be ready for our appre- 
 hension," are cited without any expUcit claim to find 
 in them signs of prof oimd legal knowledge ; but inasmuch 
 as Edmund says, aside : " If I find him comforting the 
 king, it will stuff his suspicion more fully," we are duly 
 reminded that " comforting " is the term used in " the 
 indictment against an accessory after the fact, /or treason." 
 The Lord Chancellor would appear to have been imaware 
 that the word is used in indictments after the fact for 
 lesser crimes than treason ! It must have been heard 
 as so used in every Elizabethan court, and would be 
 famiUar in every village.^ It may be mentioned inci- 
 dentally that " back up " or " encourage " is the original 
 meaning of " comfort," and that the word is used often 
 by Wiclif in that sense.* 
 
 34. There being no other " law " in Lear, we are 
 finally assured that at least " In Act iii, Sc. 6, the 
 imaginary trial of the two unnatural daughters (iy the 
 mad Lear) is conducted in a manner showing a perfect 
 familiarity with criminal procedure." In this case I 
 spare comment. 
 
 35. In Hamlet the simple phrase, " should it be sold 
 in fee " (iv, 4) is alleged to be one of the various expres- 
 sions " showing the substratimi of law in the author's 
 mind." We then learn that the mention of impressed 
 shipwrights who work on Sunday " has been quoted; 
 both by text writers and by judges on the bench, as an 
 authority upon the legality of the press-gang, and upon 
 the debated question whether shipwrights, as well as 
 common seamen, are Uable to be pressed into the service 
 of the royal navy." That is to say, the passage tells of 
 
 * In a recent English case which excited much interest, the 
 newspapers printed the phrase in question, some misreading it 
 " comport." In Elizabeth's day, the mistake would have been 
 impossible. 
 
 2 Treatise Against the Order of Friars, chs. 20, 24, 31. 
 
78 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Elizabethan usage. There is no question of "legal 
 knowledge " in the matter. 
 
 36. Hamlet's phrase, " As this fell sergeant Death is 
 strict in his arrest," cannot be let pass without the remark 
 that in this metaphor Death comes " as it were to take 
 him into custody vmder a capias ad satisfaciendum." 
 His lordship would doubtless have said the same had he 
 met in Shakespeare with Ben Jonson's " He'll watch this 
 sen'night but he'll have you : he'll out-wait a sergeant 
 for you" (Epicoene, iv, 2). Had Lord Campbell read 
 Chapman's All Fools he would have known from a 
 phrase about Dame Nature sending " her serjeant John 
 Death to arrest his body " (i, i), that the trope was in 
 common use. Chapman's " executioner of justice, 
 Death " (Revenge for Honour, iii, i), and Massinger's 
 " Svmunoned to appear in the court of Death " (The 
 Duke of Milan, v, 2) are simply samples of a vein of 
 metaphor which runs through all Engl^h speech of the 
 period. We have it in Nashe's Christs Teares over 
 Jerusalem (1593) : 
 
 The Judge [shall] deliver thee to Death, his Sarjant, the Sarjant 
 to the divel. 
 
 Worhs, ed. McKerrow, ii, 32. 
 We have it again in Dekker : 
 
 They have broke Virtue's laws; Vice is her serjeant. 
 Her jailer and her executioner. 
 
 Old Fortunatus, v, 2. 
 
 37. Over the grave-diggers' scene; naturally, we have 
 special exultation : it is " the ndne which produces the 
 richest legal lore." Inasmuch as the talk of felo de se 
 bears on the case of Sir James Hales, puisne Judge of 
 the Conmion Pleas, who became insane and committed 
 siucide soon after the accession of Queen Mary, we are 
 assured that " Shakespeare had read and studied Plowden's 
 Report of the celebrated case of Hales v. Petit, tried in 
 the reign of Philip and Mary." The sole basis for this 
 now familiar stress of asseveration is that in the lawsuit 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 79 
 
 over Hales' estate, in which one side argued that a man 
 " cannot be attainted of his own death " and " cannot 
 hefelo de se till the death is fully consiimmate," whereas 
 " the death precedes the felony and the forfeiture," the 
 other side argued that " the act consists of three parts " 
 — ^imagining, resolving, and executing. In the play, the 
 Clown says, with regard to the suicide of Ophelia, " an 
 act hath three branches, it is to act, to do, and to per- 
 form." That is the whole case. 
 
 Now, it is obvious that such a notable argument as 
 that in the Hales case must have been reported, dis- 
 cussed, and commented on for two generations all over 
 England; and it would be discussed among common 
 folk as among the educated. Shakespeare could often 
 have heard just some such confabulation as he ascribes 
 to the grave-diggers. If this be denied, we must decide 
 that he put in the mouths of common folk quasi-legal 
 talk which neither they nor, the audience could even 
 loosely understand. There is not the slightest reason to 
 suppose that he went to Plowden to study a case of 
 common notoriety for the sole purpose of framing a few 
 burlesque phrases for a comic dialogue — ^for that is the 
 sole use to which he puts the matter. Once more the 
 legalist case, at its highest pretension, collapses on a 
 moment's scrutiny. 
 
 38. Over Hamlet's speech on the skull, however, we 
 have inevitably a further sweeping claim, inasmuch as 
 it " abounds with lawyer-like thoughts and words." 
 " These terms of art are all used seemingly with a full 
 knowledge of their import ; and it would puzzle some 
 practising barristers with whom I am acquainted to go 
 over the whole seriatim and to define each of them satis- 
 factorily." So that Shakespeare, once more, is m- 
 artistic enough to put in the mouth of a prince a string 
 of law terms which a Victorian barrister wovdd be hard 
 put to it to define ! 
 
 But, as usual, other dramatists of the time do likewise. 
 
80 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 In Ben Jonson's Epic(ene (iv, 2) we have Morose's list 
 of terms to match Hamlet's : 
 
 There is such noise in the court that they have frighted me 
 home with more violence than I went ! such speaking and 
 counter-speaking, with their several voices of citations, appella- 
 tions, allegations, certificates, attachments, interrogatories, refer- 
 ences, convictions and affictions, indeed, among the doctors and 
 proctors, that the noise here is silence to't. 
 
 Then, in the scene (v, i) in which Otter and Cutbeard 
 play the parts of a divine and a canon lawyer, we have 
 these legd terms : 
 
 Divortium legitimum ; divinere contractimi ; irritum reddere 
 matrimonium, " as we say in the canon law, not to take away 
 the bond, but cause a nullity therein " ; impedimentum erroris ; 
 error personae ; error fortunae ; error qualitatis nee post nup- 
 tiarum benedictionem ; irrita reddere spon3alia ; conditio ; 
 votum ; cognatio spiritualis ; crimen adulterii ; cultus dis- 
 paritatis ; vis ; ordo ; ligamen ; publica honestas, which is 
 inchoata quaedam nffinita-«s ; affinitas orta ex sponsalibu^ ; leve 
 impedimentum — and yet more. 
 
 Why should Ben Jonson be denied his diploma as canon 
 lawyer ? 
 
 39. In Macbeth the only phrases cited as having " the 
 juridical mark " upon them are Macbeth's " take a bond of 
 fate " and " live the lease of nature " (iv, i). Upon these 
 citations there follow certain professional pleasantries 
 which laymen may pass by. It is fitting, however, to 
 note that Mr. Castle, K.C., ^ classes Macbeth among 
 " the non-legal plays," and pronoimces the " bond of 
 fate " phrase " mere sound, not sense," as he does the 
 "lease of nature" phrase to be "nonsense."* Above 
 all, he is impressed by the legal ignorance displayed in 
 the story of the traitor Cawdor, concerning whom Angus 
 
 * Work cited, p. 96 sq. 
 
 * If so, it was popular nonsense. In Webster's White Devil, 
 Brachiana tells Flamineo : " I will not grant your pardon. . . . 
 Only a lease of your life ; and that shall last But for one day" 
 (iv, s, end). 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 8i 
 
 alleges " treasons capital, confessed and proved," without 
 being able to tell the king what they were. In particular, 
 Mr. Castle insists that the passage : 
 
 Is execution done on Cawdor ? 
 Are not those in commission yet returned ? 
 
 " is an inaccurate and improper expression," inasmuch 
 as Cawdor had not been tried. I leave this crux to the 
 Baconians and the other legalists, merely noting that 
 Mr. Castle finds " this condemnation of Cawdor to death 
 without trial . . . the most convincing proof that Shake- 
 speare had no legal assistance in writing this play." The 
 poet, he thinks, personally leant to the view that the 
 king could condemn any one to death without trial — as 
 did James, to the scandal of the lawyers, in the case of 
 a cutpurse, on his journey to London to be crowned. 
 Perhaps James had read Richard III ! 
 
 40. From Othello Lord Campbell contrives to wring 
 a larger harvest than from any other play. As thus : 
 
 (a) Nonsuits my mediators (i, i). 
 
 {b) Lawful prize (ii, 2) — ^the trope indicating that there would 
 be a suit in the High Court of Admiralty to determine the 
 validily of the capture. 
 
 (c) The trial of Othello (i, 3) before the Senate as if he had 
 been indicted on Stat. 33 Hen. VII, c. 8. for practising con- 
 juration, witchcraft, enchantment, and sorcery, to provoke to 
 unlawful love. 
 
 {d) The lines of Desdemona (iii, 3) : 
 
 111 intermingle everyUiing he does 
 
 With Cassio's suit : Therefore be merry. Cassio : 
 
 For thy Solicitor shall rather die 
 
 Than give thy cause away. 
 
 {e) lago's line {ib.) : 
 
 Keep leets and lawdays, and in session sit. 
 
 In {d) Desdemona's appeal, we are told, "is made to 
 assume the shape of a juridical proceeding " ; in (e) the 
 language " shows that Shakespeare was weU acquainted 
 with all courts, low as well as high." Noting the utter 
 futility of the two last cited pleas, we can best rebut the 
 
 F 
 
82 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 whole five instances by citing a much longer series of 
 " legal "passages from one play of Ben Jonson — Epic(ene, 
 OR The Silent Woman : 
 
 They say he has been upon divers treaties with the fishAvives 
 and orange-women, and articles propounded to them, (i, i .) 
 
 It gives thee the law of plaguing him. . . . Disinherit thee ! 
 he cannot, man. Art not thou next of blood, and his sister's 
 son ? (76.) 
 
 He shall never have that plea against me. {lb.) 
 
 Have I ever cozened any friends of yours of their land ? 
 bought their possessions ? taken forfeit of their mortgage ? 
 begged a reversion for them ? {lb.) 
 
 f^^Daw. Syntagma juris civilis ; Corpus juris civilis ; corpus 
 juris canonici. . . . 
 Daup. What was that S5mtagma, sir ? 
 Daw. A civil lawyer, a Spaniard. 
 Daup. Sure, Corpus was a Dutchman, [ii. 2.) 
 
 He's better read in yur£ cm/e than ... (76.) 
 
 I'll kiss you, notwithstanding the justice of my quarrel, (iii, 2.) 
 
 I have an execution to serve upon them, I warrant thee, shall 
 serve, (iv, 2.) 
 
 Batter! Ifhedare, I'll have an action of battery against him. (76.) 
 
 In addition, we have aU the other Jonsonian legalisms 
 noted above and hereinafter — in all fifty times as much 
 " law " as Lord Campbell finds in Othello. It is doubt- 
 less a work of supererogation to cite parallels to " non- 
 suits," " lawful prize," " leets," and " sessions," but here 
 they are. In one speech in a play of Jonson we have : 
 
 Pennyboy jun. But Picklock, what wouldst thou be ? Thou 
 
 canst cant too. 
 Picklock. In all the languages in Westminster Hall, 
 Pleas, Bench, or Chancery. Fee-farm, fee-tail 
 Tenant in dower, at will, for term of life. 
 By copy of court-roll, knight's service, homage. 
 Fealty, escuage, soccage, or frank almoigne. 
 Grand serjeantry, or burgage. 
 
 The Staple of News, iv, i. 
 
 Had Lord Campbell found such a catalogue in Shake- 
 speare, with what superlatives would he have cited it ! 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 83 
 
 " Lawfvil prize " is a standing Elizabethan term : 
 witness — 
 
 *Tis a lawful prize 
 That's ta'en from pirates. 
 
 Dekker, Match Me in London, Act iii. 
 Pearson's ed. of Work, siv, 187. 
 'Twas la\vful prize when I put out to sea 
 And Wcirranted in my commission 
 
 Hesrwood, Edward IV, Part II. 
 Pearson's ed. of Works, i, 123. 
 
 Take further the following : 
 
 But now the sessions of my power's broke up, 
 And you exposed to actions, warrants, writs ; 
 For all the hellish rabble are broke loose 
 Of Serjeants, sheriffs, bailiffs. 
 
 Heywood, The English Traveller, iv, 5. 
 
 There's subject for you ; and, if I mistake not, 
 A supersedeas of your melancholy. 
 
 Jonson, The Poetaster, i, i. 
 
 Many are the yearly enormities of this fair, in whose Courts of 
 Pie-poudres I have had the honour, during the three days, some- 
 times to sit as judge. Id. Bartholomew Fair, ii. i . 
 
 Such a plea 
 
 As nonsuits all your princely evidence. 
 
 Greene, Orlando Furioso, Sc. i. 
 Set a supersedeas of my wrath. Id. ib. 
 
 As for " leets and lawdays," it was evidently a standing 
 phrase. In the publisher's or editor's address "to the 
 Reader," prefaced to Latimer's Second Sermon before 
 King Edward VI, 1549, we have : 
 
 Why, but be not lawyers diligent, say ye ? Yea truly are 
 they ; about their own profit there are no more diligent men, nor 
 busier persons in all England. They trudge, in the term time, 
 to and fro. They apply the world hard. They foreslow ! They 
 follow assizes and sessions, leets, law-days, and hundreds. They 
 should serve the king, but they serve themselves. 
 
 Sermons by Hugh Latimer, Ed. in " Everyman's Library," p. 94. 
 
 This smrely is not a lawyer's outburst ! 
 
 Add that in a dozen other plays by non-lawyer drama- 
 tists of Shak^peare's day there are far more elaborate 
 
84 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and realistic trials— to be noted hereafter— than any in 
 Shakespeare, and the case founded on Othello is done 
 with. 
 
 41. Avowing that he can find no instance in Julius 
 CiESAR " of a Roman being made to talk like an English 
 lawyer," Lord Campbell proceeds to claim that in Antony 
 AND Cleopatra (i, 4) Lepidus " uses the language of a 
 conveyancer's chambers in Lincoln's Inn " when he says 
 that the faults of Antony seem " hereditary rather than 
 purchased;" adding in a footnote a citation of the king's 
 lines in 2 Henry IV, iv, 4 : 
 
 What in me was purchas'd 
 Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort. 
 
 The point is that in legal terminology " whatsoever does 
 not come through operation of law by descent is ■purchased, 
 although it may be the free gift of a donor." As we shall 
 have occasion to go fully into this point later in connection 
 with a similar claim by Mr. Grant White, it may suffice 
 here to say that, as usual. Lord Campbell puts it in entire 
 ignorance of the common phraseology of other Elizabethan 
 dramatists and writers, and that we shall find the word 
 used in the same way by them in scores of instances. 
 What he describes as a specifically legal use of the term 
 " purchase " was in fact the primary and normal sense 
 of the word in English, as may be seen by tracing it 
 through ordinary literature down to Shakespeare's day. 
 
 42. Citing the speech of Menenius in Coriolanus 
 (ii, i), reproaching the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus with 
 their fashion of wasting time over trifling causes, and 
 embroiling issues " between party and party " by wanton 
 displays of impatience and temper. Lord Campbell argues 
 that here " Shakespeare shows that he must have been 
 present before some tiresome, testy, choleric judges at 
 Stratford, Warwick, or Westminster." He admittedly 
 "mistakes the duties of the tribune for those of the 
 praetor" (a likely thing on the part of a trained lawyer !) ; 
 but " in truth he was recollecting with disgust what he 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 85 
 
 had himself witnessed in his own country." And if so, 
 what then ? Is this any proof of profound legal know- 
 ledge ? Where the claim is so feeble, it is hardly worth 
 while to offer parallel instances ; but as usual, they are 
 easily found. The testy and choleric judge, a lamentably 
 common figure in Tudor England, ^ appears in Webster's 
 White Devil ; in Chapman's Admiral of France ; in 
 Massinger's The Fatal Dowry, and in Lodge and 
 Greene's Looking Glass for London. In the Duchess 
 OF Malfy (i, i) Webster makes Antonio say of the Duke 
 that he " will seem to sleep o' the bench. Only to trap 
 offenders." Is this such a reminiscence as proves leg«J 
 training? 
 
 43. Concerning Romeo and Juliet, we are assured 
 that the first scene may " be studied by a student of the 
 Ixms of Court to acquire a knowledge of the law of assault 
 and battery." Without bringing a microscope to bear 
 on the few minutiee put forward in support of this cha- 
 racteristic assertion, we may note that so much knowledge 
 of the law of assault and battery could probably be picked 
 up by any inhabitant of Stratford, to say nothhig of those 
 who attended the inferior courts of London. Lord Camp- 
 bell himself evidently feels the triviality of the detail that 
 the elder Montagu and Capulet are boimd over, in the 
 English fashion, " to keep the peace," as is Bobadill in 
 Every Man in his Humour. But he strives to make 
 a good finish by citing Mercutio's phrase, " buy the fee 
 simple of my life for an hour and a quarter " (iii, i), and 
 adding in a footnote that Parolles in All's Well (iv, 3) 
 " is made to talk like a conveyancer of Lincoln's Inn " 
 
 1 See Latimer's Third Sermon before Edward VI. Bishop 
 Bale, recounting the Examination of Aime Askewe, tells of " the 
 judges, without all sober discretion, running to the rack, tugging, 
 hauling, and pulling thereat, like tormentors in a play. Compare 
 me here." he adds, " Pilate with Wrisley, the high chancellor 
 of England, with Rich, and with other . . . and see how much 
 the pagan judge excelled in virtue and wisdom the false christned 
 judge." Select Works, Parker Soc. rep. p. 241. 
 
86 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 when he says : "He will sell the fee-simple of his salva- 
 tion . . . and cut the entail from all remainders." 
 
 As we have already seen, the phrase " fee simple " is 
 shown by other men's plays to have been a household 
 word; but it may be well to conclude with further 
 analogies and parallels : 
 
 You helped me to three manors in fee-farm.^ 
 
 Heywood, Edward IV, Pt. II. 
 Pearson's ed. of Works, i, 150. 
 There is only in the amity of women an estate for will, and every 
 person knows that is no certain inheritance. 
 
 Webster and Dekker, Westward Ho, i, 2. 
 Runs it [the warrant] 
 Both without bail and mainptize ? * 
 
 Heywood, The English Traveller, iv, i. 
 I'll hire thee for a year by the Statute of Winchester. 
 
 Id. The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, ii, i. 
 Now thou art mine 
 For one and twenty years, or for three lives, 
 Choose which thou wilt, I'll make thee a copyholder. 
 And thy first bill unquestioned. 
 
 Jonson, The Staple of News, i, i. 
 They stand committed without bail or mainprize: 
 
 Id. ib. V, 2. 
 I told you such a passage would disperse them 
 Although the house were their fee-simple in law. 
 
 Id. The Magnetic Lady, ii, i, near end. 
 
 This concludes Lord Campbell's case as regards the 
 plays. It remains to note his citations from the poems. 
 They are nearly all instances of metaphor such as we have 
 already dealt with : 
 
 1. But when the heart's attorney once. is mute. 
 The client breaks as desperate in the suit. 
 
 Venus and Adonis, I. 335. 
 
 2. Which purchase if thou make for fear of slips. 
 Set thy seal-manual on my wax-red lips. 
 
 Id. 515-16- 
 
 3. Her pleading hath deserved a greater fee. Id. 609- 
 
 ^ This term occurs only once in Shakespeare. 
 This term never occurs in Shakespeare. 
 
 2 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 87 
 
 4. Dim register and notary of shame. 
 
 Rape of Lucrece, 765. 
 S- Since that my case is past the help of law. Id. 1022. 
 
 6. No rightful plea might plead for justice here. Id. 1649. 
 
 7. Hath served a dumb arrest upon his tongue. Id. 1780. 
 
 8. When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
 
 I summon up remembrance of things past. Sonnet 30. 
 
 9. So should that beauty which you hold in lease. 
 
 10. And summer's lease hath all too short a date. 
 
 11. And 'gainst thyself a lawful plea commence. 
 
 Sonnet 13. 
 Sonnet 18. 
 
 Sonnet 35. 
 
 12. "When that fell arrest 
 
 Without all bail shall carry me away. Sonnet 74. 
 
 13. Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted. 
 
 Sonnet 88. 
 
 14. Which works on leases of short numbered hours. 
 
 Sonnet 124. 
 
 15. Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage. 
 
 Sonnet 26. 
 Sonnet 134. 
 
 16. And I m3rself am mortgag'd to thy will. 
 
 17. Why so large cost, having so short a lease ? 
 
 Sonnet 146. 
 
 18. So should that beauty which you hold in lease 
 
 Find no determination. Sonnet 13. 
 
 Finally, Sonnet 46 is quoted entire, with the claim that 
 it " smells as potently of the attorney's office as any of 
 the stanzas penned by Lord Kenyon while an attorney's 
 clerk in Wales." 
 
 Hitherto, the legalist case has proceeded on the implicit 
 assumption that Shakespeare chronically vitiates his art 
 by putting in the mouths of lay characters phraseology 
 which only lawyers could understand. Now the implica- 
 tion is that he similarly flavours his sonnets and poems 
 in a way that only a lawyer woxild have done. Again, 
 all that is necessary is to cast a glance over that con- 
 temporary poetry which Lord Campbell never takes into 
 account. This has already been duly done by Sir 
 
88 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Sidney Lee ; and it will here sufftce to quote a few of 
 the sonnets to which he points as the patterns and pre- 
 cedents ^ of those in which Shakespeare plays the lawyer : 
 
 Then to Parthenophe, with all post haste 
 
 (As full assured of the pawn fore-pledged), 
 I made ; and with these words disordered placed 
 
 Smooth (though with fury's sharp outrages edged). 
 Quoth I, " Fair Mistress ! did I set mine Heart 
 
 At liberty, and for that, vaaAe him free ; 
 That you should win him for another start. 
 Whose certain hail you promised to be ! " 
 " Tush ! " quoth Parthenophe, " before he go, 
 
 I'll be his hail at last, and doubt it not ! " 
 " Why then," said I, " that Mortgage must I show 
 Of your true love, which at your hands I got. 
 Ay me ! She was and is his hail, I wot. 
 But when the Mortgage should have cured the sore 
 She passed it off, by Deed of Gift before. 
 
 Bamabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 
 Sonnets, &c., 1593. Sonnet 8. (In rep. of 
 Arber's Elizabethan Sonnets, 1904, i, 173.) 
 .... Why then, inhuman, and my secret foe. 
 
 Didst thou betray me ? yet would be a woman ! 
 From my chief wealth, outweaving me this woe. 
 
 Leaving thy love in pawn, till time did come on 
 When that thy trustless bonds were to be tried ! 
 
 And when, through thy defatUt, I thee did summon 
 Into the Court of Steeidfast Love, then cried, 
 
 " As it was promised, here stands his Heart's bail I 
 And if in bonds to thee my love be tied. 
 Then by those bonds take Forfeit of the Sale I " 
 
 Id. ib. Sonnet 11, as cited, p. 174. 
 Those Eyes (thy Beauty's Tenants f) pay due tears 
 For occupation of mine Heart, thy Freehold, 
 In tenure of Love's service ! If thou behold 
 1 Before the fashion of sonnets broke out as it did in the 
 'nineties, George Gascoigne had produced his poem " The Arraign- 
 ment of a Lover" (in Posies, 1575), wherein the lover is tried 
 at " Beauty's Bar," accused by False Suspect, whereon " Craft, 
 the Crier, called a Quest." and after sentence " Jealous, the Jailor, 
 bound we fast, To hear the verdict of the Bill " ; the procedure 
 ending with "Faith and Truth my Sureties," than which there 
 is "no better warrantise." See the poem in Arber's Spenser 
 Anthology, p. 132 ; Gascoigne's Works, ed. Cunliffe, i. 38. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 89 
 
 With what exaction it is held through fears ; 
 And yet thy Rents, extorted daily, bears. 
 
 Thou wouldst not thus consume my quiet's gold ! 
 And yet. though covetous thou be, to make 
 
 Thy beauty rich, with renting me so roughly 
 And at such sums, thou never thought dost take 
 But still consumes me ! Then, thou dost misguide all ! 
 Spending in sport, for which I wrought so toughly • 
 When I had felt all tortmre, and had tried all ; 
 
 And spent my stock through 'strain of thy extortion ; 
 On that, I had but good hopes for my portion. 
 
 Id. ib. Sonnet 20, p. 181. 
 
 Shall we be told, in the absence of all biographical evidence; 
 that Barnes must have been a lawyer ? There is simply 
 no legal trace of him. But what is quite clear is that 
 Shakespeare had read his poems, published in 1593. It 
 is not merely that he writes " legal " sonnets in Barnes's 
 fashion, and distinctly echoes him at various points : 
 
 A quest of thoughts all tenants to the Heart. 
 
 Sonnet 46. 
 That fell arrest without all bail. 
 
 Sonnet 73 {Cp. 133). 
 Your charter is so strong 
 That you yourself may privilege your time. 
 
 Sonnet 58 (Cp. 87). 
 — ^the two last recalling Barnes's 
 
 that charter. 
 Sealed with the wax of stedfast continence 
 
 Sonnet 10, 
 and 
 
 Thy love's large Charter, 
 
 Sonnet 15 ; 
 
 but that there are so many echoes of tune and theme that 
 in reading Barnes one seems half the time to be hearing 
 undertones of the more powerful song of Shakespeare. 
 And as Lord Southampton was one of Barnes's as well 
 as one of Shakespeare's proclaimed patrons, the two men 
 are very likely to have been acquaintances.^ Shake- 
 
 * Dr. Creighton, in his Shakespeare's Story of his Life {1904), 
 works out a wildly speculative tale of Shakespeare's use of Barnes 
 
go THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 speare's sonnets are in any case notably in the manner 
 of Barnes's, and he was following him in legalism as in 
 other fashions. And the same holds of his relation to the 
 anonymous sonneteer who in 1594 published the volume 
 entitled Zepheria. Here we have the same trick of 
 legal phraseology : 
 
 Mine eyes (quick pursuivants !) the sight attached 
 
 Of Thee . . . 
 
 Mine heart, Zepheria ! then became thy fee. 
 
 Canzon 3. Vol. II of Bliz. Sonnets, as cited, p. 158, 
 Care's Usher ! Tenant to his own Oppression. 
 
 Canzon 5, p. 159, 
 Wherein have I on love committed trespass ? 
 O, if in justice thou must needs acquit me, 
 Rewaid me with thy love. 
 
 Canzon 16, p. 165, 
 
 and so forth. Two complete ". canzons " show how far 
 the fashion went : 
 
 How often hath my pen (mine heart's Solicitor !) 
 
 Instructed thee in Breviat of my case ! 
 While Fancy-pleading eyes (thy beauty's Visitor !) 
 
 Have patterned to my quill, an angel's face. 
 How have my Sonnets (faithful Counsellors !) 
 
 Thee, without ceasing, moved for Day of Hearing ! 
 While they, my plaintive Cause (my faith's Revealers !) 
 
 Thy long delay, my patience, in thine ear ring. 
 How have I stood at bar of thine own conscience ; 
 
 When in Requesting Court my suit I brought ! 
 How have thy long adjournments slowed the sentence. 
 
 Which I (through much expense of tears) besought ! 
 Through many difficulties have I run ; 
 Ah, sooner wert thou lost, I wis, than won ! 
 When last mine eyes dislodgdd from thy beauty. 
 
 Though served with process of a parent's Writ : 
 A Supersedeas countermanding duty. 
 
 Even then, I saw upon thy smiles to sit ! 
 Those smiles which we invited to a Party, 
 
 Disperpling clouds of faint respecting fear. 
 Against the Summons which was served on me 
 
 A larger privilege of dispense did bear. 
 
 as " devil " after lampooning him as ParoUes. All this is idle 
 m3^h-mongering ; but the two men must have met. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 91 
 
 Thine eyes' edict, the statute of Repeal, 
 
 Doth other duties wholly abrogate, 
 Save such as thee endear in hearty zeal. 
 
 Then be it far from me, that I should derogate 
 From Nature's Law. enregistered in thee I 
 So might my love incur a Prtsmunire. 
 
 It will hardly be disputed that either Shakespeare had 
 read in manuscript, or heard some one quote, Zepheria, 
 or the sonneteer had read Venus and Adonis. That one 
 poet should write of his " heart's soUcitor," and another 
 of the " heart's attorney," by sheer coincidence, is not 
 plausibly to be argued. And even if it could be proved; 
 which it cannot, that the more lawyerlike poet was a 
 lawyer, it would be sufficiently idle to contend that the 
 other must also have been so, in view of what we have seen 
 of the habit of legalism among all the dramatists of the day. 
 We are witnessing a fashion of the time, comparable with 
 the vogue of Euphuism. The many echoes and parallels 
 of earlier sonnets in those of Shakespeare are weighty 
 hints of the slightness of our ground for taking his as 
 direct records of his heart's experience. Even when 
 he youthfully imitated other men's modes, he could not 
 but give to his echoes the deeper vibration of his larger 
 spirit, even as he avoided his models' grosser crudities. 
 In Zepheria, the canzon last above cited is followed by 
 two in which we have the barbarisms " irrotulate " and 
 " foyalty," " excordiate " and " exordiate "—outrages 
 possible to a pedant, but not to our poet. But however 
 his finer taste and deeper feeling might preserve him from 
 such offences, he is none the less mannered by the " form 
 and pressure " of the time, which in this matter of 
 legalist vocabulary and imagery is nearly universal. The 
 Elizabethan sonneteers, like the old troubadours, have 
 their tunes and themes in common, and each man's 
 collection is visibly suggested by or suggestive of others. 
 Their very titles, Phillis, Licia, Delia, Diana, Coelia, 
 Idea, Zepheria, Fidessa, Chloris, Laura, tell of a 
 reigning mode, setting in with Sidney's Astrophel and 
 
92 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Stella, and drawing much on French originals. It was 
 in full force in 1593, and culminated about i597_the 
 years between which we know Shakespeare to have 
 written many of his " sugred sonnets." That he should 
 copy a particular fashion as he copied the general was 
 entirely natural. Drayton, who was no lawyer, but was 
 a poet, could not so far resist the legalist craze as to 
 abstain from working out in one Sonnet ^ the fancy that 
 his mistress may be tried for murdering his heart : 
 
 The verdict on the view 
 Do quit the dead, and me not accessory. 
 
 Well, well ! I fear it will be proved of you ! 
 The Evidence so great a proof doth carry. 
 
 Shakespeare had thus the example, in these matters, of a 
 poet whom he coxild not but esteem, and whom in one of 
 his later sonnets he has so closely imitated that there can 
 be no question of the influence. In this case the parallel 
 is so striking that once more we are led to doubt the 
 primary character of the experience suggested in Shake- 
 speare's sonnet : 
 
 Drayton 
 
 An Evil Spirit (your Beauty) haunts me still. 
 
 Wherewith, alas, I have been long possest ; 
 Which ceaseth not to attempt me to each ill. 
 
 Nor gives me once, but one poor minute's rest. 
 In me it speaks, whether I sleep or wake ; 
 
 And when by means to drive it out I try. 
 With greater torments then it me doth take. 
 
 And tortures me in most extremity. 
 Before my face, it lays down my despairs. 
 
 And hastes me on unto a sudden death : 
 Now tempting me to drown myself in tears ; 
 
 And then in sighing to give up my breath. 
 Thus am I still provoked to every evil. 
 By this good-wicked Spirit, sweet Angel-Devil. 
 
 No. 22 in 1599 ed. of Idea ; No. 20 in ed. cited, p. 191. 
 
 ^ No. 51 of ed. IS99 of Idea ; No. 2 in reprint in Elizabethan 
 Sonnets, as cited, ii, 182. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 93 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 Two loves I have, of comfort and despair 
 
 Which like two spirits do suggest me still : 
 The better angel is a man right fair. 
 
 The worser spirit a woman, colour'd ill« 
 To win me soon to hell, my female evil 
 
 Tempteth my better angel from my side, ' 
 And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, 
 
 Wooing his purity with her foul pride. 
 And whether that my angel be turned fiend, 
 
 Suspect I may, yet not directly tell ; 
 But being both from me, both to each friend, 
 
 I guess one angel in another's hell : 
 Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt. 
 Till my bad angel fire my good one out. 
 
 Sonnet 144. 
 Dra3rton has told in another sonnet (21) how : 
 
 A witless Gallant, a young wench that wooed. . . . 
 Intreated me, as e'er I wished his good. 
 To write him but one Sonnet to his Love ; 
 
 and how he did so, with the success desired. It is not 
 easy to believe that these sombre lines of Shakespeare's 
 were but such an exercise. Yet they may have been. 
 In any case, there is no excuse now left for imputing to 
 an overmastering devotion to law, the result of a deep legal 
 training, the legalisms in which he outwent Drayton. 
 
 So far from being " lawyerlike " in the sense of striking 
 the literary note natmral to a trained lawyer, they struck 
 such a lawyer, to wit Sir John Davies, as rather ridiculous. 
 Davies, in one of his " gulling sonnets," avowedly parodies 
 the legalist sonnets of the poet of Zepheria; and he 
 seems to have had before him in manuscript Shakespeare's 
 Sonnet 26 when he penned his parody beginning : 
 
 To love, my lord, I do Knight's service owe. 
 
 " B. Grif&n, Gent." who dedicated his Fidessa (1596) to 
 the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court, and was presmnably 
 one of them, makes only one sUght excursion into legal 
 imagery in his sonnets. Yet the Baconians would have 
 us believe that Bacon, who in his non-legal works so 
 
94 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 rarely resorts to legal phraseology, touched the sonnets 
 with it so abundantly by reason of a natural professional 
 propensity. 
 
 In this coimection, however, it is hardly necessary 
 to consider the theorem which, on the strength of the 
 legalisms and of the fixed Baconian idea, would ascribe 
 to Francis Bacon, as a real expression of experience, all 
 the Sonnets. In no other aspect and over no other 
 issue is that theorem more staggering to judgment. But 
 we shall recur to it in a later chapter. For the present 
 it is enough to have shown how entirely nugatory is the 
 non-comparative process by which Lord Campbell has 
 unwittingly fooled the Baconians to the top of their bent. 
 Citing him, they have relieved themselves of the trouble 
 of outgoing his research. The whole phenomenon is 
 a warning instance of the heedless pretence, and the more 
 heedless acceptance, of authority in criticism. " All law 
 critics admit," says Dr. R. Theobald, '^ that such language 
 as that of the 46th Sonnet " is not the writing of an 
 amateur but of an expert." Lord Campbell alone is cited 
 for the " all " : Mr. Devecmon's counter-doctrine is un- 
 known to the Baconian. We have seen the value of Lord 
 Campbell's pronouncement, and we shall similarly 
 examine some others. 
 
 But critics like Dr. Theobald, themselves habitually 
 dogmatising on a basis of literary ignorance, are willingly 
 at the mercy of any false evidence that chimes with 
 their predilection. " Lawyers say," writes Dr. Theobald, 
 " that one of the most difficult things to acquire in their 
 profession is the phraseology." Dr. Theobald need only 
 have read in the Elizabethan drama a little further than 
 he went for material to prove that Bacon wrote Shake- 
 speare and Marlowe, in order to learn that the lawyers 
 talked ignorantly. When, however, he proceeds to help 
 them in their mystification by asserting that " the out- 
 sider is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. He will 
 ^ Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light, 1904, p. 19. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL ALLUSIONS 95 
 
 traverse what he approves (!), — or empanel a witness (!) 
 instead of a jury — or in some way his legal chatter will 
 degenerate into jargon." On this principle, Dr. Theobald's 
 assent to the lawyer's claim is of no value; he being 
 no lawyer. Unable to illustrate his proposition save by 
 imaginary enormities of blundering, he must by his own 
 accoxmt be unable to detect any sUghter deviations from 
 legal accuracy. Then his endorsement of their expertise 
 is admittedly worthless to start with. 
 
 Lawyers of literary competence will be the first to 
 admit, on a study of the case, that Lord Campbell's 
 handling of the literary problem before us partakes of the 
 natvire of literary charlatanism ; and that Lord Pen- 
 zance's professed " sunmiing-up " of the Bacon-Shake- 
 speare problem, being a grossly ex parte statement, is 
 entitled to neither lay nor professional respect. In this 
 matter the sole authorities are critical reason and literary 
 evidence. Unhappily we shall find some professed 
 Shakespearean scholars as uncritical as the judges. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY: 
 MR. GRANT WHITE'S CASE: 
 
 UNCRITICAL as are the arguments alike of 
 Lord Campbell and the Baconians about 
 the legal learning of Shakespeare, they are 
 not more so than those put forth to the 
 same effect by Mr. Grant White, a Shakespearean scholar 
 and a hearty contemner of the entire Baconian theory. 
 From him Mr. Greenwood is able to cite the allegation 
 that 
 
 legal phrases flow from his (Shakespeare's) pen as part of his 
 vocabulary, and parcel of his thought. Take the word "pur- 
 chase," for instance, which in ordinary use means to acquire 
 by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining 
 property except by i^eritance or descent, and in this peculiar 
 sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four 
 plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four pla3rs of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. I 
 
 This passage, which follows Lord Campbell's lead, forms 
 part of a longer one in which the infirmity of Mr. White's 
 handling of the problem lies on the surface. 
 
 Malone [he writes], noticing the frequency with which Shake- 
 speare uses law terms, conjectured that he had passed some of 
 his adolescent years in an attorney's office. In support of his 
 conjecture, Malone, himself a barrister, cited twenty-four 
 passages distinguished by the presence of law phrases ; and to 
 these he might have added many more. But the use of such 
 phrases is by no means peculiar to Shakespeare. The writings 
 of the poets and plasrwrights of his period, Spenser, Drayton, 
 Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Donne, and many 
 
 1 Memoirs of William Shakespeare in 1866 ed. of Shakespeare's 
 Works, I, pp. xlv. Repr. later. 
 
 96 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 97 
 
 others of legs note, axe thickly sprinkled with them. In fact the 
 application of legal language to the ordinary affairs of life was 
 more common two hundred and fifty years ago than it is now ; 
 though even nowadays the usage is far from uncommon in the 
 rural districts. There law shares with agriculture the function 
 of providing those phrases of common conversation which, used 
 figuratively at first, and often with poetic feeling, pass into mere 
 thought-saving formulas of speech. 
 
 Having thus reached a point of view from which his 
 own theory is manifestly open to suspicion, since the 
 first purpose of drama must be to be " understanded of 
 the people," Mr. White nevertheless proceeds to offer 
 " reasons for beUeving that Shakespeare had more than 
 a layman's knowledge of the law. ' ' Yet the sole ' ' reason' ' 
 suggested is the merest begging of the question. Needy 
 yoimg lawyers in the Elizabethan period, we are told; 
 turned to play-writing as they now do to joumaUsm ; 
 " and of those who had been successful in their dramatic 
 efforts how inevitable it was that many would give 
 themselves up to play-writing, and that thus the language 
 of the plays of that time should show a remarkable in- 
 fiision of law phrases." That is to say, we expect to 
 find lawyer-dramatists filling their plays with law. Then 
 comes the logical somersault : 
 
 To what, then, must we attribute the fact that of all the plays 
 that have survived of those written between 1580 and 1620 
 Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect ? For no 
 dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was a younger 
 son of a Judge of the Common' Pleas, and who, after studying 
 in the Inns of Court, abandoned law for the drama, used legal 
 phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and exactness. 
 
 Shakespeare; that is to say, is more given to legalisms 
 than are the lawyer dramatists, and must therefore have 
 been much more of a lawyer than they ! Shakespeare, 
 accordingly, is likely to have had not the mere superficial 
 training of a lawyer's clerk ; the probability is that he 
 
 was allowed to commence his studies for a profession for which 
 his cleverness fitted him — and that he continued those studies 
 until his father's misfortunes, aided, perhaps, by some of those 
 
 G 
 
98 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 ax;ts of youthful indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull 
 ones will sometimes commit, threw him upon his own resources ; 
 and that then, law failing to supply his pressing need, he turned 
 to the stage, on which he had townsmen and friends. 
 
 Thus a new hypothesis, outgoing all tradition; and 
 resting on no shred of direct testimony, is superimposed 
 on a dubious tradition, by way of supporting an un- 
 proved assumption. For Mr. White does not make one 
 attempt to reach a true quantitative or qualitative 
 estimate of the legal element in Shakespeare and his 
 contemporaries by way of detailed comparison. He 
 makes the blank affirmation, and merely follows it up 
 with the before-cited passage about purdiase, and by a 
 further non-comparative recital of legal terms from the 
 ShakespeareJin plays in rebuttal of the view that the 
 whole vocabulary may have been acquired by haunting 
 the law comrts. 
 
 Those terms his use of which is most remarkable . . . are not 
 such eis he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at nisi 
 prius, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property — 
 " fine and recovery," " statutes marchant," " purchase," " in- 
 denture," "tenure," "double voucher," "fee simple," "fee 
 farm," "remainder," "reversion," "forfeiture," &c. This 
 convejrancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging 
 round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years 
 ago, when suits as to the title to real property were comparatively 
 rare. And besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in 
 his early plays, written in his first London years, as in those 
 produced at a later period. 
 
 It is necessary to show in some detail that we have 
 here, once more, merely a forensic " blufE " ; and it is 
 hardly possible to begin the demonstration without a 
 word of protest against the hand-to-mouth fashion in 
 which a critic who was most unsparing in his denimciation 
 of other men's laxities and inadequacies went about a 
 task which obviously called for the most exact critical 
 procedure. He has been so heedless as to assign to 
 Shakespeare the common phrase " statutes marchant," 
 which is not to be foimd in any of the plays or poems. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 99 
 
 while he cites eight terms which axe to be found by the 
 hundred in Elizabethan drama. But his lack of caution 
 becomes still more clear when we examine the first-cited 
 illustration, upon which he most relies — that which turns 
 upon the word " purchase." In point of fact the words 
 "purchase," "purchased," " purchaseth," and "pur- 
 chasing " occur in all some fifty times in Shakespeare's 
 plays, and twice in Lucrece, and they have their primary 
 force — ^which Mr. White fallaciously reduces to a " legal " 
 one — far oftener than five times, else Shakespeare would 
 indeed have been pectdiar among his contemporaries in 
 giving the word its secondary and modem force. By the 
 definition "legal modes of obtaining property" the 
 critic merely obscures the fact that the term covered 
 all modes of acquisition save inheritance. There was no 
 more a " legal " sense of the term " purchase " than there 
 was or is of the term " property " or " obtain " : the 
 law simply discriminated, on legal lines, between tight and 
 wrong modes of "purchase." To pick out cases in the plays 
 in which " purchase " means lawful acquisition is thus 
 pure m3^tification : any lawyer, even, might say " lawful 
 purchase " by way of expressly distinguishing between 
 lawful and unlawful purchase, as he might say " stolen 
 property " on occasion. As Mr. White does not specify 
 his five cases, and Mr. Greenwood, quoting Mr. White as he 
 quotes Lord Campbell, makes no scrutiny of the assertion, 
 I will simply clear the matter up by citing many instances 
 of the use of the quasi-" legal " use of the word in other 
 writers and dramatists, noting that it is frequently applied 
 in the sense of " booty " or plunder. To begin with, Mr. 
 White is merely mystifying us in his assertion that the 
 " legal " sense of " purchase " occurs only once in 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's fifty-four dramas. In its 
 original and general sense, which is the " legal," it occurs 
 twice in one of their plays : 
 
 Lovegood. I thought till now 
 
 There had been no such living, no such purchase 
 
100 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 (For all the rest is labour), as a list 
 Of mensurable friends. 
 
 Wit without Money, iii, 4. 
 Luce. Must every slight companion that can purchase 
 A show of poverty, and beggarly planet [?], 
 Fall under your compassion ? 
 
 lb. iv, 4. 
 
 — these being the only instances of the word; in any 
 application, in the play in question. And it occurs re- 
 peatedly in others by the same authors : 
 
 Morecrafi. I purchased, wrung, and wire-drawed for my 
 wealth, lost, and was cozened. 
 
 The Scornful Lady, v, 4. 
 
 (Here the meaning is " got by stratagems " — within 
 the limits of the law.) 
 
 Dinant. Yet, but consider how this wealth was purchased 
 [= acquired] . . . 
 
 In brief. 
 All you shall wear, or touch, or see, is purchased 
 By lawless force [prize-taking at sea]. 
 
 The Little French Lawyer, i. i. 
 
 Let us enjoy our purchase [= capture]. 
 
 lb. iv, 6. 
 
 Again, these two last are the only instances of the word 
 " purchase " in the play cited. 
 
 A partial collation of Beaumont and Fletcher's large 
 mass of work yields the following additional instances : 
 
 You make me more a slave still to your goodness. 
 And only live to purchase thanks to pay you. 
 
 A King and No King, iv, i. 
 [Can] his arms rust in ease 
 That bears the charge, and sees the honoured purchase 
 Ready to gild his valour ? 
 
 Thierry and Theodoret, iv, i . 
 I hear some noise : it may be new purchase [= booty]. 
 
 lb. V, I. 
 Here, you dull slaves : purchase, purchase ! the soul of the 
 rock, diamonds, sparkling diamonds ! 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY loi 
 
 Why, what remains but new nets for [= to effect] the purchase. 
 
 Valeniiniaii, \, i, end. 
 Let not this body . . . now be purchase 
 For slaves and base informers. 
 
 Id. i, 3. end. 
 Can any but a chastity serve Caesar, 
 And such a one the gods would kneel to purchase. 
 
 Id. iv, I. 
 I need no company to that, that children 
 Dare do alone, and slaves are proud to purchase. 
 
 Id. iv, 4. 
 To purchase fair revenge. 
 
 Id. V, 2. 
 What have I got by this now ? what's the purchsise ? 
 
 The Chances, i,i. 
 My holy health ... to purchase which . . . 
 
 Monsieur Thomas, v, 4. 
 I have purchased to m3rself, besides nune own undoing, the 
 ill opinion of my friends. 
 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle, iv, 3. 
 This sessions, purchased at your suit, Don Henrique, 
 Hath brought us hither. 
 
 The Spanish Curate, in, 3. 
 Grant he purchase 
 Precedency in the country. 
 
 The Elder Brother, i, i. 
 Oh, Honour I 
 How greedily men seek thee, and, once purchased. 
 How many enemies to man's peace bringst thou ! 
 
 The Prophetess, iii, 3. 
 
 The philological fact is that the sense of " acquisition," 
 " a thing got," is the fundamental meaning of the word 
 " purchase," of which the starting-point is the idea of the 
 chase (Fr. fourchasser), the product of hunting or foraging. 
 It is the idea of buying that is secondary, though that 
 has now become the normal force of the word. That is 
 to say, the so-called " legal " meaning of " acquisition of 
 property by one's personal action as distinct from inheri- 
 tance " is the original meaning, and is the likely sense of 
 the word in the whole feudal period. The meaning of 
 " buy " is merely an evolution from that, buying being 
 a common way of obtaining, a mode of " purchase." The 
 
102 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 fact that " purchase " still means " hold "—as in " get 
 a purchase on a rope " — shows the primary meaning 
 subsisting on one line of extension while it has ceased 
 on another. But down to the age of Shakespccire the 
 original and quasi-legal sense was normal. To begin 
 with, that use of the word in ordinary literature is 
 established as early as Chaucer. Professor Skeat there 
 assigns to the verb the meanings '' to procure or acquire, to 
 win, to buy, to promote, to contrive, to provide ; " and to 
 the noun the meanings " proceeds, gifts acquired, gain ; " 
 with the further sense of " conveyancing " in the form 
 " purchasing." * In the Canterbmy Tales we have : 
 
 His purcha3 was wel better than his rente ; 
 
 Prologue, 256. 
 
 and again : 
 
 My purchas is the effect of al my rente. 
 
 Frere's Tale, 1451- 
 
 Yet again, in another place, we have : 
 
 My purchas is better than my rent. 
 
 Romaunt of the Rose, 6837. 
 
 In Troilus and Criseyde also (iv, 557) we have : 
 
 Sin wel I wot I may her not purchAce 
 
 — in the sense of " obtain." And again in the Prologue 
 we have a secondary use (318-20) : 
 
 So greet a purchasour was nowher noon. 
 Al was fee symple to him in effect. 
 His purchasyng myghtd not been infect. 
 
 That is, he (the Sergeant) was a great conveyancer, 
 whose conveyancing could not be impugned. In The 
 Persone's Tale, in the phrase " for to purchasen many 
 earthly things (sent. 742), and in the Tale of Melibeus 
 (§ 55). in the phrase " they that loven and purchasen 
 
 * Prol. to Cant. Tales, 1. 320. Other scholars (see Glossary of 
 Globe ed.) assign the meanings " prosecuting " and " prosecutor " 
 in the case of the description of the Man of Lawe. Skeat's seems 
 the correct view. In the Frere's Tale, 1449, however, purchasing 
 means acquiring. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 103 
 
 peace," the meaning is clearly the primary one. We 
 have the word again in Langland : 
 
 And purchased him a pardon 
 
 A poena et a culpa 
 
 Manye wepten for joie 
 
 And preiseden Piers the Plowman 
 
 That purch£ised this bulle. 
 
 Vision of Piers Ploughman, 
 ed. Wright. 4469-70. 4S38-40. 
 — where the idea is not buying but obtaining. It has the 
 same force in the phrase "favour craftily purchasing " 
 in Roye's Rede me and be nott Wrothe (1528) and in 
 Sir Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort against 
 Tribulation (1534) : 
 
 If we might once purchase the grace to come to that point, 
 
 Dent's rep. with Utopia, p. 187 ; 
 
 and again, in the editor's preface to Latimer's Second 
 Sermon before Edward VI, the word is used in the alleged 
 " legal " sense, though the writer is ostensibly a foe to 
 lawyers : 
 
 Thou that purchasest so fast, to the utter undoing of the poor. 
 Sermons of Latimer, Dent's rep. p. 90. 
 
 Obviously this was the regtdar force of the term, and 
 it is in that sense that Latimer himself uses it : 
 
 A certain great man that had purchased much lands. 
 
 Last Sermon before King Edward, ed. cited, p. 240. 
 
 So in Roger Hutchinson : 
 
 Now they [who " were wont to . . . maintain schools and 
 houses of aims "] be purchasers and sellers-away of the same. 
 
 Epistle to Archbishop Cranmer ; Parker Soc. vol. of 
 Works, p. 4. 
 
 In theology the term is often used metaphorically with 
 
 the same force : e.g. 
 
 The everlasting heritage which he [Christ] hath purchased for us. 
 Trans, of Calvin on Ephesians, 15. fol. 146. verso. 
 
 A metaphorical use of the word, resting on the " legal " 
 
 sense, was in fact normal throughout Tudor literature ; 
 
 arid a dozen instances of it may be found in the early 
 
104 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 version (from the Italian) of the Phceniss^ of Exiripides 
 by Gascoigne and others under the title of Jocasta 
 (1566), It is common, again, in Spenser, in various 
 senses which all turn upon the alleged " legal " one : 
 
 For on his back a heavy load he baxe 
 Of nightly stelths and pillage severall 
 Which he had got abroad by purchas criminall. 
 
 Faerie Queene, B. I, C. iii, St. 16. 
 That [sword] shall I shortly purchase to your hand. 
 
 Id. B. II, C. iii, St. 18. 
 Made answere that the mayd of whom they spake 
 Was his owne purchase and his onely prize. 
 
 Id. B. VI. C xi, St. 12. 
 Sicker I hold him for a greater fon (fool) 
 That loves the thing he cannot purchase. 
 
 Shepheard's Calendar, 158-9. 
 
 Again in the prose dedication of Muiopotmos he has : 
 
 That honourable name which ye have by your brave deserts 
 purchast to yourself. 
 
 In Puttenham's prose this sense of the term is explicit : 
 
 No doubt the shepheard's . . . trade was the first act of lawful 
 acquisition or purchase, for at these da3rs robbery was a manner 
 of purchase. 
 
 Art of Poetrie, Arber's rep., p. 53. 
 
 That the word was in normal EUzabethan use in the 
 
 quasi-legal sense might be inferred from its occurring 
 
 twice metaphorically with such a meaning in Nicholas 
 
 Breton's Tom the Page's Song : 
 
 Faith ! she will say, you wicked page ! 
 I'll purchase you an heritage. 
 
 To purchase me an heritage. 
 Joys of an Idle Head, in A Flourish uponFancy, 1582. 
 Rep. in Arber's Spenser Anthology, 1899, p. 187. 
 
 In homiletic literature it has the same metaphorical 
 force : 
 
 Thereby purchase to himself . . . eternal damnation. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomic of Abuses, Collier's Rep. p. 37. 
 Again, p. 68. 
 
 And unless we are to suppose that all the dramatists 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 105 
 
 alike made their personages talk out of character — as 
 in efiect the legalists imply that Shakespeare did — we 
 must draw the same inference from their plays, for they 
 all introduce the word in the broad primary sense, and 
 this far more often than in the limited modem one : 
 
 He that will purchase things of greatest prize 
 Must conquer by his deeds, and not by words. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, ii, i. 
 My valour ever5rwhere shall purchase friends. 
 
 Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, IV, ii, 6. 
 To purchase Godhead, as did Hercules. 
 
 Id. ib. 1. 19. 
 To piu-chase fame to our posterities. 
 
 Id. Cornelia, v, 5. 
 His company hath purchased me ill friends. 
 
 Arden of Fever sham, v, i [twice]. 
 Jeron. How like you Don Horatio's spirit ? 
 What, doth it promise fair ? 
 
 K. of Spain. Ay, and no doubt his merit wDl purchase more. 
 First Part of Jeronimo [1603] Sc. i, 11. 17-19. 
 Sadoc. God save Lord Cusay. And direct his zeal 
 To purchase David's conquest 'gainst his son. 
 
 Peele, David and Bethsabe, iii, 2. 
 
 To purchase hearing with my lord the King. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Messenger. How many friends I purchase everywhere. 
 
 King Leir and his Three Daughters, Sc. 17. 
 That purchas'd kingdoms by your martial deeds. 
 
 Marlowe, I. Tamb. v, 2, end. 
 To purchase towns by treachery. 
 
 Id. Jew of Malta, v, 4. 
 He that will not when he may 
 When he desires shall surely purchase nay. 
 Greene, Alphonsus King of Arragon, v, ed. Dyce, p. 245. 
 
 Your pardon is already purchased. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 246. 
 
 Greene iises the word in the same way in his prose tales : 
 He thought no victuals to have their taste which were not 
 purchased by liis own sweat. 
 
 Id. Tale of Pcrimedes the Blacksmith [1588], 
 Works, ed. Grosart, vii, 12. 
 
io6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Thou may'pt practise virtue if thou take heed, or purchase 
 discredit if thou beest careless. 
 
 Id. Card of Fancy. Works, iv, 20. 
 
 and in his play James IV (v, 4) : 
 
 The crafty men have purchased great men's lands. 
 
 Jonson in his plays uses it many times : 
 
 I glory 
 More in the cunning purchase of my wealth 
 Than in the glad possession. 
 
 Jonson, Volpone, i, i, near beginning. 
 A diamond, plate, chequines. Good morning's purchase. 
 [In this case— acquisitions by gift]. 
 
 Id. ib. near end of Scene. 
 Do you two pack up all the goods and purchase. 
 [In this case = cheaters' booty]. 
 
 Ib. iv, 4. 
 
 I think I must be enforced to purchase me another page. 
 
 Id. Cynthia's Revels, ii, i. 
 I will not rob you of him, nor the purchase. 
 
 Id. The Magnetic Lady, v, 6, end. 
 Wittipol. I will share. Sir, 
 
 In your sports only, nothing in your purchase [in tiiis case ^ gains]. 
 
 The Devil is an Ass, iii, i. 
 This second blessing of your eyes 
 Which now I've purchased. 
 
 Ib. i, I. 
 Purchase to themselves rebuke and shame. 
 
 Sejanus, iii, i. 
 
 (Here the sense is ". attained to." Wittipol would not 
 tell the lady that he has bought the sight of her.) 
 
 No less common is the word in Webster and his col- 
 laborators : 
 
 I will not purchase by thee [Lavema] but to eat. 
 
 Webster and Rowley, A Cure for a Cuckold, ii, i. 
 And will redeem myself with purchase [= booty]. 
 
 Id. ii, 2. 
 Of all my being, fortunes, and poor fame 
 (If I have purchased any) . . . 
 You have been the sole creatress. 
 
 Id. iii, 3- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 107 
 
 I made a purchase lately, and in that 
 I did estate the child — 
 Joint-purchaser in all the land I bought. 
 
 Id. iv, 1. 
 Ignorance, when it hath purchased honour. 
 It cajinot wield it. 
 
 Webster, Duchess of Malfi, ii, 3. 
 Were all of his mind, to entertain no suits 
 But such they thought were honest, sure our lawyers 
 Would not purchase half so fast. 
 
 Id. The Devil's Law Case, iv, i. 
 They do observe I grew to infinite purchase 
 The left-hand way. 
 
 Id, iii, I. 
 That noblemen shall come with cap and knee 
 To purchase a night's lodging of their wives. 
 
 Id. iii, 2. 
 
 In the same sense we have it in Randolph : 
 
 Here is a conquest purchas'd without blood. 
 
 The Jealous Lovers, i, 10. 
 
 In Thomas HejTwood the word is particularly frequent : 
 
 I'll gain her, or in her fair quest 
 Purchase my soul free and immortal rest. 
 
 He3rwood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, vi, i. 
 I have a trade. 
 And in mjrself a means to purchase wealth. 
 
 Id. The Foure Premises of London, i, i . 
 They are all on fire 
 To purchase [— win booty] from the Spaniard. 
 
 Id. The Fair Maid of the West, i, i . 
 Now could your lady purchase 
 Their pardon from the king. 
 
 [Here the force is, " obtain by favour "]. 
 
 Id. ib. v, 1. 
 I'll purchase 't with a danger. 
 Id. Part II. Fair Maid of the West. Pearson's 
 He5rwood, ii, 349. 
 
 Purchased by this bold answer. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 3SO. 
 Show me the way 
 To gain this royal purchase. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 350. 
 
io8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Not to do it 
 May purchase liis displeasure. 
 
 Id. ih.^. 351. 
 
 Here the word is used in the quasi-legal sense four tini( 
 in three successive pages. But it constantly recurs i 
 the same general sense, as distinct from that of bujang. 
 To purchase to yourself a thrifty son. 
 
 Id. The English Traveller, iv, 6. 
 Could I have purchased houses at that rate, 
 I had meant to have bought all London. 
 [Here the sense is " acquired by fraud "]. 
 
 Id. ih. 
 Your grace may purchase glory from above, 
 And entire love from all your people's hearts. 
 
 Id. If you know not me you know nobody. Pt. 
 Pearson's Hejnvood, i, 225. 
 When my poor wife and children cry for bread. 
 They stiU must cry till these [hands and spade] have purchast il 
 
 Id. ib. Part II, ed. cited, p. 304. 
 My love to her may purchase me his love. 
 
 Id. Pti I of King Edward IV, ed. cited, i, 129. 
 Jupiter. Hadst thou asked love, gold, service, Empiry, 
 This sword had purchased for Callisto all. 
 
 Id. The Golden Age, ii, i, ed. cited, iii, 26. 
 I'll wake her 
 Unto new life. This purchase I must win. 
 
 Id. ib. iv, I, p. 68. 
 Saturn. Re-purchast and re-lost by Jupiter. 
 
 Id. ib. V, I, p. 7S. 
 I'll try conclusions. 
 And see if I can purchase it with blows. 
 
 Id. ib. p. j6. 
 Pluto. Ceres nor Jove, nor all the Gods above. 
 Shall rob me this rich purchase [Proserpine]. 
 
 Id. The Silver Age, iii, vol. cited, p. 137. 
 Hercules. We take but what our valour purchast us. 
 
 Id. The Brazen Age, i, i, p. 177- 
 Atreus. Without some honour purchast on this Boar. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 188. 
 Meleager. To have purchased honour in this hasty quest. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 189. 
 Thou hast purchast honour and renown enough. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 192- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 109 
 
 Jason. Rename all Greece 
 
 By the rich purchase of the Colchian fleece. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 203. 
 Hercules. Now is the rich and precious fleece 
 
 By Jason's sword repurchast. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 218. 
 Medea. To redeem the fleece. 
 
 And it repurchase with your tragic deaths. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 2 19. 
 Hercules. She is the warlike purchase of thy sword. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 225. 
 And by our deeds repurchase our renown. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 246. 
 
 Here we have the word used nine times in one play, and 
 only in the primary sense. For Heywood, in fact, 
 "purchase" normally means acquisition otherwise than 
 by inheritance or buying ; and there is no inference open 
 save that this was a normal sense of the word in his day. 
 
 But we have it also in Dekker : 
 
 That would have purchased sin alone to himself. 
 
 Dekker. The Honest Whore, Pt. I, ii, i. 
 
 The purchase [booty] is rich. 
 
 Ib. Pt. II, iv. I. 
 It shall concern thee and thy love's purchase. 
 The Witch of Edmonton, by Rowley, Dekker, Ford, &c. iii, i. 
 
 Of this as of other " legal " uses of terms we have 
 frequent examples in the prose of Nashe : 
 
 It may be that he meaneth about purcheising [acquiring prop- 
 erty] as he hath done. 
 
 First part of Pasquil's Apology. Works, ed. 
 McKerrow, i, 128. 
 
 That recantation purchased his liberty. 
 
 Four Letters Confuted. Vol. cited, p. 297. 
 
 Their purchased [= granted by the King] prerogatives. 
 
 Nashe' s Lenten Stuff, ed. cited, iii, 165. 
 
 Voyages of Purchase of Refusals. 
 
 Id. p. 180. 
 
 Men that have no means to purchase credit with their prince. 
 
 Id. p. 218. 
 
no THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 In Massinger the usage abounds : 
 
 Style not that courtship, madam, which is only 
 Purchased on your peirt. 
 
 A New Way to Pay Old Debts, i, 2. 
 
 By that fair name I in the wars have purchased. 
 
 Id. iii, I. 
 Purchased with his blood that did oppose me. 
 
 Id. iii, 2. 
 Honour 
 By virtuous wa5rs achieved, and bravely purchased. 
 
 Id. iv, 1. 
 I can do twenty [tricks] neater, if you please, 
 To purchase and grow rich. 
 
 Id. v, near end. 
 the knowledge of 
 A future sorrow, which, if I find out, 
 My present ignorance were a cheap purchase. 
 
 The Picture, i, i. 
 this bubble honour . . . 
 With the loss of limbs or life is, in my judgment. 
 Too dear a purchase. 
 
 Id. i, 2. 
 There are other toys about you the same way purchased 
 [= received in gift]. 
 
 Id. iii, 6. 
 I would not lose this purchase [o^gain]. 
 
 The City Madam, v, i. 
 This felicity, not gained 
 By vows to saints above, and much less purchased 
 By thriving industry. 
 
 Id. ib. V, 3. 
 I shall break 
 If at this rate [by marriage] I purchase you. 
 
 Id. The Guardian, i, i. 
 Here purchase the reward that was propounded. 
 
 Id. The Virgin Martyr, v, near end. 
 The danger in the purchase of the prey. 
 
 Id. The Unnatural Combat, ii, i. 
 You have purchased 
 This honour at a high price [moral]. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 My scrip, my tar-box, hook, and coat, will prove 
 But a thin purchase [—booty]. 
 
 Id, The Bashful Lover, iii, i. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY iii 
 
 I would purchase 
 My husbeuid by such benefits. 
 
 Id. ib. iii, 2, near end. 
 I will practise 
 All arts for your deliverance, and that purchased . . . 
 
 Id. The Bondman, v, 2. 
 And it is frequent in Chapman : 
 
 Borrowing 
 With thee is purchase. 
 
 Byron's Conspiracy, i,i. 
 My purchased honours. 
 
 The Admiral of France, ii, 2. 
 Consume 
 All he hath purchased. 
 
 All Fools, i, 1. 
 While we abroad fight for new Kingdoms' purchase. 
 
 Revenge for Honour, ii, i. 
 So much I prize the sweetness 
 Of that unvalued purchase. 
 
 Id. i V, I . 
 Then your purchase holds. 
 
 The Ball, ii, 2. 
 We have it in the anonymous play Nero [1624] : 
 
 That heady and adventurous crew 
 That go to lose their own to purchase but 
 The breath of others and the common voice. i, 31 
 
 and in Henry Porter's Two Angry Women of Abington : 
 What shall I do purchase company ? (v, i) 
 
 It seems unnecessary to carry the comparison further. 
 The primary and quasi-" legal " sense of " purchase," 
 so far from being peculiar to Shakespeare; is far more 
 common than the other in the dramas of other writers 
 in his and the next generation. And so absolutely normal 
 was this use of the word that it enters into the old 
 rhymed version of the Psalms, authorised for use in the 
 chmrches in 1645 : 
 
 The swallow also for herself 
 
 Hath purchased a nest. Ps. Ixxxiv, 3.* 
 
 * Hopkins' sixteenth-century version of this Psalm, still 
 retained in Scotljind. Tate and Brady (1696) give a changed 
 rendering. 
 
112 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 When therefore we find the word used by Bacon (Essay 
 OF Honour and Reputation) we are not reading a 
 legalism imposed on belles lettres by a lawyer, but a current 
 English word used in its current meaning.^ So widely 
 was that meaning established that we find it as late as 
 1727 in a preface of Bishop Warburton's : 
 
 For now the Invention of Printing hath made it [the usage of 
 dedications] a Purchase for the Vulgar. 
 
 A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes 
 of Prodigies and Miracles, 1727, ded. p. vii. 
 
 For the rest, Mr. Grant White's general case is obviously 
 as void as that of Lord Campbell. To say no more of 
 his divagation over the term " purchase," it is astonishing 
 that such a scholar, who must have had a general acquaint- 
 ance with the EUzabethan and Stuart drama, should find 
 evidence of special and technical knowledge of conveyanc- 
 ing in the bare use of such terms and phrases " fine and 
 recovery," " indenture," " tenure," " double voucher," 
 "fee simple," "remainder," "reversion," and "for- 
 feiture." A perusal of two plays of Massinger's might 
 have led the critic to cancel his whole thesis. In A New 
 Way to Pay Old Debts we have, in addition to the 
 passages already cited, this swarm of legal terms : 
 
 On forfeiture of their licences. 
 
 Makes forfeiture of his breakfast. 
 
 On the forfeit of your favour. 
 
 Sue in forma pauperis. 
 
 Put it to arbitrament. 
 
 Come upon you for security. 
 
 By mortgage or by statute. 
 
 You had it in trust, which if you do discharge, 
 Surrendering the possession, you shall ease 
 Yourself and me of chargeable suits in law. 
 
 ^ Bacon uses the word in its modern sense thrice in the Essay 
 Of Usury. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 113 
 
 If thou canst forswear 
 Thy hand and seal, and make a forfeit of 
 Thy ears to the pillory. 
 
 Indented, I confess, and labels, too, 
 But neither wax nor words ! 
 
 There is a statute for you. 
 
 I know thou art 
 A public notary, and such stand in law 
 For a dozen witnesses : the deed being drawn too . . . and 
 
 delivered 
 When thou wert present, will make good my title. 
 
 Your suit is granted 
 And you loved for the motion. 
 
 In The City Madam, by the same plajnvright, we have 
 these : 
 
 I can make my wife a jointure of such lands too 
 As are not encumbered : no annuity 
 Or statute lying on them. 
 
 His bond three times since forfeited. 
 
 Ten thousand pounds apiece I'll make their portions. 
 And after my decease it shall be double. 
 Provided you assure them, for their jointures. 
 Eight hundred pounds per annum, and entail 
 A thousand more upon the heirs male 
 Begotten on their bodies. 
 
 The forfeiture of a bond. 
 
 His whole estate 
 In lands and leases, debts and present monies. 
 With all the movables he stood possess'd of: 
 
 Cancel all the forfeited bonds I sealed to. 
 
 I will likewise take 
 The extremity of your mortgage, and the forfeit 
 Of your several bonds : the use and principal 
 Shall not serve. 
 
 From almost no play of Shakespeare can there be cited 
 so many " legalisms " as occm* in either of these two of 
 Massinger. But Massinger is not singular. We have 
 already noted dozens of legalisms in Jonson, Dekker, 
 Heywood, and Chapman. 
 
 H 
 
114 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 In Lilly's Mother Bombie alone I find some thirty 
 " legal " allusions : 
 
 A good evidence to prove the fee simple of your daughter's folly, 
 
 I convey a contract: 
 
 Impannelled in a jury. 
 
 Carrying the quest to consult. 
 
 A deed of gift. 
 
 Witnesses to their contract. 
 
 Let us join issue with them. 
 
 He arrests you at my suit for a horse. 
 
 Sergeant, wreak thine office on him. 
 
 Nay, let him be bailed. 
 
 I'll enter into a statute marchant to see it answered. But if 
 thou wilt have bonds, then shalt have a bushelful. 
 
 Thou bound in a statute marchant ? A brown thread will bind 
 thee fast enough. But if you will be content all four jointly to 
 enter into a bond, I will withdraw the action. 
 
 A scrivener's shop hangs to a sergeant's mace like a bur to a 
 frieze coat. 
 
 You must take a note of a bond. 
 
 The scrivener cannot keep his pen out of the pot : every goblet 
 is an ink-horn. 
 
 I, such as they cry at the 'size$, a work in issues. 
 
 Where did I consent ? When ? What witness ? 
 
 Our good wills being asked, which needed not, we gave them, 
 which booted not. 
 
 Wast thou privy to this practice ? 
 
 Thou shalt be punished as principal. 
 
 Let the conveyance run as we agreed. 
 
 You convey cleanly indeed, if cozenage be clean dealing. 
 
 You shall presently be contracted. 
 
 Upon submission escape the punishments 
 
 Thy fact is pardoned, though the law would see it punished. 
 
 I was content to take a bond jointly of them all. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 115 
 
 Sealed me an obligation, nothing to the purpose. 
 
 By this bond you can demand nothing. 
 
 I have his acquittance : let him sue his bond 
 
 With such a noverint as Cheapside can show none such. 
 
 Every one of these phrases would have been certified by 
 Lord Campbell and Senator Davis as a proof of legal 
 knowledge had they found it in Shakespeare, and in 
 no Shakespearean play can they find half as many. Was 
 Lilly then a lawyer ? If Shakespeare's plays exhibit a 
 professional knowledge of conveyancing, what inference, 
 once more, are we to draw from tMs series of conveyancer's 
 phrases in a single play of Ben Jonson's ? — 
 
 The thing is for recovery of drown'd land 
 Whereof the crown's to have a moiety 
 If it be owner ; else the crown and owners 
 To share that moiety, and the recoverers 
 To enjoy the t'other moiety for their charge. 
 
 The Devil is an Ass, ii, i. 
 He keeps more stir 
 For that same petty sum, than for your bond 
 Of six, and statute of eight hundred. 
 
 Then we grant out our process, which is diverse 
 Either by chartel. Sir, or ore tenus. 
 
 Id. ii, 3. 
 Id. iii, I. 
 
 Have your deed drawn presently, 
 And leave a blank to put in your feoffees 
 One, two, or more, as you see cause. 
 
 Id. iii, 2. 
 Get the feoffment drawn, with a letter of attorney 
 For livery and seisin. 
 
 But, sir, you mean not to make him feoffee. 
 
 Sir Paul Eitherside willed me give you caution 
 Whom you did make feoffee ; for 'tis the trust 
 Of your whole state. 
 
 He has a quarrel to carry, and has caused 
 A deed of feoffment of his whole estate 
 To be drawn yonder. 
 
 Id. iv, 2. 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Id. iv, 3. 
 
ii6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 I am ready 
 For process now, Sir ; this is publication. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 By which means you were 
 Not compos mentis when you made your feoffment. 
 
 Id. V, 3. 
 Move in a court of equity. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 In Jonson, as in LiUy, we have one of the law terms 
 erroneously ascribed by Grant White to Shakespeare : 
 
 I'll be his Statute staple, Statute-marchant 
 Or what he please. 
 
 The Staple of News, iii, i. 
 We find it in Nashe : 
 
 ; ; . The Divell used to lend money upon pawnes, or anything, 
 and would let one for a need have a thousand pounds upon a 
 Statute Marchant of his soul, or . . . would trust him upon a 
 bill of his hand. . . . 
 
 Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell. Works, i, 161. 
 
 It occurs also in at least two stories of Greene's : 
 
 Lends him money and takes a fair statute-marchant of his 
 lands before a judge. 
 
 Life and Death of Ned Browne. Works, xi, 30. 
 
 He must bind over his lands in a statute marchant or staple. 
 Quip for an Upstart Courtier. Works, xi, 277. 
 
 And this particular law term occurs in one of the old 
 morality plays : 
 
 Bounde in statute marchante. 
 
 Impatient Poverty (1560), Rep. 1909, 1. 191, 
 
 —with other legalisms such as " surety," " bill of sale," 
 '' writ of privilege," and the maxim that " the law is 
 indifferent to every person " (1. 6)— all going to show 
 that legal phraseology and discussion pervaded Eliza- 
 bethan drama from its earliest stages. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ARGXBIENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY : 
 MR. RUSHTON ; SENATOR DAVIS ; MR. CASTLE 
 
 § I. Rushton 
 
 A DISTINCTION should be drawn between the 
 argumentation of Mr. W. L. Rushton and that 
 of the later advocates, Baconian or other, of 
 the theory that the Shakespearean pla}^ ex- 
 hibit special knowledge of law. Mr. Rxishton, as has been 
 noted above, preceded and apparently primed Campbell ; 
 and throughout his series of small books on Shakespearean 
 questions he exhibits at once a wider literary learning 
 and a somewhat soimder judgment than are to be seen 
 in the other writers with whom we have to deal. His 
 Shakespeare's Euphuism is a painstaking performance, 
 the work of an industrious literary antiquary. Yet there 
 is in all his work an element of laborious trifling, and he is 
 always somewhat indiscriminate in his citation of parallels. 
 In so far as his case for Shakespeare's knowledge of 
 law is appropriated and embodied in Campbell's, it has 
 been disposed of in our examination of that. He himself, 
 however, never committed Campbell's foUy of claiming 
 for the law of the plays an entire freedom from error. 
 As he puts it in his laconic way, taking his revenge for 
 plagiarism : 
 
 We all know that Lord Campbell was a lawyer of great ex- 
 perience, yet in his book he has made several mistakes in law ; 
 how then could any errors in law which I might show in Shake- 
 speare's works aSord conclusive evidence that Shakespeare was 
 not a lawyer ? * 
 
 * Appendix B to Shakespeare's Testamentary Language, 1869, 
 p. S3 ; Shakespeare's Legal Maxims, 1907, p. 12. 
 
 117 
 
ii8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, Rushton had undertaken 
 in his Shakespeare a Lawyer " to show that Shake- 
 speare had acquired a general knowledge of the principles 
 and practice of the Law of Real Property, of the Common 
 Law and Criminal Law, that he was familiar with the 
 exact letter of the Statute Law, and that he used law 
 terms correctly." Of the value of that thesis we have 
 been able to judge in our examination of Campbell ; and 
 it need but be added that even a generally " correct " 
 use of law terms by an Elizabethan dramatist has been 
 seen to be no warrant for supposing him a lawyer, since 
 it can be predicated more largely of Jonson and Webster, 
 to name no others, than of Shakespeare. When, for 
 instance, Rushton argues that Macbeth's 
 
 But yet I'll make assurance double sure. 
 And take a bond of fate, 
 
 " refers not to a single but to a conditional bond, under 
 or by virtue of which the principal sum was recoverable," ^ 
 he says nothing to the purpose. In his later work, 
 Shakespeare Illustrated by the Lex Scripta {1870); 
 the augmentation is equally nugatory, in so far as it is 
 not a mere "illustration" of the text. The first item 
 is that in Suffolk's " praemmiire " speech in Henry VIII 
 (iii, 2) the phrase about forfeiting goods, lands, tenements, 
 &c., and being " out of the king's protection," is " the 
 exact letter of the statute law " — an assertion which 
 carries us nowhere.* The last item is the proposition 
 that when Speed, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona 
 (ii, i) says first " do you not perceive her jest ? " and 
 then " did you perceive her earnest? " he uses " perceive " 
 first in its usual meaning, but the second time in the sense 
 of a statute phrase, " take, perceive, and enjoy." If 
 
 * Shakespeare a Lawyer, 1858, p. 19. 
 
 * I do not here stress the fact that the speech in question 
 belongs to the share assigned to Fletcher in Henry VIII by the 
 critics. It stands in any case for no special knowledge. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 119 
 
 this be " illustration " of anything, it is not of the thesis 
 that the plays are written by a lawyer. 
 
 Of more significance is Rushton's more recent thesis 
 that Shakespeare's use of legal maxims tells of legal train- 
 ing. It is put with comparative circumspection, and 
 partly in bar of the Baconian view. " Although Bacon's 
 legal maxims are twenty-five in number," he writes, " I 
 have not found any of them in Shakespeare's plays ; 
 but a portion of one of them. . . . 
 
 Sententia interlocutaiia revocare potest, definitiva non potest, 
 
 expresses the law to which ShaJcespeare refers in the 
 Comedy of Errors (i, i) : 
 
 And passed sentence cannot be recalled. 
 
 To impute legal knowledge on the strength of that 
 commonplace, however, is but to continue the idle mysti- 
 fication which we have been occupied in clearing up. 
 And the case is little better when Rushton puts his point 
 that Shakespeare in his use of legal maxims translates 
 correctly from the Latin : 
 
 In the plays of Ben Jonson, George Chapman and other 
 dramatists of their time, legal maxims are to be seen in Latin, 
 Shakespeare never quotes legal maxims in Latin, but he gives 
 correct translations of them which are so embodied in his verse 
 and prose that they have not the appearance of quotations. . . . 
 Shakespeare's correct translations of legal maxims are, I think, 
 the only satisfactory evidence we have of his knowledge of Latin.^. 
 
 Here the case for the dramatist's legal knowledge is in 
 effect abandoned, and the question shifted to that of his 
 scholarship, with the admission that the evidence usually 
 cited on that head is not satisfactory. If Ben Jonson 
 and George Chapman, who are not lawyers, admittedly 
 cite legal maxims in Latin, what is to be proved from 
 Shakespeare's citation of any in English, when the same 
 thing is done by Heywood and Massinger, who also were 
 
 1 Shakespeare's Legal Maxims, p. 9. 
 
120 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 not laM\yers ? Massinger (The Fatal Dowry, i, 2) 
 writes, quite " correctly " : 
 
 though it be a maxim in our laws, 
 All suits die with the person. 
 
 Is he then not to be credited with Shakespearean lawyer- 
 ship ? 
 
 The instances given from Shakespeare by Rushton are 
 sufl&cient to entitle us once more to dismiss the whole 
 case : 
 
 I now give one example of Shakespeare's, correct translation 
 of the Latin maxims, and of the good verse (!) he makes of it : 
 
 Dormiunt aliquando leges, moriuntur nunquam 
 (The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept), 
 
 where the verbs dormior and morior in Latin are represented (!) 
 by the verbs sleep and die in English.* 
 
 It is not clear why we are not further informed that leges 
 is represented by " law." The whole point is a futility. 
 Shakespeare was citing a legal commonplace which must 
 have been familiar to thousands of laymen ; as he was 
 when he made Portia say : 
 
 To offend and judge sure distinct offices. 
 
 Merchant of Venice, ii, 9 ; 
 or Olivia say : 
 
 both the plaintiff and the judge. 
 
 Twelfth Night, v, i. 
 
 Rushton gravely cites these simple utterances, with 
 Cranmer's 
 
 I shall both find your lordship judge and juror, 
 
 Henry VIII, v, 2, 
 
 as standing for knowledge of the legal maxims : 
 
 Nemo debet esse judex in sua propria causa, 
 and 
 
 Ad questionem facti non respondent judices ; 
 Ad questionem legis non respondent juratores. 
 
 One can but patiently put the old questions. When 
 1 Work cited, p. 10. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 121 
 
 Massinger makes Alonso in The Bashful Lover (ii, 7) 
 say: 
 
 No man's a faithful judge in his own cause,* 
 
 was he drawing upon a professional knowledge of law ? 
 When Greene in one of his stories wrote : " They both 
 agreed I should be judge and juror in this controversy " 
 (Quip for an Upstart Courtier : Works, xi, 229) did he 
 prove himself a trained lawyer? Or did Rowley and 
 Dekker do so when they made characters say : 
 
 You are in effect both judge and jury yourselves, 
 
 A Cure for a Cuckold, iv, i ; 
 Thou my evidence art. 
 
 Jury and judge ? 
 
 The Witch of Edmonton, iv. 2. 
 
 A good many thousand laymen have .in their time 
 remarked that " Possession is nine points of the law " 
 without expecting to be reckoned experts for it; but 
 inasmuch as we have in King John (i, i) the lines : 
 
 King J. Our strong possession and our right for us. 
 Elinor. Your strong possession much more than your right, 
 
 our antiquary would have us see in them a translation 
 of the legal maxim : 
 
 In aequali jure melior est conditio possidentis. 
 
 And when Hamlet says, unpretentiously enough, 
 
 Man and wife is one flesh, 
 
 it is held to stand for the canonical knowledge that 
 
 Vir et uxor sunt quasi unica persona, quia caro una, et sanguis 
 uniis. 
 
 So much for the last stages of the first attempt to prove 
 " Shakespeare a lawyer." 
 
 § 2. Davis 
 
 We need spend little time over the kindred performance 
 of Senator Cushman Davis, who in his work The Law 
 * Cp. The City Madam, iii, 2. 
 
122 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 IN Shakespeare does but eke out the method and matter 
 of Campbell and Rushton with a multitude of more trivial 
 details. Like Campbell, he finds that Cade's talk of 
 parchment, wax, seals, the killing of lawyers, and the 
 charge against the clerk of Chatham, '.! are expressions 
 such as a lawyer would naturally put in the mouth of a 
 brutal and ignorant insurgent " ; and with Campbell he 
 sees recondite legal knowledge in the alleged allusion to 
 the mercheta mulierum, though he seems to ascribe it to 
 the rebel and not to the dramatist : " Cade undoubtedly 
 had this atrocious custom in his mind." I 
 
 Like the Lord Chancellor, the Senator does not ask 
 whether the lawyer-dramatist could or could not expect 
 the audience, devoid of legal training, to appreciate the 
 allusions ; and he makes nothing of the fact that they 
 are all in the pre-Shakespearean play. When, again. 
 Cade speaks of being " seized for a stray for entering his 
 fee-simple without leave," we are simply assured that 
 he " uses technical language." * It should be suitably 
 acknowledged that in the phrase : 
 
 I here entail the crown, 
 
 3 Henry VI, i, i, 
 
 the learned Senator is scrupulous enough to confess that 
 the expression is inaccurate, inasmuch as there is needed 
 the use of the term " body " "to make it a fee-tail."' 
 But as against this stand for technical . exactitude, we 
 have from him a multitude of claims for legal knowledge 
 where even Campbell would have blenched at the sugges- 
 tion. Thus in the first scene of Coriolanus the words 
 verdict, statutes, act, and repeal, are all cited as displays 
 of legal knowledge, the word edicts being unintelligibly 
 ignored. Elsewhere he makes " legal " capital of such 
 words as arrest, arrested, abjure, appdlant, avouch, addition 
 (of name), bond, cases, depose, earnest, " execution done 
 
 ^ The Law in Shakespeare, St. Paul, U.S.A., 1884, pp. 195-7. 
 2 Id. p. 198. 8 j^ p 200. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 123 
 
 on Cawdor," matter, " made good," indenture, object; 
 tenor, Sec. Sec. It may suifice to say that on the Senator's 
 principles every Elizabethan dramatist may be pro- 
 novmced a lawyer without further research. 
 
 That some of the other dramatists do display similar 
 legal knowledge he appears to be aware, herein transcend- 
 ing Campbell. But the knowledge only moves him to the 
 assertion that Ben Jonson is " not so precise in his use 
 of legal terms or in reports of legal proceedings " as is 
 Shakespeare, and that in Beaumont and Fletcher, though 
 both were lawyers, " we can find no such disposition or 
 facility in the use of law terms or the procedure of the 
 courts." 1 The last proposition may be left to work its 
 effect on readers who have had in view the Baconian 
 thesis that it was lawyership that inspired the alleged 
 lawyerism of the plays. The first statement is simply 
 false. As we have seen, Jonson uses a multitude of legsJ 
 expressions of a more technical character than any used 
 by Shakespeare; and his treatment of legal procedure 
 is realistic where Shakespeare's is merely romantic. On 
 the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice the Senator 
 pronounces that " The whole of this exquisite scene is 
 forensic. The author's mind, in its employment of legal 
 terms, has, like the dyer's hand, been subdued to what 
 it works in." * On that particular folly, the reader may 
 be referred to what has been said in the previous chapter. 
 But the Senator's words might with fair propriety be 
 applied to the mimicry of legal procedure in Ben Jonson; 
 as here : 
 
 Pru. Nor murmur her pretences : master Lovel, 
 For so your libel here, or bill of complaint 
 Exhibited, in our high court of sovereignty. 
 At this fiist hour of our reign, declares 
 Against this noble lady, a disrespect 
 You have conceived, if not received, from her. 
 
 Host. Received : so the charge lies in our bill. 
 
 Pru. We see it, his learned counsel, leave your plaining. 
 
 ^ The Law in Shakespeare, pp. 52-3. '^ Id. p. 116. 
 
124 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 We that do love our justice above all 
 
 Our other attributes ... do here enjoin . . 
 
 Host. Good! 
 
 Pru. Charge, will, and command 
 Her ladyship, pain of our high displeasure. 
 And the committing an extreme contempt 
 Unto the court, our crown and dignity. . . . 
 To entertain you for a pair of hours. . . . 
 To give you all the titles, all the privileges 
 The freedoms, favours, rights, she can bestow. . 
 Or can be expected, from a lady of honour 
 Or quality, in discourse, access, address. . . . 
 
 For each hour a kiss 
 To be ta'en freely, fully, and legally 
 Before us in our court here, and our presence. 
 
 The New Inn, ii, 2. 
 
 Pru. Here set the hour ; but first produce the parties, 
 And clear the court : the time is now of price: . . . 
 
 Ferret. Oyez, oyez, oyez. 
 
 Trundle. Os^ez, oyez, oyez. 
 
 Ferret [Trundle repeating each line"]. 
 Whereas there hath been awarded — 
 By the queen regent of love — 
 In this high court of sovereignty — 
 Two special hours of address — 
 To Herbert Lovel, appellant — 
 Against the lady Frampul, defendant — 
 Herbert Lovel come into the court — 
 Make challenge to thy first hour — 
 And save thee and thy bail — 
 
 [Enter Lady Frampul, and takes her place on the other 5t(fe.] 
 
 Host. She makes a noble and a just appearance. 
 Set it down likewise, and how arm'd she comes. 
 
 Pru. Usher of Love's court, give them both their oath 
 According to the form, upon Love's naissfil. 
 
 Host. Arise, and lay your hands upon the book. 
 
 Herbert Lovel, appellant, and Lady Frances Frampul, de- 
 fendant, you shall swear upon the liturgy of Love, Ovid de 
 arte amandi, that you neither have, nor will have, nor in any wise 
 bear about you, thing or things, pointed or blunt, within these 
 lists, other than what are natural and allowed by the court : 
 no inchanted arms or weapons, stones of virtue, herb of grace, 
 charm, character, spell, philtre, or other power than Love's 
 only, and the justness of your cause. So help you Love, his 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 125 
 
 mother, and the contents of this book. Kiss it. [Lovel kisses 
 the book.] Return onto your spats. — Crier, bid silence. 
 Ferret [Trundle repeating] 
 
 In the name of the sovereign of Love — 
 
 Notice is given by the court — 
 
 To the appellant and defendant — 
 
 That the first hour of address proceeds — 
 
 And Love save the sovereign — 
 
 Every man or woman keep silence, pain of imprisonment. . . . 
 
 {Conclusion] 
 
 Lady F. Prue, adjourn the court. 
 
 Pru. Cry. Trundle. 
 
 Trund. Oyez. 
 Any man or woman that hath any personal attendance 
 To give unto the court : keep the second hour. 
 And Love save the sovereign ! Id. iii, 2. 
 
 All this in two scenes of one play. For more matter of 
 the same order of realistic parody, see Cynthia's Revels, 
 V, 2 ; Every Man Out of His Humour, iii, i ; The 
 EOETASTER, V, I ; The Silent Woman, v, i ; to say 
 nothing of the Induction to Bartholomew Fair and 
 the trial scene in Volpone. Could they have ioxmd a 
 fraction of it in Shakespeare, Lord Campbell and Senator 
 Davis would have thankfully dropped half the rest of 
 their case ; and the latter would have been more sure 
 than ever that the dramatist knew more law than 
 Beatmiont and Fletcher. As it is, he is satisfied that 
 Shakespeare must have had a hand in the play Sir John 
 Oldcastu;, because " the scene where Harpool forces the 
 Sumner to eat the citation he has come to serve, and the 
 other legal phrases, taken together, seem to indicate this."'. 
 The Senator is tmaware that just such a scene occurs in 
 George a-Greene, which some deny to Robert Greene, 
 but none has yet assigned to Shakespeare ; and seeing 
 that just such an escapade is narrated 0/ Greene by his 
 friend Nashe," the legalist's simple solution of the author- 
 ship of the other play, it is to be feared, will not be found 
 
 i The Law in Shakespeare, pp. 51-52- 
 
 * Four Letters Confuted^ Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 271. 
 
126 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 decisive. And as Sir John Oldcastle undoubtedly 
 contains legal matter such as (i, i) : 
 
 The King's justices, perceiving what public mischief may 
 ensue this private quarrel, in his majesty's name do straitly 
 charge and command all persons, of what degree soever, to 
 depart this city of Hereford, except such as are bound to give 
 attendance at this assize, and that no man presume to wear 
 any weapon, especially Welsh-hooks and forest-bills — and that 
 the Lord Powis do presently disperse and discharge his retinue, 
 and depart the city in the King's peace, he and his followers, 
 on pain of imprisonment, 
 
 we are left to wonder whether Drayton; Hathway, 
 Munday, and Wilson, to whom Fleay ascribes the play, 
 were all lawyers like their dramatist brethren. 
 
 Characteristically, Senator Davis finds the best ground 
 for ascribing Act I of The Two Noble Kinsmen to 
 Shakespeare in the fact that it includes the phrases, 
 " the tenor of thy speech," " prorogue," " fee," " moiety," 
 and " seal the promise." 1 He can thus be thankful for 
 small mercies ; but if he had found in any alleged or 
 putative Shakespearean play such a trial-scene as that 
 in Massinger's The Old Law, of which he declares that 
 " as a forensic representation " it " is crude, lacks detail, 
 and displays none of that pomp of justice which all courts 
 of any dignity exhibit,"* he would probably have seen 
 it with other eyes. Massinger certainly jdelds many less 
 scanty crops of quasi-legal terminology than that culled 
 by the Senator from Act I of the Two Noble Kinsmen. 
 
 His treatise, in fine, is a piece of indiscriminate and 
 uncritical special pleading, serving only to prove how 
 a fixed idea can hypnotise judgment. Without adopting 
 the Baconian theory, the Senator has taken up a stand- 
 point which equally excludes any rational conception of 
 dramatic art. For him the author of the plays is a writer 
 obsessed with legal knowledge, and constantly bent on 
 embodying it in the plays, to the extent of grafting it 
 all over his recast of the old Hamlet, " all with the 
 ^ The Law in Shakespeare, p. 52. * Id. p. 54. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 127 
 
 greatest painstaJdng to be full and accurate " '—as if 
 the end of drama for Shakespeare were the communication 
 of legal lore. As we have seen, the entire conception is 
 a hallucination. Shakespeare, like his corrivals, made 
 his characters talk law as they talked Euphuism, because 
 it was the fashion of the age ; and we have only to 
 compare his legal phraseology with theirs to see that he 
 was no more a lawyer than were Jonson, Chapman, 
 He3rwood, Greene, Peele, and Dekker in his own day, 
 and Massinger after him. 
 
 § 3. Castle 
 
 Something of a diversion is created in our inquiry by 
 the performance of Mr. E. J. Castle, K.C., entitled 
 Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene. Mr. 
 Castle, albeit something of a Baconian, is driven, as we 
 have seen, to reject the hj^^bolical panegyric of Shake- 
 speare's law by Lord Campbell, and to formulate a theory 
 of his own, to the efEect that there are " non-legal " as 
 well as " legal " plays ; that in the latter only did the 
 dramatist " receive assistance " from a lawyer, probably 
 Bacon ; and that in the former he makes so many mis- 
 takes as to prove that he " personally had not the educa- 
 tion of a lawyer." We thus have one of the profession 
 denying that all the pla}^ exhibit a firm hold of its " free- 
 masonry." Indeed he premises a doubt as to the force 
 of the general argument from the use of legal terms. 
 
 I do not lay so much stress upon their presence in the plays, 
 Sec., as other persons have done, because I beUeve they are 
 capable of being learned from books, and are therefore not so 
 valuable a test, to my mind, as the familiarity with the habits 
 and thoughts of counsel learned in the law, which I think is the 
 peculiar characteristic of the legal plays.* 
 
 Further, he notes that Lord Campbell was " in many 
 
 *■ The Law in Shakespeare, p. 14. 
 
 • Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, and Greene. A Study. By 
 Edward James Castle, One of Her Majesty's Counsel. (Late 
 Lieutenant Royal Engineers.) London, 1897. P. 11. 
 
128 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 cases only repeating what Malone had said before him. 
 The consequence of confining his attention to legal expres- 
 sions is that he has missed entirely the more subtle 
 evidence which points to the life and habits of a lawyer, 
 which may not happen to be clothed in legal language." 
 
 I am not concerned to found upon this conflict of 
 authorities, or to dwell upon the chaos which the half- 
 and-half theory makes of the Baconian case in general. 
 It is more important to point out that Mr. Castle is as 
 innocent as Lord Campbell of any general knowledge of 
 Elizabethan literature, and frames his own theory in 
 vacuo, finding " subtle evidence " of lawyerism in what 
 any familiarity with Elizabethan drama would have 
 shown him to be the ordinary run of lay conversation. 
 As little need we curiously inquire whether in the " non- 
 legal " plays Shakespeare commits the " laughable 
 mistakes " which Mr. Castle discovers. Mr. Castle 
 speaks modestly enough of his handling of his own legal 
 case; avowing that "mistakes may have crept in."l 
 What is much more serious in his total ignorance of the 
 similar literature of the period. He discusses the sonnets 
 in general, No. 134 in particular, and the lawyerlike lines 
 in Venus and Adonis, with no suspicion that other 
 Elizabethan poets wrote so. The result is that when 
 he proceeds to make his own contribution to the legal 
 theory he wastes his labour as utterly as did Campbell. 
 
 Thus he finds " some of the most remarkable references 
 to law " in Lucrece ; * and he dwells especially on the 
 use of the word " colour," which, he tells us, " as used 
 in legal pleadings has a very specialized meaning." Know- 
 ing vaguely that the legal meaning has partly survived 
 in ordinary language, he cites the definition that " colour 
 in pleading is a feigned matter which the defendant or 
 tenant uses in his bar," and so forth; concluding that 
 " colour sets out a title which, though probable, is really 
 false." Then he undertakes to show that " in the plays 
 
 1 Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, and Greene, p. 25. * Id.f. 18. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 129 
 
 we find ' colour ' used in the strict legal sense as I have 
 explained it, as well as in its more colloquial manner of 
 pretence or appearance." 
 
 The very first instance he ofEers is conclusive against 
 him. He cites : 
 
 Caesar's ambition . . . against all colour, here 
 Did pat the yoke upon us. 
 
 Cymbeline, iii, i. 
 
 That is to say, on Mr. Castle's own interpretation, 
 Caesar's ambition put a yoke on Britain against a probable 
 but false title. A la3m[ian could hardly be guilty of such 
 self-stviltification. The lines simply mean that Caesar 
 usurped sovereignty in defiance of legal forms : there is 
 no special or technical connotation whatever. Citing 
 Florizel's lines in the Winter's Tale (iv, 3) : 
 
 What colour for my visitation shall I 
 Hold up before him ? 
 
 Mr. Castle uneasily writes : " Here the technical use of 
 
 the word is perhaps not quite so certain, but I think a 
 
 stronger meaning is given to the language if we use it 
 
 in the legal sense of title or justification. However, in 
 
 the next example, the word is used in its strict legal sense." 
 
 The next example is the passage : 
 
 For, of no right, or colour like to right. 
 He doth fill fields with harness in the realm. 
 
 I Henry IV, iii, 2. 
 
 Then we have Beaufort's 
 
 ' But yet we want a colour for his death. . 
 
 2 Henry VI, iii, i , 
 
 —with the explanation that "the Cardinal does not 
 seek a pretext, but a justification or title for the act, as 
 he is to be condemned by law." 
 
 Any competent lay reader will at once see that the 
 whole theorem is a mare's nest. Shakespeare uses 
 "colour" just as a hundred other Elizabethans use 
 it, in a sense which includes both "pretext" and 
 
 I 
 
130 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 51 justification." Pretext is alleged justification; and 
 pretended title is just alleged title — ^Mr. Castle's own 
 definition. In this broad sense the word was used con- 
 stantly in Shakespeare's day. I find it four times in 
 ten pages of Fenton's translation of Guicciardini (1579) : 
 
 They attempted, under colour to defend the liberty of the 
 people of Milan, to make themselves lords of that State (P. 3). 
 
 The original of the colour under the which [two kings were] 
 . . . stirred up by the Popes to make many invasions ... (P. 12). 
 
 She brake that adoption under colour of ingratitude (76.). 
 The titles and colours of right changing with the time (P. 13). 
 
 Again we have it twice on two successive pages (24, 25) : 
 
 To give some colour of justice to so great an injustice. 
 
 The better to strengthen their usurpation with a show of 
 right, to strengthen first with colours lawful. 
 
 The translator of Gentillet's diatribe against Machiavelli 
 (1577) uses it as legally as may be : 
 
 He hath a certain subtilty (such as it is) to give colour unto 
 his most wicked and damnable doctrines. 
 
 Discourse upon the Means of Well Governing, &c 
 
 against Nicholas MacAtave/,trans.bySimonPatericke. 
 Ed. 1608, pref . A ii, verso. 
 
 The word was in fact of very old standing in common 
 English. In Wiclif 's treatise Against the Orders of 
 Friars we have the statement that the friars 
 
 colour their own wicked laws under the name of these saints . . . 
 and so . . . sin is maintained by colour of holiness ; 
 
 and again: 
 
 Yet friars will colour these sins and undertake for these 
 sinful men. 
 
 Treatise cited, ch. ii. (Rep. from ed. of 1608 in Tracts 
 and Treatises of Wydiffe, 1845, pp. 228, 253.) 
 
 In the sixteenth century it was in constant use. We 
 have it frequently in Elyot's Governour : 
 
 Inasmuch as liberality wholly resteth in the giving of money, 
 it sometime coloureth a vice. B. II, c. 10 (Dent's rep. p. 160). 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 131 
 
 Under the colour of holy Scripture, which they do violently 
 wrest to their purpose. B. Ill, c. 3 (p. 205). 
 
 It seems to have been equally common in books and in 
 sermons. Thus we have it in Latimer's sermons again 
 and again : 
 
 Under a colour of religion they turned it [church property] 
 to their own proper gain and lucre. 
 
 Third Sermon before Edward VI. 
 And so under this colour they set all their hearts and minds 
 only upon this world. 
 
 Seventh Sermon on the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 It occtirs repeatedly in Ralph Robinson's translation 
 (1551) of More's Utopia : 
 
 Under the same colour and pretence. 
 
 Under this colour and pretence. 
 
 A shew and colour of justice. 
 
 B. I pent's rep. pp. 22, 37, 38). 
 
 It is used in the same way by Jewel (1565) : 
 
 By any sleight or colour of appeal. 
 
 Reply to M. Harding's Answer, Art. V, 21st 
 Div. Works, Parker Soc. ed. i, 389. 
 
 and again : 
 
 Pighius granteth simply, without colour . . . 
 
 Sermon at Paul's Cross, 1560. Works, as cited, i, 8. 
 
 The translator (Tyndale ?) of the Enchiridion Militis 
 Christiani of Erasmus (1533) has : 
 
 With false title and under a feigned colour of honesty. 
 
 Methuen's rep. p. 75. 
 Lest under a colour of pastime he might entice . . . 
 
 Id. p. loi. 
 
 It was evidently a normal term for the clergy. Bale has 
 it many times : 
 
 Sincerely and faithfully, without craft or colour. 
 The Image of Both Churches: Works, Parker Soc. ed. p. 265. 
 As the matter is without feigned colour in every point performed. 
 Examination of Oldcastle, vol. cited, p. 43. 
 
132 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Seekest . . . the blood of this innocent woman, under a colotir 
 of friendly handling. 
 
 Examination of Anne Askewe, vol. cited, p. 162. 
 
 The Protestant Roye, who attacked Wolsey in 1528, has 
 
 By coloure of their faulce prayres, 
 Defrauded are the ryght hejrres 
 From their true inheritance. 
 Rede Me and be nott Wrothe, Whittingham's rep. p. 57. 
 
 Hooker uses it repeatedly : 
 
 Some judicial and definitive sentence, whereunto neither 
 part that contendeth may under any pretence or colour refuse 
 to stand. 
 
 Pref. to B. I of Eccles. Polity (1549), ch. vi, i. 
 
 Under this fair, and plausible colour whatsoever they utter 
 passeth for good and current. 
 
 Id. B. I. ch. i. §1. 
 
 And in the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall 
 issued in 1604 we have : 
 
 Purely and sincerely, without any colour or dissimulation (P. 2 .) . 
 
 Spenser uses it in his View of the Present State of 
 Ireland : 
 
 But what colour soever they allege, methinks it is not expedient 
 that the execution of a law once ordained should be left to the 
 discretion of the judge or officer. 
 
 Globe ed. of Works, p. 639. 
 
 and in the Shepheard's Calendar (February) he has : 
 
 His coloured crime with craft to cloak. 
 
 Among Shakespeare's known books, again, we find 
 the word in North's Plutarch, as in these passages : 
 
 That it might appear they had just cause and colour to attempt 
 that they did against him. 
 
 Cloak and colour the most cruel and unnatural fact. 
 
 Life of Julius Ceesar (Skeat's Shakespeare's 
 Plutarch, pp. 13, 92); 
 
 and in many others, for which see Skeat's index. The 
 legal metaphor had in fact entered into the body of the 
 language, and is as common in the drama as elsewhere. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LE^SAL PHRASEOLOGY 133 
 
 It is used at least five times, with more or less concrete 
 application, in Lady Lumley's translation of Iphigenia 
 AT AuLis, written about 1550, the English law term being 
 imposed on the classic diction. 
 
 If there is anywhere a " technical " use of the word 
 in ordinary literature it is in Greene and Lodge's Looking- 
 Glass for London, where we have twice : 
 
 It was your device that, to colour the statute. 
 
 A device of him to colour the statute. 
 
 Dyce's ed. of Greene and Peele, pp. 121, 125. 
 Jonson uses it with the same " legal " bearing : 
 
 How, how, knave, swear he killed thee, and by the law ? What 
 pretence, what colour hast thou for that ? 
 
 Every Man in his Humour, iii, 3. 
 Dekker and Webster are just as technical : 
 
 Though your attempt, lord treasurer, be such 
 That hath no colour in these troublous times 
 But an apparent purpose of revolt. 
 
 The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, Sc. 6. 
 
 Massinger uses the term as does Shakespeare : 
 
 There is no colour of reason that makes for him. 
 
 The Unnatural Combat, i, i. 
 Similarly Chapman : 
 
 Passion, my lord, transports your bitterness 
 Beyond all colour. 
 
 Byron's Tragedy, v, i. 
 His own black treason in suggesting Clermont's, 
 Colour'd with nothing but being great with me. 
 
 Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, iv, i. 
 
 If there were not all this habitual use of the word in plays 
 and books, the public were made familiar with it in the 
 ordinary course of executive justice. An offender, we 
 read, was pilloried with a paper on his breast stating 
 that he was pimished " For practising to colour the 
 detestable facts of George Saunders' wife." ^ But the 
 literary, dramatic, and theological usage, 'as we have 
 
 1 Brief Discourse of the Murther of George Saunders, 1573, in 
 Simpson's School of Shakespeare, ii, 228. 
 
134 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 seen, was universal. Shakespeare was in fact simply 
 using the word as every one else did. 
 
 Thus Mr. Castle's laboured argument from Shake- 
 speare's use of " colour " comes to nothing, being but 
 one more instance of the "method of ignorance" by 
 which the Baconians and the simple legalists alike proceed. 
 When he goes on to set forth his view of the " legal plays " 
 he pursues the same method ; but in nearly every instance 
 his argument destroys itself. Thus he contends that 
 Measure for Measure is a truly legal play inasmuch 
 as it shows knowledge of the law of precontract of 
 marriage. He is aware that the play is foimded upon 
 Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra; and he avows 
 that in refining upon the old plot by positing a pre- 
 contract between Claudio and Julia the recast "takes 
 all point out of the story," " so that in reality there is 
 no motive left for the play." ^ This is partly true : the 
 case of Julia and Claudio is on all fours with the case of 
 Mariana and Angelo, in which the Duke, after treating 
 Qaudio as liable for the same thing to capital punishment, 
 plans the intercourse of the precontracted persons. And 
 we are asked to believe that the dramatist who thus played 
 fast and loose with his legal plot was " one thoroughly 
 acquainted with legal proceedings " ! ^ 
 
 As if this were not fiasco enough, Mr. Castle adds a 
 piece of elaborate nonsense in the shape of a theory that 
 the name Escalus was coined from the " escue " in the 
 name of Sir John Fortescue, the famous English judge 
 and legalist. " Escalus " is the name of the Prince in 
 Romeo and Juliet — the first name in the dramatis 
 personcB of that play, produced long before Measure for 
 Measure. Shakespeare got it from Brooke, and it was 
 the kind of stage name that could do repeated duty. 
 Over such a chimera one is disposed to ask what kind 
 of minds we are dealing with in the debate over the 
 " legal element " in the plays. 
 
 1 Id. p. 37. 2 j^. p. 41. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 135 
 
 On the general question as to Measure for Measure 
 it suf&ces to say that Mr. Castle's summmg-up, to the 
 effect that the play must have been " written either by 
 one who has drawn the scene from the hfe or has been 
 assisted by one well versed in the every-day life of English 
 law courts," 1 is naught. Many Elizabethan dramatists 
 were so "versed"; and Shakespeare had the same 
 opportimities as they. In reading Nashe's Summer's 
 Last Will and Testament one can see that Nashe had 
 attended courts. But who in his day had not ? Had 
 Mr. Castle read Chapman and Shirley's play. The Admiral 
 OF France, he would have found a much more elaborate 
 parody of legal proceedings, perhaps based upon a reading 
 of French law reports. He gravely tells us that Angelo, 
 when exposed by the Duke, " aclmowledges his guilt as 
 a lawyer would." The wicked judge in Whetstone's 
 Promos and Cassandra and the corrupt Chancellor in 
 The Admiral of France do the same thing. Were 
 Whetstone and Chapman and Shirley then lawyers ? 
 
 Proceeding in his vain task, Mr. Castle, after granting 
 that Titus Andronicus is non-Shakespearean, insists 
 upon treating the Henry VI pla3rs as Shakespeare's, 
 representing that Malone pronounced i Henry VI non- 
 Shakespearean " principally because there were certain 
 contradictions about Henry's age." This is an idle 
 travesty : the groimd on which Malone and the great 
 majority of critics reject the play is substantially that 
 of its plainly non-Shakespearean style. Mr. Castle 
 accepts the argument in the case of Titus, and rejects 
 it in the case of the other play, mainly because that 
 course suits his argmnent. But we need not try that 
 issue here. The authors of the play were probably 
 Marlowe, Peele, and Greene ; and that they were no more 
 lawyers than Shakespeare might be gathered from Mr. 
 Castle's own argument. Thus he notes that in the third 
 scene the law style of the proclamation is correct, adding : 
 
 1 Id. p. soi 
 
136 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 " but the occasion was not one, in my opinion, in which 
 it would or shotild have been used." ^ To what end, then, 
 is all the learned research to show that the author exhibited 
 special knowledge of Temple life in making Plantagenet 
 say, " Come, let us four to dinner " ? The recondite 
 legal fact that " four makes a mess " was available to 
 Shakespeare in Lilly's Mother Bombie (ii, i). 
 
 Coming to 2 Henry VI, we find Mr. Castle endorsing 
 Lord Campbell's deliverance in regard to the legal 
 language of Jack Cade. Contentedly ascribmg both the 
 Contention and the later play to Shakespeare, he makes 
 no difficulty over the discrepancy of " heart can wish " 
 and " heart can think," and gravely concludes that " it 
 requires a lawyer of some study to be able to quote from 
 the Year Books, and we find the author of both Quarto 
 and Foho doing this." ^ So that, once more, Thomas 
 Nashe was a lawyer of some study, inasmuch as he tells 
 how his Piers Pennilesse has been 
 
 maimedly translated into the French tongue, and in the English 
 tongue as rascally printed and ill interpreted as heart can think 
 or tongue can tell. 
 
 Have with You to Saffron Walden : Works, iii, 33. 
 
 Legal learning, as Hobbes would say, is capable of a more 
 excellent foolishness than laymen could well attain to. 
 If Mr. Castle had but read Udall's Ralph Roister 
 DoiSTER, which was written about 1553, he would have 
 found Gawyn Goodlucke saying to Dame Christian 
 Custance (v, 3) : 
 
 Neither heart can thinke nor tongue tell 
 How much I joy in your constant fidelity. 
 
 If he had read King Leir and His Three Daughters, 
 he would have noted the line (sc. 24) : 
 
 My toung doth faile to say what heart doth think. 
 
 And if he had further read a little in Elizabethan literature 
 
 outside of drama and law he might have divined that 
 
 » Id. p. 63. a la, p. 74. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 137 
 
 ordinary folk in those days even read many " legal " 
 documents for various reasons. When Nashe in his tirade 
 against Harvey cries : " Letters do you term them ? 
 they may be Letters patents well enough for their tedious- 
 ness. . . . Why they are longer than the Statutes of 
 clothing or the Charter of London,"^ he is not addressing 
 himself to lawyers. He knows that many lay folk had 
 seen the Charter, and that many traders had read the 
 Statute of Clothing ; and when he speaks of " caUing a 
 fellow knave that hath read the Book of Statutes, since 
 by them all in general they were made," ^ he really does 
 not mean that lawyers are all, or are the only, knaves, 
 or that only lawyers read the volume. Even when he 
 writes of 
 
 never reading to a period (which you shall scarce find in thirty 
 sheets of a lawyer's declsiration), 
 
 Lenten Stuff: Works, iii, 214, 
 
 he is assiraiing that others than lawyers have perused 
 lawyers' documents. That he was no lawyer may be 
 held to be proved by his lines : 
 
 Smooth-tongufid Orators, the fourth in place. 
 Lawyers our commonwealth entitles them ; 
 Mere swash-bucklers and rufi&anly mates 
 That will for twelve pence make a doughty fray. 
 Set men for strawes together by the ears. 
 Summer's Last Will and Testament : Works, iii, 276. 
 
 When Mr. Castle goes on to quote Gloster's lines : 
 
 Let these have a day appointed them 
 For single combat in convenient place, 
 
 with the comment that "All this correctly states the 
 appeal by combat, the essential point of which is, there 
 must be a doubt,"^ he does but show that, like Lord 
 Campbell, he knew nothing of Webster, who exhibits 
 a detailed and technical knowledge of the law of trial 
 by combat, without being a lawyer. Ten thousand lay- 
 
 1 Have with You, as cited, p. 34. 
 
 2 Id. p. 119. ' Work cited, p. 75. 
 
138 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 men could have said all that is implied in the lines cited ; 
 as they might have known and said that Gloster had 
 used torture beyond legal rule.* It is edifying to learn 
 that, on re-reading Henry VI, Mr. Castle finds " some- 
 thing fresh " for his purpose in the story of Gloster's 
 cross-examination of the sham blind-man. This, he 
 assures us, is a further " trace of the author being ac- 
 quainted with a lawyer's training.' ' * As if any intelligent 
 layman who told the well-known tale would not have 
 brought out the points in the same fashion. 
 
 It is after this lamentable series of non sequiturs that 
 Mr, Castle claims to have indicated in Shakespeare's 
 works " not only the mere legal acquirements as collected 
 by Lord Campbell . . . but . , . pictures drawn of the 
 different members of the legal profession." What then 
 are we to say of the " pictures " drawn by Jonson and 
 Chapman, Greene, Webster, and Massinger ? Mr. Castle 
 modestly begins his preface with the avowal : " I have 
 some doubts whether I should publish this book. The 
 world does not like to have its estabUshed beliefs ques- 
 tioned. ..." The world might fairly urge that those 
 who undertake such questioning should take a reasonable 
 amount of pains to prove their case. Mr. Castle has not 
 done so. He writes concerning " Shakespeare, Bacon, 
 Jonson, and Greene " without having read beyond Shake- 
 speare and Bacon, save in so far as the commentators 
 tell him of the relations of Greene and Jonson to Shake- 
 speare. Of the plays of the two last-named, and of 
 Greene's prose writings, he appears to know nothing. 
 He is carefid and laborious in matters of strictly legal 
 research : of the necessary literary research he has 
 apparently no idea. 
 
 The result is that when he approaches the strictly 
 
 Uterary question of the alleged coincidences of phrase in 
 
 Bacon and Shakespeare he is wholly at the mercy of such 
 
 an egregious guide as Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, from whom 
 
 ^ Id. p. 76. « Id. p. 77. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM LEGAL PHRASEOLOGY 139 
 
 he cites I instances of (i) identical expressions, (2) identi- 
 cal metaphors, (3) identical opinions, and (4) identical 
 studies. Under the first head he gives only this egregious 
 example : 
 
 Custom ! an ape of nature. 
 
 Bacon. 
 Oh sleep, thou ape of death. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 In a later chapter we shall deal with that and many other 
 of the alleged " identities " of expression in Bacon and 
 Shakespeare. But it is impossible to part from Mr. 
 Castle without a final protest against the sheer thoughtless- 
 ness of his handling of this aspect of his problem. From 
 Mr. Donnelly, whose cipher he sees to be a farce, he 
 accepts a few utterly inconclusive parallels as proof of 
 Mr. Donnelly's conclusion, without even putting the 
 question whether other Elizabethan writers do not exhibit 
 the same kind of " identities " with Bacon. In the same 
 way he ascribes to Bacon and Shakespeare " identical 
 studies " on the sole strength of one allusion in each to 
 gardens and one to the formation of knots in trees, never 
 even inquiring how it comes that all the main lines of 
 Bacon's studies and aims are wholly unrepresented in 
 Shakespeare. Such incredible laxity in the handling of 
 evidence would discredit any literary critic as such. 
 
 When it is exhibited by trained lawyers and judges, 
 it is one more ground for disregarding their mere assevera- 
 tions as to the presence of legal knowledge in the plays. 
 If Mr. Castle's argument be regarded as an improvement 
 upon Campbell's, the breakdown of the whole is complete, 
 for his specially selected and presented instances of legal 
 knowledge in the plays, as we have seen, are just as 
 nugatory as the rest. 
 
 * Id. p. 196. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LITIGATION AND LEGALISM IN ELIZABETHAN 
 ENGLAND 
 
 FOR all who have cared to follow it, the process of 
 confronting with parallel passages the evidence 
 offered for the legal training of the author of the 
 Shakespearean Plays must be decisive as to the 
 fallacy involved. But even without that tedious process 
 of confutation, any alert student of Elizabethan literature 
 might be expected to reject a thesis which proceeds upon 
 lack of familiarity with the life which that Uterature 
 more or less clearly mirrors. Most of the champions of 
 the " legal " theory — orthodox, Baconian, and anti- 
 Stratfordian alike — simply ignore the evidence for the 
 general currency of legal phrases in the Elizabethan and 
 Jacobean period. Mr. Grant White, as we have seen, 
 does avow the frequency of legal allusions in the drama 
 in general, but goes on to posit the false proposition that 
 in Shakespeare they are much more numerous than else- 
 where. In reality, as we have already to some extent 
 seen, they pervade all Elizabethan literature, and they 
 tell of a general litigiousness which is at once the cause 
 and the explanation, " Thou'lt go to law with the vicar 
 for a tithe goose," says Hobson in Heywood's Edward IV.* 
 As Nashe has it in Pierce Penilesse his Supplication 
 TO the DrvELL : " Lawyers cannot devise which way 
 in the world to beg, they are so troubled with brabble- 
 ments and suits every term, of yeomen and gentlemen 
 that fall out for notWng. If John a Nokes his hen do 
 but leap into Elizabeth de Yappe's close, she will never 
 
 1 Part I. Pearson's Heywood, vol. i, p. 71. 
 140 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 141 
 
 leave to haunt her husband till he bring it to a Nisi 
 pHus. One while the parson sueth the parishioner for 
 bringing home his tithes : another while the parishioner 
 sueth the parson for not taking away his tithes in time." \ 
 All the while the burden of " the law's delays " was known 
 to all men. Chapman makes a character declare that 
 " cures are like causes in law, which may be lengthened 
 or shortened at the discretion of the lawyer : he can 
 either keep it green with replications or rejoinders, or 
 sometimes skin it fair a' th' outside for fashion sake : 
 but so he may be sure 'twill break out again by a writ 
 of error, and then he has his suit new to begin." * 
 
 Roger Hutchinson, in his Sermons Of Oppression, 
 Affliction, and Patience (1553) is amusingly careful 
 to explain that when Paul blames Christians for going 
 to law, " the fault which he afl&rmeth to be in suits must 
 be referred to one party, not to the plaintiff and defendant 
 both. . . . These words [' Why rather suffer ye mot 
 wrong ? '] are spoken to unjust and contentious suitors, 
 and do not disprove rightful suits " ' — an audacity of 
 misinterpretation at which an attorney would have 
 blenched. The England of that day, in fact, appears 
 to have been a scene of manifold oppression as well as 
 of litigiousness ; and a doctrine of non-resistance would 
 not have won much assent. But Hutchinson devoutly 
 protests that "for as much as . . . malice increaseth 
 daily by delays, and long continuance of suits through 
 the covetousness of lawyers ; would God the King's 
 Majesty, by the assent of his Parliament, would make 
 some statute that all suits should be determined and 
 judged within the compass of a year, or of half a year if 
 their value were under a hundred poimd, upon pain of 
 some great forfeiture to the judges before whom such 
 matters come." * 
 
 » Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 189. * All Fools, iv, 1. 
 
 * Works of Roger Hutchinson, Parker Soc. ed. 1842, p. 328, 
 « Id. p. 332. 
 
142 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 It might have been well to set up some machinery for 
 the/discouragement of frivolous suits. Latimer in his 
 j&rst Sennon before King Edward VI tells of a lawsuit 
 
 betwixt two friends for a horse. The owner promised the otiier 
 should have the horse if he wotild : the other asked the price ; 
 he said twenty nobles (five pounds). The other would give him 
 but four pound. The owner said he should not have him then. 
 The other claimed the horse, because he said he should have him 
 if he would. Thus this bargzdn became a Westminster matter : 
 the lawyers got twice the value of the horse ; and when all came 
 to all, two fools made an end of the matter.^ 
 
 In his Second Sermon before the King, again, Latimer 
 tells of unjust judges, who listen only to the rich htigant, 
 and help him to oppress the poor. " I caimot go to my 
 book, for poor folks come unto me, desiring that I will 
 speak that their matters may be heard. ' ' ^ Purely oppres- 
 sive suits were common ; but there were as many fools 
 as knaves, all making work for the lawyers. 
 
 This mania for htigation is dramatically set forth again 
 in the poor play. If You Know Not Me, You Know 
 Nobody, Part II — obviously, as it stands, the work of 
 several hands and different times, but ascribed to Hey- 
 wood, who doubtless had " a hand or a main finger " in 
 it as in two hundred more. In one of the earlier scenes 
 Gresham and Sir Thomas Ramsey, the eminent London 
 merchants, are brought together to be reconciled over a 
 foolish lawsuit in which they have been embroiled for 
 six or seven years. Doctor Nowell tells 
 
 How by good friends they have been persuaded both, 
 Yet both but deaf to fair persuasion ; 
 
 and old Hobson jovially rates then^ on their passion 
 
 To beat yourselves in law six or seven year. 
 
 Make lawyers. " tumeys' " clerks, and knaves to spend 
 
 Your money in a brabbling controversy. 
 
 Even like two fools. 
 
 The two litigants for a time snap at each other, revealing 
 the animal pugnacity of the race, which turned sponta- 
 
 * Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. in " Everyman's Library," 
 P- 76. 2 Id. p. 108. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 143 
 
 neously to litigation when the reign of law set limits to 
 private warfare. Their ground of quarrel was that 
 Ramsey had " given earnest " f or a piece of land which 
 Gresham, not knowing of the previous transaction, 
 bought and built upon ; and they are now induced to 
 shake hands upon the friendly arbiter's decision that 
 Gresham shall pay Ramsey a himdred pounds compensa- 
 tion, each losing the five hundred pounds he has spent 
 during the futile lawsuit. If it be objected that plays 
 are not valid evidence as to social usage or habit, it may 
 sufi&ce to cite Mr. Hubert Hall's account ' of the lawsuits 
 over the inheritance of " Wild Darrell " for imimpeach- 
 able evidence of Elizabethan manners, morals, and 
 practices. We there seem to find ourselves in a world 
 still half-savage, where law and lawlessness are in a 
 perpetual, breathless grapple, and where the authentic 
 record at once makes credible many episodes in the con- 
 temporary and later drama which at a first reading seem 
 grotesque exaggerations. The litigiousness and the law- 
 lessness, the legal and the illegal frauds and violences, 
 are correlative. 
 
 Apart from such stress of strife, the whole Elizabethan 
 drama tells of a normal resort to the procedure of arrest 
 for debt. One of the commonest situations is that in 
 which a personage is either rightfully or fraudulently 
 " attached " or arrested ; and the invariable question; 
 " At whose suit ? " tells of a general famiUarity with the 
 occurrence. People in humble life are made normally 
 to use technical language in regard to such mishaps. In 
 the play last cited, the pedlar, Tawnycoat, utters a 
 soliloquy which, had it occmred in a Shakespearean play; 
 would have been triumphantly cited by the critical tribe 
 of Lord Campbell as proof positive of the playwright's 
 " profound " acquaintance with legal procedure : 
 
 I broke my day with him. O had that fatal hour 
 Broken my heart ; and, villain that I was, 
 
 1 Society in Elizabethan England. 
 
144 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Never so much as writ in my excuse ; 
 And he for that default hath sued my bill, 
 And with an execution is come down 
 To seize my household stuff, imprison me. 
 And turn my wife and children out of doors. 
 
 Ed. cited, p. 303. 
 
 He3nvood was no lawyer, but he makes a non-legal 
 character, still in the same play, quote in due form legal 
 maxims that would have proved his lawyership for both 
 Lord Campbell and Mr. Rushton. Twice over, Jack 
 Gresham quotes one such maxim, the second time thus : 
 
 Friend, Ployden's proverb : the case is alter' d ; and, by my 
 troth, I have leam'd you a lesson ; forbearance is no acquittance.^ 
 
 That phrase, " The case is aJter'd," is a standing tag in 
 Elizabethan drama, and Ben Jonson makes it the title 
 of a play. In the second part of his King Edward the 
 Fourth, again, where Aire, after being saved from execu- 
 tion for piracy by the influence of Jane Shore, is executed 
 for succouring her, Heywood makes the doomed man 
 thus play on legal terms and procedure in his farewell 
 speech : 
 
 Jane, be content ! 
 I am as much indebted unto thee 
 As unto nature : I owed thee a life 
 When it was forfeit unto death by law. 
 Thou begdst it of the King and gav'st it me. 
 This house of flesh, wherein this soul doth dwell, 
 Is thine, and thou art landlady of it. 
 And this poor life a tenant but at pleasure. 
 It never came to pay the rent till now, 
 But hath run in arrearage all this while. 
 And now for very shame comes to discharge it 
 When death distrains for what is but thy due. 
 
 Peaison's.ed. of Works, i, 181. 
 
 Here we have the very fashion of lawyerism seen in those 
 Sonnets of Shakespeare which are cited as proof of his 
 "profound technical knowledge," and this in a play 
 meant for common folk and tolerable only to them. To 
 such phraseology they were daily accustomed. Such a 
 1 Id. p. 332. (Cp. p. 329.) 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 145 
 
 proclivity meant, further, a habitual haunting of law 
 courts ; and in Stratford-on-Avon, where a fortnightly 
 court was regularly held, it is morally certain that people 
 with any idle time on their hands would frequently seek 
 there what must have been the most interesting entertain- 
 ment regularly open to them. If such resort is still 
 conmion in days of newspapers and in towns suppUed 
 with theatres, it must have been much more so in a time 
 and in places where news-sheets were still unknown and 
 theatres non-existent. Drajrton draws a picture which 
 generalises one that must have been famiUar to many 
 thousands of his coimtrymen : 
 
 Like some gteat learned judge, to end a weighty cause. 
 Well furnished with the force of arguments and laws, 
 And every special proof that justly may be brought ; 
 Now with a constant brow, a firm and settled thought. 
 And at the point to give the last and final doom : 
 The people crowding near within the pester 'd room. 
 A slow soft murmuring moves amongst the wond'ring throng. 
 As though with open ears they would devour his tongue.^ 
 
 In respect of the state of society in which this was a 
 normal experience, it is hardly necessary to prove that 
 Shakespeare had any special inducement in youth to 
 take an interest in legal procedure. But, as it happened, 
 he had. It is generally known, and the legalists might 
 have been expected to remember, that Shakespeare's 
 father was a man of many lawsuits. But nowhere in 
 connection with this question, I think, has note been 
 taken of the extent and significance of that experience 
 in the Shakespeare household. It has been left to a 
 clerical writer — partly bent on proving the quite arguable 
 thesis that John Shakespeare was a Puritan recusant, 
 partly on pressing the fantastic one that William Shake- 
 speare was a profound Biblical student — ^to bring out the 
 full force of the evidence as to the father's manifold expe- 
 rience of law courts. The summary is that " He was one 
 of the most litigious of men. . . . From Jvily, 2 Philip 
 
 1 Polyolbion, 5th Song, ii, 29-36. 
 
 K 
 
146 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and Mary, to March, 37 Elizabeth, there are no less than 
 sixty-seven entries of cases in which his name appears 
 on one side or the other ; and some of his actions are with 
 his best friends, as Adrian Quiney, Francis Herbage, 
 Thomas Knight, and Roger Sadler ; but in 1591 there 
 is only one entry, wherein John Shakespeare sued as 
 plaintiff in a debt recovery action and won with costs." ! 
 
 This noteworthy record, and many of the details on 
 which it is based, bring out three facts of obvious import- 
 ance in the biography of Shakespeare : (i) the normality 
 of litigation in Stratford as in Elizabethan England in 
 general; (2) the abundant share of the Shakespeares 
 in legal experience ; and (3) the possibility of error in 
 the old inference, accepted by most of us, as to the 
 father's impecimiosity. The fact seems to be that when 
 John Shakespeare was distrained upon for debt and the 
 writ was returned {1586) endorsed with the note, " quod 
 praedictus Johannes Shakspere nihil habet imde distrin- 
 gere potest habet," he was not at all devoid of means, 
 but was simply baffling the suit against him. Real 
 property he certainly possessed at that time,* as did 
 other substantial citizens who were also being proceeded 
 against ; ^ to say nothing of the obvioiis consideration 
 that he must have had household fxmiiture. I will not 
 attempt here to decide the problem as to whether the 
 whole episode of John Shakespeare's finings and the 
 disqualification consequent on his non-attendance at the 
 Coimcil was simply a matter of his recusancy. The prima 
 facie case for that view is extremely strong ; but it calls 
 for a more searching investigation than I have yet met 
 with ; and I simply note that it puts in doubt the whole 
 theory of John Shakespeare's progressive impecuniosity, 
 which in the past I had accepted like others. Mr. Halli- 
 well-PhiUipps had indeed pointed out that when Alderman 
 
 * Rev. T. Carter, Shakespeare : Puritan and Recusant, 1897, 
 p. 166. 
 
 » Work last cited, pp. 30, 93, 124. 159. » Id. p. i6S- 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 147 
 
 Shakespeare went on paying heavy fines for persistent 
 non-attendance at the Council, it was " not an evidence 
 of falling-off in circumstances, but rather the opposite, 
 for it implies on the contrary the ability to pay the fines 
 for non-attendance, for we cannot doubt that if he had 
 not paid them some notice would have appeared in the 
 books." '. This, however, was not convincing ; and the 
 theory of lack of funds was ostensibly the reasonable one. 
 But on a review of all the data the question must be 
 pronounced unsettled ; and among other things the theory 
 that the boy WiUiam had to leave school at thirteen 
 because of his father's pecuniary embarrassments is 
 obviously put in doubt. 
 
 Whatever be the ultimate solution, it is at least clear 
 that the boy Shakespeare had not less but more than the 
 normal Elizabethan ground of interest in legal matters. 
 It would be idle for the " anti-Stratfordians " to argue 
 that we have no evidence of his taking any interest in 
 his father's litigations. It might as well be said that 
 we have no evidence of his caring about anything. Com- 
 mon sense warrants the belief that he heard endless talk 
 in the home circle on legal matters ; and the very illiteracy 
 of his father, so often stressed by the Baconians and their 
 allies, carries the irresistible presumption that the boy 
 was called on to read some legal dociunents for his parents. 
 In view of om: previoiis survey of the legalisms in the 
 plays it is worth noting that the enigmatic document of 
 agreement between John Shakespeare and Robert Webbe, 
 entered into in 1579, makes mention of " feoffments, 
 grants, entails, jointmres, dowers, leases, wills, uses, rent 
 charges, rent sects, arrearages of rent, recognizance, 
 statute merchant and of the staple, obhgations, judg- 
 ments, executions, condemnations, issues, fines, amerce- 
 ments, intrusions, forfeitures, alienations without license," 
 &c.* Of most of these terms John Shakespeare, with 
 his many litigations and title-deeds, was likely enough 
 
 » Citation by Carter, p. 125. * Carter, as cited, p. 98. 
 
148 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 to know the meaning, whether or not he could sign his 
 name. Between the docmnents and the lawsuits, his 
 son had occasion enough to know as well as any layman 
 of his day the common vocabulary of lawyers, which is 
 practically all that his plays indicate him to have known. 
 And as that very transaction about the Asbies, with which 
 the Webbe agreement connects, dragged on long after 
 he was a grown man, and came into the court of Chancery 
 in 1597 — " after the days of persecution were over," as 
 Mr. Carter notes, when a reciisant could go to law without 
 fear of amercement — William Shakespeare had a personal 
 interest in studying all the documents concerned. If 
 Mr. Grant White and the legalists had taken such things 
 into accoimt, they might have foimd a simple solution 
 for the occurrence of legal terms in the plays. 
 
 But Shakespeare's experience, be it repeated, was not 
 abnormal in that litigious and court-haimting age. The 
 public in general had the same proclivities, and the other 
 dramatists, as we have seen, catered freely for the same 
 appetite. The habit of cotirt-haimting is indicated in 
 Webster and Rowley's Cure for a Cuckold (iii, i) : 
 
 A judge, methinks, looks loveliest when he weeps, 
 Pronouncing of death's sentence ; 
 
 and in the same scene a character sententiously puts sex 
 attraction in a legal figure : 
 
 Although the tenure by which land was held 
 In villanage be quite extinct in England, 
 Yet you have women there at this day living 
 Make a number of slaves. 
 
 Latimer in the pulpit (1529) turns to homiletic account 
 
 three terms which we have common and usual amongst us, that 
 is to say, the sessions of inquirance, the sessions of deliverance, 
 and the execution day. Sessions of inquirance is like unto judg- 
 ment ; for when sessions of inquiry is, then the judges cause 
 twelve men to give verdict of the felon's crime, whereby he shall 
 be judg;ed to be indicted : sessions of deliverance is much like 
 council : for at sessions of deliverance the judges go among 
 themselves to council, to determine sentence against the felon ; 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 149 
 
 execution-day is to be compajed with hell-fire. . . . Wherefore 
 you may see that there are degrees in these our terms, as there 
 be in those terms. ^ 
 
 The same habit of covirt-haunting is taken for granted 
 by Sir Thomas Elyot (1531) : 
 
 And in the country, at a sessions or other assembly, if no 
 gentyl men be thereat, the sa}dng is that there was none but the 
 commonalty.* 
 
 The habits of Henry the Eighth's day i n this regard had 
 not changed in Ehzabeth's. No matter in what country 
 they lay their scene, the dramatists assmne the universal 
 interest in matters of law and litigation. 
 
 I walking in the place where men's lawsuits 
 Are heard and pleaded — 
 
 Chapman, All Fools, ii, i, 
 
 is quite a natural way of beginning an accovmt of an 
 episode ; equally by the way is the description : 
 
 Heard he a lawyer, ne'er so vehement pleading. 
 He stood and laugh'd. 
 
 Id. Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, i, i ; 
 
 and Chapman had made a personage say, before Dickens : 
 
 The law is such an ass. 
 
 Revenge for Honour, iii, 2. 
 
 The natural result of such a general preoccupation is 
 that not merely the phraseology but the procedure of 
 the law-courts everywhere obtrudes itself in literature. 
 Even in our day, trial scenes are often the central features 
 in melodramas, the spontaneously dramatic character 
 of a trial giving the playvnigbt an easy opportimity ; 
 and as soon as the Elizabethan drama had come in touch 
 with normal life, even on a poetic plane, it availed itself 
 of this obvious resource. Not only does the drama 
 swarm with trials and trial scenes, lawsuits, advocates, 
 judges, magistrates, scriveners, warrants, sergeants and 
 affairs of justice, but the judicial procedure and the legal 
 
 ^ Sermons, ed. cited, pp. 9-10. 
 
 * The Boke named the Governour, ed. in same series, p. 2. 
 
150 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 terminology are alike constantly resorted to in poetic 
 and polemic literatiu-e. 
 
 Nashe, in one of his hilarious wrangles with Gabriel 
 Harvey, in Four Letters Confuted, plunges into the 
 trial form as naturally as any dramatist, thus : 
 
 The Arraignment and Execution of the Third Letter. 
 To every reader favourably or indifferently affected. 
 Text, stand to the Bar. Peace there below. 
 
 After a quotation and a comment, we have : 
 
 You would foist in non causam pro causa. ... If you have 
 any new infringement to destitute the indictment of forgery 
 that I bring against you, so it is. 
 
 Here enters Argumentutn a testimonio humano, like Tamburlaine 
 drawn in a chariot by four kings.^ 
 
 In Greene's story, A Quip for an Upstart CouRTffiR, 
 similarly, the onlooker in the quarrel between Velvet- 
 breeches and Qoth-breeches says to the former : 
 
 Listen to me. and discuss the matter by law ; . . . you claim 
 all, he [Cloth-breeches] would have but his own : both plead an 
 absolute title of residence in this country : then the course 
 between you be trespass or disseisin of frank tenement : You, 
 Velvet-breeches, in that you claim the first title, you shall be 
 plaintifE and plead a trespass of disseisin done you by Cloth- 
 breeches, so shall it be brought to a jury, and tried by a verdict 
 of twelve or four-and-twenty. 
 
 The reply is that Vdvet-breeches cannot rely on juries' 
 justice, " for my adversary is their cotmtryman and less 
 chargeable : he shall have the law ndtigated if a jury of 
 hinds or peasants should be empannelled." Upon this 
 comes the rejoinder : 
 
 You need not doubt of that, for whom you distrust and think 
 not indifierent, him you upon a cause manifested, challenge 
 from your jury. 
 
 K your law allow such large favour, quoth Velvet-breeches, 
 I am content my title be tried by a jury, and therefore let mine 
 adversary plead me Nul tort nul disseisin.* 
 
 * Works, ed. cited, i, 293, 
 
 * Works, ed. Grosart, xi, 228-9. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 151 
 
 Later there is a literary jury-trial., and the narrator 
 addresses the jury, first naming a knight as foreman : 
 
 Worshipful sir, with the rest of the jury, whom we have solicited 
 of choice honest men, whose consciences will deal uprightly in 
 this controversy, you and the rest of your company are here 
 upon your oath and oaths to inquire whether Cloth-breeches 
 have done disseisin unto Velvet-breeches, yea or no, in or about 
 London, in putting him out of faicink tenement, wronging him 
 of his right and imbellishing [weakening] his credit : if you find 
 that Cloth-breeches hath done Velvet-breeches wrong, then lei 
 him be set in his former estate and allow him reasonable damages.' 
 
 Greene's story, as it happens, is a systematic plagiarism 
 from the doggerel poem The Debate between Pride 
 AND Lowliness, by Francis Thynne, a young attorney, 
 probably written and privately printed, but not published, 
 before 1570.* The curious thing is, however, that Greene 
 puts the case in a more lawyerlike way than does the 
 lawyer, who is mainly concerned to moralise, and whose 
 point lies in the destruction of Cloth-breeches by a mis- 
 cellaneous jury whose sympathies are with Velvet- 
 breeches, the rich oppressor ; whereas Greene gives the 
 legal victory to the man with right on his side, on legal 
 grounds. Thynne mentions the maxim nul tort, nul 
 disseisin, merely as a comment in epilogue : Greene 
 brings it into the case. The story was long popular: 
 evidently the public taste for legalism could be relied 
 on by both authors and publishers. And Greene, as 
 we have seen, freely emplo3rs legal phraseology in other 
 tales. In this he has a phrase about " statute marchant 
 or staple " which is not in his original ; and in the 
 Defence of Coney-Catching (Works, xi, 55), among 
 other " legal " expressions, there is a transaction in 
 which a borrower " promised to acknowledge a statute 
 staple " to the borrower, " with letters of defeysance," 
 and further " made an absolute deed of gift from wife 
 
 » Id. p. 293. 
 
 * See J. P. Collier's preface to the Shakespeare Society's 
 reprint (1841) of Thjmne's poem. 
 
152 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and children to this usurer of all his lordship," [worth 
 in " rent of assise seven score pounds by the year "] 
 " and so had the 2000 marks upon the plain forfeit of 
 a bond." In Alcida, Greene's Metamorphosis (1588), 
 we have the dictum " Where love serveth his writ of 
 command, there a supersedeas of reason is of no avail " 
 (Works, ix, 42). If such a quantity of technical phrase- 
 ology and procedure had been found in a Shakespearean 
 play, it would have been pronounced proof positive of 
 the saturation of the poet's mind with legal ideas through 
 a legal training. But Greene was no more a lawyer than 
 Nashe. 
 
 Even Spenser in the Faerie Queene' follows the 
 prevailing fashion : 
 
 On a day when Cupid held his court. 
 As he is wont at each Saint Valentine, 
 
 a fair cruel maid is found to have " murdred " many 
 sighing lovers. 
 
 Therefore a Jury was impcinnelled straight . . . 
 
 Of all these crimes she there indited was. 
 
 All which when Cupid heard, he by and by 
 
 In great displeasure willed a Capias 
 
 Should issue forth t' attach that scornful lass. 
 
 The warrant straight was made, and therewithal 
 
 A Bailiff-errant forth in post did pass. 
 
 Whom they by name there Portamore did call. 
 
 He which doth summon lovers to love's judgment hall. 
 
 The damsel was attacht, and shortly brought 
 
 Unto the bar whereas she was arraigned ; 
 
 But she thereto nould plead, nor answer ought. . . . 
 
 So judgment past, as is by law ordained 
 
 In cases like, which when at last she saw . . . 
 
 Cried mercy, to abate the extremitie of law. 
 
 Turning to the drama, we find the expedient of a trial 
 resorted to by half the dramatists of the period. Peele 
 makes a trial the central matter of his Arraignment of 
 Paris (1584), which precedes Marlowe. Jonson employs 
 the expedient again and again. In The Poetaster he 
 
 1 B. VI. c. vii, 33-37. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 153 
 
 puts into the form of a trial his quarrel with his rivals 
 and calumniators, as does his antagonist Dekker in 
 Satiromastix. An elaborate trial scene is inserted in 
 VoLPONE, with "Avocatori, Notario, Conunandatori, 
 Saffi, and other officers of justice " : and the procedure 
 is incomparably more court-like than that in the trial 
 of the case of Antonio and Shylock. In The Silent 
 Woman there is a long scene in which a divine and a 
 canonist debate at length on the law of divorce as they 
 might have done in a court. In The Staple of News 
 there is a parade of characters representing legal abstrac- 
 tions — ^Mortgage, Statute, Band, Wax, with a lawyer 
 Picklock ; and in The New Inn we have, as aforesaid,' 
 a " Court of Love " scene in a room " furnished as a 
 tribimal," where the maid Prudence " takes her seat of 
 judicature " and calls for the clearing of the court and 
 administration of oaths. In his other plays, as we have 
 seen, legalisms aboimd : in The Magnetic Lady, as we 
 shall see, there is far more legal " shop " and talk about 
 lawyers than in any three plays of Shakespeare. A play- 
 scene was in fact counted-on as a " draw," though Jonson 
 did not succeed with The New Inn. Chapman and 
 Rowley make their entire play of The Admiral of France 
 a tissue of judicial investigations. An inquiry, held by 
 way of a trial, and corruptly swayed by an iniquitous 
 Chancellor, is followed by another trial, in which, the 
 King's Advocate prosecuting, the Chancellor is exposed 
 and brought to justice. One or both of the authors had 
 certainly watched trials, as nearly everybody in that 
 day did ; and there is a probability that the elaborate 
 harangues in this play were modelled upon printed 
 reports. Yet neither Chapman nor Rowley was a lawyer. 
 A less elaborate but still lengthy trial scene occurs in 
 Byron's Tragedy : the device was evidently popular 
 in the period ; and in Chapman's plays it must have been 
 the main attraction. 
 
 V Above, pp. 123-5. 
 
154 T'HE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Other playwrights show the same proclivity. In 
 Dekker's Old Fortunatus (v, 2), in the scene in which 
 Vice and Virtue and Fortune dispute, the effect of a trial 
 is got by a reference to the Queen in the audience : 
 
 Fortune. Thou art too insolent : see, here's a court 
 Of mortal judges : let's by them be tried. 
 Which of us three shall most be deified. 
 
 And in If This be not a Good Play, the Devil is in It * 
 we have similar extempore effects : 
 
 Pluto. Sit, call a sessions : set the souls to a bar. 
 3. Jud. Make an Oyes ! . . . 
 
 Shacklesoul. A jury of brokers impannell'd and deeply sworn, 
 to pciss on all the villains in hell. 
 
 Then follows a trial of souls of bad men — Ravaillac, 
 Faust, &c. In A Warning for Faire Women (1599) 
 there is a long trial scene to which, for detail, formality, 
 and general realism, there is no parallel in Shakespeare's 
 plays. A murderer, concerning whose case there has 
 already been much amateur detective investigation, is 
 tried before " the Lord Mayor, the Lord Justice, and the 
 four Lords, and one clerk, and a Sheriff," who enter in 
 due form. The Lord Justice calls : 
 
 Bring forth the prisoner, and keep silence there. 
 Prepare the Inditement that it may be read. 
 
 The clerk duly does so, the document being given in full, 
 in the strict form of the day. The criminal is told in full 
 legal detail how " with one sword, price six shillings," 
 he accomplished his crime : and on his pleading guilty 
 the case proceeds exactly as such a case might, the judge 
 pronouncing a homily before passing sentence. The 
 abettors of the crime are then brought in and indicted 
 " jointly and severally," with the same technical pre- 
 cision, and searching questions are put to the guilty 
 persons. The "inditements " stand as documents of 
 Elizabethan criminal procedure. Had such a scene been 
 found in a Shakespearean play, it would have been 
 ^ Pearson's ed. vol. iii, p, 353. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 155 
 
 claimed by the legalists as overwhelming evidence of 
 Shakespeare's lawyership. The play is anonymous, and 
 is conjectnrally ascribed by Fleay to Lodge, whose train- 
 ing was in medicine. Shakespeare's it certainly is not, 
 though Shakespeare in Macbeth echoed some of its lines. 
 {See below, Ch. ix.) 
 
 In A Looking Glass for London, Greene and Lodge 
 insert an elaborate trial scene for the purpose of showing 
 how justice was perverted both by advocates and judges 
 in the interest of usurers : the trial being here presented, 
 as it were, for its own sake. 
 
 In The Fatal Dowry, Massinger sdts out, in " A 
 Street before the Coiut of Justice," with a discussion on 
 the arbitrary ways of law courts ; and the second scene 
 consists in the hearing of a plea to set aside the rigour 
 of justice in the case of a dead body seized for debt. In 
 the second Act the debate is continued. In the fourth 
 Act the wronged husband causes his father-in-law, an 
 ex-judge, to try the cause of the imfaithful wife, telling 
 the servants to set down the body of the slain seducer 
 " before the judgment seat " ; and the wife is to " stand 
 at the bar " : 
 
 For me, I am the accuser. 
 
 In the fifth Act, finally, the husband is himself formally 
 tried in court for his act of vengeance; the victim's 
 father, a judge, being present. The whole conduct of 
 these trials is sufficiently unlawyerlike ; tut that is not 
 the question. The point is that, like Shakespeare, the 
 other dramatists, without legal training and without 
 concern for strict legal form, spontaneously resorted to 
 trials and court procedure as a dramatic method. 
 
 In The Maid of Honour, Massinger makes the heroine 
 plead her cause before the King as before a judge : 
 
 To do me justice, 
 Exacts your present care, and I can admit 
 Of no delay. If, ere my cause be heard. 
 In favour of your brother you go on, sir. 
 
156 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Your sceptre cannot right me. He's the man, 
 
 The guilty man, whom I accuse ; and you 
 
 Stand bound in duty, as you are supreme, 
 
 To be impartial. Since you are a judge. 
 
 As a delinquent look on him, and not 
 
 As on a brother : Justice painted blind 
 
 Infers her ministers are obliged to hear 
 
 The cause : and truth, the judge, determine of it ; 
 
 And not sway'd or by favour or affection. 
 
 By a false gloss or wrested comment, alter 
 
 The true intent or letter of the law. . . . 
 
 I stand here mine own advocate. 
 
 Legal style and diction are lent to the scene in excess of 
 any need in the situation, for it takes place in a room of 
 the palace. The King in judicial style says : 
 
 Let us take our ^eats. 
 What is your title to him ? 
 
 And the heroine answers : 
 
 By this contract, 
 Seal'd solenmly before a reverend man, 
 I challenge him for my husband. 
 
 [Presents a paper to the King.] 
 
 We are witnessing a drama cast in legal forms, for the 
 entertaimnent of an audience accustomed to hear law 
 and talk law, by a dramatist who has no more special 
 legal knowledge than they. Had Lord Campbell had it 
 before him as a Shakespearean work he would imquestion- 
 ably have professed to find in it proof of close f amiUarity 
 with legal procedure, though in point of fact, like Shake- 
 speare's own legal scenes, it is as loose as may be in its 
 imitation of the real work of courts. 
 
 Middleton, in turn, makes the whole play of The Widow 
 turn on the getting of warrants, arrests, bails, the attempt 
 to secure a widow in marriage by having concealed 
 witnesses to her verbal " contract," the attempt on her 
 part to escape by htigation, and her " deed of gift " 
 which, as she announces, " was but a deed in trust." 
 Middleton, we shall be told, was a barrister ; and it must 
 have been his professional experience that so filled his 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGAIJSM 157 
 
 head with legal ideas and terms that he bestows them 
 on the widow. But in his other plays he uses no such 
 machinery ; and Webster, who was a " Merchant Taylor," 
 makes three of his pla}^— The White Devil, The 
 Devil's Law Case, and Appius and Virginia — turn 
 upon formal trieJs, besides introducing a trial scene into 
 The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, which he 
 wrote in collaboration with Dekker. Concerning the 
 second of the plays named, Mr. Devecmon has remarked 
 that it contains " more legal expressions, some of them 
 highly technical, and all correctly used, than are to be 
 found in any single one of Shakespeare's Works." ^ Upon 
 my citation. of this judgment* Mr. Greenwood protests^ 
 that 
 
 the fact is that the statement as to The Devil's Law Case is not 
 only not true, but so preposterously contrary to the truth that 
 one can hardly believe that Mr. Devecmon had read the drama 
 in question. There is, incredible as it may sound, practically 
 no law at all in Webster's play ! There are indeed a few legail 
 terms such as "livery and seisin," a "caveat," "tenements," 
 " executors," thrown in heie and there, and there is an absurd 
 travesty of a trial where each and everybody — ^judge, counsel, 
 witness, or spectator — seems to put in a word or two just as it 
 pleases him ; but to say that there are " more legal e3q>ressions " 
 in the play " (and some of them highly technical and all correctly 
 used) than are to be found in any single one of Shakespeare's 
 works," is an astounding perversion of the fact, as any reader 
 can see who chooses to peruse Webster's not very delicate drama. 
 I cannot but think that Mr. Robertson had either not read the 
 play, or had forgotten it when he quoted this amazing passage. 
 
 I am quite willing to stake the entire question upon 
 this issue. Mr. Greenwood might, I think, have taken 
 the trouble to collate the legal references in The Devil's 
 Law Case, and compare them with Lord Campbell's 
 citations from any one Shakespearean play : it would 
 have been more to the purpose than any amount of simple 
 
 1 In re Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, p. 8. 
 
 2 Did Shakespeare write ' Titus Andronicus'P 1905, p. 54. 
 ' The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 398. 
 
158 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 asseveration, however emphatic. He would thus have 
 learned that the " few " legal terms which he dismisses 
 as of no accoimt are exactly on a par with most of those 
 cited by Campbell from Shakespeare (only more realistic), 
 and with those cited by Grant White in a passage which 
 he himself has quoted with approbation. Having read 
 Webster's play thrice — which is more, I fear, than Mr. 
 Greenwood had done by Campbell's book — I will make 
 good his omission. The following "legal" phrases are 
 cited as they come. Act by Act : 
 
 Act I. Scene I. 
 Romdio. He makes his colour 
 
 Of visiting us so often, to sell land. 
 
 Contarino. The evidence of the piece of land 
 
 I motion'd to you for the sale. 
 
 Leonora. To settle your estate. 
 
 Act I. Scene 2. 
 Jolenta. Do you serve process on me ? 
 
 Rom. Keep your possession, you have the door by the ring. 
 That's livery and seisin in England. 
 
 Ercole. To settle her a jointure. 
 
 Jolenta. To make you a deed of gift. 
 
 Winifred. Yes, but the devil would fain put in for's share 
 in likeness of a separation. 
 
 Contarino. You have delivered him guiltless. 
 
 Act. II. Scene i. 
 Jtdio, Any action that is but accessory. 
 Crispiano. One that compounds quarrels. 
 Ercole. Your warrant must be mighty. . 
 
 Contarino. has a seal 
 
 From heaven to do it. 
 
 Act II. Scene 3. 
 
 Ariosto. What should move you 
 Put forth that harsh inter'gatory ? 
 
 Romelio. The evidence of church land. . . . 
 A supersedeas be not su'd. 
 
 Lonora. To come to his trial, to satisfy the law. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 159 
 
 Act II. Scene 4. 
 Capuchin. The law will strictly prosecute his life. 
 
 Act III. Scene 2. 
 
 Romelio. He has made a will . . . and deputed Jolenta his heir. 
 
 Romelio. If we can work him, as no doubt we shall. 
 To make another will, and therein assign 
 This gentleman his heir. 
 
 Romelio. I must put in a strong caveat. 
 To put in execution Barmotho pigs. 
 Here's your earnest. 
 
 Act III. Scene 3. 
 
 Romelio. You are already made, by absolute wiU, 
 Contarino's heir : now, if it can be prov'd 
 That you have issue by Lord Ercole, 
 I will make you inherit his land too. . . . 
 
 I have laid the case so radically 
 Not all the lawyers in [all] Christendom 
 Shall find any the least flaw in't. . . . 
 No scandal to you, since we will affirm 
 The precontract was so exactly done 
 By the same words us'd in the form of m£irriage, 
 That with a little dispensation, 
 A money matter, it shall be register'd 
 Absolute matrimony. 
 
 Act rv. Scene I. 
 
 A long quibbling dialogue between Ariosto. the advocate, and 
 Sanitonella, who has been " diy-founder'd " in a pew of a law 
 office "this four years, seldom found non-resident from my 
 desk," and presents a brief which " cost me four nights' labour." 
 Ariosto tears it up ; and the clerk " must make shift with the 
 foul copy." Cantilupo, being next consulted, pronounces, 
 " "Tis a case shall leave a precedent to all the world " ; Sanitonella 
 concluding, " The court will sit within this half hour ; peruse 
 your notes ; you have very short warning." 
 
 Act rv. Scene 2. Trial. 
 Ercole pas^s an officer to get a seat in " a closet belonging 
 to the court," where he " may hear all unseen " ; and Sanitonella 
 warns the officers to "let in no brachygraphy-men to take 
 notes," and, as " this cause will be long a-pleading," produces a 
 pie which he " may pleasure some of our learned counsel with," 
 as he has done " many a time and often when a cause " has 
 dragged long. 
 
i6o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The judge asks whether the parties are present ; and on 
 Romelio saying he is ignorant of what he is to be charged with, 
 says: 
 
 I assure you, the proceeding 
 
 Is most unequal then, for I perceive. 
 
 The counsel of the adverse party fumish'd 
 
 With full instruction . . . 
 
 Sir, we will do you 
 
 The favour, you shall hear the accusation ; 
 
 Which being known, we will adjourn the court 
 
 Till a fortnight hence : you may provide your counsel. 
 
 After further dialogue, Cantilupo opens : 
 
 May it please your lordship and the reverend court 
 
 To give me leave to open to you a case 
 
 So rare, so altogether void of precedent. 
 
 That I do challenge all the spacious volumes 
 
 Of the whole civil law to show the like. 
 
 We are of counsel for this gentlewoman. 
 
 We have receiv'd our fee : yet the whole course 
 
 Of what we are to speak is quite against her. 
 
 Yet we'll deserve our fee too. 
 
 After he has lengthily stated his case, the judge comments : 
 A most strange suit this ; 'tis beyond example, &c. 
 
 and proceeds to question the parties. When a witness 
 is asked for, Sanitonella responds, " Here, my lord, ore 
 tenus." and there is a long cross-examination. 
 
 In Act V, Scene 4, we have a passage which may be 
 instructively contrasted with Lord Campbell's illustration 
 of Shakespeare's deep and accurate knowledge of the 
 procedure of trial by battle : 
 
 Julio. I have undertaken the challenge very foolishly. 
 
 Prospero. It would be absolute conviction 
 
 Of cowardice and perjury ; and the Dane 
 
 May to your public shame reverse your arms. 
 
 Or have them ignominiously fasten'd 
 
 Under his horse-tail. 
 
 And in Scene 6 we have the actual trial by battle. The 
 Marshal begins in due form : 
 
 Give the appellant his summons : do the like 
 To the defendant ; 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM i6i 
 
 the proceedings go on with ostensible technical acciu^cy ; 
 and we have the herald's cries : " Soit la hataiUe. et 
 victoire a ceux qui ont droit ! " What would not Lord 
 Campbell have made of it aU ! 
 
 How Mr. Greenwood, in the face of all this matter, 
 can say that Mr. Devecmon's assertion " is an astoimding 
 perversion of the fact," I cannot understand. He must 
 have written in total oblivion, or ignorance, of the matter 
 upon which Lord Campbell founded his amazing dicta. 
 If there is " no law at all in Webster's play," Lord Camp- 
 bell has cited none from Shakespeare ; and Mr. Green- 
 wood's handling of the matter, in view of the use he has 
 made of Lord Campbdl's egregious treatise, calls for 
 somewhat serious reprehension. Evidently he had no 
 idea of the nature of the grotmds on which Campbell 
 proceeds. He speaks of " a few legal terms thrown in 
 here and there." What did Campbell produce from 
 Shakespeare ? If the trial in Webster is an " absurd 
 travesty of a trial, where each and everybody — ^judge, 
 counsel, witness, or spectator — seems to put in a word 
 or two just as it pleases him," what, in the name of honest 
 controversy, is the trial in The Merchant of Venice, 
 which Lord Campbell alleged to be " conducted according 
 to the strict forms of legal procedure " ? Upon Lord 
 Campbell's scandalous deUverances Mr. Greenwood founds 
 his main case. Will he venture to discriminate between 
 Shakespeare's law case and Webster's? And if Lord 
 Campbell is entitled to ascribe to Shakespeare a full 
 knowledge of the procedure of trial by battle on the sole 
 ground of his use of the word " craven," and to make 
 this imspeakable absurdity part of his case for Shake- 
 speare's " profotmd and accurate knowledge of law," 
 upon what critical principle does Mr. Greenwood sweep 
 aside the actual trial by battle in Webster, with all its 
 technicalities ? 
 
 I am not concerned to go into the question of the 
 accuracy of Webster's or Massinger's phraseology : that 
 
 L 
 
i62 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 is neither here nor there. Even Campbell, in flat contra- 
 diction of his own claims, admitted inaccuracies in Shake- 
 speare; and Mr. Greenwood, in turn, fatally pressed 
 by Mr. Devecmon, makes further admissions, forgetting 
 that they absolutely destroy his own case, which rested 
 not upon mere citation of legal matter in Shakespeare, 
 but upon the repeated claim that Shakespeare's law was 
 impeccable, never open to demurrer or writ of error, and 
 therefore possible only to one within the freemasonry of 
 the profession. It may be left to either lawyers or lay- 
 men to judge for themselves whether there is not much 
 more show of legal knowledge and recourse to legal 
 phraseology in Webster than in Shakespeare. From 
 twenty-three of Shakespeare's plays Lord Campbell 
 can cite on the average only two or three legal allusions 
 apiece : Webster's one play 5delds over thirty. I do not 
 for a moment pretend that they exhibit " deep " or 
 " accmrate " knowledge : I leave these follies to the 
 other side, who profess to certify a pla5n)mght's lawyer- 
 ship on grotmds that would move a policeman to derision. 
 The question is whether Webster's multitude of " legal- 
 isms " do not, by every principle on which Lord Campbell 
 proceeded in his extracts and his comments, erfiibit 
 tenfold more preoccupation with legal matters than do 
 Shakespeare's, and, by mere variety of allusion, far more 
 " knowledge." 
 
 I have dealt thus far only with one of Webster's plays— 
 apart from the incidental citations I have made from him 
 in conmion with other playwrights in dealing with Lord 
 Campbell's proofs. But an almost equal abundance of 
 legal allusion is found in Appius akd Virginia, as the 
 following citations show : 
 
 Were you now 
 In prison, or arraign 'd before the senate 
 For some suspect of treason ; 
 
 Virginius, we would have you thus possess'd. 
 We sit not here to be prescrib'd and taught. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 163 
 
 Nor to have any suitor give us limit 
 Whose power admits no curb. 
 
 (i. 3) 
 Is my love mispriz'd ? 
 
 Hadst thou a judge's place above all judges 
 That judge all souls, having power to sentence me. 
 
 Your rashness we remit. 
 Blind misprision. 
 
 I'll produce 
 Firm proofs, notes probable, sound witnesses. 
 Then, having with your lictors summon'd her, 
 I'll bring the cause before your judgment seat. 
 Where upon my infallid evidence 
 You may pronounce the sentence on my side. 
 
 The cause is mine ; you but the sentencer 
 
 Upon that evidence which I shall bring. 
 
 The business is, to have warrants by arrest 
 
 To answer such things at the judgment bar 
 
 As can be laid against her : ere her friends 
 
 Can be assembled, ere himself can study 
 
 Her answer, or scarce know her cause of summons. 
 
 To descant on the matter, Appius may 
 
 Escimine, try, and doom Virginia. 
 
 The most austere and upright censurer 
 That ever sat upon the awful bench. 
 
 {lb.) 
 (lb.) 
 (lb.) 
 
 (lb.) 
 
 (lb.) 
 (iii. I.) 
 
 If you will needs wage eminence and state 
 Choose out a weaker opposite. 
 
 (lb.) 
 
 First, the charge of her husband's funeral, next debts and 
 legacies, and lastly the reversion. 
 
 (iii, 2.) 
 
 The term-time is the mutton-monger in the whole calendar. 
 Do your lawyers eat any salads with their mutton ? 
 
 (iii. 2.) 
 Deny me justice absolutely, rather 
 Than feed me with delays. 
 
 (lb.) 
 
i64 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 My purse is too scant to wage law with thee : 
 I am enforc'd be mine own advocate. 
 
 to let you know. 
 Ere you proceed in this your subtlement, 
 What penalty and danger you accrue 
 If you be found to double. 
 
 Having compounded vrith his creditors 
 For the third moiety. 
 
 Your reverence to the judge, good brother. 
 
 May it please your reverend lordships. 
 
 Now the question 
 (With favour of the bench) I will make plain 
 In two words only without circumstance. 
 
 Here's her deposition on her death-bed. 
 
 If that your claim be just, how happens it 
 That you have discontinu'd it the space 
 Of fourteen year ? 
 
 I shall resolve your lordship. 
 
 Where are your proofs of that ? 
 Here, my good lord, 
 With depositions likewise. 
 
 For your question 
 Of discontinuance : put case. . . . 
 
 (76.) 
 
 (16.) 
 
 (J6.( 
 
 (iv, I.) 
 
 (16.) 
 
 (16.) 
 (76.) 
 
 (760 
 (76.) 
 
 (76.) 
 
 I bend low to thy gown, but not to thee. 
 Let us proceed to sentence. 
 
 (76.) 
 (76.) 
 (76.) 
 
 Over and above all this resort to forms of trial, the 
 habit of legal phraseology and legal allusion, as we have 
 seen, pervades the Elizabethan drama to an extent which 
 implies a general proclivity in the people. Even the 
 many parallels above presented to the citations of Lord 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 165 
 
 Campbell from Shakespeare give but an inadequate idea 
 of the extent of the practice ; and at the risk of wearying 
 the reader I will transcribe for him a string of the legaUsms 
 and references to law and htigation in a single play of 
 Ben Jonson's — ^The Magnetic Lady. 
 
 Compass. He is the prelate of the parish here. . . . 
 Makes all the matches and the marriage feasts 
 Within the ward ; draws all the parish wills. 
 Designs the legacies. . . . 
 For of the wardmote quest he better can 
 The mystery, than the Levitic law. 
 
 Lculy Loadstone. He keeps ofi all her suitors, keeps the portion 
 Still in his hands, and will not part withal 
 On any terms. 
 
 [Many references to this] 
 
 Compass. Master Practice here, my lady's lawyer 
 Or man of law (for that is the true writing), 
 A man so dedicate to his profession 
 And the preferments go along with it. . . . 
 So much he loves that night-cap ! the bench-gown 
 With the broad gaid on the back ! these shew a man 
 Betroth'd mito the study of our laws. . . . 
 He has brought your niece's portion with him, madam. 
 At least, the man that must receive it, here 
 They come negociating the afiair ; 
 You may perceive the contract in their faces. 
 And read the indenture. 
 
 Sir Diaphanous. I have $een him wait at court there, with his 
 maniples . . . 
 
 Of papers and petitions. 
 
 Practice. He is one 
 
 That over-rules though, by his authority 
 Of living there ; and «u:es for no man else : 
 Neglects the sacred letter of the law ; 
 And holds it all to be but a dead heap 
 Of civil institutions : the rest only 
 Of common men, and their causes, a farrago 
 Or a made dish in court ; a thing of nothing. 
 
 Compass. And that's your quarrel with him ! a just plea. 
 
 Lady Loadstone. Will Master Practice be of counsel againpt us ? 
 
 Compass. He is a lawyer and must speak for his fee. 
 Against his father and mother, all his kindred. 
 
166 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 His brothers or his sisters ; no exception 
 
 Lies at the common law. He must not alter 
 
 Nature for form, but go on in his path ; 
 
 It may be, he'll be for us. . . . 
 
 He shall at last accompt for the utmost farthing 
 
 If you can keep your hand from a discharge. 
 
 Sir Moth. The portion left was sixteen thousand pound : 
 I do confess it as a just man should. . . . 
 Now for the profits every way arising. 
 
 Well sir, the contract 
 Is with this gentleman, ten thousand pound. 
 An ample portion for a younger brother . . . 
 He expects no more than that sum to be tender'd 
 And he receive it : these are the conditions. 
 
 Practice. A direct bargain, and sale in open market. 
 
 Sir Moth. And what I have fumish'd him withal o'tbe by 
 To appear or so, a matter of four hundred 
 To be deduced upon the payment. . . . 
 
 Draw up this 
 Good Master Practice, for us, and be speedy 
 
 Practice. But here's a mighty gain, sir, you have made 
 Of this one stock : the principal first doubled. 
 In the first seven year, and that redoubled 
 In the next seven, beside six thousand pound. 
 There's threescore thousand got in fourteen year. 
 After the usual rate of ten in the hundred. 
 And the ten thousand paid . . . 
 
 Sir Moth. . . . 'Tis certain that a man may leave. 
 His wealth or to his children or his friends ; 
 His wit he cannot so dispose by legacy. . , , 
 
 Compass. He may entail a jest upon his house. 
 Or leave a tale to his posterity. 
 To be told after him. 
 
 Practice. . . . The reverend law lies open to repair 
 Your reputation. That will give you damages ! 
 Five thousand pound for a finger, I have known 
 Given in court ; and let me pack your jury. 
 
 . . . Sir, you forget 
 There is a court above, of the Star Chamber 
 To punish routs and riots. 
 
 Cotnpass. . , . There's no London jury but are led. 
 In evidence, as far by common fame 
 As they are by present disposition 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 167 
 
 ... a man 
 MarVd out for a chief justice in his cradle. 
 
 Practice. ... I am a bencher, and now double reader 
 
 Compass. But run the words of matrimony over 
 My head and Mistress Pleasance's in my chamber ; 
 There's Captain Ironside to be a witness, 
 And here's a license to secure thee. — ^Parson 
 What do you stick at ? 
 
 Palate. It is afternoon, sir. 
 Directly against the canon of the church. 
 
 Sir Diaphanous. I saw the contract and can witness it. 
 
 Compass. Varlet, do your office. 
 
 Serjeant. I do arrest your body. Sir Moth Interest, 
 In the King's name, at suit of Master Compass, 
 And dame Plancentia his wife. The action's enter'd. 
 Five hundred thousand pound. ... 
 
 Lady Loadstone. I cannot stop 
 
 The laws, or hinder justice : I can be 
 Your bail, if it may be taken. 
 
 Compass. With the captain's, 
 
 I ask no better. 
 
 Rut. Here are better men 
 Will give their bail. 
 
 Compass. But yours will not be taken. . . . 
 
 Serjeant. You must to prison, sir. 
 Unless you can find bail the creditor likes. 
 
 Compass. Bring forth your child, or I appeal you of murder. 
 
 Prac. The law is plain : if it were heard to cry. 
 And you produce it not, he may indict 
 All that conceal it, of felony and murder. 
 
 Polish. . . . Here your true niece stands, fine Mistress 
 Compass, 
 To whom you are by bond engag'd to pay 
 The sixteen thousand pound, which is her portion 
 Due to her husband, on her marriage-day. 
 I speak the truth, and nothing but the truth. . . . 
 
 Ironside. You'll pay it now. Sir Moth, with interest. . . . 
 
 Sir Moth. Into what nets of cozenage am I cast 
 On every side ? . . . What will you bate ? 
 
i68 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Compass. No penny the law gives. 
 Sir Moth. Yes, Bias's money. 
 
 Compass. What, yotir friend in court ! 
 I will not rob you of him, nor the purchase. 
 
 Lady Loadstone. . . . There rests yet a gratuity from me 
 To be conferr'd upon this gentleman. 
 Who, as my nephew Compass says, was cause 
 First of the offence, but since of all amends. 
 The quarrel caused the affright, the fright brought on 
 The travail, which made peace ; the peace drew on 
 This new discovery, which endeth all 
 In reconcilement. 
 
 Compass. When the portion 
 Is tender'd, and received. 
 
 Sir Moth. Well, you must have it ; 
 As good at first as last. 
 
 The whole play, in fine; is the working out, without 
 resort to courts, of a dispute in law. Plays in a similar 
 taste will be found in Chapman, He3?wood, Dekker, and 
 Massinger, who were not lawyers, and in Middleton, who 
 was. But, as it happens, no such play of pervading legal 
 intrigue is to be found in Shakespeare. In no Shake- 
 sperean play, indeed, apart from the Merchant of 
 Venice, is there to be found nearly so much reliance 
 upon and reference to a legal interest as is to be seen in 
 Chapman's first plaiy. The Blind Beggar of Alex- 
 andria, where a question about a mortgage alleged to 
 be forfeited recurs half a dozen times, with long dis- 
 cussions about " statutes " and " assurances " such as 
 Shakespeare nowhere indulges in. Where Shakespeare 
 merely uses legal phrases, as often as not metaphorically, 
 the other dramatists introduce actual matters of Utiga- 
 tion. 
 
 Apart from the endless allusions to concrete litigation 
 in Tudor literature, again, we find in the writings even 
 of the theologians constant evidence of the legalist habit 
 of mind. They often put religion in lawyer-fashion; 
 knowing their readers would so relish it. Thus Bishop 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 169 
 
 Hooper, answering Bishop Gardiner on the subject of 
 the Eucharist, writes of 
 
 the promise of God ... of the which . . . these Sacraments 
 be testimonies, witnesses ; as the seal annexed unto the writing 
 is a stablishment and making good of all things contained and 
 specified within the writing. This is used in all bargains, 
 exchanges, purchases, and contracts. 
 
 When the matter entreated between two parties is fully 
 concluded upon, it is confirmed with obligations sealed inter- 
 changeably, that for ever those seals may be a witness of such 
 covensmts as hath been agreed upon between the both parties. 
 And these writings and seals maketh not the bargain, but con- 
 firmeth the bargain that is made. No man useth to give his 
 obligation of debtor before there is some contract agreed upon 
 between him and his creditor. No man useth to mark his 
 neighbour's ox or horse in his mark before he be at a full price 
 for the ox, or else were it felony and theft to rob his neighbour. 
 Every man useth to mark his own goods, and not another man's ; 
 so God, in the commonwealth of his church, doth not mark any 
 man in his mark, until such time as the person that he marketh 
 be his. There must first be had a communication between 
 God and the man, to know how he can make any contract of 
 friendship with his enemy, the living God.^ 
 
 In a similar vein he handles the Ten Commandments : 
 
 Forasmuch as there can be no contract, peace, alliance, or 
 confederacy between two persons or more, except first the 
 persons that will contract agree within themselves upon such 
 things as shall be contracted . . . ; also, seeing these ten com- 
 mandments are nothing else but the tables or writings that 
 contain the conditions of the peace between God and man. 
 Gen. xix, and declareth at large how and to what the persons 
 named in, the writings are bound unto the other . , . ; it is 
 necessary to know how God and man was made at one, that such 
 conditions could be agreed upon and confirmed with such solemn 
 and public evidences, as these tables be, written with the finger 
 of God. The contents whereof bind God to aid and succour, 
 keep and preserve, warrant and defend man from all ill, both of 
 body and soul, and at the last to give him eternal bliss and 
 everlasting felicity.* 
 
 1 Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker Soc. vol. p. 136. 
 ' Declaration of the Ten Commandments : pref. " Unto the 
 Christian Reader," 1550. 
 
170 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 And this comes from an evangelical writer; a martyr, 
 much prized in the generation following him. 
 
 After this we can imderstand how a later divine, Thomas 
 Adams, could deliver in a sermon the " legal "-passages 
 cited from him by Mr. Judge Wilhs, and candidly quoted 
 by Mr. Greenwood,' who can offer no better semblance 
 of a rebuttal than the suggestion that Adams had " prob- 
 ably looked into some law books, and perhaps been thrown 
 into legal company." Now, the passages cited are so 
 technical that, had Lord Campbell found them in Shake- 
 speare, he would have reckoned them " the best stakes 
 in his hedge," as Hooker would say. And if it be rational 
 to explain Adams's law by the "probably" and the 
 " perhaps " above cited, why, in the name of reason and 
 consistency, should not the same suggestion hold in the 
 case of Shakespeare ? 
 
 It is idle on Mr. Greenwood's part to fall back on an 
 appeal to the "inteUigent and unprejudiced reader" 
 to go through the plays and poems and note " the persist- 
 ence, the accuracy with which he makes use of legd terms 
 and legal allusions, in season and out of season," and all 
 the rest of it, " and then say if he thinks these expressions, 
 culled from the sermons of Thomas Adams, furnish any- 
 thing like a parallel case to that which we have been con- 
 sidering." The intelligent and unprejudiced reader will 
 reply (i) that the expressions of Adams are more tech- 
 nically lawyerlike than anj^hing in Shakespeare, and 
 (2) that par£dlel cases to Shakespeare's are furnished by half 
 a dozen of the dramatists whom we have put in evidence, 
 and whom Mr. Greenwood, like Lords Campbell and 
 Penzance and the other lawyers, had never thought of 
 examining — ^the only difference being that Jonson and 
 Webster and Chapman show much more knowledge of 
 and interest in law than does Shakespeare. 
 
 Mr. Greenwood's answer to me on the subject of The 
 Devil's Law Case is a sufficient proof that he had adopted 
 * The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 392-3. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 171 
 
 the conclusions of Lord Campbell without stud5dng his 
 exposition. I will not believe, unless he makes affidavit to 
 that effect, that he thinks the trial-scene in the Merchant 
 OF Venice is lawyerlike in comparison with that in 
 Webster's play. His attack on that is a mere distortion 
 of the issue. He has prodigally and blindly endorsed 
 alike Lord Campbell and Mr. Castle and the other legalists 
 — save where he candidly avows (p. 381) that he " cannot 
 attach much weight to the judgment of a critic [Mr. 
 Churton Collins] who sees the trained lawyer's hand in 
 Titus Andronicus " on the strength of such items as 
 " aSy," " warrants," " suum quique." " seizeth," " fee," 
 " purchase," and so forth. But it is just on such things 
 as these that the case of Campbell is mostly built up. 
 It includes even far weaker items. If such data be dis- 
 allowed, nine-tenths of his book goes by the board at 
 once. 
 
 Replying to Mr. Devecmon, Mr. Greenwood strangely 
 protests (p. 400) against what he calls the " ciuious idea " 
 that " a dramatist cannot be a lawyer imless he makes 
 his ladies and laymen speak in the language that a trained 
 lawyer would employ," Mr. Devecmon having shown 
 that Shakespeare did not do so. At this line of argument 
 I must express my astonishment. Twice over, Mr. Green- 
 wood has in effect surrendered his case. Proceeding 
 as he does upon Lord Campbell's deUverance, without 
 examining the absurd evidence by which it is supported, 
 he at a pinch throws over that evidence while still insisting 
 upon the judge's finding. Met by Judge Willis with 
 more technical legalisms than Shakespeare's in the writ- 
 ings of a divine of Shakespeare's day, he denies that such 
 instances furnish " any analogy with the case of Shake- 
 speare." 
 
 It is not (he goes on) a question of the mere use of legal 
 phrases or maxims, such as " acknowledging a fine," " a writ ad 
 melius inquirendum," " non est inventus," " noverint universi." 
 " seised," "volenti non fit injuria." « tenants at will," " tenants 
 
172 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 in capite," "bargain and sale," and the like. The question is, 
 whether Shakespeare, when we consider his works as a whole, 
 does not exhibit such a sound and accurate knowledge of law, 
 such a familiarity with legal life and customs, as could not 
 possibly have been acquired (or " picked up ") by tlie Stratford 
 player ; whether it be not the fact, as Richard Grant White 
 puts it, that " legal phrases flow from his pen as part of his 
 vocabulary, and parcel of his thought " ? It is not to the purpose 
 to compile mere lists of legal terms and expressions from the 
 pages of other Elizabethan writers, and those who do so simply 
 display an ignoratio elenchi, as the old philosophers would say. i 
 
 I regret to have to say that there is something worse here 
 than ignoratio elenchi ; but I will not characterise it 
 further than by use of the phrase of the distinguished 
 living statesman who pronoimced certain political argu- 
 ments to be samples of the " black arts of surrebuttal 
 and surrejoinder." Mr. Greenwood has simply sought 
 to change the issue while professing to argue it. It is 
 a question of " the mere use of legal phrases or maxims " 
 — or, still worse, of the inferences to be drawn from mere 
 scofi&ng allusions to the practices of lawyers. Campbell 
 did not scruple to foimd on these as proofs of an inside 
 f amiharity with legal life. He actually cited the phrase 
 " crow like a craven " as proof of a technical knowledge 
 of the law of wager by battle. Beyond such ineptitudes 
 as these, he could cite only the use of legal phrases, apart 
 from a very few claims as to legal knowledge being implied 
 in the plots of plays. To all the ineptitudes of Campbell's 
 case Mr. Greenwood is committed when he founds on 
 the deliverances which Campbell so justified. If Mr. 
 Greenwood means to assert that a " sound and accurate 
 knowledge of law " is to be proved in the plays apart 
 from the use of legal phrases, he is talking, I must say, 
 even more heedlessly than Campbell, for Campbell did 
 at least make a parade of evidence in respect of the legal 
 phrases. Had Campbell found " writ ad melius inquiren- 
 dum " in Shakespeare he would have made it the head- 
 
 * Work cited, p. 395. 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 173 
 
 stone of the comer. It is really carrying special pleading 
 beyond the bounds of professional licence to turn round 
 as Mr. Greenwood does, after staking his whole case on 
 a judgment ^ founded on a " mere Ust of legal terms and 
 expressions," and assert that lists of other men's legal 
 terms and expressions coxmt for nothing as against an 
 alleged general knowledge of law in the Shakespeare 
 plays for which he has no other evidence worth mentioning. 
 I am at a loss, I confess, to know finally what Mr. 
 Greenwood does mean ; for in this very passage, disparag- 
 ing mere legal phrases, he resumes the claim that " legal 
 phrases flow from Shakespeare's pen as part of his vocabu- 
 lary and parcel of his thought." Does he mean that 
 other men's legal phrases flowed from their pens in some 
 other way ? If so, whose ? The plain truth is that Mr. 
 Greenwood had never looked at the legal phrases of the 
 other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Had he 
 done so, he would not have written his book. Indeed 
 I cannot believe that if, instead of taking Campbell's 
 mere dictum at second hand from Lord Penzance, he 
 had merely gone through the Shakespeare plays ad hoc 
 in the critical spirit in which he approached the Shake- 
 speare biography, he would ever have dreamt of formulat- 
 ing for himself any legalist theory. Reading the trial 
 scene in the Merchant of Venice, he would have said 
 of that, as he quite irrelevantly says to me concerning 
 the Devil's Law Case, that it " contains no law at all." 
 He dismisses with just contempt the " legal " phrases 
 cited by Mr. Churton Collins from Titus Andronicus; 
 and agrees with Mr. Castle that the play " seems to do 
 everything that a lawyer would not do, and leave imdone 
 everything that he would." I am curious to know whether 
 he would say otherwise of the Merchant of Venice, 
 which Mr. Castle does not examine. But the phrases 
 cited by Mr. Collins from Titus are not a whit more 
 
 » Lord Penzance, be it remembered, merely quoted Campbell^ 
 making no investigation of his own. 
 
174 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 nugatory than most of those founded upon by Campbell. 
 Furthermore, on his imfortunate presupposition that 
 what eminent lawyers affirm in his favour about law in 
 Shakespeare must be true, Mr. Greenwood has committed 
 himself to Mr. Castle's special claim about the use of 
 " colour " in Shakespeare, which we have seen to be as 
 worthless as Campbell's and Grant White's claim about 
 " purchase," and Campbell's case in general. 
 
 Mr. Greenwood's respect for legal opinion vanishes, of 
 comrse, when it goes against his thesis. We have seen 
 how he treats the dicta of Mr, Devecmon. I fancy that 
 any open-minded lawyer who has followed the discussion 
 will give Mr. Greenwood short shrift — ^if I may so mix 
 professional metaphors. In his impatience of the other 
 lawyer's contradiction, he tmwittingly falls foul of a 
 fellow legalist, Senator Davis. From that writer Mr. 
 Devecmon quoted the admission that " Antony in speak- 
 ing of the real estate left by Caesar to the Roman people, 
 does not use the appropriate word ' devise.' " Upon 
 which Mr. Greenwood retorts (p. 403) that the dramatist 
 was not " so absurdly pedantic " as to make Antony 
 use a correct legal expression when the " left " of North 
 sufficed. Then he proceeds to quote " the critic " as 
 saying that the expression " mito your heirs for ever " 
 was imnecessary. " Really, really ! " exclaims Mr. 
 Greenwood, " This is just a little irritating." Perhaps ; 
 but the offence comes from Senator Davis, who affirms 
 in general the profundity and accuracy of Shakespeare's 
 legal knowledge, not Mr. Devecmon, who denies it ! And 
 only thirty pages earher (p. 374), Mr. Greenwood had 
 cited this very Senator Davis as one giving weighty testi- 
 mony to Shakespeare's command of a legal vocabulary 
 in which " no legal solecisms will be found." If then 
 the irritating phrase is, as Mr. Greenwood protests, 
 " surely an argument fit only for the least intelligent of 
 readers," the protest should go to the right address. 
 When he repugns against Mr. Devecmon's criticisms 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 175 
 
 of Shakespeare's law, Mr. Greenwood merely cuts the 
 bough on which he sits. In an amvising footnote he 
 quotes from my book on Titus Andronicus the phrase, 
 " putting a few necessary caveats." " No lawyer," he 
 comments, " wovild speak of ' putting a caveat.' The 
 legal term -is to ' enter a caveat.' " And the compiler of 
 his index sternly clinches the matter by the entry, 
 " Robertson, Mr. J. M., betrays his ignorance on law, 
 372, note." The most amusing item of all, perhaps, is 
 that I happen to have spent four and a half years of my 
 youthful life in a law office. But it was a Scotch office 
 (to say nothing of the fact that I was immensely more 
 interested in iterature than in law) ; and in Scotch law 
 they do not, to my recollection, speak of " caveats," which 
 word is therefore for me simple English, and not " jargon." 
 " Enter a caveat " is a phrase well entitled to the latter 
 label. But let Mr. Greenwood's and the indexer's 
 judgment stand : what then becomes of Mr. Greenwood's 
 attempted rebuttal of Mr. Devecmon ? * He really cannot 
 have it both ways. If he insists that no lawyer would 
 say " put a caveat," he has quashed his own objection 
 to the argument that Shakespeare makes his characters 
 talk law as no lawyer would. He does not deny that 
 Shakespeare makes Queen Catherine "challenge" a 
 judge, as lawyers "challenge" jurors. Then Shake- 
 speare was no lawyer. It is idle for Mr. Greenwood to 
 say that " challenge " was used in a general sense. What 
 about " caveat " ? . . . 
 
 1 At one point, I will offer Mr. Greenwood my humble literary 
 support against Mr. Devecmon, my ally. Mr. Devecmon criticises 
 Shakespeare's use of " statutes " in Love's Labour's Lost, i, i . 
 " A statute," he objects, " is an act of the legislature." It was 
 really other things as well ! Apart from its perfectly legitimate 
 application to the laws of a college, the word was habitually 
 applied in Shakespeare's day to "statutes marchant " &c. 
 without the defining term. I think my ally is in the wrong for 
 once — ^in the course of an argument in which he is overwhelmingly 
 in the tight. 
 
176 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 I am not concerned to follow Mr. Greenwood through 
 the rest of the difficulties in which he has enmeshed him- 
 self. It is sufficient to repeat that he cannot without 
 self-stultification plead that the laxities of Shakespeare's 
 law do not prove him to have been no lawyer. The 
 summing-up of Campbell, upon which Mr. Greenwood 
 proceeded, was to the effect that Shakespeare did in- 
 variably use legal terms — ^that is, make his characters 
 use them — as a trained lawyer would. It was Mr. Green- 
 wood's citation of that and similar enormities of nonsense 
 that enabled Mark Twain to die contented in the Baco- 
 nian faith. The breakdown of Campbell's case at the 
 first serious push tells of the levity with which it was 
 framed. But if we allow Mr. Greenwood to recall Camp- 
 bell's extravagances and restate the proposition as he 
 wUl, it is annihilated for every candid student by that 
 comparison of the Shakespeare plays with those of his 
 contemporaries which has been made in these pages, and 
 which neither Campbell nor Mr. Greenwood attempted. 
 
 When, then, Mr. Greenwood winds up his legal chapter 
 by citing the passage about " common " and " several " 
 from Love's Labour's Lost (ii, i), and the similar passage 
 from the Sonnets, and triumphantly puts the questions, 
 " Did the provincial player, the ' Stratford rustic,' write 
 such sonnets as those \i.e. the various ' legal ' sonnets] 
 I have quoted ? Is it his law which appears in Venus's 
 allusion to a common money bond, or in the various 
 passages of Lucrece ? Did he write the travesty of 
 * Hales V. Petit ' in Hamlet ? Did he discourse of 
 common of pasture ' and ' severalty ' in Love's Labour's 
 Lost ? Is it to him that we owe the thousands (!) of legal 
 allusions scattered throughout the plays ? " — ^to the whol? 
 series of challenges we answer. Yes ! — with the qualifica- 
 tion that " thousands " should be " dozens." On the very 
 previous page Mr. Greenwood had obliviously cited an 
 allusion to a " several " in the First Part of Sir John Old- 
 castle. Was that play written by a lawyer ? The jesting 
 
LITIGATION AND LEGALISM 177 
 
 figure about " conunon " and " enclosed " ground, applied 
 to a woman, occurs twice in Dekker's Honest Whore 
 (Pt. II, iv, i). Was that written by a lawyer ? In 
 Bacon's Apophthegms Mr. Greenwood will find a sufii- 
 ciently free jest about " conunon and several " ascribed 
 to Sir Walter Raleigh. Was Raleigh a lawyer? And 
 can Mr. Greenwood doubt that such stories were widely 
 current in Shakespeare's day ? In his own words, " I 
 think not. Credat JudcBus " ; or let us rather say, 
 " Credant judices " — Campbell and Penzance ! 
 
 The other items in Mr. Greenwood's challenge are as 
 void as this. We have seen them one and all put down 
 on test. His final afiirmation of " profusion of legal 
 phraseology and wealth of legal knowledge," made without 
 any judicial comparison of Shakespeare's plays with 
 other men's; will not, I trust, be repeated after such a 
 comparison has been laid before him. But I am moved 
 to put two additional challenges, after the model of his. 
 (i) If " Shakspere " the actor were a " Stratford rustic," 
 why on earth should that rustic, of all people, be supposed 
 to be ignorant of the rurally notorious facts about the 
 usage of "common" and "several"? (2) But why, 
 on the other hand, should Shakespeare, coming to London 
 in early manhood and living there till near his death, be 
 singled out for rusticity any more than Bacon ? Myself 
 bom a rustic, I have some interest in the answer. 
 
 M 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 
 OF THE PLAYS 
 
 (I) Lord Penzance and Mr. Donnelly 
 
 ONE province of our inquiry, that constituted 
 by the argument from " legal knowledge," has 
 been traversed, not without tedium. Two 
 others remain to be explored. The " legal " 
 argument is backed up by the "classical" — the argument 
 from the " classical scholarship " said to be revealed by the 
 Plays ; and both are sought to be corroborated by the 
 citation of " coincidences of thought and phrase " in the 
 Shakespearean plays and Bacon's works. We are now 
 to deal with the " classical " position. 
 
 The dialectical experience will be found to be curiously 
 similar to that which we have undergone. The pervading 
 fallacy of the legalist argiunent has been, in a word, that 
 of incomplete induction. The quality of lawyership has 
 been assigned to one pla5nvright mainly by inference 
 from a study of his plays alone ; when a wider survey 
 proves that he had no special proclivity or accomplish- 
 ment. Where a form of testing has been gone through, 
 it has been carelessly and misleadingly applied. Sub- 
 stantially the same error we shall find made in respect 
 of the inference thgit the plays of Shakespeare exhibit 
 wide classical scholarship because they contain classical 
 allusions and classical commonplaces. For in this case 
 also the conclusion has been drawn without resort to the 
 comparative method, which would reveal non-classical 
 sources for Shakespeare's small classical knowledge. 
 Much of the discussion, indeed, proceeds on the assump- 
 
 178 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 179 
 
 tion that the commonplaces of antiquity are unique, and 
 incapable of being independently invented by other 
 peoples, whereas it is of the very nature of commonplaces 
 to be universal. Such tropes as that of " a sea of 
 troubles," such saws as " time tries all," " your father 
 lost, lost his," and so forth, have been seriously cited 
 as ideas possible only to men who knew them by classic 
 quotation. The late Professor Churton Collins, while 
 repeatedly conceding that such phrases are mere co- 
 incidences of ordinary reflection, claimed that the saw 
 " Fat paimches have lean pates " (L. L. L. i, 1) is " un- 
 doubtedly from the anon5mious Greek proverb " to the 
 same effect. It was a current English proverb, and is 
 found in two forms in Dekker's Old Fortunatus : 
 
 For a lean diet makes a fat wit. 
 
 (i. 2)- 
 I am not fat. 
 Andel. I'll be sworn thy wit is lean. 
 
 (ii. 2). 
 
 Even as regards less common sa5dngs, common sense and 
 common experience remind us tiiat a htmdred lessons of 
 life are learned and briefly recorded by common folk 
 to-day even as they were by the ancients. An old friend 
 of my own, a Scotch foreman carpenter, once remarked 
 to me, with regard to his function as foreman, " I can 
 say, * Come on, chaps ' ; I canna say, ' Go on.' " I 
 am very sure he knew nothing of the classic Docet tolerare 
 labores, non juhet : the idea was as natural to him as to 
 any ancient. And in the case of a writer so obviously 
 given to sententious phrase as the author of the Shake- 
 spearean plays and poems, common sense might admit 
 the probable spontaneity of many items of every-day 
 reflection that happen to have been penned in antiquity. 
 Antithesis and aUiteration, again, are natural devices in 
 all languages. Learned Professors — Mr. Chiuton Collins and 
 Mr. Lowell, for instance — cannot read such a line as : 
 Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled. 
 
i8o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 without suspecting reminiscence of Greek sets of terms 
 beginning with the piivative a. Now, not only are lines 
 of sequences of words in "un" common in Spenser, ^ 
 they are common in Fairfax's translation of Tasso's 
 Jerusalem Delivered {1600), and still more common 
 in Daoiel's Civil Wars : 
 
 Unseen, unheard, or undescried at all. 
 
 Fairfsix, B. i, st. 65. 
 Unseen, unmarked, unpitied, unrewarded. 
 
 Id. B. ii, St. 16. 
 Daniel has : 
 
 Uncourted, unrespected, unobeyed. 
 
 B. ii, St. 52. 
 Unheard and unarraigned. 
 
 B. iii, St. 23. 
 Undaunted, unafieared. 
 
 B. iii, St. 76. 
 Unsupported and unbackt. 
 
 B. iii, St. 79. 
 
 There is no reason to infer here any reminiscence of Greek 
 tragedy : the device goes back to Chaucer, and might 
 be independently reinvented. Daniel and Fairfax were 
 not Greek scholars. 
 
 The main stress of the " classical " case, of course, is 
 laid upon direct classical allusions and upon non-pro- 
 verbial passages which may fairly be described as quota- 
 tions. But in this connexion also the inference of 
 original scholarship is often quite imcritically drawn. 
 Even Shakespearean scholars in some cases seem to fail 
 to realise how much popular knowledge of classical 
 matters was scattered by both homilies and popular 
 plays in the Tudor period, apart from the publication of 
 translations. Some of the Interludes are notably abun- 
 dant in their classical allusions. That of The Trial of 
 Treasure, printed in black-letter in 1567, has references, 
 often discursive and explanatory, to Diogenes, Alexander, 
 Antisthenes, Pythagoras, Pegasus, Morpheus, Hydra; 
 
 * See refs. in Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. p. 299. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP i8i 
 
 Hercules, Hector, Ttilly, Epicurus, Croesus (thrice), Esop, 
 Aristippus, Prometheus, Solon, Adrastia, Circe, Diony- 
 sius, Tarquin Superbus, Heliogabalus, Helen, Thales, 
 and Cressida, to say nothing of gods and goddesses. It 
 contains such passages as these : 
 
 The advice of Aristippus have in your mind 
 
 Which willed me to seek such things as be permanent. . . 
 
 For treasures here gotten are uncertain and vain, 
 
 But treasures of the mind do continually remain. 
 
 Thou never remembrest Thales his sentence, 
 Who willeth men in all things to keep a measure, 
 Especially in love to incertainty of treasure. 
 
 The remarkable interlude called The Four Elements, 
 with its elaborate argument to prove the roundness of 
 the earth, its discussions of natural phenomena, its in- 
 troduction of the scholastic " Nature Naturate," and its 
 frequent allusions to " cosmography," is a notable 
 reminder that the stage even in the time of Henry VIII 
 could be a source of popular culture as well as of enter- 
 tainment. ^ 
 
 In this fashion, people who could not read might have 
 some acquaintance with the lore of " clerks " ; and 
 common folk whose reading did not go beyond homiletic 
 works could easily meet with a multitude of classical 
 allusions, sufficiently explained. Tyndale's translation 
 of the Enchiridion Militis Christiani of Erasmus, 
 printed in 1533 by Wynkyn de Worde, is a small store- 
 house of such lore, the many allusions of Erasmus being 
 
 1 Dr. C. W. Wallace, after the most thorough research yet 
 made upon the subject (The Evolution of the English Drama up 
 to Shakespeare : Berlin, Reimer, 1912), confidently decides that 
 The Four Elements and several of the better Interludes ascribed 
 to Heywood were written by his predecessor Cornish. It may 
 well be so ; but documentary evidence seems still to be lacking. 
 Dr. Wallace holds that the best Interlude work was produced 
 for the court ; and that this play is " evidently ' ' by Cornish (p. 1 7) . 
 Yet it lacks the dramatic character which he ascribes to Cornish's 
 work. In any case, as printed, it appears to have been intended 
 for general performance. 
 
i82 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 marginally " glossed " by the translator with long elucida- 
 tions. Thus the English reader was brought into much 
 contact with Plato, reading, for instance, the famous 
 simiUtude of the cave, and getting accounts of Phocion, 
 Apelles, Crates, Alcibiades, Hesiod, and of Catullus, besides 
 mythic personages such as Prometheus and Pandora, 
 Proteus, Ajax, Achilles, Mneas, Ixion, Tantalus, Hercules 
 and Hydra, Ulysses and the Sirens, &c. &c. Similar 
 allusions must often have been made in the pulpit, though 
 the later Puritan school would tend to shun the scholarly 
 liberalism of Erasmus. In the treatise of the Minister 
 Northbrooke Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and 
 Interludes (1577) there are scores of quotations from 
 both Fathers and pagan writers, with exact translations 
 and much elucidatory comment, embracing a wide range 
 of classical allusion. In the face of such a variety of 
 ordinary sources for matters of ordinary classical know- 
 ledge, it is a sufficiently reckless course to credit Shake- 
 speare with scholarly knowledge on the score of the very 
 ordinary classical references in his plays. 
 
 Here again, orthodox writers are as deep in fallacy as 
 any of the Baconians. Long ago. Dr. Farmer proved 
 to the satisfaction of the scholars of his generation that 
 the author of the Plays had little classical scholarship, 
 and that the instances put forward by Upton, Lewis 
 Theobald, and others, were all reducible to English 
 sources. The contrary thesis, however, has been zeal- 
 ously revived in recent times by two strongly anti- 
 Baconian scholars, the late Professor Fiske and the late 
 Professor Chmrton Collins, who drew upon the previous 
 argumentation of Dr. Maginn and Professor Baynes. 
 Having elsewhere! discussed at length the "classical" 
 case put by these critics and by Mr, Greenwood, I will 
 first deal with it mainly as it is put by Lord Penzance, 
 who proceeds uncritically upon the data given him by 
 
 See the author's Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd edition, 
 1909 ; per index. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 183 
 
 Mr. Donnelly and upon the sweeping assertions of several 
 " orthodox " scholars. For Lord Penzance, who could 
 not believe that the Plays were \vritten by the Stratford 
 actor, it is quite certain that their author was " master 
 of French and Italian as well as of Greek and Latin, and 
 capable of quoting and borrowing largely from writers 
 in all these languages," and this mainly because the 
 assertion is made by certain " orthodox " scholars, 
 though he attaches no weight whatever to the authority 
 of these scholars when they contemptuously repudiate 
 the Baconian theory. And he appears to attach equal 
 weight, on the classical question, to the authority of 
 Mr. .Donnelly, who appears to have had no classical 
 scholarship whatever. Yet he accepts at the same time,* 
 on the authority of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the statement 
 that Shakespeare's " acquaintance with the Latin language 
 throughout his life was of a very limited character," 
 though Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps grounds this verdict largely 
 if not mainly on the internal evidence of the Plays. Lord 
 Penzance does not seem ever to have asked himself what 
 critical method means. 
 
 The first piece of evidence offered by him to prove the 
 classical scholarship of the author of the dramas is the 
 familiar citation from i Henry VI (i, 6) : 
 
 Thy promises are like Adonis' gardens, 
 
 That one day bloom'd and fruitful were the next. 
 
 It is almost needless to say that Lord Penzance does not 
 once glance at the critical case for the attribution of the 
 Henry VI plays — Part I in particular— in large measure 
 or wholly to other hands than Shakespeare's. Here he 
 is in accord with the whole Baconian school. Mr. Green- 
 wood, I think, is the only " anti-Stratfordian " writer 
 who realises that a large portion of " Shakespeare " is 
 alien matter ; that Titus Andronicus, for instance, is 
 non-Shakespearean; and that Shakespeare merely wrought 
 
 » P. so. 
 
i84 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 over the Henry VI group. Lord Penzance v;as quite 
 unaware, apparently, that a large number of Shake- 
 spearean critics, for over a century, have ascribed the 
 bulk of I Henry VI to Marlowe, Peele, and Greene. 
 
 But even as to the significance of the particular passage 
 under notice he has, as tisual, made no critical investiga- 
 tion. It suf&ces for him that Mr. Grant White, whose 
 treatment of the Baconian problem he regards as utterly 
 xmcritical, made the astonishing assertion that "no 
 mention of any such garden in the classic writings of 
 Greece and Rome is known to scholars, as the learned 
 Bentley first remarked."! Even this grossly erroneous 
 passage Lord Penzance quotes without any first-hand 
 investigation, for he goes on * to write : 
 
 A recent commentator, James D. Butler, has found out the 
 source of this allusion, says Mr. Donnelly. He pointed out that 
 the couplet might have been suggested by a passage in Plato's 
 Pfusdrus, which he translated thus : " Would a husbandman 
 (said Socrates) who is a man of sense, take the seeds which he 
 values and wishes to be fruitful, and in sober earnest plant them 
 in some garden of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them 
 in eight days appearing in beauty ? " 
 
 Now, the very passage here cited from the Ph^drus 
 was actually produced by Mr. Grant White in 1869 in 
 his essay on " Glossaries and Lexicons " (reprinted in 
 his Studies IN Shakespeare, 1885). There, improving 
 slightly on his note to the passage in his first ec^tion of 
 Shakespeare — ^where, however, he had already fathered 
 the negative statement on Bentley, and cited Milton's 
 allusion — ^Mr. Grant White blunderingly writes : 
 
 The mention of Adonis' gardens in Henry VI, Pt. I, Act i. Scene 6, 
 gave Bentley the opportunity of remarking that there is no authority 
 for the existence of any such gardens, in Greek or Latin writers ; 
 the KijToi 'AZuviZoc being mere pots of earth planted with a 
 little fennel and lettuce, which were borne by women on the 
 feast of Adonis, in memory of the lettuce-bed where Venus laid 
 her lover. But Spenser, writing before Shakespeare, says : 
 
 1 Note in loc. in his ed . of Shakespeare. * P. 60. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 185 
 
 But well I wote by tryale that this same 
 All other pleasant places doth excell. 
 And called is by her lost lover's name. 
 The Garden of Adonis, fax renown'd by fame. 
 
 • "•••• 
 
 Daily they grow jind daily forth are sent 
 Into the World. 
 
 Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto 6, st. 29, 36. 
 And the scholar-poet Milton calls Eden 
 
 Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned 
 Or of revived Adonis or renowned 
 Alcinous. 
 
 Paradise Lost, ix, 440. 
 
 But, after all, Shakespeare, or the author of the First Part of 
 King Henry VI, whoever he was, whether from knowledge or by 
 chance, was more correct, or rather less incorrect, than Spenser 
 or Milton. He does not speak of the gardens of Adonis as a place, 
 or as a spot : he only compares speedily redeemed promises to 
 " Adonis's gardens, that one day bloomed and fruitful were the 
 next." So Plato says in his Phaedrus : 
 
 Now do you think that a sensible husbandman would take 
 the seed that he valued, and, wishing to produce a harvest, would 
 seriously, after the summer had begun, scatter it in the gardens 
 of Adonis for the pleasure of seeing it spring up and look green 
 in a week ? * 
 
 When all is saidj however, the whole theorem remains a 
 mare's nest. The " gardens of Adonis " referred to in 
 the Phjedrus are just the proverbial kxitoi 'AButviSos, 
 the baskets or pots or trays of lettuces or herbs borne 
 by women at the feast of Adonis. What the worshippers 
 did was to plant seeds (or put young plants) in earth, 
 in their trays or pots — ^here emplo3dng a primitive form 
 of " sympathetic magic," now well understood by anthro- 
 pologists, ^ for the promotion of all plant life. Even as 
 Mr. Donnelly discusses Grant White without reading 
 him, and Lord Penzance copies Mr. Donnelly's citations 
 without reading Mr. Grant White, Mr. Grant While in 
 
 * Studies in Shakespeare, 1885, pp. 296-7. 
 
 * See the classical references and the anthropological explana- 
 tion in Dr. Frazer's Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 1906, ch. ix. 
 
i86 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 turn had cited Bentley without reading him. Bentley's 
 note has no reference whatever to the play. It is to be 
 found in his edition of Milton, ^ wherein he sets forth 
 his theory that Paradise Lost was (not written by 
 Bacon ! but) edited by a fraudulent and incompetent 
 personage who committed many blunders and many 
 forgeries. The allusion to the gardens of Adonis or 
 Alcinous gives Bentley the opportunity to convict this 
 imaginary villain at once of bad taste and bad scholar- 
 ship; and the note is a standing warning of what a 
 scholar may come to under the spell of a fixed idea. 
 
 Our Editor [says Bentley] confesses that those gardens were 
 feigned. Why then brought in here at all ? What Deliciousness 
 can exist in a fable ? or what proportion, what compare, between 
 Truth and Fiction ? And then for Solomon's Garden, which 
 he makes real, not mystic, contriv'd it seems for the sapient 
 King's Dalliance, our Editor might have had more Sapience 
 than to introduce such silly and prophane Ideas. But if 
 these exceptions do not fully detect his Forgery, what follows, 
 certainly will. He supposes the Garden of reviv'd Adonis to be 
 some magnificent and spacious Place, like that of Alcinous in 
 Homer. There was no such Garden ever existent or even feigned. 
 K^ot 'ASwvtSos, the Gardens of Adonis, so frequently mentioned 
 by Greek writers, Plato, Plutarch, &c., were nothing but portable 
 earthen Pots, with some lettuce or fennel growing in them. On 
 his yearly Festival, every woman carried one of them for Adonis's 
 worship, because Venus had once laid ><iTTi in a lettuce bed. The 
 next day they were thrown away ; for the herbs were but raised 
 about a week before, and could not last for want of root. Hence 
 the Gardens of Adonis grew to be a proverb of contempt for any 
 fruitless, fading, perishable afiair. And now is not a Garden of 
 Adonis, a. Pot with a few Herbs in't, a proper comparison for the 
 Garden of Paradise ? They that can believe Milton guilty of 
 such Ignorance, have not lie opinion of his Learning, which I 
 profess to have. 
 
 Thus Bentley, cracked but learned still. Mr. Grant White 
 
 cannot have seen this note, which has no shadow of 
 
 connection with the passage in i Henry VI, and applies 
 
 solely to that in Milton. So far from den5dng that there 
 
 were references in the classics to " Gardens of Adonis," 
 
 * 1732. 4to. Pp. 282-3. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 187 
 
 Bentley gives an exact account of what those references 
 convey, contending— rightly enough, at the height of 
 his hallucination, save as regards an overlooked passage 
 in Pliny — that there was no classic mention of such 
 Gardens of Adonis as are described by Milton. Had 
 Bentley known his Spenser as he knew his classics, he 
 would have realised that Milton had simply followed his 
 predecessor's wrong lead — unless he and Spenser had 
 alike been misled by Pliny or some Italian poet.l Upon 
 this subject there was a comprehensive brawl among 
 the Shakespearean commentators of the eighteenth 
 century, duly recorded in the variorum editions. The 
 only excuse to be made for Spenser and Milton is the 
 passage in Pliny (xix, 4) : 
 
 Antiqnitas nihil prius mirata est quam Hesperidum hortos ac 
 regum Adonidos Alcinoi, 
 
 which Bentley might justly have dismissed as a mere 
 utterance of Roman error, cited to justify that of two 
 English poets. Mr. Grant White, overlooking all this, 
 and knowing nothing about the point in question, blimder- 
 ingly applied Bentley's negative to the use of the phrase 
 in I Henry VI, where it is not applicable, since the lines 
 there, as he sees later, are loosely compatible with the 
 classic description. In the end, accordingly, he claims 
 for the dramatist a scholarship more accurate than that 
 of Spenser and Milton. But he is still astray. The very 
 nature of his conclusion, raising as it does the question 
 how the young Shakespeare could have acquired a wider 
 and more exact scholarship than Milton's, might have 
 startled him into distrust of the whole theorem of the 
 classic scholarship of the author of the Plays. His own, 
 clearly, was neither wide nor exact. If on the one hand 
 he had but consulted the variorum edition, and on the 
 other either looked up Bentley's note, or but turned to 
 
 * Warton. who does not seem to realise the nature of Spenser's 
 ertoT {Observaiions, ed. 1807, i. 122), mentions no Italian source, 
 but I have some vague recollection of one. 
 
i88 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the old Classical Dictionary of his countrsnnan, Professor 
 Anthon, he would have learned that " the expression 
 'AScowSoc KVToi became proverbial, and was applied to 
 whatever perished previous to the period of maturity " — 
 as is witnessed by the Adagia Veterum, p. 410, The 
 passage in i Henry VI is simply a loose application of 
 this proverbial phrase, and expressly excludes knowledge 
 of the Ph^drus, where " eight days " are allowed for 
 the growth of the plants. 
 
 Such then, on analysis, is the foundation for Lord 
 Penzance's assertion that " \^^iam Shakespeare (if he 
 was the author) had so far progressed in his studies by 
 the month of March 1592, as to have mastered the Greek 
 Izngudge thus early ; and that he had pushed his reading 
 in directions not traversed by the ordinary run of classic 
 readers." We are witnessing a game of literary blind- 
 man's-buff. Nobody in the whole discussion, not even 
 Bentley, tinned monomaniac, has drawn a sane inference. 
 Bentley, knowing the classical facts, cannot beUeve that 
 Milton was ignorant of them. The clear fact is that 
 both Spenser and Milton — ^the latter cop3dng the former, 
 or both following an Italian poet — ^were misled by the 
 bare traditional phrase, and created in imagination an 
 idea which had no conformity with its historical origin. 
 Spenser commits his error repeatedly — ^in the Faerie 
 QuEENE, B. II, c. X, St. 71 ; in the motto to the canto 
 before cited ; in Stanza 39 of the same canto ; and in 
 Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1. 855. Nor was he 
 the only Elizabethan who so erred. So ripe a scholar as 
 Ben Jonson, probably following Spenser, has the phrase : 
 
 Remember thou art not now in Adonis' garden, but in Cynthia's 
 presence. 
 
 Cynthia's Revels, v, 3. 
 
 Where Spenser, Jonson, and Milton fell short, it was 
 not by dint of deep scholarship that the playwright came 
 nearer the truth. An imquestioning acceptance of Mr. 
 GrantWhite's fallacious note, and of the fallacies appended 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 189 
 
 thereto by himself and the Baconians, serves as passport 
 to the wildest generalisations concerning the scholarship 
 of the plaj^wright. It is all in the air. The writer of 
 the lines in i Henry VI was probably Marlowe, who was 
 no very deep classicist, and was here merely employing 
 a classic commonplace. But Shakespeare, much less 
 of a classicist still, might very well have known it as 
 such. 
 
 In this connection it may be well to note a cognate 
 error on the part of Mr. Grant White, whose fundamental 
 mistakes as to the legal and classical knowledge in the 
 Plays have given so much countenance to the Baconian 
 theory, which he contemned. In the same essay on 
 " Glossaries and Lexicons," dealing with Achilles' speech 
 in Troilus and Cressida (iii, 3) as to the eye being 
 unable to see itself, he quotes from Plato's First Alci- 
 BiADES this passage : 
 
 We may take the analogy of the eye. The eye sees not itself, 
 bat from some other thing ; for instance, a mirror. Bat the eye 
 can see itself also by reflection in another eye ; not by looking 
 at any other part of a man, but at the eye only ; 
 
 remarking that the " similarity of thought between it and 
 Achilles' speech . . . seems quite inexplicable, except 
 on the supposition that Shakespeare was acquainted 
 with what Plato wrote." Now, as Mr. Grant White 
 ought again to have remembered, the commentators 
 long ago pointed out, on the similar passage in Julius 
 C^SAR (i, 2), that in Sir John Davies' poem Nosce Teip- 
 SUM (1599), the classicism about the eye being unable to 
 see itself is fully elaborated (Grosart's ed. i, 20, 25) : 
 
 It is because the mind is like the eye 
 
 Throagh which it gathers knowledge by degres — 
 Whose rays reflect not, but spread outwardly : 
 
 Not seeing itself when other things it sees. 
 
 Mine eyes, which view all objects, nigh and far. 
 Look not into this little world of mine. 
 Nor see my face, wherein they fixed are. 
 
190 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 That Shakespeare^ had read Davies' poem, whether 
 or not he found the idea there for the first time, is nearly 
 certain, in view of the fact that in Troilus and Cressida 
 he twice uses the phrase " spirits of sense," which is 
 thrice used in NoscE Teipsum. But, further, as I have 
 elsewhere pointed out,^ the classicism about the eye was 
 available to him in Cicero's Tusculans, which had been 
 translated by Dolman in 1561 ; and the expatiation on 
 this and other themes in the speeches of Achilles and 
 Ulysses, and in the analogous passages in Measure for 
 Measure (i, i), could all have been derived by him from 
 Davies plus passages in Cicero and Seneca which lay to 
 his hand in Florio's translation of Montaigne. The late 
 Professor Churton Collins, who independently advanced 
 the reference to Plato's First Alcibiades for the same 
 purpose, has wasted his labour like Mr. Grant White; 
 for lack of resort to the comparative method. 
 
 Returning to Lord Penzance, we find him accepting 
 as perfectly conclusive the allegation of Charles Knight, 
 who in turn was no classical scholar, that 
 
 the marvellous accuracy, the real and substantial learning, of 
 the three Roman plays of Shakespeare, present the most complete 
 evidence to our minds that they were the result of a profound 
 study of the whole range of Roman history, including the nicer 
 details of Roman manners, not in those days to be acquired in 
 a compendious form, but to be brought out by diligent reading 
 alone. * 
 
 Over such utterances one has a discouraging sense of the 
 waste of time and thought set up in all fields of criticism 
 by heedless assertion. No scholar will to-day grant a 
 tithe of the claim made by Knight for Shakespeare in 
 regard to Roman history, even if we put aside the 
 consideration that Julius C^sar is probably founded 
 on or inclusive of other men's work, of which, in the 
 
 1 Whether or not we assume him to have written originally 
 the whole of Julius Casar. 
 
 Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. pp. 9S-105. 
 Biography of Shakespeare, p. 61. 
 
 2 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 191 
 
 judgment of some of us, there axe palpable remains in 
 the extant play.^ It is now perfectly well established 
 that Shakespeare diew for his Roman plays mainly on 
 North's translation of Amyot's Plutarch ; 2 that where 
 
 *■ As to this problem, see Fleay's argument (Life of Shakespeare. 
 p. 215) to the effect that the play is a condensation of two. a 
 CtBsar's Tragedy and a Ccesar's Revenge. " That the present play 
 has been greatly shortened." remarks Fleay. " is shown by the 
 singularly large number of instances in which mute characters are 
 on the stage ; which is totally at variance with Shakespeare's usual 
 practice. The Icirge number of incomplete lines in every possible 
 position, even in the middle of speeches, confirms this point." 
 Fleay's theory has not been duly considered by later critics, 
 though they have noted Gildon's remark that the play is rather 
 a Brutus than a Ceesar ; and though Craik had argued (The 
 English of Shakespeare. 6th ed. p. 55) that "it might almost be 
 suspected that the complete and full-length Caesar had been 
 carefully reserved for another drama." The question arises : If 
 the play be a condensation, what and whose work does it con- 
 dense ? As we have no text before that of the Folio, it is impossible 
 to say that Shakespeare has not taken up the composite per- 
 formance of Dekker, Munday, Drayton, Webster, and Middleton, 
 entitled Casar's Fall (or " The Two Shapes ") mentioned in 
 Henslowe's Diary, May 22. 29, 1602. Unless this can be excluded, 
 the view that Drayton copied Shakespeare in the phrase about 
 " the elements ... so mixed " cannot be established. Professor 
 MacCallum, in discussing the point in his Shakespeare's Roman 
 Plays, takes no account of the possibilities of mixed authorship, 
 though these are obtruded by the style of much of the play ; 
 and though a recognition of them would suggest a solution of the 
 anomalies in the characterisation, on which he dwells. 
 
 * See Professor MacCallum's Shakespeare's Roman Plays and 
 their Background, 1910, Appendices, as to the possible use of 
 Appian (of which B3mniman's translation had been published in 
 1S78) in Julius Ceesar, and the very probable use of it in Antony 
 and Cleopatra. For Coriolanus there appears to be no source save 
 North's Plutarch. But all along Shakespeare's own creative 
 genius vivifies and expands his material, achieving what mere 
 " culture " could never do. As to his possible knowledge of 
 Gamier's Marc Antoine or the Countess of Pembroke's transla- 
 tion, of Gamier's Cliopatre or Daniel's translation, and of Gamier's 
 Corn6lie or Kyd's translation, see the same work, introd. §3. 
 That Shakespeare recalled some lines of Kyd's version of Gamier's 
 Corntlie in the speech of Antony to Eros, IV, xiv, 72. was long ago 
 suggested by Steevens (Reed's ed. of Dodsley, 1780, ii, 26^). 
 
192 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 North errs, following Amyot, Shakespeare errs, following 
 North ; that at no point does he supplement him ; and 
 that, in his ignorance or disregard of chronology, he 
 makes additional mistakes of his own. The blunder of 
 making Lartius speak of Cato (Cor. I, v, 59) as a con- 
 temporary or predecessor, is one of these. The blunder 
 about " the napless vesture of humility "(Cor. II, i, 224) 
 is another, made through following North, who took 
 Amyot's " robbe simple " to mean " a poor gown." The 
 Baconians and the critics who persist in assigning Titus 
 Andronicus to Shakespeare have alike failed to realise 
 that the writer of the " Candidatus " passage in that 
 play knew the fact that public men seeking office in Rome 
 wore a white toga, whereas the writer of Coriolanus 
 knew of no such usage. To ascribe to him profound and 
 exact knowledge of Roman history in the face of such 
 facts as these is but to exhibit superficiality and in- 
 accuracy. 
 
 (2) Mr. G. G. Greenwood 
 
 In the whole of this discussion we have a standing 
 illustration of the vitiating force of a prepossession. It 
 was an idolatrous prepossession that set scholars like 
 Upton and Theobald in the eighteenth century upon 
 crediting Shakespeare with high scholarship. Fanner 
 appreciated Shakespeare as much as they did ; but his 
 habit of comparative scholarship and his inductive faculty 
 made dear to him their error. Later idolaters and 
 Baconians alike have visibly hated him for his pains. 
 " Anti-Stratfordians " like my friend Mr. G. G. Green- 
 wood, setting out with a primary ideal of a highly " cul- 
 tured " mind as being alone capable of writing " Shake- 
 speare," clutch desperately at every semblance of classical 
 knowledge which the plays and poems present ; and, 
 fiercely intolerant of any semblance of too-ready belief 
 on the " Stratfordian " side, are profuse of their "cer- 
 tainlys " and " tmdoubtedlys " over the merest shadows 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 193 
 
 of evidence for their own faith. Mr. Greenwood. I see, 
 takes me to task^ for representing him as claiming to 
 prove Shakespeare's familiarity with Horace on the 
 strength of two lines of a hackneyed quotation, when in 
 point of fact he had in another passage extended the two 
 lines to four. I cheerfully allow the correction, noting 
 afresh the absurd exiguity of the case as thus stated. 
 Had Mr. Greenwood come to the thesis of the scholarship 
 of the plays in the temper in which he handles what he 
 calls the " tradition " of the authorship, he would have 
 laughed to scorn the notion that a writer's " scholarship " 
 is to be proved by a few scraps of translated quotation, 
 all of the most hackneyed order. He labours to persuade 
 us that when Shakespeare wrote " Most sure, the goddess," 
 he must * have remembered, in the original, Virgil's " O 
 dea certe ! " Well, supposing the poet had remembered 
 the whole passage, where is the proof of " scholarship " ? 
 Supposing that, without blenching over Mr. Greenwood's 
 amusingly violent conjunction of Miranda's " certainly 
 a maid" with Venus's " Virginibus TjnHlis mos est," we 
 allow that Shakespeare may well have read that and 
 more of Virgil at school, how much nearer are we, in the 
 name of common sense, to proving "wide familiarity 
 with the classics," the now modified form to which Mr. 
 Greenwood reduces his former claim of " remarkable 
 classical attainments " ?" On a perfectly straightforward 
 induction, we are not entitled even to claim that the poet 
 had " O dea certe " in mind. Such lines as Chapman's : 
 
 Without all question, 'twas a God, the Gods are easily known. 
 
 Trans, of Iliad, xiii, 69 ; 
 
 1 The Vindicators of Shakespeare. (n.d.), p. 133. 
 
 ' " It can hardly be doubted," are his words, p. 96. 
 
 • " The proof " that the dramatist had " a large knowledge of 
 Latin," he originally declared, " is so cogent that it cannot be 
 disputed " (p. 102) — ^this after deriding every " certainly " and 
 "doubtless" of the " Stratfordians." The claim is simply 
 ridiculous ; and the assertion as to " a very fair amount of 
 Greek " is no better. 
 
 N 
 
194 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 These ears and these self eyes approved 
 It was a Goddess, 
 
 Id. xxiv, 209-10 ; 
 
 Straight he [Achilles] knew her [Ath€n6] by her eyes, so terrible 
 
 they were. 
 
 Id. i, 204 ; 
 
 Whose [Aphroditfi's] virtue Helen felt and knew, by her so 
 radiant eyes, 
 
 Jd.iii, 415, 
 
 should serve to remind us that, apart from direct transla- 
 tions, Elizabethan belles lettres were steeped in classical 
 allusion of every kind, and that no poet could miss know- 
 ing many such passages, whatever may have been his 
 schooling. Mr. Greenwood, without going to Farmer 
 for himself, does not scruple to cite from Mr. Churton 
 Collins — ^whose judgment he elsewhere derides — the 
 charge that Farmer is silent " on almost all the classical 
 parallels which are really worth considering." That 
 charge was disingenuous in the highest degree ; and Mr. 
 Greenwood's reproduction of it without investigation is 
 a confession of critical insolvency. Farmer dealt with 
 all parallels of any importance that had in his day been 
 put forward ; and Mr. Churton Collins has but advanced 
 equally untenable parallels, of which Farmer could have 
 disposed at a glance. The argument (of Mr. Collins) 
 on which Mr. Greenwood relies seems to be that Shake- 
 speare was as likely to have gone to Virgil or Ovid as 
 "to spell out me^aeval homilies and archaic Scotch." 
 This again is mere misrepresentation on Mr. Collins's 
 part. Stanyhurst's Virgil is not mediaeval homily or 
 archaic Scotch ; and Farmer's point was that the phrase 
 could have currency in English. But the essential thing 
 is that the passages f oimded on are never such as a poet 
 would "go to " a classic for, but passages and phrases 
 such as were in the mouths of all men who affected htera- 
 tiure. Neither Mr. Collins nor Mr. Greenwood has made 
 the slightest attempt to meet Farmer's point, that Taylor, 
 the water-poet, who avowed his failure to get through 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 195 
 
 the Latin accidence, and his ignorance of all languages 
 but his own, has a far greater number of classical allusions 
 than occur in all the Shakespeare plays. 
 
 In his determination to deny the possibility of any use 
 of translations by an Elizabethan dramatist, Mr. Green- 
 wood, like Mr. Collins, falls into complete misapprehen- 
 sion and distortion of an opponent's statement. He 
 thus represents me as having found a cheap " solution " 
 for the small element of classical knowledge in the 
 LUCRECE : 
 
 Shakespeare, "having decided to write a Lucrece as contrast 
 to the Vends," » may have " had a translation made for him " ! 
 In this easy manner difficulties are jauntily disposed of per 
 solium. 
 
 Now, what I actually wrote was : " It is not impossible; 
 indeed," that Shakespeare may have had a translation 
 made for him "... but that hypothesis is unnecessary." 
 The " indeed," one would suppose, must have led any 
 reader, however hasty, to note the waiving of the possible 
 plea. In the passage from which Mr. Greenwood quotes, 
 I expressly proceed to indicate that; according to one 
 testimony, there was a translation of the Fasti, published 
 in 1570, and that there certainly were three " ballads," 
 which might mean poems, or even plays, of any length. 
 Of all this Mr. Greenwood's readers cordd have no notion 
 from the kind of accoimt he has given of my argument. 
 
 In this connection Mr. Greenwood endorses another 
 of Mr. Collins's arguments which, upon any other issue, 
 he would have seen to be worthless. Whereas I had 
 spoken of " the many manuscript translations then in 
 currency " of Latin poetry, he cites Mr. Collinis's state- 
 ment that in the British Museum MSS. " there are only 
 two versions from classical dramatists which can be 
 assigned to the sixteenth century," and that " this seems 
 proof positive that classical translations could not have 
 circtdated on a large scale." Mr. Collins's language might 
 ^ Ref. to Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. p. 314. 
 
196 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 almost have been specially chosen in order to obscure 
 the problem. The reason for believing that MS. transla- 
 tions of Latin poetry were nvimerous in Shakespeare's 
 day are manifold ; and I confess to being astonished that 
 any one, even in the ardour of an idee fixe, should doubt 
 the likelihood. The argument from the lack of preserved 
 MSS. is surprisingly uncritical. Lady Lumley's transla- 
 tion of the Iphigeneia in Aulis, made about 1530, might 
 well be preserved by her family ; but who would lay 
 store by a contemporary manuscript version of the Fasti 
 made about 1590 ? That actual versions even of Greek 
 plays were not all preserved we do know. Mr. Collins 
 ought to have been aware that Peele translated one of 
 the two Iphigeneias of Emipides, and that that transla- 
 tion is not extant. But translations from Ovid, if not 
 by noted poets, or if unmarked by special merit, would 
 be much more likely to be let go as old scribblings. 
 
 It is a question of supply and demand. I have seen 
 a number of French MS. versions, made in the eighteenth 
 centmy, from the works of English deists, of which 
 translations were printed. The MS. versions, which were 
 fair copies, may, for aught I know, have been made 
 either before or after those actually printed ; in those 
 days even printed deistical books soon became scarce 
 through seizures and destructions ; and fresh versions 
 might readily be made by enthusiastic readers for their 
 friends. Of the genuine and complete Testament de 
 Jean Meslier a good many MS. copies are known to have 
 been current in the eighteenth century, but not till late 
 in the nineteenth was one recovered for a printed edition. 
 The MSS. seen by me were not in the BibUothSque 
 Nationale, but in a Paris bookseller's shop. If such 
 MSS. translations from English into French were current 
 in France in the eighteenth century, why should any 
 one doubt that the habit of doing MS. versions of Latin 
 poetry, certainly common since, was common in Shake- 
 speare's day? Did Mr. Greenwood, I wonder, never 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 197 
 
 do such translations in his youth ; and, if so, has he 
 preserved them?^ 
 
 The question of the source of the Comedy of Errors 
 moves Mr. Greenwood to further exclaim against all 
 who suggest that the author of the plays ever used a 
 translation, though he is perfectly well aware that North's 
 Plutarch was " certainly " used for the composition of 
 the three Roman plays. Not content with insisting that 
 Warner's translation of the Men^chmi is not to be traced 
 anywhere in the Comedy, 2 he protests against the natural 
 surmise that the play is founded on the old Historie 
 OF Error recorded to have been played before Elizabeth 
 " by the children of Powles " in 1576-77. " Nothing at 
 all," says Mr. Greenwood, " is known about this early 
 play." After all, we do know that there was such a 
 play, and Mr. Greenwood should let that count for some- 
 thing. He has committed himself to a theory of the 
 authorship of the plays by a man of whom he professes 
 to know not even the name. Is all the latitude of 
 hypothesis to be one way ? But the question is otiose ; 
 and in the interests of rational Shakespeare-criticism I 
 will simply indicate what seems to me the reasonable view 
 of the genesis of the early play, as to which Mr. Green- 
 wood appears to halt oddly between two opinions. 
 
 It is really not in the least necessary to find a given 
 original for the Comedy. The essential point is that it 
 is a composite work. Any one who will carefully scan 
 the first two scenes will note that in the first, which has 
 152 blank- verse lines, the double-endings are only 2 per 
 
 1 I can remember doing, in my early teens, a punctilious 
 translation of the Life of Hannibal (then my favourite hero) 
 from Cornelius Nepos ; and in my later teens, versions from 
 Catullus, Horace, Boileau, &c. Three hundred years hence, 
 doubtless, even those humble performances might be catalogued 
 if they should then exist. But they certainly will not ! 
 
 2 This, of course, is no proof that Warner's version had not 
 been used. I may point out to Mr. Greenwood, who is so con- 
 temptuous of any " manuscript " suggestion, that the printer's 
 
198 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 cent ; while in the second, with 103 blank-verse lines, 
 the double-endings number 25 — over 24 per cent. I 
 know no theory of verse evolution which would ascribe 
 the two scenes to the same hand in the same period. But 
 whereas Shakespeare, like the preceding poets, can broadly 
 be seen to have increased his proportion of double-endings 
 as he progressed in his art, the first scene of the Comedy, 
 which has only three double-endings, is much better 
 and more pregnant in style than the shorter second scene, 
 which has twenty-five. No such diffuse verse as that 
 is to be found in any unquestioned work of his at the 
 time at which he used any such large proportion of double- 
 endings.* The verse of the second scene, with all its 
 double-endings, is mostly end-stopped — a siure mark of 
 early work. Then the second scene is not Shakespeare's, 
 to begin with ; and the disparity of styles is to be noted 
 throughout the play. 
 
 Two alternative inferences are open. The play may 
 have been one of collaboration, or it may have been an 
 adaptation by Shakespeare of a previous work. There 
 is certainly no trace of versification in the style of 1576 : 
 the double-endings in the second scene covild hardly be 
 dated earher than 1591 for any author ; and the theory 
 of collaboration is therefore the more likely one. But 
 on either theory we are relieved of the problem of the 
 classic " source " ; for the collaborator may have known 
 his Plautus without resort either to Warner or to the 
 HiSTORiE OF Error ; and it is the collaborator (or 
 previous writer) who begins the Plautine work of the 
 play. 
 
 By this strictly inductive line of inference we reach a 
 view of Shakespeare's early work which clears up other 
 
 advertisement to Warner's translation (entered in 1594) expressly 
 states that it had been circulated for some time in MS. 
 
 ^ His share in Richard III. where the double-endings are so 
 numerous, has long been in dispute. I have alwa3rs held that 
 play to be but a partial recast of other men's work— Marlowe's 
 and Kyd's, for choice. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 199 
 
 mystifications. For my own part, I have always insisted 
 on a loyal acceptance of Shakespeare's own express 
 declaration that Venus and Adonis was the " first heir 
 of his invention ";^ and I have never been able to believe 
 that he would have kept such a work by him for years 
 xmpublished. The only justifiable interpretation of his 
 phrase is " the first work planned and composed by me." 
 Standing to that interpretation, I have alwa5rs argued 
 that the dramatic work done by him before 1593 was but 
 collaboration or adaptation. But I never hdd, as Mr. 
 Greenwood so strangely asstmies in his Shakespeare 
 Problem Restated, that Shakespeare had done no 
 dramatic writing before 1593. Mr. Greenwood puts the 
 case thus : * 
 
 Mr. J. M. Robertson, too, roundly asserts that we must take 
 Shakespeare strictly at his word, and believes, since Venus and 
 Adonis was the first heir of his invention, that all the plays were 
 written subsequently to that date. If so, these eleven, twelve 
 E" the Meres list "] or more dramas must have been composed by 
 Shakespeare, and brought upon the stage (if not also published) 
 between 1593 and 1598. If Mr. Robertson can believe this, he 
 has indeed great faith, which seems to be reserved for the Strat- 
 fordian Gospel only, Credat Judaus, non ego I 
 
 I regret to observe that my friend, who is always so 
 scrupulously respectful to the wildest theses of the 
 Baconians, resorts to his " Credat Judaeus " only when 
 he is exclaiming at a " Stratfordian " thesis which he 
 has entirely misunderstood, or at some point where his 
 own view is demonstrably the irrational one.' It is his 
 indiscriminating zeal for his own thesis of an absolutely 
 unknown and imtraceable author — ^in regard to whom 
 his " faith " is truly transcendental— that has led him so 
 hopelessly to misconceive me. Yet his own footnote 
 to the very passage I have quoted shows him to have 
 
 1 As to this see Did Shakespeare write " Titus Andronicus "? 
 pp. 22-23. 
 
 2 Work cited, p. 517. ' See above, p. 177. 
 
200 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 had the facts in view. To the words above italicised 
 by me he has appended the note : 
 
 With this alternative, however, viz. that " Shakespeare for the 
 best reasons would not regard as heirs of his invention plays in 
 which he nsed other men's drafts or shared with others the task 
 of composition" {Did Shakespeare tarite ' Titus\ Andronicus ' } 
 p. 29). It is suggested therefore that he had collaboratoFS 
 [I wrote " collaborators or draughtsmen "] for The Two Gentlemen, 
 Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, the Dream, Richard 
 II, and other early plays. 
 
 Thus Mr. Greenwood had my real opinion before him. 
 What he oddly calls an alternative is the substantive 
 thesis. Why then did he leave standing in the text his 
 complete misconception of it ? Apparently a fling at 
 " the Stratfordian Gospel " could not be foregone. If 
 Mr. Greenwood could only get his " Stratfordian " 
 troubles out of his head, he would, with his power to 
 recognise the non-Shakespearean character of Titus 
 Andronicus, soon realize that the loyal construction of 
 " first heir of my invention " brings everjrthing into line. 
 The only pla5rs commonly dated before 1598 which we 
 have good ground for pronouncing wholly Shakespearean 
 in style are The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV. 
 With Fleay, indeed, I am willing to date the first draft 
 of Twelfth Night as early as 1594, agreeing with him 
 that the play was certainly revised or rewritten later. 
 It may, in my opinion, have been the Love's Labour's 
 Won of Meres' list, though it only imperfectly answers 
 to that title. But whether we assign that title to Twelfth 
 Night or to Much Ado or to All's Well, and date the 
 first form of any one of them before 1598 ; and whether 
 or not we give Shakespeare the whole of the Two Gentle- 
 MEN* (I prefer to posit a foundation play by Greene), 
 we have no diffictilty about placing the plays in question 
 between 1593 and 1598. On the other hand there can 
 be no reasonable doubt that of the plays indicated by 
 
 1 Some critics have doubted the genuineness of the entire play. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 201 
 
 me as works of collaboration or adaptation a number 
 were written before 1593, as were the Henry VI group. 
 I would only add that I see nothing of Shakespeare in 
 Titus, nothing in i Henry VI, and next to nothing in 
 the Shrew. 
 
 If the reader will keep in view these last propositions, 
 he may be assisted in his scrutiny of the " classical " 
 thesis, as put by Baconians and others. Quantitatively, 
 the classical case, as regards direct classical allusions and 
 quotations, points precisely to the most doubtful of all 
 the plajrs pubUshed as Shakespeare's in the Folio. This 
 alone is surely a reason for vigilant examination of the 
 general ascription to the dramatist of a " wide knowledge 
 of the classics." Mr. Greenwood, who is so confident 
 about the Latin scholarship of the pla3rwright, agrees 
 with me in dismissing Titus and most of the Henry VI 
 group ; and I do not see how he can differ from the mass 
 of critical opinion as to the Shrew ; yet it is on these 
 pla}^ that the bulk of the classical case, which he supports, 
 is founded. But it is only rarely that we need even 
 recall this particular ground for demurrer. The Baconian 
 case, as we have thus far examined it, and as it presents 
 itself in the writers dealt with in the following sections, 
 consists in imputing classical scholarship for every 
 semblance of a classical allusion, and generally collapses 
 on the first application of comparative tests. 
 
 (3) Dr. R. M. Theobald^ 
 
 Dr. Theobald follows up Mr. Donnelly in this as in 
 other matters, naturally making the most of what had 
 been said by idolatrous commentators, in particular 
 Mr. and Mrs. Cowden Clarke, of the " miraculous " quality 
 of the classical learning shown in the plays. Taking 
 these and other pronouncements as imchallenged, taking 
 Leigh Hunt's verdict (that Shakespeare's poetry is if 
 
 * Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light, ed. 1904, ch. xiii. 
 
202 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 an5^hing "too learned") as one which " completely 
 disposes of Milton's uncritical lines," and without saying 
 a word of the old Essay on the Learning of Shake- 
 speare by Dr. Farmer, he proceeds in the customary 
 iSaconian way to claim that Shakespeare, the actor, 
 cannot have had the scholarship thus ascribed. "The 
 poet was assuredly no untutored child of nature, but a 
 scholar and a man of the world." " The imbiassed, 
 uncritical [sic .'] reader of the poems must inevitably 
 conclude that the Poet was a learned man, and that 
 neither genius, nor good fellowship, nor cribs can account 
 for the classic element in his writings." " There can 
 be no doubt that if there were no controversial necessity 
 for maintaining that William Shakespeare was a very " 
 [who said very ?^ ] " imperfectly educated man, if it could 
 be proved that he . , . had had a university education 
 and acquired a complete mastery of the classic languages 
 and literature, ... no one would hesitate to accept the 
 very strong indications of scholarship in the poems as 
 . . . entirely characteristic of such antecedents and 
 training." 
 
 Such are the preliminary assertions : let us come to 
 the proofs. After all his parade of asserted abundance 
 of classic learning and allusion in the plays. Dr. Theobald 
 dutifully proceeds to repeat,* after Mr. Donnelly and 
 the rest : 
 
 I. The argument which we have fully dealt with above 
 (p. 189), helplessly copied from Richard Grant White, as 
 to the derivation from Plato of the passage in Troilus 
 
 1 Mr. Greenwood, noticing in his Vindicators of Shakespeare my 
 demurrer to his assumption that the view opposed to his ascribed 
 ignorance and complete lack of culture to the Poet, pleasantly 
 observes that I " admit " I do not entertain such an idea ; but 
 adds : " Such an idea has been held and maintained by many " 
 (p. 136). What I want to know is, who were they ? 
 
 * For most of his references, he admits, he is " indebted either 
 to Stapfer or Lewis Theobald." Work cited, p. 305. I take his 
 selection as showing what Baconians are disposed to stand to. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 203 
 
 about the eye not seeing itself. On that head, no further 
 refutation is needed. 
 
 2. Next comes the other well-worn plea from the 
 " most profound and philosophic discussion " in Henry V 
 (I, ii, 180-213), " of the mutual dependence of different 
 offices and functions in a government, which is compared 
 to the structure of a harmonic combination in music. 
 This idea," we are dogmatically assured, " is taken from 
 a portion of Cicero's long lost treatise De Republica, 
 a fragment of which is preserved' by St. Augustine." 
 Charles Knight is of course quoted, to the effect that 
 " the lines of Shakespeare are more deeply imbued with 
 Platonic philosophy than the passage of Cicero," so that 
 Shakespeare had inferribly read Plato's Republic in 
 the original. 
 
 We have here the standing illustration of the childish 
 position that Shakespeare had read deeply in the Greek 
 and Latin classics, only to produce a few references to 
 commonplaces which had for centuries been themes of 
 didactic writing. He is assumed on the one hand to 
 have gone to Augustine for the fragment of Cicero, 
 though he gives no other sign of having read the De 
 CiviTATE Dei ; and he is held on the other hand to 
 have read Plato's Republic, though he nowhere else 
 seems to quote it. Knight -solemnly averred that the 
 passage " develops imquestionably the great Platonic 
 doctrine of the Tri-tmity of the three great principles 
 in man with the idea of a State. " It is all a futile mystifi- 
 cation. The Baconians cannot even pretend that the 
 passage is dupUcated in Bacon : they do but take for 
 granted that, being " classic," it must be from Bacon's 
 pen. Obviously, the passage is ultimately traceable to 
 Augustine's quotation from Cicero ; and if Shakespeare 
 had seen that in the original, his small Latin might suffice 
 to translate it. But it is idle to make such an assumption 
 in regard to a passage so likely to be dilated upon by 
 divines and moraUsts. Richard Grant White, whose 
 
204 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 far-fetched parallel between Plato and the Troilus 
 passage has fooled the Baconians to the top of their 
 bent, swung to the other extreme when he wrote ^ that 
 '' it is more than superfluous to seek, as some have sought, 
 in Cicero's De Republica the origin of this simile ; for 
 that book was lost to literature, and unknown, except 
 by name, until Angelo Mju discovered it upon a palimpsest 
 in the Vatican, and gave it to the world in 1822." A 
 professed commentator might have been supposed to 
 know that Lewis Theobald in his notes on his" edition 
 cited the very passage in question from the De Civitate 
 Dei. " Cicero," adds White, " very probably borrowed 
 the fancy from Plato ; but it was not Shakespeare's way 
 to go so far for that which lay near to hand." This 
 opinion is ignored by the Baconians. They might indeed 
 reply that the expressions " through high and low and 
 lower, put into parts, doth keep in one concent . . . hke 
 music," do point specially to Cicero's " Sic ex summis, 
 et mediis et in infimis interjedis ordinibus, ut sonis . . . 
 consensu dissimiliorum concinere ; et quae harmonia a 
 musicis ... in civitate concordiam." But the reason- 
 able inference is that the passage had often been applied 
 to politics by previous writers. 
 
 The passage cited from Henry V is followed by the 
 well-known one on the polity of the bees, which Malone 
 long ago showed to be substantially derived from Euphues 
 AND His England. But there are other clues. The 
 theme of " the state of man " is handled afresh in Troilus, 
 which the Baconians do not cite in this connection. But 
 both passages suggest very distinctly reminiscences of 
 Elyot's BoKE OF the Governour, or of some discourse 
 or discoiurses which drew upon that and upon Lilly. 
 Elyot insists on " degree," and " higher and lower," and 
 he combines with his thesis the illustration of the bees' 
 commonwealth. The first chapter of The Governour 
 
 * Essay on Shakespeare's Genius, pref. to ed. of Works, vol. i, 
 p. ccxxv. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 205 
 
 sets out with a pointed discrimination between " publike 
 weale " and " conunvme weaie," the latter tenn being 
 condemned (with an obvious aim at Sir Thomas More) 
 as suggesting " that every thinge should be to all men 
 in coDMnime." Elyot dwells on 
 
 the discrepance of degrees, whereof proceedeth ordie. . . More- 
 over, take away ordve from all things, what should then rema3me ? 
 Certes nothynge finally, except some man would imagine eft 
 soones Chaos. . . . WTiere there is any lacke of ordre needes 
 must be perpertuall conflicte ; ajid in thjmges subiecte to Nature 
 nothynge of hym self only may be norisshed ; but when he hath 
 destroyed that wherewith he doth participate by the ordre of his 
 creation, he himselfe of necessite must then perisshe, whereof 
 ensueth universal dissolution. . . . 
 
 Hath not [God] set degrees and estates in all his glorious workes ? 
 Fyrst in his hevenly ministres, whom ... he hath constituted 
 to be in divers degrees called hierarchies. Beholde the four 
 elements whereof the body of man is compacte, how they be 
 set in their places called spheris, higlier or lower, ... so that 
 in every thing is ordre, and without ordre may be nothing stable 
 or permanent, and it may not be called ordre, except it do conte3me 
 it in degrees, high and base. . . And like as . . . the fire which 
 is the most pure of elements ... is deputed to the highest 
 sphere or place. . . . 
 
 In the second chapter follows an accoimt of the life of 
 the bees : 
 
 lefte to man by nature, as it seemeth a perpetuall figure of a just 
 governance or rule, who hath among them one principall Bee for 
 their govemeur, who excelleth all other in greatness, yet hath 
 he no prick or stinge. . . . The capitayne hym selfe laboureth 
 not for his sustenance, but all the other for him ; he only seeth 
 that if any drone or other unprofitable bee entreth into the 
 h3rve . . . that he be immediately expelled from that 
 company. . . . 
 
 Compare Shakespeare : 
 
 While that the armed hand doth fight abroad 
 The advised head defends itself at home. 
 For government, through high and low and lower 
 Put into parts, doth keep in one concent. . . . 
 
 Therefore doth heaven divide 
 The state of man in divers functions. . . . 
 
2o6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 To which is fixed, as an aim or butt. 
 Obedience ; for so work the honey bees, 
 Creatures that by a rule in nature, teach 
 The act of order to a peopled kingdom. 
 They have a king. . . . 
 Who, busied in his majesty surveys .... 
 Delivering o'er to executors pale 
 The lazy yawning drone. 
 
 Henry V.i.2. 
 When that the general is not like the hive, 
 To whom the foragers shall all repair. 
 What honey is expected ? Degree being vizarded. 
 The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. 
 The heavens themselves, the planets and the centre. 
 Observe degree. . . . 
 And therefore is the glorious planet Sol 
 In noble eminence enthroned and sphered. . . . 
 
 O, when degree is shaked 
 Which is the ladder to all high designs. 
 Then enterprise is sick ! How should communities. 
 Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities. . . . 
 But by degree, stand in autiientic place ? 
 Take but degree away, untune that string 
 And hark, what discord follows ! each thing meets 
 In mere oppugnancy. . . . 
 
 Great Agamemnon, 
 This chaos, when degree is suffocate. 
 Follows the choking. . . . 
 
 Troilus and Cressida, i, 3. 
 
 It does not follow that Shakespeare had Elyot directly 
 in mind when he wrote : the general topic is obviously 
 likely to have been commented often between Elyot's 
 day and his. Long before Elyot and Lilly, Bartholomew 
 had discoursed imaginatively of the bees in his cyclopaedia 
 De proprietatibus rerum ;^ and a hundred homiUsts must 
 have handled the theme. But some line of connection 
 between Elyot and Shakespeare there siurdy was; and 
 there is no need to make the latter resort to Augustine 
 for ideas so certainly current in his own tongue, whether 
 
 1 See the extracts from Berthelet's ed. (1535) of Trevisa's 
 trans, in Dr. Seager's Natural History in Shakespeare's Time, 18516, 
 PP- 32-33- 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 207 
 
 written or spoken. The Baconians shoidd be the last 
 people to dispute that Shakespeare had read and remem- 
 bered either Elyot's treatise or others which drew from 
 it and from Bartholomew. Had they found any such 
 " echoes and correspondencies " between Shakespeare 
 and Bacon, they would have been glad to rest their whole 
 case upon them. For the rest of us it is sufficient to say 
 that Shakespeare certainly did thus utilise English books 
 and discourses ; and that, this being clear, it is worse 
 than idle to ascribe to him Greek and Latin erudition 
 to account for his knowledge of a few classical conunon- 
 places. And still more futile, in this connection, is the 
 Baconian h3Tpothesis. Dr. Theobald does not make out 
 one verbal coincidence between Shakespeare and Bacon 
 in respect of the " Platonic " passages, familiar as were 
 the commonplaces they set forth. 
 
 3. Dr. Theobald reproduces the parallel between 
 
 Hamlet's 
 
 Lay her i' the earth. 
 And from her fair and unpolluted flesh 
 May violets spring ! 
 
 and Persius' 
 
 Non nunc e manibus istis, 
 
 Non nunc e tumulo, fortunataque favilla, 
 
 Nascentur violae ? 
 As I have dsewhere^ pointed out, the second and third 
 lines cited from Persius are quoted by Montaigne in his 
 essay Of Glory, and are duly translated by Florio (1603). 
 As there are a number of clear echoes of Montaigne in 
 Hamlet, the reasonable presumption is that Shakespeare 
 found them there. But 
 
 4. Shakespeare speaks of "method in madness" in 
 Hamlet, II, ii, 207 ; M. for M., V, i, 63 ; and Lear, IV, 
 vi, 178-9. This Dr. Theobald refers to Horace : 
 
 Insanire paret certS ratione modoque, 
 
 Sat. II, iii, 271 ; 
 
 » Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. 1909, section on "The 
 Learning of Shakespeare," p. 329. 
 
208 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 citing in this connection Bacon's "cum ratione qua- 
 dam et prudentia insanirent " (Nov. Org. pref.), and an 
 extract in the Promus from Horace, Sat. II, iii, 120. 
 This item Shakespeare might very well have known with 
 " small Latin." But the first two Books of the Satires 
 had been twice translated in English — ^by Lucas Evans 
 in 1564, and by B. L. in 1567 ; and the whole of the 
 Satires, with the Art of Poetry and the Epistles, by 
 Thomas Drant in 1567. 
 
 5. As might have been expected, the " undiscover'd 
 coimtry " lines in Hamlet are by Dr. Theobald as by 
 his predecessors affirmed to be "evidently taken from 
 Catullus " ; though Dr. Theobald does not repeat Mr. 
 Donnelly's exploit with the " brief candle " rendering 
 of hrevis lux. I must repeat here, what I have pointed 
 out elsewhere, that the old commentators cited for the 
 line in question the phrase in Sandford's translation of 
 Cornelius Agrippa {circa 1570 : described by Steevens 
 as " once a book of uncommon popularity ") : " The 
 coimtrie of the dead is irremeable, that they cannot 
 retiim " ; and the parallel in Marlowe's Edward II : 
 
 Weep not for Mortimer, 
 That scorns the world, and as a traveller, 
 Goes to discover countries yet unknown. 
 
 The Catullus derivation is thus one more delusion. 
 
 6. Dr. Theobald, however, vmdertakes to show " many 
 other quotations from Catullus." He cites from 2 
 Henry IV, I, i, 47, the phrase " devour the way," claim- 
 ing to be the first to refer it to " its classic soturce " in 
 Catullus (xxxiii) : 
 
 Quare, si ^apiet, viam vorabit. 
 
 The variorum edition would have informed him that 
 Blackstone and Malone between them traced it to 
 Nemesian — 
 
 latumque fuga consumere campum. 
 
 But it would further have referred him to Job xxxix : 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 209 
 
 " He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage," 
 and to Ben Jonson's Sejanus (v, 10, near end) : 
 
 With that speed and heat of appetite 
 With which they greedily devour the way 
 To some great sports. 
 
 It was evidently a current trope, like Ariel's " I drink 
 the air." 
 
 7. Parallels between Miranda's " I am your wife " 
 speech (Tempest, III, i, 83) and Ariadne's cry in Catullus' 
 Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos (158 sq.) : 
 
 Si tibi non coida fueiant connubia nostra, &c. ; 
 
 and again between Catullus' lenta vitis lines (In Nuptias 
 JuLLE ET Manlii, io6 sq.) and Adriana's 
 
 Thou art an ehn, my husband, I a vine. 
 
 (Comedy of Errors, II, ii, 176 sq.) 
 
 are really not worth discussing. The image is of universal 
 vogue, e.g. : 
 
 As the Vine married unto the Elme 
 With strict embraces. 
 
 Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, IS92, 11. 829-30. 
 
 And it is nearly alvrays those universally current tropes 
 that are cited to prove Shakespeare's classical scholarship. 
 
 8. Of course the lines : 
 
 What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted ? 
 Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just 
 
 (2 Henry VI. III. ii, 232), 
 
 must be derived from the equally familiar lines : 
 
 Uli robur et aes triplex 
 Circa pectus erat. 
 
 Horace, Carm. I, ii.', 9-10. 
 
 In vain did Malone point out that in Lust's Dominion, 
 an old play probably in part by Marlowe (circa 1588) 
 occur the lines : 
 
 Come, Moor ; I'm arm'd with more than complete steel, 
 The justice of my quarrel. 
 
 Those cited from 2 Henry VI are almost certainly 
 
 o 
 
210 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 non-Shakespearean. In any case they are not the 
 equivalent of the Horatian phrase. ^ 
 
 9. Dr. Theobald naturally affirms that the allusion to 
 Roman lachrimatories in Antony (I, iii, 63) is " very 
 remarkable " for its " classic learning," " referring as it 
 does to usages not likely to be familiar to an unlearned 
 writer." It is as likely to have been known to English 
 readers in Shakespeare's day as the Roman usage of 
 burning the dead. 
 
 10. " When Aegon begins the story of his life with : 
 
 A heavier task could not have been imposed 
 Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable " 
 
 (Com. Er. I, i, 32), 
 
 says Dr. Theobald, " the poet must certainly have had 
 
 in his mind the well-known line of Virgil : 
 
 Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem." 
 
 And if he had, he was only referring to one of the most 
 hackneyed lines in Latin literature, which he had para- 
 phrased to his hand in Marlowe and Nashe's Dido, 1594 : 
 
 A woeful tale bids Dido to unfold. 
 
 'Whose memory, like pale Death's stonny mace. 
 
 Beats forth my senses from this troubled breast. 
 
 But in neither case do we have a close resemblance. 
 
 11. " In the same speech," adds our Baconian, " when 
 he says : 
 
 For what obscured light the heavens did grant 
 Did but convey unto our fearful minds 
 A doubtful warrant of immediate death. 
 
 1 In discussing many other passages of plays which I believe 
 to have been only worked over, adapted, or collaborated-in by 
 Shakespeare, I make no attempt to meet the Baconian argument 
 by suggesting other authorship. To such a consideration 
 Baconians seem to be impervious ; and in nearly every case they 
 can be easily confuted even on their own lines. But as I have 
 in some cases pointed out the non-Shakespearean character of 
 passages stressed by them, I tiiinkit well to explain that omission 
 to say the same thing in other cases where it would apply does 
 not mean acceptance of the passage discussed as really 
 Shakespearean. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 211 
 the poet is reproducing Virgil's 
 
 Praesentemque vires intentant omnia mortem." 
 
 It is not necessary to discuss such a " reproduction." 
 
 12. The allusions to " Sybil," Xantippe, and the swelUng 
 Adriatic in the Shrew (I, ii.yo), prove to Dr. Theobald 
 that the poet's mind is " f\iU of classic illustration " ; 
 and we are reminded that Bacon refers to " Sybilla " ^ 
 in his essay on Delays. All this is truly remarkable 
 classical learning ! The fact that most good critics are 
 of opinion that the Shrew was not by Shakespeare will 
 naturally have no influence with Baconians. 
 
 13. The references to the " many-headed multitude " 
 in CoRiOLANUS (II, iii, 17) and to the " blimt monster 
 with uncounted heads " in 2 Henry IV (Induction, 18) 
 are of course declared to be " derived from Horace — 
 Bellua multorum es capitum." The Baconian is as usual 
 unaware that in Elyot's Governour (1531) occurs the 
 remark that the Athenian democracy " moughte well 
 be called a monstre with many heedes " (B. i, c. 2) ; and 
 that " many-headed multitude " occurs in Sidney's 
 Arcadia (B. ii). Yet he might have learned the latter 
 fact from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Without 
 going to either Elyot or Sidney, Shakespeare cotild have 
 got tiie tag from a previous play. It occurs in the first 
 part 'of Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Pt. I, iv, 3) 
 
 A monster of five hundred thousand heads ; 
 also in The Troublesome Raigne of King John : 
 
 The multitude, a beast of many heads, 
 Hazlitt's Shakespeare Library, Part II, vol. i, p. 290 ; 
 
 and in Daniel's poem (i595) on The Civil Wars (ii, 12) : 
 
 This many-headed monster Multitude ; 
 
 ^ Bacon of course wrote " Sibylla." Shakespeare in the 
 Merchant (i, 2) speUs " SibUla " ; and in Othello (iii, 4) " SybiU." 
 But in the non-Shakespearean Shrew also (i, 2) we have " Sibell " 
 and " Zentippe " ; and in Tittis (iv, i) " Sibel." 
 
212 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 to say nothing of the later plays which show it to have 
 been a common expression, ^d Bacon quoted Horace 
 too! 
 
 14. Juliet's lines : 
 
 Thou mays't prove false : at lovers' perjuries 
 They say, Jove laughs, 
 
 " may have been taJcen either from Tibullus or Ovid," 
 says Dr. Theobald, vdth comparative moderation. The 
 implication is that when Shakespeare puts a " they say " 
 into the mouth of a girl he is writing something which 
 he does not know to be a common saw, and is importing 
 a classical quotation from his own reading. Dr. Theobald 
 admits that " in Marlowe there is a metrical version : 
 
 For Jove himself sits in the azure skies 
 And laughs, below, at lovers' perjuries." 
 
 This he learned from one conomentator, and, being con- 
 vinced that Bacon wrote Marlowe, is willing to mention 
 it. From Malone he might have learned that the phrase 
 occurs also in Greene's Metamorphosis. And if he 
 had read Lilly's Ekdimion he would haye noted (i, 2) : 
 
 If the gods sit unequal beholders of injuries, or laughers at 
 lovers' deceits, then let mischief be as well forgiven in women as 
 perjury wink^ at in men. 
 
 15. The same inveterate unwisdom is shown in the 
 citation of Lewis Theobald's note to the jocular direction 
 of Launcelot in the Merchant of Venice (II, ii, 42) : 
 " Turn upon your right hand at the next tinning, but 
 at the next turning of all," &c. The commentator sug- 
 gested that it " seemed to be copied " from Terence's 
 Adelphi, iv, 2. It is simply not copied. It is a piece 
 of such fooling as spontaneously goes on in all countries, 
 at all times. Those who thus strive to credit the dramatist 
 with classical learning make him a pedantic fool, who 
 from wide reading harvests only commonplaces and 
 trivialities. Such was neither Shakespeare nor Bacon. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 213 
 
 16. Proceeding on his own learning. Dr. Theobald 
 writes that the " sentiment " of the passage : 
 
 If our virtues 
 Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
 As if we had them, not, 
 
 M.forM.I,i.34, 
 
 " appears to have originated " in Horace's 
 
 Paullum sepultse distat inertiae 
 Celata virtus. 
 
 Od. iv, 9. 
 
 The sentiment in question is the same as that put in the 
 mouth of Ulysses in Troilus (III, iii, 96 sq.) and it 
 " originated " before Horace. It is substantially put 
 by Cicero, De Amicitia, 19. It is developed afresh by 
 Seneca, De Beneficiis, B. v. And if Shakespeare had 
 not met with it — as probably he did not — ^in the current 
 translations of those treatises, he had it all to his hand, 
 with a thousand other classic saws, in Florio's translation 
 of Montaigne.^ But it would be folly to suppose that 
 such a maxim as Frustra hahet qui non utitur, given in 
 the Adagia of Erasmus, had not been a thousand times 
 quoted before Shakespeare. The argument that " nothing 
 is seen here to be made for itself . . . the noblest creatinres 
 have need of the basest, and the basest are served by the 
 noblest," is elaborated by De Momay in his treatise on 
 the Truth of the Christian Religion, translated by Sidney 
 and Golding in 1587 (ed. 1604, p. 18) ; and mast have 
 been many times employed. In this passage, be it noted, 
 we have the argtunent found in Henry V, with the phrase, 
 " so many and so divers pieces .... so coupled with one 
 another, making one body, and full of so apparent consents 
 of affections." The general sentiment that men are not 
 made for themselves is a standing theme : 
 
 As learned men have remembered, saying, we be not borne 
 solely to ourselves, but partely to the use of our Countrey, of our 
 
 1 See Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. pp. 95-104. 
 
214 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Parentes, of our Kinsfolkes, and partly of our Friendes and 
 Neyghboures. . . . 
 
 StaGoTd.Brief Coiiceipt of English Pollicy, I s8i, N.S.S. rep. p. 15. 
 
 How certaine it is, both by the tradition of ancient and modeme 
 judgments avowed, that everie man is not borne for himself e. 
 Ford, Honor Triumphant, 1606, first sentence. 
 
 The same Ciceronian maxim is employed twice over by 
 Northbrooke in his Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, 
 &c. (1577) — in the Epistle Dedicatory and in the text 
 (Sh. Soc. rep. p. 57) ; with the addition of a similar 
 sa5dng translated from Plato, Homines hominum causa esse 
 generates. It was evidently a familiar exordium. 
 
 17. And this is the fitting comment on the set of 
 parallels cited to Horace's Extinctus amabitur idem and 
 Virtutem incolumen odimus. The phrase " I shall be 
 loved when I am lack'd" (Coriolanus, IV, i, 15) is 
 flagrantly proverbial. Such things are said everjnvhere 
 by unlearned men who never read a line of Latin or even 
 a translation of a classic. It is the very ecstasy of error 
 that moves Dr. Theobald to write : " It is curious to 
 note how frequently the word lack'd is used in the Shake- 
 speare passages : it is the equivalent of Extinctus." 
 Bacon's Promus, where the quotation is found, is a mere 
 gamer of proverbial and colloquial sayings. 
 
 18. " Catullvis," says Dr. Theobald, " again turns up 
 in the following : 
 
 Be now as prodigal of all dear grace 
 As nature was in making graces dear. 
 When she did starve the general world beside, 
 And prodigally gave them all to you. 
 
 L. L. L. II, i. 9- 
 
 " In the 84th [should be 86th] Epigram, Lesbia is simi- 
 larly complimented : 
 
 Quae cum pulcherima tota est, 
 
 Tum omnibus una omnes surripuit Veneres." 
 
 It would be hard to cite a sentiment more completely 
 run to death in the whole world of amorous poetry. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 215 
 
 Surrey's " Praise of his Love," developing this theme, 
 is the type of a hundred Elizabethan lyrics. 
 
 19. Following his namesake, Lewis, Dr. Theobald 
 refers the opening lines of Troilus : 
 
 I'll uncinn again. 
 Why should I war without the walls of Troy, 
 That find such cruel battle here within, 
 
 to Anacreon : " 'Tis in vain I have a shield," &c. Once 
 more we are dealing with a poetic commonplace. E.g. : 
 
 Why fearest thou thy outward foe, 
 
 When thou thy selfe thy harme doste feede ? 
 
 Tottel's Miscellany, Arber's rep. p. 204. 
 
 It is mostly to such f amiUar sentiments that the Baconian 
 references point, making " scholarship " a mere means 
 of access to common metaphor. And we have the same 
 thing in the deducing of Pandarus' comment on the 
 Trojan warriors from Homer's episode of Helen on the 
 walls of Troy, copied by Euripides and Statins and a 
 score of poets more. Chapman's translation of the first 
 seven books of the Iliad appeared in 1598. 
 
 20. Following Lewis Theobald again, our Baconian 
 refers Hamlet's " large discourse " (IV, iv, 36) to Homer 
 (Iliad, iii, 109 ; i, 343 ; xviii, 250) ; and notes that 
 " the profound philosophical expression ' discourse of 
 reason '" is " used by Bacon." The expression in 
 question, as I pointed out long ago, occurs four times 
 in Florio's translation of Montaigne, demonstrably read 
 by Shakespeare while he was writing Hamlet. It is 
 also found in Sidney and Golding's translation of De 
 Momay on the Christian Rehgion (1587) ; repeatedly in 
 Fenton's translation of Guicciardini (1579) » ^o^^ times 
 in Holland's translation (1603) of one essay (" Of Moral 
 Virtue ") in Plutarch's Moralia, and frequently in other 
 essays ; to say nothing of Hooker (1594) and earlier 
 writers such as Jewel and More. " Discourse " is an 
 absolutely normal word in Tudor literature : 
 
 Discourse of state and government. 
 Fenton's ep. ded. to trans, of Guicciardini. 
 
2i6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 By the light of natural discourse. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, B. I, ch. xiv, § i. 
 
 If you desire to see me beat my breast. . . . 
 Then you may urge me to that sad discourse. 
 
 Heywood, Fair Maid of the West, v, i. 
 
 The mind, which in discoursing reacheth far beyond all sensible 
 
 things. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay. 
 
 Ed. 1604, p. 7. 
 The manner of his [man's] discourse is but to proceed from 
 kind to kind. 
 
 Id. p. 42. 
 
 The word occurs scores of times in Florio and Holland. 
 
 21. " The classic scholarship shown in Titus Androni- 
 cus is very remarkable," says Dr. Theobald. '.^This 
 play is crowded with classic allusions." All scholarship 
 seems to Dr. Theobald " very remarkable." But Titus 
 is not Shakespeare's work ; and the allusion to Hecuba's 
 killing of Polymnestor (I, i, 136) is from the hand of 
 Peele.* If Lewis Theobald and Steevens, who dwell 
 on the classic knowledge exhibited in the allusion to the 
 bmial of Ajax (I, i, 379), had done their work properly, 
 they would have noted that the very phrase "wise 
 Laertes' son " occurs in Peele's Tale of Troy (1589, 
 1. 362), where the quarrel and suicide of Ajax are lengthily 
 described. 
 
 So much for Dr. Theobald's selection of classical 
 parallels to prove the Baconian case. " The list," he 
 writes, " might be very easily extended ; but it is needless 
 to do so." It would be useless : the whole " classical " 
 case is hollow, the work of men with preconceived notions, 
 seeking to buttress them by any semblance of proof. 
 On the foregoing series of miscarriages there follows a 
 final attempt to prove " classical knowledge " in the 
 playwright from an alleged use of Latin idioms and 
 
 ^ See the point discussed in Did Shakespeare write " Titus 
 Andronicus " ? pp. 226-7, 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 217 
 
 grammatical fonns, as set forth in Dr. Abbott's Shake- 
 SPEREAN Grammar. Such forms as "the mightiest 
 Juhus." "without aU bail," "after" = secundum. 
 " mere " = sheer, " my very friends," " your," as in 
 
 Your serpent of "Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation 
 of your sun ; so is your crocodile. 
 
 Antony, II, vii, 29 ; 
 such forms as 
 
 What with your help, what with the absent king ; 
 What with the injuries of a wanton time, 
 
 I Henry IV, v, i, 49 
 
 — these and other tmiversally used idioms of the period 
 are seriously cited as "classic footprints." The argu- 
 ment is not worth discussion. Even if such forms had 
 all been classic in origin — ^which they were not — they 
 had become part and parcel of common English speech, 
 built up as that so largely was by men schooled in Latin, 
 in ages when priests wrote interludes for the people, and 
 preachers quoted from the Vulgate. The " your " form 
 is put by Shakespeare in the mouths of carters and grave- 
 diggers, and we are asked to suppose that it stood for 
 familiarity with Latin. 
 
 " Verray," which comes through French vrai and not 
 by imitation of Latin usage, is already completely estab- 
 Ikhed in Chaucer, who uses it scores of times in Boece 
 alone : " Verray tears," " a more verray thing," " thilke 
 sdve welefulnesse " and "thilke verray welefulnesse," 
 " verray blisfulnesse," " verray and parfit good," " false 
 goodes . . . verray goodes," "verray good," "right 
 verray resoun," "verray resoun," "no more.verraye 
 thing," " verray light," &c. &c. The usage remained 
 fixed till Shakespeare's time. "Very" is a normal 
 usage in Elyot in 1530, as in " my very son Esau." " Very 
 God " was a standing term in the creeds ; and thus 
 " very," with somewhat the force of " sheer " or " abso- 
 lute," was constantly used in theology. It could be 
 cited twenty times from one popular book : e.g. " very 
 
2i8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 corruption," " in very deed," " in very truth," " a very 
 m£in," " verie goodness and wisdom," &c. (Sidney and 
 Golding's trans, of De Momay, ed. 1604, pp. 93, 97, 264, 
 271, 272, 273, 282, 295, 298, 329, &c. &c.). "Mere" 
 = "pure" or "sheer" was in equally universal use, 
 as will be shown in the next chapter. Solvuntur tabula. 
 
 Uneasily conscious that there are some notoriously 
 awkward facts which he must face, Dr. Theobald avows : 
 
 In writing these plays, it is probable that English translations 
 were used as a matter of convenience, even though the writer 
 might have been (sic) capable of going to the original sources. My 
 conviction is that any unbiassed reader will not easily lose the 
 impression that a poet who could so faithfully reproduce the 
 spirit and entourage of classic events and persons must have 
 studied them carefully in their most authentic setting. But 
 when this impression does not arise, or is resisted, I have no means 
 of enforcing it by argument." * 
 
 Quite so. After all the confident bluster we have 
 examined ; after all the " certainly s " and " undoubted- 
 lys " ; after all the procession of quotations and sources 
 in regard to which it is claimed that only one inference 
 is open, we have the inept conclusion that the dramatist 
 " probably " used translations " for convenience "— 
 that Bacon, who so often wrote and so constantly quotes 
 Latin, found it inconvenient to translate for himself. 
 And in fine we have, pro ratione, the proposition : " My 
 conviction is. . . . I have no means of enforcing it by 
 argument." That is my case, 
 
 § 4. Mr. William Theobald 
 
 In 1909 there was posthimiously published, imder the 
 editorship of Dr. R. M. Theobald, The Classical Element 
 IN THE Shakespeare Plays, by his cousin, the late Mr. 
 William Theobald. In the editorial preface there is 
 cited a particular coincidence (non-classical) of idea and 
 phrase between Shakespeare and Bacon, with which I 
 
 1 Work cited, pp. 308-9. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 219 
 
 shall deal in the next chapter ; and there is advanced 
 an argument in regard to the " integration of a number 
 of small or doubtful resemblances," which will there also 
 be discussed on its merits. I mention it here by way of 
 noting that even Dr. Theobald perceived the " faint and 
 probably accidental " character of some of the " resem- 
 blances " alleged by his relative, concerning which he 
 claims, however, that they are " not entirely valueless." 
 As to this the reader can decide for himself when he has 
 perused the series of alleged classical parallels examined 
 hereinafter. I have gone through one entire chapter 
 of these, ignoring nothing. But before coming to them 
 it may be well to note how Mr. WiUiam Theobald in his 
 Introduction deals with the general question of Shake- 
 speare's scholarship. 
 
 He begins by accepting the existence of one Shakspere 
 or ShaJ^per, for whom he accepts as properly applicable 
 the epithets of " poet-ape," " Johannes factotum," and 
 " upstart-crow," which, it is alleged, " two of his con- 
 temporaries, who knew him personally," apply to him. 
 The second and third epithets are those of Greene, concern- 
 ing whose personal acquaintance with Shakespeare Mr. 
 Theobald offers no evidence whatever ; and who in any 
 case wrote as his enemy. The first is from Ben Jonson's 
 epigram, which might fitly be applied to any one of three 
 or four of Jonson's enemies ; which is absolutely in- 
 compatible with Jonson's express praise of Shakespeare ; 
 and concerning which also Mr. Theobald makes no attempt 
 to prove that it was directed at Shakespeare. Then the 
 theorist proceeds to accept the testimony of Ben Jonson 
 that " Shakespere " [sic] had " small Latin and less 
 Greek," saying nothing of the significance of the fact 
 that this testimony is part of a panegyric upon Shake- 
 speare of Stratford as one of the great dramatists of all 
 time. 
 
 Beyond this Mr. Theobald's exposition consists in 
 affirming that the author of Hamlet " certainly " knew 
 
220 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Greek ; and in charging " unblushing dogmatism " upon 
 Sir Sidney Lee and others who claim that, beyond 
 rational dispute, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote 
 the plays which we cherish as his. On the point of the 
 " non-Shakespearean " character of some of them, Mr. 
 Theobald is as uncritical as the rest of the Baconians and 
 some of the orthodox, merely arguing that the editors 
 of the Folio " should have known the author of the plays 
 included therein," and that Jonson " must have known 
 also." All the while he assmnes that the plays assigned 
 to Shakespeare were written by Bacon, to whom he has 
 no scruple in ascribing Titus Andronicus. 
 
 In so far as he argues that " all writers are, consciously 
 or unconsciously, indebted for ideas, facts, allusions, and, 
 in a word, literary material, to previous writers," he is 
 forcing an open door. The purpose of his book is to 
 prove that Shakespeare did hk borrowing largely at first 
 hand from Greek and Latin writers ; and it is in this 
 undertaking that Mr. Theobald fully reveals his incapacity 
 to draw rational inferences from literary evidence. Dr. 
 Fumivall's deliverance, that 
 
 Chaucer, George Gascoigne, Holinshed's Chronicle, Lyly's 
 Euphues, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, and other collections of 
 novels. Greene's prose tales, Montaigne's Essays, are the main 
 books we trace in [Shakespeare's] works, 
 
 Mr. Theobald pronoimces a " preposterous utterance." 
 We shall see in due course the value of his opinion. 
 
 At one point Mr. Theobald's argument becomes so 
 incoherent that it is difficult to understand how even a 
 careless editor coiild pass it without comment. He 
 accuses of gross misrepresentation an anti-Baconian 
 writer who first remarked on the folly of the thesis that 
 Bacon would choose as his mask " a rude unlettered 
 fellow " ; and later observes that " the Baconians had 
 to prove that Shakespeare was a scholar." Obviously 
 the writer meant that they had to prove that the play- 
 wright was a scholar. But after thus fiercely denouncing 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 221 
 
 a mere ellipsis, Mr. Theobald in his own person reasons 
 thus : 
 
 The true reason why the writer of the plays (Bacon) did not 
 care to bring too prominently forward his knowledge of the Greek 
 tragedies, wjis probably the risk thereby incurred of jeopardising 
 his cherished incognito ; as his literary stalking-horse, Shakspere, 
 was too well known to be readily credited with deriving raaterials 
 from the works of Sophocles, £schylus, or Euripides. Even at 
 second-hand, through Seneca, the risk was too great to be encountered. 
 
 I invite attention to this piece of reasoning. It affirms 
 (i) That the man Shakespeare was too well known {i.e., 
 by implication, to be no scholar) to permit of the real 
 author introducing into the plays any signs of knowledge 
 of the Greek classical drama, or even of a dramatist so 
 widely read in those days as Seneca. But it is involved 
 in this proposition (2) that Shakespeare could pass among 
 those who knew him not only as the author of all the 
 poetry and eloquence in the plays, but as having scholar- 
 ship enough for what scholarly touches there are in them. 
 That is to say, those who knew Shakespeare would see 
 no reason for doubting that he was able to write all the 
 plays and poems he signed — ^this by the admission of the 
 Baconian. 
 
 Be it now noted (3) that Mr. Theobald in his opening 
 chapter undertakes to show that the plays reveal not 
 only a " good," a " thorough," nay, even a " pedantic " 
 knowledge of Latin literatTure in general, but a knowledge 
 of Aristotle, Euripides, and Homer; and (4) that in 
 subsequent chapters he claims to prove, still from the 
 plays, a knowledge not only of these writers but of ^schy- 
 lus, Anacreon, Aristophanes, Athenseus, ^lian, Appian; 
 Plato, Theocritus, TyrtseMS, and ApoUonius Rhodius, 
 to say nothing of such out-of-the-way Latin writers as 
 Alanus, Ausonius, Avienus, Fracastorius, &c. &c. Bacon, 
 then, could safely let his unlettered mask figure as 
 possessed of all that classical reading, while forced to 
 withhold all signs of knowledge of " Sophocles, -^Eschylus, 
 or Euripides," or even Seneca ! 
 
222 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 After this sample of his mental processes, it is perhaps 
 superfluous to explain that when Mr. Theobald under- 
 takes to convict Farmer of gross ignorance he merely 
 exhibits entire failure of comprehension. Farmer remarked 
 that Taylor, the " Water Poet," has " more scraps of 
 Latin and allusions to antiquity than are an3nvhere to 
 be met with in the writings of Shakespeare." Upon this 
 Mr. Theobald thus explodes : "To imderstand the 
 audacity of this assertion, it is sufficient to quote the 
 authority of Taylor himself," citing the poet's avowal 
 that he covdd never get beyond possum and posset. Of 
 this fact, Farmer was not only perfectly aware : he had 
 given the very clue which Mr. Theobald takes ! In his 
 preface* he had mentioned the passage about possum 
 and posset ; and in the text he had expressly quoted 
 Taylor's avowal that " he never learned his Accidence, 
 and that Latin and French were t6 him heathen Greek " ; 
 going on : " yet, by the help of Mr. WhaUey's argument, 
 I will prove him a learned man, in spite of everything 
 he may say to the contrary." The whole point of 
 Fanner's argument was that an English poet avowedly 
 ignorant — ^in the scholarly sense — of any language but 
 his own could nevertheless make hundreds of classical 
 allusions in virtue of his English reading, and could even 
 use many scraps of Latin. 
 
 I do not accuse Mr. Theobald of gross misrepresenta- 
 tion : his infirmity appears to have been intellectual 
 rather than moral. But when he proceeds to pretend 
 that Farmer, in pointing to the English books where 
 Shakespeare could have found his "classical" matter, 
 in positing something harder of belief than the " classical " 
 thesis itself, Mr. Theobald exhibits a fairly low standard 
 of candovir. He actually names French writers without 
 mentioning that Farmer had referred to EngUsh transla- 
 tions of them. But he probably could not tmderstand 
 
 ^ To the second edition, in which first occurs the passage above 
 cited and denounced by Mr. Theobald. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 223 
 
 that in pointing to the English currency of the classical 
 items in dispute Fanner did not mean to claim that 
 Shakespeare had necessarily read every one of those 
 books — ^though he very well might — but simply to show 
 that the knowledge in question was current for English 
 readers without resort to Greek and Latin. The rationale 
 of the whole problem is hidden to a writer of Mr. Theo- 
 bald's intellectual habits. 
 
 This is finally made clear by his handling of the point 
 of the parallel, pressed by himself, between the declara- 
 tion in the Shrew that " 'Tis death to any one in Mantua, 
 To come to Padua." For this Mr. Theobald was bound 
 to find a classic original ; and he fathers it on Aulus 
 Gellius' story (vii, 10) of the decree of the citizens of 
 Athens against those of Megara. In the eighteenth 
 centiuy, George Colman had traced a character in the 
 Shrew to the untranslated Trinummus of Plautus ; 
 whereupon Farmer pointed out, in his Essay, that both 
 the character and the part of the plot in question had 
 been borrowed from the previous comedy of Supposes; 
 a translation by George Gascoigne from Ariosto's Sup- 
 POSiTi. Colman was convinced on this head, though 
 he held out on others. Not so Mr. Theobald. He decides 
 (p. 167) that " as the work of Gascoigne was published 
 without date. Farmer's argument does not carry convic- 
 tion." Farmer, I fancy, would not have been concerned 
 to carry conviction to Mr. Theobald. But in the interest 
 of minds more permeable to reason it may be wdl to 
 mention that Gascoigne's Supposes was published as 
 having been " presented " at Gray's Inn in 1566. It 
 would thus have been known to actors apart from publica- 
 tion ; but it is known to have been pubUshed by Jeffes 
 in 1587. 
 
 Since Farmer's day, the critical examination of the 
 Shrew has been carried far enough to make us sure that 
 Shakespeare had no hand in its framing, but at most 
 touched it up and inserted some passages^ This, of course. 
 
224 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 is not a matter to be put to Baconians ; but it is one the 
 consideration of which may save some brands from their 
 burning. Mr. Theobald is not an investigator of historic 
 fact, but a m5rth-maker. In his pages, I suppose, are 
 to be foxmd all the standard mares' nests of his sect. He 
 duly enshrines the " HonorificaUlitudinitatibus." He has 
 read in the Athenaum the sentence on it from the Catho- 
 LicoN of Giovanni da Genova; and then, in the true 
 Baconian manner, he pronotmces (p. 170) : " Whether 
 Bacon was the more likely man to have had recourse to 
 the pages of that work, or Shakespeare, I confidently 
 leave to the common sense of my readers." Mr. Theo- 
 bald is truly a precious authority on common sense. The 
 old variorum edition could have informed him that the 
 " word " is to be met with in Nashe's Lenten Stuff, 
 in a passage (Works, ed. McKerrow, iii, 176) which shows 
 it to have been quite familiar in thdt day. We are dealing 
 with perhaps the most impossible of aU the Baconians. 
 
 None the less his entire chapter on " Classical Allusions 
 Generally" shall be examined in detail. I hesitate to 
 express my opinion of its general critical quality before 
 the reader has had a full opportunity of judgment ; and 
 thereafter he may be more moved to compassion than 
 to censure. Let him but note that in a number of 
 instances Mr. Theobald coincides in his claims with Dr. 
 R. M. Theobald ; and that in these cases I refer back, or 
 forward to the next chapter. 
 
 1. Captious (All's Well, I, iii, 193). 
 
 See helow, Ch. VIII, p. 283. 
 
 2. Lethe' d (" a Lethe'd dulness " : Antony, II, i, 27). 
 " Simply the Latin Lethaus in an EngUsh dress," says 
 
 Mr. Theobald, " as when Statins uses the expression 
 LethcBum vimen, a rod dipped in Lethe (or Lethe'd rod), 
 Thebais, ii, 30." 
 
 There was no need to resort to Statins. " Lethe " 
 had the current force of " oblivion." Ascham in The 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 225 
 
 ScHOLEMASTER notes (Arber's rep. p. 75) that Plato 
 " doth plainelie declare that pleasure . . . doth ingender 
 in all those that yield up themselves to her, f oure notorious 
 properties," the first being X^riv, " forgetfuhiess of all 
 good things learned before." In the drama and in poetry 
 the word was in common use : 
 
 I have drunk Lethe. 
 
 Webster, The White Devil, iv, 2. 
 
 His memory to virtue and good men 
 Is still carousing Lethe. 
 
 Id. Appius and Virginia, iv, i. 
 
 To drown the pain it did abide 
 In solitary Lethe's sleepy tide. 
 
 Kyd, Cornelia, Act ii. 
 
 Drinking of the Lethe of mine eyes. 
 He is forced forget himself. 
 
 Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, 1592. 
 
 3. Exigent (Antony, IV, xiv, 62). 
 
 See below, p. 310. 
 
 4. Prosecution (= following up : same passage). 
 
 " Used precisely as in Latin," sajrs Mr. Theobald. But 
 also precisely as in many English writers : 
 
 Caesar . . . also prosecuted them [his enemies] with such 
 celerity and effect. . . . 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, i, 23 ; Dent's rep. p. 100. 
 
 He with his army did prosecute after. 
 Latimer, First Sermon before Edward VI. Dent's rep. p. 73. 
 
 To prosecute their purposes. 
 Ascham, Scholemaster, Arber's rep. p. 69. 
 
 Our intent is not so exactlie to prosecute the purpose. 
 Puttenhzim, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 127. 
 
 The King . '. . prosecuted still in questioning. 
 
 Greene, Penelope's Web, 1587 : Works, v, 232. 
 
 I will prosecute what disgrace my hatred can dictate to me. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 2. 
 Left then to prosecute her. 
 
 Lilly, Love's Metamorphosis, i, 2. 
 
 P 
 
226 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Whose bodies axe followed in the world with lust, and prosecuted 
 in the grave with tyranny. 
 
 Id. ih. 
 Prosecuting of this enterprise. Prosecute the cause. 
 
 Sir John Oldcastle, Pt. I, iii, i ; v, lo. 
 
 Go prosecute the Senate's will. 
 A Knack to Know an Honest Man, 1596, 1. 516. 
 
 One of Caesar's captains which was sent to Rome to prosecute 
 his suit. 
 
 North's trans, of Life of Casar. Skeat's Sh. Plutarch, 
 p. 70. 
 
 5. The Ablative Absolute : 
 
 My music playing far off, There, I will betray, &c., 
 
 Antony, II, v, 10. 
 
 Such constructions were perfectly normal in English— 
 the natural result of Latin culture. Latimer has : 
 
 Those premises considered, I would have you, &c.. 
 
 Fifth Sirmon before Edward VI. 
 
 Elyot has many such constructions. 
 
 6. Percussion (Coriolanus, I, iv, 59). 
 
 " Not an English word," says Mr. Theobald, on the 
 score that Richardson gives only this and instances from 
 Bacon. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from Phaer, 
 Regiment of Lyfe, c. vii, and Holland's Plutarch, p. 
 
 I34«- 
 Compare : 
 
 Salute me with thy repercussive voice. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, i, i (1601). 
 
 7. Progeny (= ancestry. Coriolanus, I, viii, 11). 
 
 " Used not in its English sense," says Mr. Theobald, 
 " but as the equivalent of ancestry and of the Greek word 
 progenitor. It is occasionally used in this sense of 
 ' ancestry ' in Latin by Cicero and Terence, but I make 
 bold to say it would not have been so used by a man who 
 was not a good classical scholar and aware of the authority 
 he had for so uncommon a use of the word." No man who 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 227 
 
 knew anything of Tudor English could have advanced 
 such an assertion. The sense of " ancestry " was it any- 
 thing more common than that of offspring or posterity. 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from WicUf, 
 Gower, Higden, Fabyan, and Cranmer. Add : 
 
 They descend of famous progeny; 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe. 1528. 
 Whittingham's rep. p. loi. 
 
 His name is Person, and his progeny. 
 Now tell me of what ancient pedigree ? 
 Greene, Lacena's Riddle, in The Tritameron of Love, 1584. 
 
 Honour'd for his parentage and progeny [said of an unmarried 
 youth]. 
 
 Id. Mirror of Modesty, 1584 : Works, iii, 9. 
 
 Whose [Danae's] parentage and progeny [before bearing 
 children]. 
 
 Id. Tritameron of Love, 1587 : Works, iii, 69. 
 
 I therefore dissent because the destinies have appointed my 
 progeny from such a peevish parent. 
 
 Id. Planetomachia, 1585 : Works, v, 40. 
 My parents and progeny. 
 
 Id. Menaphon : Works, vi, 1 10. 
 The honour of thy house and progeny. 
 
 Peele, David and Bethsabe, ii, 2. 
 Neither noble progenie, succession, nor election be of such force 
 that. . . 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. ii, c. 1 ; Dent's ed. p. 117. 
 
 In a horse or good greyhound we praise that we see in them 
 and not the beauty or goodness of their progeny. 
 
 W. B. ii, c. 5, p. 130. 
 Bom of worshipful progeny. 
 Stubbes, Anatomic of Abuses, Collier's rep. p. 42. 
 
 Wot ye not how great lord I [Pride] am. 
 Of how noble progeny I came ? 
 Medwall, Nature, in Farmer's Lost Tudor Plays, p. 66. 
 
 8. Microcosm (Coriolanus, II, i, 57). 
 
 " The word ' microcosm,' " remarks Mr. Theobald, 
 " occurs in Bacon, Syl. Syl. Cent, x, introd., which was 
 not published in Shakespeare's lifetime. Also in Sir 
 
228 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Walter Raleigh's History of the World (B. i, ch. 2); 
 but this was not published when the play was written 
 (the first volume being published in 1614)." Mr. Theo- 
 bald does not expressly say that these were the first uses 
 of the word in English books apart from Shakespeare, 
 but unless he means that he is sa3ang nothing. Let us 
 then supplement somewhat his literary information : 
 
 Microcosm, as the Oxford Dictionary notes, occurs in 
 Lydgate (1426). Norton (1477). I^ee (1570) ; the First 
 Part of The Return from Parnassus (1597). and Florio's 
 Montaigne (1604). Compare the following : 
 
 That is to say, MocfocosfWMS and Microcosmus, which is to say, 
 the greater world and the lesser world. 
 
 Gascoigne, Viewe of Worldly Vanities: Works, ed. 
 Cunlifie, ii, 234. 
 Let us make Man ; that is, a wonderful creature, and therefore 
 is called in Greek Microcosmos, a little world in Imnself. 
 
 Stubbes, The Anaiomie of Abuses, 1583, Ep. Ded. 
 
 For our English Mikrokosmos or Phenician Dido's hide of 
 ground. 
 
 Nashe, Lenten Stuff e, 1599. Works, ed. McKerrow, iii, 186. 
 
 No my harts, I am an absolute Microcosmus, a pettie world of 
 
 myself. 
 
 Lilly, Endimion, 1591, iv, 2. 
 
 In 1603 John Davies of Hereford published a long poem 
 entitled Microcosmus. It wovild thus appear that the 
 word was attainable without resort to consultation with 
 Bacon or Raleigh. 
 
 9. lUustrous (Cymbeline, I, vi, 108). 
 
 "Who but a classical scholar, nay, a very pedant, 
 would have used the word ' illustrous ' in place of dim ? " 
 asks Mr. Theobald— after explicitly arguing that Bacon 
 dared not indicate his scholarship in the plays put out 
 by him under the name of Shakespeare. As it happens, 
 we do not know that Shakespeare ever did this. The 
 Folio reads " illustrious " ; and as there is no warrant for 
 giving to that word the sense of " dim," some editors 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 229 
 
 have substituted " illustrous." Rowe put " unlustrous," 
 and that reading is adopted in the Globe edition. So 
 that " Shakespeare's " pedantry is still to prove. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary, as it happens, does not include 
 the word " illustrous " at all. This is surprising, for that 
 word does actually appear in Shepherd's edition of Chap- 
 man's Minor Poems and Translations, in the prose 
 Justification of " Perseus and Andromeda " (1614) 
 p. 194, col. 2, in the phrase " their present doctrinal and 
 illustrous purposes." Unless Shepherd gives a false 
 reading, the Dictionary has fallen into a sin of omission. 
 The word appears again, however, with the meaning 
 " illustrious," in Shepherd's edition of Chapman's transla- 
 tion of the Iliad, viii, 182. Here the bare scansion calls 
 for three syllables, though four could pass. On the 
 whole, the presumption is that the word had some 
 currency, and that Shakespeare did not coin it. 
 
 10. Eager (Hamlet, I, ii, 68). 
 
 " The word ' eager,' " Mr. Theobald informs us, " is 
 here used in its classical or root sense of sharp, from the 
 Greek axis (!), a sharp point, whence metaphorically sharp 
 in the sense of acid, which none but a scholar wotdd have 
 so introduced. The commoner word acid is not used 
 in the plays. ' Posset ' here is introduced, too, into the 
 language for the first time." 
 
 Such folly " striketh a man dead," as the Elizabethans 
 would say. Mr. Theobald is imaware that " eager " is 
 simply the French aigre, and is so used by scores of 
 writers between Chaucer and Shakespeare. He does 
 not even know that " the commoner word acid " — then 
 very uncommon — is found in Bacon ; or else he ignores 
 the point, as not serving the Baconian purpose. His 
 remark as to " posset " is astounding even to a reader 
 of the Baconians. It was an every-day word in every 
 English household. Heywood puts it twice in the mouths 
 of farmer-folk in the First Part of his Edward IV, 
 
230 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 published in 1600. Ben Jonson in the preliminary matter 
 to Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) has (List of 
 Characters : Carlo BufEone) : 
 
 A slave that will swill up more sack at sitting than would 
 make all the guard a posset. 
 
 It occurs in Blurt, Master-Constable (1602, iii, 3) 
 assigned to Middleton ; and thrice in Webster and 
 Marston's Malcontent, published in 1604. 
 
 A posset, the commentators explain, was " wine boiled 
 with milk. ' ' The dialogue in The Malcontent illustrates 
 this description. 
 
 11. Implorators (Hamlet, I, iii, 129). 
 
 Mr. Theobald's note on this word must be cited in 
 full, to do it justice : " The word * implorators ' is neither 
 Latin nor English, though it might conceivably have 
 been formed (as amator is from amare) had the metre 
 required it. But the metre forbids it, and Lewis Theobald 
 was therefore justified in treating the word as a printer's 
 error for implorers. If, however, the word ' implorators ' 
 was the poet's own word, it clearly shows how the classical 
 bias of his mind was so strong as to overpower elementary 
 requirements, in this case of prosody." Q. E. D. 
 
 Most modem editors, recognising, pace Mr. Theobald, 
 that prosody does not reject " implorators," retain the 
 word. They happen to know that there was a French 
 legal word implorateurs, which probably was Anglicised 
 long before Shakespeare by the lawyers. 
 
 12. Green Wound (2 Henry IV, II, i, 93). 
 
 Mr. Theobald impressively notes that Bacon in the 
 Essay Of Revenge speaks of a man keeping his own 
 woimds green. " It was also," he explains, " a classical 
 usage, as Euripides applies the term chloros, green or 
 fresh, to blood " (Hecuba, 129). So that Shakespeare 
 had appropriately put a Greek expression in the mouth 
 of Mrs. Quickly, the better to reveal his scholarship ! 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 231 
 
 This perhaps deserves to rank, even in competition 
 with the assertion about " posset," as the last word in 
 Baconian wool-gathering. The phrase must be about 
 as old as English. In the Morte Darthur we read how 
 Sir Tristram "in his raging took no keep of his green 
 wound that King Mark had given him " (B. viii, ch. 14). 
 In Surrey's first poem in Tottel's Miscellany (1557) 
 is the line : 
 
 Of mine old hurt yet feel the wound but green. 
 
 And in Sackville's Complaint of Buckingham — part 
 of his Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates (1563) 
 — ^is the line : 
 
 And feeling green the wound about his heart. 
 
 Sackville's Works, ed. 1859, p. 135. 
 
 It may be well to add, in a world in which Baconians 
 flourish, that the phrase was current in the Elizabethan 
 drama : 
 
 Lest he dismount me while my wounds are green. 
 
 Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, i, 4. 
 That wound yet too green. 
 Chapman, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596) ». i- 
 Wounds must be cured when they be fresh and green. 
 Greene, Alphonous King of Arragon, iii, ed. Dyce. p. 236. 
 And for your green wound . . . 
 Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, iii, 2. 
 That [comfort which green wounds receive from sovereign 
 balm. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore. Part I, v, 2, near end. 
 
 13. Absque hoc (2 Henry IV, V, v, 28). 
 See above, p. 72. 
 
 14. Caesar and his Fortune (i Henry VI, I, ii, 138). 
 Mr. Theobald, in a lucid interval, admits that the 
 
 phrase " is almost too familiar to quote," but proceeds 
 to point out that " the epithet ' insulting ' applied to the 
 ship, is used ... in its purely Latin sense." As to this 
 see below, p. 321, 
 
232 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 15. Proditor {Id. I, iii, 31)- 
 
 This, Mr. Theobald explains, " is a Latin word and 
 not an Enghsh one," quoting Cicero and Horace. It 
 will be shown below, p. 337, that the word was in 
 English use. 
 
 16. Simular (Lear, III, ii, 54). 
 
 See below, p. 348. 
 
 17. Virtue {Id. V. iii, 104). 
 
 " Here the word ' virtue ' is used in its primary classical 
 sense, without any reference to moral goodness : that is, 
 trust to thy ' valour ' alone to save you." 
 
 The word in this sense was perfectly familiar, and there 
 is absolutely no innovation in the matter. Elyot in his 
 GovERNOUR has the saying : 
 
 A mein is called in Latin vir, whereof, saith Tully, vertue is 
 named. 
 
 B. iii, c. 9. Dent's rep. p. 229 ; 
 
 and he has the phrase : 
 
 A semblance of vertue or cunning (B. i, c. 20). 
 
 About the same date, Tjmdale in his translation of the 
 Enchiridion of Erasmus has the expression : 
 Christ, the virtue or strength of God ; 
 
 and in the first chapter of Sir Thomas North's translation 
 of Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus, read by Shakespeare, 
 we have the sentence : 
 
 Now in those days valiantness was honoured in Rome above 
 all other virtues : which they called virtus, by the name of virtue 
 itself, as including in that general name all other special virtues 
 besides. So that virtus in the Latin was as much as valiantness. 
 
 Skeat's Sh. Plutarch, p. 2. 
 On the stage we have : 
 
 And, valiant with a forced Vertue, longs 
 To die the death. 
 
 . Hughes, Misfortunes of Arthur, IV, ii, 206-7. 
 
 One is moved to ask whether Mr. Theobald, at the 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 233 
 
 height of his hallucination, could suppose that tha^ospel 
 phrase, " Virtue had gone out of hhn," and such a con- 
 stantly used phrase as " the virtue of herbs," were classic 
 mysteries for common folk ? 
 
 18, 19, 20, 21. Epitheton, Festinately, Pernicious, 
 and Sequent, all previously put forward by Dr. Theobald, 
 are dealt with below, in ch. viii. 
 
 22. Laus Deo, bone intelligo (L.L.L. V, i, 24). 
 
 " The author," declares Mr. Theobald, " must have 
 been a fair scholar to know that there is no such word 
 as bone, but only bene." It wovdd be interesting to know 
 what Mr. Theobald would regard as " small Latin." For 
 the rest, the context is corrupt ; ^ and " bone " does not 
 occur in the original, being merely an editorial guess. 
 
 23. Perge (L-L.L. IV, ii, 50). 
 
 " This is not a word that would be picked up in any 
 translation," says Mr. Theobald. It might, however, 
 have been picked up at school ! Mr. Theobald, with 
 ripe learning, points to Seneca, Thyestes, i, 23 ; Virgil, 
 EcLOGA, vi, 13 ; Claudian, De Bello Gildonico, 201, 
 from which it " may have been borrowed." Several 
 other instances of the use of the word may be found in 
 Stephanus. With all of the writers named, says Mr. 
 Theobald, "the author of the pla}^ was familiar." 
 " Paper is patient," say the Germans — borrowing from 
 the Latin. 
 
 24. Deformed (L.L.L. IV, ii, 50). 
 
 " Your beauty . . . hath much deformed us." The 
 word is " here used in its classical or root sense, which 
 does not necessarily involve the idea of ugliness as the 
 English word does ; and its use in this place is, I consider, 
 a clear indication of the scholarly mind of the author," 
 says Mr. Theobald. Unluckily, the word had been used 
 * See above, p. 3. 
 
234 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 in the " classical or root sense " by English authors long 
 before Shakespeare : 
 
 His hair and beard defonned with blood and sweat. 
 
 Kyd, Cornelia, Act iii. 
 
 He shall not reform himself, but raCther deform his conscience. 
 Hooper, Declaration of Christ and His Office, 
 Parker Soc. rep. p. 29. 
 
 To rip up all our deformities I mind not here. 
 
 Foxe, Four Considerations, pref . to Martyrs. 
 
 Now over and beside this deformity of life. 
 
 Id. Exordium. Cattley's ed, i, 12. 
 
 Joys that deform us with the lusts of sense. 
 
 Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, iv.i. 
 
 A . . . jester that . . . with absurd smiles will transform any 
 person into deformity. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour : List 
 of Characters ; Carlo Buffone. 
 
 Where they shaM see the time's deformity 
 Anatomized in every nerve and sinew. 
 
 Id. lb. Induction. 
 
 25. Receipt (= receptacle : Macbeth, I, vii, 66). 
 
 " The word ... in this sense is very classical," says 
 Mr. Theobald, referring to Cicero's Tusculans, I, xx 
 (should be xxii), 52, for " receptacle." The astonishing 
 thing is that there is no reference to Bacon, who in the 
 Essay Of Gardens (No. 46) speaks of two kinds of 
 fountains of which one is " a faire receipt (= pool or 
 basin) of water." How comes it that the Baconians had 
 not detected such a " coincidence " ? Of course, as 
 Bacon's phrase shows, the word was in common use in 
 that sense. It was so long before. Hoccleve has : 
 
 My . . . greedy mowth, (receite of swich outrage). 
 La Male Regie de T. Hoccleve, 1. ii4- 
 Lydgate has : 
 
 The thought, resceyt of wo and of compla)mt. 
 
 Complaynt of the Black Knight, 1. 226. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 235 
 
 Roye has : 
 
 The prestes of Babilone . . . 
 
 Had an ydole called Bell. 
 Outwajrdly made all of bras. 
 And inwardly of earth it was. 
 
 Having a resceyte so devised 
 That the ydole semed to devowere 
 An C shepe with wine and flower 
 
 Daily unto it sacrjrfised. 
 
 Rede Me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 
 And Heywood uses the word twice for the " capacity " or 
 " holding power " of a theatre in his Apology for Actors. 
 Compare his line : 
 
 Of all the houses for a king's receipt. 
 
 2 Edward IV (1599), iii, 2. 
 
 26. Multitudinous — Incarnadine (II, ii, 62). 
 
 Not content with " incarnadine," Mr. Theobald an- 
 nounces, more suo, that " multitudinous " is " here used 
 for the first time." EnUghtened from within, the Baco- 
 nian dreams not of consulting the variorum edition, 
 where he might learn that the word is used by Dekker 
 in The Wonderful Year, 1603, in the phrase, "the 
 multitudinous spawn." As to incarnadine, see helour, 
 p. 361. 
 
 27. Way of life (Macbeth, V, iii, 22). 
 
 Some one having expressed perplexity over this phrase, 
 Mr. Theobald pitjongly observes that it Is " an example 
 of how the eyes of critics, commentators and editors are 
 sealed by the absurd assmnption that the author of the 
 plays was a poor classical scholar." He confidently 
 points to " secretum iter et faUentis semita vitee " in 
 Horace, Epist. I, xviii, 103, as " probably the source 
 whence the phrase * way of Ufe ' was derived." The 
 puzzle is, how came Shakespeare to be able to speak 
 EngUsh at aU save through Latin ? It^SijR^ 
 
 Not for the Baconian is the old leisurely debate over 
 way" and "May." Colman gave two instances to 
 
 <( 
 
236 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 justify Johnson's emendation, " May," that word being 
 a common poetic figure for the period of youth, as Steevens 
 further proved by seven more instances. But, as it 
 happens, other poets and dramatists did write " way of 
 life " for " course of life " — e.g. Massinger in Very 
 Woman and New Way to pay Old Debts; and in 
 Pericles, i, i, that simple form occurs, as in Henry VIII 
 we have " the way of our profession." And even apart 
 from such usages, it seems sane to infer that English 
 people could think or speak of the path or the journey 
 of life without getting the idea from Horace. 
 
 28. Wicked Hannibal (M. FOR M. II, i, 170). 
 
 Mr. Theobald with profotmd learning shows that 
 Hannibal was a name for detestableness among the 
 Romans. He is convinced that Bacon-Shakespeare 
 studied the classics thus to illuminate the dialogue of 
 contemporary clowns ! 
 
 And he would doubtless give the same explanation in 
 the case of Ben Jonson : 
 
 Your maids too know this, and yet would have me turn 
 Hannibal, and eat my own flesh and blood. 
 
 Every Man in his Humour, iii, 2. 
 
 " Hannibal " for " cannibal " was a standing tag. 
 
 29. Loss of Question (M. FOR M. II, iv, 90). 
 
 Mr. Theobald takes joy in the explanation, given so 
 long ago as 1852, that "loss of question" stands for 
 casus questionis. He does not explain why Shakespeare 
 should translate casus by " loss." The passage is in all 
 likelihood corrupt. Johnson's suggested emendation, 
 " toss of question," flouted by Grant White, would make 
 it clear enough. 
 
 30. Delighted spirit (M. for M. Ill, i, 122). 
 
 This old crux gives Mr, Theobald another opportunity. 
 His cousin, Dr. Theobald, is all for " delated " : he him- 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 237 
 
 self prefers to read " delighted " as de-lighted = deprived 
 of light, because Homer (Iliad, xviii, 6) uses the phrase 
 " to lose the light " as the equivalent for " to die." And 
 yet probably Shakespeare just wrote " delighted " and 
 meant " delighted " in the sense of " hitherto full of the 
 delight of life " ! Anyhow, " de-lighted " is not classical. 
 
 31. On p. 40, whether of artistic intent or by the skill 
 of his editor, Mr. Theobald has the oracular passage : 
 
 In Hamlet Polonius says (II, ii, 105) " Perpend," 
 
 making no comment. On p. 48 we have a similar intima- 
 tion with reference to The Merry Wives, II, i, 19. Here 
 Mr. Theobald censures an editor for saying that " per- 
 pend " was " an affected term." This hits Dr. R. M. 
 Theobald, who noted that in Shakespeare " the word is 
 used oxily by pedantical speakers or professional fools." 
 " There was no affectation in its use in the time of Eliza- 
 beth," says Mr. W. Theobald, " as it was a word used in all 
 seriousness by Bale, Burnet, Fox, and Brown." The 
 general proposition is quite true. But only the Baconian 
 can follow Mr. Theobald in proceeding to coimect Shake- 
 speare's use of it with Lucretius. It was current English. 
 See below, p. 330. 
 
 32. Evitate (Merry Wives, V, v, 215). 
 
 The word, says Mr. Theobald, "is rarely used in 
 English, but Bacon was one of the few who adopted it," 
 and this in " a work not published in Shakespeare's life- 
 tune." 
 
 See below, p. 308, as to another source of vocabulary 
 open to poor Shakespeare in this matter. 
 
 33. Thrice-blessed (M.N.D., I, i, 74). 
 
 " The use of ' thrice,' as an intensitive," says the 
 indefatigable Mr. Theobald, " was a peculiarity of Shake- 
 speare's style " ', and " this is very suggestive of the 
 Greek," and also of the Latin. It was even such a 
 
238 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 peculiarity as the taking of salt with meat. Every 
 dramatist of the period did it : 
 
 Thrice-happy. Thrice dreadful. Thrice mighty. Thrice 
 noble. 
 
 Thrice royal. Thrice sacred. Thrice almighty. Thrice 
 
 sacred. 
 
 Chapman, Shepherd's vol. of Minor Poems, Sec, pp. 4, 
 10, 16, 49, 128, 243, 2SS, 342. A dozen more 
 instances could easUy be found in the same poet. 
 
 Thrice reverend (thrice). Thrice valiant (twice). Thrice 
 haughty. Thrice worthy. Thrice honourable. 
 
 Peele, Dyce's vol. of Greene and Peele, pp. 365, 366, 
 367. 377. 380. 462, 543. 547- 
 Thrice-renowned . 
 
 Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, i, 3. 
 Thrice-renowned . 
 
 Daniel, Cleopatra, 1. 704. (Ill, ii). 
 Thrice fortunate. 
 
 Lilly, Endimion, iv, 3. 
 
 "Nothing hath made my master a fool but flat 
 scholarship," says Epiton in the last-cited play. 
 
 34. By lifting a lost passage from p. 40 to p. 49 we 
 realise that Mr. Theobald finds " peculiarity " in Shake- 
 speare's use of " liberal " in Hamlet (IV, vi, 171) as well 
 as in Othello (II, i, 164 ; V, ii, 223). " In both these 
 instances the word * liberal ' is used in one of its classical 
 senses, which it never bears in English, though the synony- 
 mous word ' free ' does." Mr. Theobald's monotony of 
 error approaches the miraculous. " Liberal " was in 
 Elizabethan use in all of the senses in question : 
 
 To declare his mind in broad and liberal speeches. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 234. 
 
 Thus when her fair heart-binding hands had tied 
 Those liberal tresses. 
 
 Chapman, Ovid's Banquet of Sense, 1595. Shepherd's 
 ed. of Minor Poems and Translations, p. 31- 
 
 Fair Phillis wore a liberal tress. 
 
 Chapman, Phillis and Flora, 1595 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 239 
 
 Committing their bitterness, and liberal invectives against all 
 estates, to the mouths of children. 
 
 Hejnvood, Apology for Actors, 1612. 
 
 Their breasts liberal to the eye. 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, B. iii, ed. 1627, p. 235. 
 
 35. Generous (Othello, III, iii, 284). 
 See hdow, p. 355. 
 
 36. Infection (Richard II, II, i, 44), 
 
 Mr. Theobald is " certain " that we shoiild here read 
 " infestion," because that enables him to impute classic- 
 ism, albeit " the word is itself corruptly formed from 
 infesto, and is the' Englished form of infestatio . . . 
 shortened for the sake of the metre into infestion." Thus 
 is scholarship demonstrated ! All the while, the actual 
 reading is " infection." Those who stand for infestion = 
 invasion make a tautology, the line being " Against 
 infection and the hand of war." 
 
 37. Beat your breast (Richard III, II, ii, 3). 
 
 " The idea of * beating the breast ' as a sign of grief 
 is, I think "—thus Mr. Theobald—" more Ukely due to 
 classical literature than to personal observation of the 
 poet either in Warwickshire or in Middlesex." So that 
 the Baconian is for the moment " Stratfordian." But 
 as beating of the breast figures as an English usage in 
 fifty Elizabethan poets and dramatists, it is not clear 
 why Mr. Theobald should bar either Warwickshire or 
 Middlesex. 
 
 38. Gallop apace (Romeo and Juliet, III, ii, i). 
 "Fiery-footed steeds," Mr Theobald reminds us, "is 
 
 the classical epithet for the horses of the Sun," as in 
 Ovid and Statins. But why not also cite "bright 
 Phoebus " and " chaste Diana " ? 
 
 39. Aristotle's Checks (Shrew, I, i, 32). 
 
 Mr. Theobald endorses the argument of some one 
 
240 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 (" the same viiter " — no one being mentioned in this 
 connection) in 1853, to the effect that " checks " must 
 be the right reading, because any tiro might have written 
 " ethics," " but no person except one well read in the 
 philosophy itself would think of giving it such a designa- 
 tion as ' checks.' " Thus again is a man's scholarship 
 to be demonstrated. 
 
 40. Piece. (" Thy mother was a piece of virtue " ; 
 Tempest, I, ii, 56.) Mr. Theobald interprets this to 
 mean pars virtutis. "It illustrates the author's habit 
 of thinidng in Latin, as when writing ' piece ' he had the 
 Latin equivalent pars in his mind " — as in Horace, 
 partem aninuB (Carm. II, xyii, 5). 
 
 If Mr. Theobald could only have been as consimmiately 
 ignorant of all English literature as he was of the pre- 
 Shakespearean, he might have furnished us with commen- 
 taries on living writers for which the comic press would 
 have been grateful. As it is, the foregoing will be appre- 
 ciated by those who know that " piece " was a standing 
 figure (usually laudatory) for a woman (sometimes it 
 is applied to a man) in Elizabethan poetry and drama: 
 
 Have won ... a peece that hath no peere. 
 
 Gascoigne, Adventures of Master F. J., 15 : Works, 
 ed. CunlifEe, i, 414. 
 
 Behold here a peerelesse piece. 
 Id. The Glass of Government : ii, 6 (CunlifEe, ii, 41). 
 
 A pece surely of price. 
 
 Id. Hetnetes the Heremyte : ii, 481. 
 
 Make such another piece as Scudmore is. 
 
 A Woman is a Weathercock (c. 1606), i, i. 
 So fair a piece. 
 
 Spenser, Sonnet 14. 
 A beautiful and brave attired piece. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, i, i. 
 
 In fine, a piece, despite of beauty, framed 
 To show what Nature's lineage could afford. 
 
 Greene, verses in The Triiameron of Love {1587). 
 Dyce's Green and Pede, p. 285. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 241 
 
 Fait Helena, that brave and peerless piece. 
 
 Peele, Tale of Troy, 1. 112. 
 
 Touched with the rape of this reproachful piece. 
 
 Id. 1. 218. 
 To paint the colours of that changing piece. 
 
 Id. ed. 1589. Dyce's ed. p. 555, note. 
 
 To intimate that even the daintiest piece 
 And noblest-bom dame should industrious be. 
 Chapman, Hero and Leander, 5th Section : Tale of Teras. 
 
 The sweet Armida ... a tender piece. 
 Fairfax, tr. of Tasso's Jerusalem, i6co, B. iv, st. 27. 
 
 This figure of man's comfort, this rare piece. 
 
 Chapman, An Humorous Day's Mirth, 1599, 
 (Shepherd's ed. of Plays, p. 32). 
 
 41. Pole-clipt Vineyard (Tempest, IV, i, 68). 
 
 " This is a poetic reflection of Homer's description of 
 a vineyard surrounded by a ditch encompassed by a fence — 
 that is, pole-clipt (Iliad, xviii, 564)." Q. E. D. ! 
 
 42. Scarcity (" Scarcity and want shall shvin you " : 
 Tempest, IV, i, 116). " This impersonation of ' scarcity,' 
 and her inability to remain where ' plenty ' was to be 
 fomid, recalls the Plutus of Aristophanes. ..." Simi- 
 larly, doubtless, it was classical training that enabled 
 the early English to propose to " drive away dull care " 
 and " banish sorrow." 
 
 43. Sea of wax (Timon, I, i, 47). 
 
 " This," sa}^ Mr. Theobald, " is a classical allusion 
 to the use of wooden tablets, covered with wax, to write 
 on — ^the tablet used by the poet for the praises of Timon 
 being so large as to suggest the idea of a sea of wax." 
 It may be so, though the interpretation has been flouted. 
 In any case, Mr. Theobald might have learned from the 
 commentators that the same practice existed in England 
 as late as the end of the fourteenth century. But a non- 
 Baconian can conceive that Shakespeare heard of the 
 Roman practice at school. 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 44. Remotion (TiMON, IV, iii, 338). 
 
 Remotio, Mr. Theobald informs us, " is a rare Latin 
 word used by Cicero, and not used by English writers 
 before Shakespeare's time.' ' For the literary facts, see the 
 next chapter, p. 372. Dr. R. M, Theobald, who had 
 learned from Judge WiUis's " Baconian Mint " that the 
 word was current before Shakespeare's time, writes a 
 preface to his cousin's book in 1909 without any 
 attempt to rectify his ignorant assertion. 
 
 45. Pantheon (TiTUS, I, i, 240). 
 
 " This reference to the great temple of Jupiter . . , 
 infers a considerable knowledge of Roman archaeology." 
 More knowledge, certainly, than Mr. Theobald had of 
 Tudor literature. " The name of Lavinia, too . . . ! " 
 
 46. Palliament (TiTUS, I, i, 179). 
 
 " Here we have a word, ' palliament,' wholly imknown 
 to the English language, but derived from the Latin 
 word pallium, a doak." Mr. Theobald has for once the 
 excuse that the commentator Steevens knew of no 
 previous use of the 'vord. But it was previously in print, 
 like so many othe^ words unknown to Mr. Theobald. 
 See above, p. 121. 
 
 47. Candidatus {Id. ib.). 
 
 " Representing " for Mr. Theobald, of coinrse, " an 
 idea which would be familiar only to a thoroughly classical 
 scholar." The word is Peele's, not Shakespeare's, who 
 in CoRiOLANUS shows that he did not know what candi- 
 datus ^ meant ; but what a truly Baconian basis for a 
 certificate of scholarship ! 
 
 48. Assubjugate (Troilus, II, iii, 185). 
 
 " A word which could only have been coined by a 
 classical scholar, as it is assuredly derived from no transla- 
 
 * Though its significance had been noted in Puritan controvei?y. 
 Marsden's Hist, oj the Early Puritans, ed. 1853, p. 26. 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 243 
 
 tion." Mr. Theobald's assurance on this head is truly 
 valuable. But as we have " assubject " in Fenton's 
 Guicciardini, and " assecured " and " assiege " (after 
 Chaucer) often in Daniel, the non-Baconian reader must 
 reluctantly doubt. 
 
 49. Sacred (Troilus, IV, v, 132). 
 
 Steevens is responsible for Mr. Theobald's conviction 
 that in " my sacred aunt " Shakespeare betrayed the 
 knowledge that theios, " sacred," was " used as a noun 
 for a father's brother, or uncle," and that the poet, " by 
 a daring stretch of orthography transferred the expression 
 in its adjectival sense from uncle to aunt." But Mr. 
 Theobald does not mention Steevens' inference that 
 Troilus is not wholly by Shakespeare. The open- 
 minded reader will want to know how a mtsapplication 
 of an alleged Greek usage proves deep scholarship. 
 
 50. Galathe: Sagittaty (Troilus, V, v, 14, 20). 
 
 These allusions to items not mentioned in Homer 
 move Mr. Theobald to assert that " the writer was familiar 
 with the medieval versions of the tale of Troy." As the 
 old commentators pointed out, they are both derived 
 from Lydgate and The Three Destructions of Troy, 
 printed by Caxton. 
 
 51. Tears of joy ("sorrow wept ... for their joy 
 waded in tears " : Winter's Tale, V, ii, 44). 
 
 "This idea of joy producing tears is very classical, 
 as in the case of the Herald, who returned safe to his 
 native Argos — ^Agam. 541 ; Iliad, vi, 482." So om: 
 profound scholar. As Shakespeare thus demonstrably 
 could not have had the notion from personal knowledge, 
 we must take refuge in the h5rpothesis that he had been 
 electrified by previously meeting the phrase " tears of 
 joy " in Peele's Edward I, i, i. 
 
 With that theorem about " tears of joy " Mr. Theobald's 
 first chapter appropriately ends. I have dealt with every 
 
244 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 item in it, and leave to the reader the characterization 
 of its merits. I will not ask them to follow any such 
 detailed examination of the follies which follow. A few 
 samples will indicate how effectually they maintain the 
 level reached in the opening chapter, 
 
 52. The proverb, ". Smooth nms the water where the 
 brook is deep " (2 Henry VI, III, i, 53) is declared (p. 58) 
 to refer " to a fable of Abstenuus, which shows that 
 there is more to be apprehended from a silent than from 
 a noisy enemy!" Why did not Mr, Theobald cite 
 instead Quintus Curtius, who has : Altissima quaeque 
 flumina minimo sono labi (vii, 4, 13) ? Unhappily for 
 our Baconian, the line he quotes as Shakespeare's belongs 
 to the old Contention. 
 
 53. The " Mouse-hunt " passage in Romeo and Juliet 
 (IV, iv, 11) is alleged (p, 59) to display " a thorough 
 acquaintance . . . with some of the nicer points of 
 classical idiom," inasmuch as " we learn from MUzd. the 
 unsavoury sense the word bore in amatory phraseology." 
 
 54. The lines in Julius C^sar (III, 1, 106) 
 
 And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood 
 Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords 
 
 — ^which may be paralleled in twenty rants in previous 
 Elizabethan plays — are gravely referred (p. 63) to the 
 passage in the Septem Contra Thebam which describes 
 the ceremonial cutting of a bull's throat, and the touching 
 of the blood by the seven chiefs ! 
 
 55. The identity of Shakespeare with Bacon is proved 
 (p, 91) by the fact that, among other things, both held 
 by the common error that snails voluntarily cast their 
 shells, 
 
 56. Lady Macbeth's " fate and metaphysical aid " is 
 declared (p. 91) to be the phrase of " a thorough scholar, 
 versed in classical idioms," in the face of the cited fact 
 that Marlowe previously made Faustus speak of " these 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 245 
 
 metaphysics of magicians." Of course, Bacon wrote 
 Marlowe. It follows, then, presumably, that he wrote 
 The Puritan, since there we have : 
 
 You see I know your detenninations, which must come to me 
 metaphj^ically, and by a supernatural intelligence. 
 
 (Act ii, Sc. I.) 
 And he must previously have written Marston's Scourge 
 OF ViLLAiNE (1599), where we have (1. 10) : 
 My soule — an essence metaphysicall. 
 57. The phrase, " lurched all swords of the garland " 
 (CoRiOLANUS, II, ii, 99), is declared (p. 108) to be " a 
 metaphorical use of a word derived from the Latin lurco, 
 to devour; an uncommon word, and one it is hardly 
 credible Shaksper {sic) could ever have come across," but 
 which was known to Bacon, who, by impUcation coined 
 " lurcheth " (Essay 45). It has been given to few, even 
 in the Baconian camp, to flaunt such evidences of arro- 
 gant ignorance as are multiplied by Mr. Theobald. From 
 the variorum or a school edition he might have learned 
 that B^i Jonson in The Silent Woman has the phrase : 
 Yon have lurched your friends of the better half of the garland ; 
 
 that in Florio's Italian Dictionary, 1598, the phrase 
 Gioco marzo is defined, " A maiden set, or lurch, at any 
 game " ; and that in Cotgrave Bredouille is defined " a 
 lurch at cards, at tables " ; and Lourche " the game 
 called Lurche, or a Lurch in game." The vernacular 
 phrase " left in the lurch " might indicate even to a 
 Baconian the common tise of the term. In the sense of 
 filching or over-reaching, " to lurch " was a common 
 Elizabethan word. In the Merry Wives (ii, 2) Shake- 
 speare puts it in the mouth of FalstafE, talking to Pistol. 
 Nashe, in Christ's^ Teares over Jerusalem, speaks of 
 courtesans " laughing at the punies they had lurched " 
 (Works, ed. McKerrow, ii, 150). Lilly in Endimion 
 (ii, 2) has : 
 
 Is not love a lurcher, that taketh men's stomacks away, that 
 they cannot eate ? 
 
246 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and the old interlude of William Roye, Rede Me and 
 
 BE NOTT Wrothe (1528) has the lines : 
 
 Yea, but thorowe falce lorchers. 
 And uiithr5rfty abbey lobbers. 
 
 Whittingham's rep. p. 108. 
 
 Shakespeare is fortunate in his foes ! 
 
 58. Many-headed beast. Mr. Theobald, going halves 
 in this as in so many other mares' nests with his cousin, 
 Dr. R. M. Theobald, cites the phrase in English from 
 Buchanan's De Jure Regni aptid Scotos, c. 27, proceeding 
 to explain that Buchanan copied Horace. Buchanan 
 actually quotes the words of Horace. Apparently this 
 is supposed to strengthen the claim that Shakespeare 
 drew the phrase hence. Mr. Theobald, like his cousin, 
 has not an inkling of the fact that Shakespeare could 
 have f oxmd the phrase in Elyot even if it were not already 
 cturent on the stage. See above, p. 211. 
 
 59. Falstaff's " If the rascal have not given me medicines 
 to make me love him, I'll be hanged," is explained to be 
 " an allusion to the classical belief in the efficacy of love- 
 potions," though in the next breath it is avowed that 
 such potions were traded in by witches " ancient and 
 modem." That is to say, the idea was known in every 
 English village. 
 
 60. A notable sample of the method of learned igno- 
 rance is furnished in Mr. Theobald's assertion that the 
 line in Much Ado (I, i, 226) : 
 
 In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke, 
 is " paraphrased from a line of Ovid— 
 
 In time the unbroken steers come beneath the yoke, 
 
 Ars.Amat.471." 
 
 In so well-known a play as The Spanish Tragedy 
 
 (ii, I) he might have found it in English : 
 
 In time the savage bull sustains the yoke ; 
 
 and from the conmientators he might have learned that 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 247 
 
 the passage is an almost literal transcription from Watson's 
 Hecatompathia, Sonnet 47, which in turn is adapted 
 from a sonnet by Serafino d'Aquila. It was one of the 
 most hackneyed quotations of the age, in English. 
 
 61. Of course Mr. Theobald repeats (p. 298) the stock 
 Baconian argument that " the eye seeing not itself " is 
 from the First Alcibiades of Plato ^ (this after positing 
 at the outset the view that Bacon did not dare indicate 
 his scholarship in works to be ascribed to Shakespeare) ; 
 and, following previous speculators, is sure that the " To 
 be " soliloquy is derived from Plato, Parmenides, and 
 " the Eleatic fragments." The items in the soliloquy 
 have been traced to many sources, often unnecessarily 
 enough. The " sea of troubles " continues to be traced 
 to the KOKotv ireXoyof of iSlschylus, in disregard of the 
 words "of troubles" and "by opposing end them," 
 which point to the old story of the Celts nishing into 
 the sea to fight it — a story made current in English by 
 the translation of The Regystre of Hystories of 
 £lian, published in 1576. The simple idea of " a 
 sea of troubles " was a current poetical commonplace 
 in Shakespeare's day, as it doubtless was in that of 
 ^schylus. Lewis Theobald admitted that it " grew 
 into a proverbial usage." A metaphorical use of "sea" 
 was in fact one of the very conomonest tropes in the 
 language.* " A sea of evils," as Steevens pointed out, 
 is found in Morysine's translation of Ludovicus Vives' 
 Introduction to Wysedome, 1544 ; and Malone cited 
 " seas of guiltless smart " from Higgins's Mirrour for 
 Magistrates (1575). There also we find "seas of care" 
 (Induction, st. 5), which is repeated as " seas of never- 
 ceasing care " in Selimus, 1. 1761 (1594). We have " sea 
 of blood " in Fairfax's Tasso and in Mucedorus (1598) ; 
 "sea of bloody tragedy" in A Knack to Know an 
 Honest Man (1598) ; and " seas of heinous faults " in 
 
 * See above, p. 189. * See below, ch. ix. 
 
248 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Gascoigne's Jocasta, i, i, (1566). In Florio's Montaigne, 
 again, we have (Essay Of Physiognomy) " tide of mis- 
 chief," after " ann myself to expel or wrestle against " 
 " unpleasant conceits." In the fortieth essay, again, 
 we have Montaigne's citation and translation of Augus- 
 tine's malam mortem non fadt, nisi quod sequitur mortem, 
 which may be said to be the gist of the whole soliloquy. 
 The reference to Plato is idle ; as perhaps is that to 
 Cardan's De Consolatione, translated by Bedingfield 
 into English in 1576. If Socrates' Apology be a source 
 for part of the soliloquy, it lay to Shakespeare's hand, 
 substantially reproduced in Montaigne (iii, 12), Florio's 
 translation of which we know him to have read, and 
 parts of which he may well have seen, as we know others 
 did, before it was printed.^ The them^ is one that must 
 have been often discussed in Shakespeare's day as in 
 every other ; and there is not an idea in the soliloquy 
 that would not readily arise in such discussion. 
 
 62. And this is the best of Mr. Theobald's matter : the 
 rest, which we have sufl&ciently sampled, runs to such 
 follies as the derivation of " Time tries all " from Pindar : 
 
 Future da}rs forsooth are the wisest witnesses. 
 
 It was a trite English saw, and is found in the interlude 
 Respublica, 1553 : 
 
 Yet time trieth all, and time bringeth truth to light. 
 
 Farmer's Los/ Tudor Plays, 1907. p. 180. 
 
 63. In an Appendix, with suicidal industry, Mr. Theobald 
 busies himself to show, among other things, what every- 
 body knows, that the author of the plajrs freely used the 
 English Chronicles and borrowed from Lilly and Florio's 
 Montaigne — as if " the Stratford actor " could not even 
 read English. But in the same Appendix we are informed 
 that the common proverb " two may keep counsel when 
 the third's away " (Titus, IV, ii, 144) is " borrowed from 
 the Seventh Fable in the Hitopadesa." It was simply 
 
 1 See Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. pp. 40, 77, 161, 139- 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 249 
 
 a standing English proverb, and is to be found in Greene's 
 Mamillia (1580) : Works, ii, 30 ; and in Lilly's Mother 
 BoMBiE (1589), ii, I. The other recondite proverb about 
 the man bom to be hanged was a household word. 
 
 64. In one case Mr. Theobald is able to cite a distin- 
 guished critic for " an absolutely conclusive proof that the 
 author of the plays knew Italian." Georg Brandes had 
 pointed to the " prophetic fury " passage in Othello, 
 and its derivation from the Orlando Furioso (Canto 46, 
 Stanza 80), adding : 
 
 The agreement here cannot possibly be accidental. And what 
 makes it still more certain that Shakespeare had the Italian text 
 before him is that the words prophetic fury, which are the same 
 in Othello as in the Italian, are not to be found in Harington's 
 English translation, the only one then in existence. He must 
 thus, whilst writing Othello, have been interested in Orlando, 
 and have had Berni's and Ariosto's poems lying on his table. ^ 
 
 The reference to Bemi has regard to the passage begin- 
 ning " Who steals my purse steals trash," ; concerning 
 which Mr. Theobald affirms that " Grant White remarks 
 that this " [the opening phrase] " is taken from the 
 Orlando Innamorato of Bemi." If Grant White said 
 so, he erred. There is nothing about " stealing trash " 
 in Bemi, whose lines are cited in full by Brandes : it is 
 the rest of the passage that points there. But the critic's 
 confident condusion that Shakespeare read ^emi and 
 Ariosto is a notable instance of unwarranted induction. 
 He has overlooked (i) the question whether Othello is 
 a first-hand play ; (2) the fact that the allusion is remote, 
 Ariosto naming Cassandra whereas Shakespeare does not, 
 but speaks of a " sybill " ; while the poet tells of a canopy 
 and the dramatist of a handkerchief; (3) the endless 
 possibilities of translated passages of Italian poetry 
 coming in Shakespeare's way ; and (4) the English books in 
 which the " steals my good name " thesis is explicitly put 
 forth. Hunter cited from Wilson's Rhetorique (1553) the 
 
 1 William Shakespeare, 1898, ii, 123. 
 
250 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 suggested argument "that a slanderer is worse than any 
 thief, because, . . . the loss of money may be recovered ; 
 but the loss of a man's good name cannot be called back 
 again " ; and Mr. Hart in his excellent edition of Othello 
 adds from Humphrey Gifford's Posie of Gilloflowers 
 (1580 : ed. Grosart, p. 8) the sentence : 
 
 Such as take men's purses from them undesired, passe often 
 by the sentence of a cow ; and shall such as rob men of their 
 good names undeserved be supposed to escape scot-free ? 
 
 To these instances may be added earlier : 
 
 First of all it [lust] pulleth away from thee thy good fame, a 
 possession far-away most precious. 
 
 Tyndale's trans, of Erasmus' Enchiridion, 1533, eh. 32. 
 
 After he [the merchant] hath put his honest reputation of good 
 report that is sprung of him, his life, his soul, in a thousand 
 jeopardies. 
 
 Id. ch. II. 
 We will appear religious in such using of meats, and in hurting 
 men's fame we be bold and hardy. 
 
 Id. Pref. Epist. . 
 
 But Shakespeare, if he needed a hint on such a well-wom 
 topic, had it much nearer home, in Ben Jonson : 
 
 When no malicious thief 
 Robs my good name, the treasure of my life. 
 
 The Poetaster, m, 2. 
 
 In the face of all this, it is a strain upon common sense 
 to be referred to Bemi for the simple sentiment in question. 
 And it is hardly less precipitate to take it for granted 
 that any slight verbal parallel in Othello to an Italian 
 classic must be an original adaptation by Shakespeare, 
 who took so much other Italian matter at second-hand. 
 The phrases " prophetic fury " and " poetic fury," be 
 it added, are very conunon in Elizabethan literature. 
 
 This summary handling of critical problems in regard 
 to authorship is one of the blemishes of Brandes' com- 
 prehensive book on Shakespeare. It affects his treatment 
 of Titus Andronicus ; still more his handling of The 
 Taming of the Shrew, in regard to which he does not 
 
ALLEGED CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 251 
 
 even notice the doubts of many preceding critics as to 
 Shakespeare's share. Thus he allows Gremio's descrip- 
 tion of an Italian interior (Act ii, end) to count in favour 
 of the hypothesis of Shakespeare's visiting Italy ; when 
 the hypothesis of Greene's hand in the play would dispose 
 of the other ; to say nothing of the fact that the " Arras 
 counterpoints " occur in the old Taming, of a Shrew. 
 Gremio's speech is expressly assigned by Boswell-Stone 
 to the pre-Shakespearean hemd. 
 
 With similar precipitance, Brandes has assigned the 
 Jack Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI to Shakespeare, here 
 accepting the untenable theory of Shakespeare's part 
 authorship of the old play ; and like other Shakespeareans 
 he has played into the hands of the Baconians by un- 
 critically adopting the thesis that " Shakespeare shows 
 a quite imusual fondness for the use of legal expressions. 
 He knows to a nicety the technicalities of the bar, the 
 formulas of the bench,"* and all the rest of it. He has 
 thus given with one hand while taking away with the other 
 in his use of the demonstration that Lilly's Euphues 
 and not Bruno is the source, if source be needed, for 
 Hamlet's bitter dialogue with Ophelia.* 
 
 The error of such a critic as Brandes is a very different 
 thing from the divagations of the Baconians. Mr. 
 Theobald knew Brandes only by quotation at second- 
 hand. It is fitting in this connection to note what 
 Brandes says of the " ignorant and arrogant attack " of 
 the " wretched group of dilettanti " who have " been 
 bold enough, in Europe and America, to deny William 
 Shakespeare the right to his own life-work, to give to 
 another the honoiu" due to his genius, and to bespatter 
 him and his invulnerable name with an insane abuse 
 which has re-echoed through every land."' And since 
 
 * Work cited, i, 109. * Id. ii, 18-19. 
 
 * Work cited, ii, 413. Compare i, 104 sq. Brandes at the 
 close avows that the BEiconian attack was one of his two motives 
 for writing his book. 
 
252 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the Baconians have also made use of Grant White, it may 
 be well to keep under view his remark that " every man 
 of common sense and even a little knowledge of the 
 literary and dramatic history of the times of Elizabeth 
 and James I, has the right to feel aggrieved and injured 
 when the productions of the two greatest minds of 
 modem times are made the occasion of a gabble of con- 
 troversy, the sole foundation of which is a petty parade 
 of fiddling, perverted verbal coincidences, which have 
 no more real significance than the likeness of the notes 
 of two cuckoos or of two cuckoo-clocks."^ 
 
 We have had enough, I think, of the general Baconian 
 argument from the alleged " classical scholarship " of 
 the plays. Foimded on the fallacies of many orthodox 
 Shakespeareans, it has been carried by the Messrs. Theo- 
 bald to lengths which might have given pause to the 
 most idolatrous of the orthodox. In all stages alike; it 
 breaks down utterly upon critical investigation. We 
 are left, as before, to the conclusion that Jonson knew 
 whereof he spoke when he declared, in the midst of his 
 splendid panegyric, that his dead friend had "small 
 Latin and less Greek.' ' Those who maintain the contrary 
 have simply ignored or been ignorant of the mass of con- 
 temporary Elizabethan literature in which the " classical " 
 matter of the plays is scattered broadcast, and in which 
 we can so often find the ipsissima verba founded on. 
 
 * " The Bacon-Shakespeare Craze," in Studies in Shakespeare, 
 i88S. P- 153- 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 
 ii : DR. R. M. THEOBALD'S LIST OF WORDS 
 
 §1 
 
 AFTER giving the " examples of Latin construc- 
 tion " already dealt with, Dr. Theobald com- 
 piles a chapter " the object of which is to 
 show that Shakespeare's vocabulary was in 
 the highest degree classic, . . . that his English contains 
 very large augmentations from the Latin. It shows him 
 constantly making linguistic experiments, endeavotiring 
 to enrich his language by coining new words, derived from 
 the Latin ; and that even ordinary English words often 
 became plastic and elastic in his speech, carrying a 
 larger import than their vernacular employment can 
 account for." * 
 
 The claim is not Baconian in origin. So judicious a 
 critic as Hallam suggested that Shakespeare's vocabulary 
 showed " a greater knowledge of Latin than had com- 
 monly been ascribed to him. The phrases, tininteUigible 
 and improper, except in the sense of their primitive 
 roots, which occur so copiously in his plays, seem to 
 be unaccountable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. 
 In the Midsummer Night's Dream these are much less 
 frequent than in his later dramas. But here we find 
 several instances. Thus, * things base and vile, holding 
 no quantity,' for value; rivers that 'have overborne 
 their continents' the continente ripa of Horace ; ' compact 
 of imagination ' ; ' something of great constancy,' for 
 consistency ; ' sweet Pyramus, translated there ' ; ' the 
 1 Work cited, p. 318. 
 253 
 
254 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate.' 
 I have considerable doubts whether any of these expres- 
 sions would be found in the contemporary prose of 
 Elizabeth's reign." ^ Hallam goes on to say that " could 
 authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still 
 not very likely that one who did not understand their 
 proper meatiing would have introduced them into 
 poetry " — a proposition which is not likely to be disputed. 
 Unfortunately Hallam, like so many later and less erudite 
 critics, had tmduly trusted to his memory and general 
 knowledge, and has here, as we shall see, half-claimed 
 uniqueness for a number of Shakespearean words which 
 were more or less fully current before 1590. It is par- 
 ticularly surprising to find that Hallam hesitated over 
 " compact," which occurs often in Elyot's Governour ; * 
 that he should have seen any novelty in " continents "= 
 bounds or banks ; and that he should have had no 
 recollection of the conomon pre-Shakespearean use of 
 " translate " ' in the physical sense. Such slips by 
 eminent critics make for harm. Hallam's qualified 
 obiter dictum has been adopted, without scrutiny, by 
 Mr. G. G. Greenwood, as a support to the " classical " 
 theory ; * and the Baconians, mostly devoid of general 
 knowledge of Tudor literature, make wholesale assertions 
 
 1 Introd. to Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, ii, 280. 
 
 2 See above, p. 205 ; and Elyot, B. i, chs. 13, 26 ; B. iii, ch. 28. 
 » See below,., p. 351. Constancy for consistency is likewise 
 
 precedented. The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 A death constant and agreeable to a- life honestly and godly 
 led. Baret's .i^/veanc, 1580. 
 
 But the Dictionary takes "constancy," in the passage cited 
 by Hallam, to mean " certainty " (for which use again it cites a 
 precedent in 1563), not " consistency." Extenuate is dealt with 
 below in Dr. Theobald's list. No. 74, p. 312. 
 
 • Mr. Greenwood insists, in obvious error (p. 125), that Shake- 
 speare's allusions to the river's "continents" is "exactly" 
 Horace's continente ripa. It is simply a normal use of the English 
 word. But if it were a reminiscence of Horace, it would count 
 for Uttle. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 255 
 
 where Hallam, possessing wide though not philologically 
 specialised knowledge, ventured only to advance " con- 
 siderable doubts." Thus we attain to the wholesale 
 declaration above cited from Dr. Theobald. The writer 
 who would have coimted the Baconian theory insane 
 becomes a stepping-stone thereto. 
 
 It is obvious that in Dr. Theobald's sweeping pro- 
 position there might be contained a grain of truth. If 
 we simply rest rationally on Ben Jonson's verdict that 
 Shakespeare had " small Latin and less Greek," we are 
 not debarred from the assumption that what Latin he 
 imbibed at the grammar-school had some shaping in- 
 fluence on his diction. A man with a genius for utterance 
 must be supposed to reflect on the formation as well as 
 the significance of words. Some touches of etymology 
 must necessarily have entered into grammar-school 
 teaching ; and questions of word-values and word-forms 
 could hardly miss being debated at times among the 
 company at the Mermaid, to say nothing of the greenroom. 
 To reject such possibilities would be to revert to the 
 miracle-mongering conception of Shakespeare which has 
 prepared the way for the aberrations of the Baconians. 
 It would be quite compatible with such a non-academic 
 culture, on the basis of an ordinary middle-class schooling, 
 that a bom master of speech, such as our plajnvright 
 unquestionably was, shoidd innovate in language mthin 
 certain limits ; and it would be interesting, if possible, 
 to trace any such innovation in his work. But the 
 tracing is obviously the task of a trained EngUsh philo- 
 logist : a mere random groping, in terms of a mere general 
 knowledge of Latin and late English Uterature, can jdeld 
 only guesses and chimeras. Where Hallam slipped, 
 Baconians must fall painfully. 
 
 As all English scholars are aware, all words of Latin 
 or French derivation bore in the sixteenth century a 
 closer relation to their source than they do now. They 
 were then, so to speak, nearer to their roots, even as were 
 
256 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the native words, which also have since undergone 
 much mutation. Words which have now become 
 specialised in narrow senses had then their larger primary 
 significance, or something near it. " G>rpse " or " corse " 
 was still corpus, " body," and was commonly applied to 
 the Uving body, so that " dead corse," as in Hamlet 
 (also in Gascoigne, as often before in Sackville), was 
 no tautology. " Success " had still much of its primary 
 force, of " sequence " ; so that we constantly meet with 
 such phrases as " fortunate success," " good success," 
 and " vile success " in the poets and dramatists. 
 " Courage " could still mean " the state of the heart," 
 so that men could significantly speak of " good courage " 
 and " vile courage." For a time they kept the noun 
 " discourage." Such a phrase as " detract [=sunder] 
 our vows" (Sir Clyomon) was still possible to writers 
 for the stage in Shakespeare's day ; though " detraction " 
 was already an established term in the modem sense. 
 "Rest" still had the force of "remain," as in "it 
 resteth." " Painful " meant painstaking. " Presently " 
 could still mean " now " in England, as it yet does in 
 Scotland. " Censure " meant " judgment," not 
 " blame " : " enormities " were still " departures from 
 the norm," not necessarily atrocities ; and " enormous 
 times " were times of tumult or disorder. They had the 
 word "radicate" as well as "eradicate"; "confer" 
 (the " cf." of our footnote references) meant for them, as 
 in Latin, "compare." "Edify" stiU meant "buOd" 
 or "construct" as well as "instruct"; "reduce" 
 commonly or often meant " lead back " : we can see its 
 modem sense of " subdue " coming in from the French 
 side. "Admire" often meant simply "wonder"; 
 " continent " — one of Hallam's erring instances—" that 
 which contains"; "include" could mean "bury"; 
 and " prevent " had the force of " anticipate," as still 
 in the Prayer-Book and in the daily prayers of the 
 House of Commons. A thousand words of Latin de- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 257 
 
 rivation were still " unpolarised," as Dr. Holmes would 
 say ; and many words were used in a sense in which 
 they are now never applied, as when Latimer, thrice in a 
 page, has the phrase "evacuate the cross of Christ," 
 " evacuate Christ's death." ^ 
 
 The period of Elizabeth's reign was specially given 
 to Latin formations. Some of Chaucer's constructions 
 had missed acceptance in the illiterate period between ; 
 but whereas Gower ^ had thought it necessary to explain 
 that " Ire " (freely used by Chaucer) is " that in our 
 english Wrath is bote" [=hight], the earlier preachers 
 of the sixteenth century used "ire" frequently in the 
 pulpit. It is noteworthy that the Authorised Bible of 
 1611, conservative as it is of older EngUsh, never employs 
 the word at all. Many old words, however, were dropped 
 for good. Where Pecock had said "overer" and 
 " netherer," all English writers would say " superior " 
 and ' ' inferior. ' ' Many less common Latin formations were 
 added to the language between More and Bacon ; but the 
 period of early Protestant controversy was perhaps as 
 fruitful in them as the later age of Shakespeare. They 
 abound in the old Interludes. Preachers naturally 
 employed both Latinic and vernacular forms, giving us 
 such sentences as : " Our understanding and spirit is 
 depressed with the gross lump and dimgeon of the 
 corruptible body.' They used " erudition " for " teach- 
 ing" or "instruction," and spoke of David as "the 
 Psalmographe " * : but they would use also such simple 
 vernacular as : " Thou art pinched and nipped by the 
 shins for thy misdoings." * The common folk were 
 thus in some degree accustomed to both vocabularies. 
 
 Further, the first age of printing was boimd to be a 
 
 ^ Sermon of the Plough. 
 
 * Confessio Amantis, B. ii, 19-20. 
 
 * Roger Hutchinson, The Image of God, 1550, end, 
 
 * Id. Second Sermon on the Lord's Supper, 1560. 
 
 * Id. Second Sermon of Oppression, &c. 
 
 R 
 
258 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 period of new word-making. It was so in France. 
 Rabelais, himself a very free-and-easy neologist, presents, 
 in the person of the Limousin student, a t3rpe of the more 
 extravagant word-maker, who, arising later in Elizabethan 
 England, is satirised in its drama. Jonson,^ Dekker, 
 Webster,* and Shakespeare, alike hold him up to ridicule. 
 In LocRiNE {circa 1587) it is probably Greene who makes 
 the comic personage say to the audience : " If any of 
 you be in love, provide ye a cup-case full of new-coined 
 words" (i, 3). In Patient Grissil (by Dekker, Chettle, 
 and Haughton, 1599) there is presented " one of those 
 changeable silk gallants " who " chew between their 
 teeth terrible words, as though they would conjm^e, as 
 ' compliment ' and ' projects,' and ' fastidious,' and 
 ; capricious,' and ' misprision/ and ' the sintheresis of the 
 soul ' and such like raise- velvet terms." This charac- 
 ter hi due course coins also " condolement," " collocu- 
 tion," " oblivionize," " incongruent," " delinquishment," 
 " vapulating," " vulnerated," and other extravagances 
 (ii, I ; iii, 2) ; but as the "terrible words" ascribed to 
 him in advance mostly found acceptance, it would appear 
 that even the fantastical neologists may have played 
 their part in enlarging the common tongue. It was so 
 in the case of a niunber of Marston's words selected by 
 Jonson for special derision in The Poetaster; and 
 many words in the old Interludes can be seen to have 
 been rather reckless coinages. 
 
 The expansion of the language was of course not 
 accomplished without resistance. There is extant a 
 letter of the great scholar Sir John Cheke, stringently 
 condemning the whole process, while in effect admitting, 
 and indeed illustrating, its inevitableness. " I am of this 
 opinion," he writes ^ " to his loving frind mayster Thomas 
 Hoby," 
 
 1 E.g. Fastidious Brisk in Every Man out of his Humour, ii, i. 
 * E.g. the lawyer in The White Devil. 
 
 ' Letter printed at end of The Courtier. 1561 ; rep. in Arber's 
 ed. of Ascham's Scholemaster, introd. p. 5. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 259 
 
 that our own tung should be written clean and pure, unmixt 
 and unmangeled with borrowing of other tunges, wherein if we 
 take not heed bi tijm, ever borowing and never paying, she 
 shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.* For then doth our 
 tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she 
 bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self 
 withall, but useth plainlie her own with such shift as nature, 
 craft, experiens and folowing of other excellent doth lead her 
 unto ; and if she want at ani tijm {as being unperfight she musi) 
 yet let her borow with suche bashfulnes, that it mai appeer that 
 if either the mould of our own tung could serve us to fascion a 
 woord of our own, or if the old denisoned words could content 
 and ease this need, we wold not boldly venture of unknowen 
 wordes. 
 
 It is clear that the eminent scholar had very inade- 
 quately considered the nature of the previous growth 
 of his native language, and was indeed vacillating while 
 he wrote. What he first forbids and then allows was 
 substantially what took place, before and after him, 
 save that his mistaken counsel about forming new 
 English words on old roots was put aside in favour of 
 formations from Latin and French, as had happened 
 in the past.* 
 
 Cheke's pupil, Roger Ascham, repugns in a like vein/ 
 at the diction of Hall's Chronicle, "where moch good 
 mater is quite marde with Indenture Englishe," desiring 
 that some one should " first change strange and inkhome 
 tearmes into proper and commonhe used words." Edward 
 King, in his Epistle prefatory to Spenser's Shepheard's 
 Calender, writes in a similar key, complaining that his 
 countrymen have let sUp many good old English words 
 and " patched up the holes with pieces and rags of other 
 languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the 
 ItaUan, everjrwhere of the Latin." All this stands for 
 the due revolt of the cultured " natural man " against 
 neology and archaism alike or in turn. So did Caesar, 
 greatest of " men of the world," contemn the antiquarian 
 
 ^ Mem. Bacon's use of the same term in the same connection. 
 • B.g., the old " spousebreaking " had long been superseded 
 by " adultery." 
 
26o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 faddists of his day. So did Favorinus, with his maxim, 
 Vive moribus prcsteritis, loquere verbis pnesentibus. 
 Neology is indeed less resistible and on the whole less 
 open to criticism than is archaism ; and neology went on 
 perforce. Could the scholars have recovered the whole 
 vocabulary of Chaucer, they might have been spared 
 much trouble. But educated England between More 
 and Bacon read much more of Latin and translated 
 theology than it did of Chaucer or Lydgate. In 1540 the 
 EngUsh of 1400 was grown so strange and " northern " 
 that Tyndale thought fit to modernise the record of the 
 examination of the Lollard martyr William Thorpe/ 
 putting it mainly into " the English that now is used 
 in England for our southern men." Spenser, indeed, 
 deUberately reverted to the northern speech in his 
 Shepheard's Calender, and used many of its terms in 
 the Faerie Queene ; but while the lovers of poetry 
 were mostly complaisant, Sidney and others demurred ; 
 and the great stream of English flowed on through the 
 new fields, receiving a multitude of rills from Latin 
 literature and the Latin lands. Sidney could not have 
 his way as to drama. He had it as to dialect. The 
 readers of Puritan sermons and treatises could not be 
 at home in Wiclif ; * the ordinary readers of Shakespeare 
 and Jonson must have had hard work to construe Chaucer 
 and Gower. 
 
 Men wont to read alike classic and post-classic Latin 
 simply covld not help Latinising if they had any turn 
 for diction. Sir Thomas More was so fastidious about 
 
 1 See the Advertisement to his Examination, in Bale's Works, 
 Parker Soc. rep. pp. 62-63. 
 
 * It is a singular fact that in a sixteenth century reprint (iS30 
 of the old Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christ it 
 is thought necessary to put " desert " in the glossary, with the 
 equivalent "wilderness." (See rep. in Harleian Miscellany, ed. 
 1808, i, 155.) In this case, a Latin word has gone out of vope 
 and a Saxon one come in. Poetic instinct had taken back the 
 more sonorous term, and it finally kept both. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 261 
 
 the correct use of the vernacular that he took Tyndale 
 lengthily to task, in the midst of a bitter theological 
 controversy, for not discriminating properly between 
 " Yes " and " Yea." " No " and " Nay " ; and in his 
 Dialogue Of Comfort against Tribulacion he is 
 evidently concerned to write simply for simple folk. 
 But he cannot refrain from such terms as " imcogitable," 
 " experimental," " medicinable," " prerogative," " enter- 
 pausying between," " enterparljong," " fatigacion," "re- 
 creation," and so on. He writes of " an estimacioun of 
 the incomparable and uncogitable joye that we shall 
 have," " the right ymaginacioun of colours," " the greate 
 physicion God, prescribing the medicines himselfe, and 
 correcting the faultes of theyr erronyous receyptes," 
 " the rebeUion of sensualitye " ; and so forth ; and in the 
 page in which he translates : " And also he that over- 
 cometh shall be clothed in whyte clothes," he writes of 
 " the very substance essentiall of all the celestiall joye," 
 " natural possibihtie," " camall fantasy," " fruicion of 
 the blisse of heaven." Quoting and translating the 
 Vulgate, he gives a lesson in new terms : " I wil give hym 
 a whyte suffrage,* and in his suffrage a new name 
 written." . . . "They used of olde in Grece (where 
 S. John did write) to elect and chose men imto honorable 
 rowmes, and every man's assent was called his suffrages : 
 whiche in some place was by the voices, in some place 
 by handes. And one kinde of those suffrages, was by 
 certayn thinges that are in latine called calculi, because 
 that in some places they used thereto round stones." ^ 
 And throughout the treatise he translates texts from the 
 Vulgate, first giving the original, as the divines con- 
 stantly did in the pulpit. 
 
 Even Latimer helps the Latin evolution. " If I 
 should preach in the country," he remarks in the Sermon 
 of the Plough, " among the unlearned, I would tell what 
 
 * This word occurs repeatedly in Roye's dramatic satire Rede me 
 and be nott Wrothe, 1528. » Dialogue cited. B. iii. c. 26. 
 
262 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 propitiatory, expiatory, and remissory is ; but here is a 
 learned auditory ; yet for them that be unlearned I will 
 expound it." And it was chiefly his discourses to such 
 audiences that were printed, to be read by thousands 
 in the next generation. Bale is much more Latinic in his 
 vocabulary, as is Hutchinson : and the whole of that 
 generation of Protestant churchmen, like Latimer, were 
 zealous for the promotion of xmiversity life. That, after 
 all, was one of the main factors in the ctdtivation of the 
 Latin element in English. At no time in English history 
 had there been so large a proportion of college-bred men 
 as in the age in which printing and the habit of reading 
 alike extended in the ratio of the general activity of the 
 intellectual renascence. Tyndale, writing in 1530, asks : 
 " Remember ye not how in our own time, of all that 
 taught grammar in England, not one understood the 
 Latin tongue ? How then came we by the Latin tongue 
 again ? . . . Out of the old authors." ^ Elyot, writing 
 about the same time, declares that " Grammers of 
 greke . . . now almost be inmmierable ; " * and if that 
 were so, Latin must have been still more widely taught, 
 for the reasons which still prevail. Ascham, writing 
 forty years later, while complaining as did Elyot of 
 imperfect teaching, testifies to a much extended study of 
 the classics.' The influence and example of Cheke had 
 wrought effectually in that direction, and the generation 
 of Camden was far more widely learned than any that 
 preceded it. Interest in the Chronicles and interest in 
 theology alike promoted the resort to Latin ; and Foxe, 
 going about his monmnental work on the martyrs in the 
 'fifties, felt himself withdrawn by that urgent under- 
 taking from what he would have preferred to be doing- 
 writing in Latin.'* His vocabulary, naturally, abounds 
 
 ^ Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, Parker Soc. rep. p. 55- 
 
 * The Governour, 1531, B. i, c. 10. 
 
 ' The Scholemaster , Arber's rep. p. 25. 
 
 * Epist. Ded. to Queen Elizabeth, 2nd. ed.of Acts and Monuments. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 263 
 
 in Latin formations. But so does that of John He5^wood 
 and the other scholarly writers of Interludes, who 
 naturally were followed in this respect by the first 
 academic writers of regular drama. Thus on all hands 
 the scholarUke amplification of the English tongue was 
 furthered ; so that Hooker and Bacon, writing about the 
 close of the century, come into the x\se of a copious and 
 sonorous speech, stately and almost stifi with Latinisms. 
 
 The sixteenth centiny, then, was in a manner Latinist 
 even in respect of much ordinary English ; and to surmise 
 classical knowledge on the part of every writer found to 
 use a word in a classical as against a modem sense would 
 obviously be mere wool-gathering. At the very outset, 
 the " classicist " thesis commits its advocates to nonsense; 
 even as does the " legalist." The latter involves the 
 constant imputation to the dramatist of the folly of 
 making his characters use a legal phraseology declared 
 to be unintelligible to his audience ; the latter similarly 
 presents him as putting classical neologisms in the 
 mouths of his personages of all grades. What Bacon did 
 not do in his books, written to be read at leisture, he is 
 represented as doing in plays written for the stage. It 
 is of course arguable that the very nearness of so much 
 current English to Latin would facilitate the formation 
 of new terms — a process >vhich must have gone on rapidly 
 between 1500 and 1600 — and that Shakespeare was 
 likely to participate in such an enterprise. It has to be 
 remembered too that there survived in Shakespeare's 
 day the pulpit practice of quoting and translating Vulgate 
 texts and classic phrases — a usage to be noted even in 
 such a " preacher to the people " as Latimer. Even 
 with " small Latin " of his own, Shakespeare might thus 
 be led to a certain amount of word-making on his own 
 accoimt. We may thus freely concede to Dr. Theobald 
 ground for speculation. 
 
 But we have only to read Dr. Theobald to be warned 
 that in this as in all other regards nothing can save us 
 
264 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 from hallucination save vigilant scrutiay upon scholarly 
 lines. The first page of Dr. Theobald's instances of 
 Shakespeare's " classic vocabulary " contains these four : 
 abruption, Academe, accite, and acknown. All four, in 
 terms of his definition, he takes to be instances either 
 of augmentation or of expansion of the English vo- 
 cabulary. A proposition of this kind one would expect 
 to rest upon some Uttle investigation, some research into 
 previous and contemporary Enghsh. So far is Dr. 
 Theobald from having made any such preparation, he 
 had not even consulted the New EngUsh Dictionary, 
 as regards two of the four words. Concerning " ac- 
 known " he has the egregious note that it is " probably 
 an attempt to bring the Latin word agnosco into the 
 language." Such a deUverance convicts the Baconian 
 once for all of unfitness for his task. " Acknown " has 
 absolutely nothing to do. with agnosco : it is an old 
 EngUsh formation, akin to " acknowledge " ; and the 
 Oxford Dictionary, had he turned thither, would have 
 furnished him with a full outline of its history. Had he 
 read Chaucer's translation of Boethius he would have 
 seen (B. I, prosa iv ; B. IV, pr. iv) the phrase, " that I 
 confesse and am aknowe ; " and the glossary would 
 have told him that it meant " I acknowledge." The 
 word lingered long.^ We have dropped " be acknow " 
 and preserved " acknowledge," just as we have dropped 
 the verbs " to custom " and " to knowledge " (-acknow- 
 ledge) extant in the sixteenth century, and preserved 
 " to accustom." 
 
 As to " accite," Dr. Theobald is in no better case. 
 The Oxford Dictionary shows this word to have been 
 in common and non-professional use long before Shake- 
 
 ^ Gower (also Chaucer) has the forms " am beknowe " and 
 "wol beknowen," Confessio Amantis, ed. Morley, pp. I47. 57- 
 Pocock has aknowe {" be aknowe us " ; • " is aknowe to ") four 
 times in his Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (circa 
 I4SS). In Piers Plowman we have the form " bi-knowen " 
 (U. 407, 1422, &c.) 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 265 
 
 speaxe. It had very much the legal force of "cite," 
 and was spelt (and pronounced, if not always) at times 
 " assite." Dr. Theobald's abstention from such a facile 
 source of information is the more astonishing because, 
 in his controversy with Mr, Judge Willis, contained in the 
 preface to the 1904 reissue of his book, he actually implies 
 that he takes the earUest date given for any word or 
 phrase in the Oxford Dictionary to be the date cif its 
 first use. This is presumably his grotmd for ascribing 
 to Shakespeare the first use of " abruption." But if 
 the New Dictionary was to be consulted for " abruption," 
 why not for " acknown " and " accite ? " 
 
 Even to the inexpert reader, however, it is hardly 
 necessary to explain that the Dictionary does not pro- 
 fess — and, in regard to words of the sixteenth century 
 could not possibly pretend — to give the first instance of 
 use.* Old forms can be closely traced in the com- 
 
 * Mr. Harold Bayley, whose useful compilation, The Shake- 
 speare Symphony {igo6), might serve to explode the Baconian 
 delusion, albeit he speaks of it with surprising sjnnpathy, un- 
 fortunately gives countenance to Dr. Theobald in respect that 
 he falls into that writer's misconception of the nature of the 
 testimony supplied by the New English Dictionary. He describes 
 it as recording not only the " birthday and parent, so far as known, 
 of every English word " (p. 208), but, by every entry, either a 
 "newly coined " or "newly used " word (p. 209). The latter 
 claim is very far astray. Mjniads of the entries in the Dictionary 
 do but serve to trace the history or continued use of words, and 
 stand for no " new use " whatever ; and Mr. Bayley's calculation 
 that " we are indebted to the poet Shakespeare for enriching our 
 English tongue with the astonishing total of 9450 newly coined 
 or newly used words " is a mere midsummer night's dream. An 
 examination of his lists will reveal this to any reader. The great 
 majority of the words there cited had been in use long before 
 the dates given ; and in the instances noted there can be no really 
 new application. Let me give one illustration. Under "Ben 
 Jonson " we have, among other words, " expulsed, 1603." This 
 must refer to the phrase " the expulsed Apicata " in Sejanus, 
 V, 10. But there is no novelty here : the word has its ordinary 
 force, and is simply noted to show continued use. So, when Mr. 
 Mr. Bayley credits Shakespeare with two new uses of " except," 
 
266 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 paratively scanty literatiire before Chaucer ; and in the 
 case of "acknown" this is carefully done; but as 
 regards Tudor English the great Dictionary gives only 
 illustrations, not complete historical lists. The more 
 need that any one going about Mr, Theobald's under- 
 taking should do a Uttle reading on his own account. 
 He might, for instance, have turned to Chaucer before 
 making his astoimding assertion that " perdurable is not 
 really an English word at all " — ^implying that it was 
 invented by Bacon-Shakespeare. It occurs at least 
 ten times in Chaucer, who uses it five times in the 
 translation of Boethius alone, and also has " perdurably " 
 and " perdurabletee " several times. At least a glance at 
 the Chaucer glossary would seem to have been worth Dr. 
 Theobald's while. He, as we have seen, has not even 
 regularly consulted the Dictionary. 
 
 What can come of even following it, on the assumption 
 that its first dates for words are always cases of first use, 
 
 two of " excellent," two of " exalted," four of " exchange," four 
 of " exercise," six of " get," ten of " go," and twelve of " go " in 
 combination, as in " go before," " go off," " go round," and so on, 
 we are witnessing mere moonshine. At this rate, every one of 
 us achieves " new uses " every day. 
 
 Again, Mr. Bayley writes (p. 128) that " According to Dr. 
 Murray, until Massinger revived it in 1622 the word 'colon' 
 [the intestine] had not been used in England since 1541." Who, 
 on a moment's reflection, can possibly believe this ? Dr. Murray 
 would never dream of asserting it : the Dictionary merely indicates 
 continued use by instances in successive generations. The 
 whole of Mr. Bayley's theorem must simply be excised. 
 
 Even Mr. PearsaU Smith, in his charming little book on The 
 English Lar^uage (191 2), goes too far in relying on first entries 
 in the Dictionary. Thus he gives Shakespeare " multitudinous," 
 whereas Dekker used the word in 1603 ; and it is impossible to 
 prove that Mac&e/A is earlier than that. Mr. Smith states (p. 114) 
 that Shakespeare has " more new words than are found in ahnost 
 all of the English poets put together." This is an extravagant 
 error. Mr. Smith admits (p. 117) that Nashe, Greene and Chapman 
 " provide immense lists of words that are only used by their own 
 creators." Quite so. There are many more new words, surely, 
 in Chapman than in Shakespeare. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 267 
 
 may be seen from a " supplementary list," compiled for 
 Dr. Theobald by Mr. Stronach, of fourteen " words the 
 first known use of which is in Shakespeare." ^ They are : 
 Abruption, Antic, Assubjugate, Cerements, Conflux, 
 Credent, Deracinate, Derogate, Dolours, Evitation, Extern 
 (as a noun), Festinate, Fluxive, Incony. Will it be be- 
 lieved that in a list thus professedly fathered on the 
 Oxford Dictionary the second word is a blunder ? The 
 Dictionary gives for " antic " two instances from 
 Marlowe (1590) and one from Drayton (1594), all in 
 senses in which Shakespeare uses the word. These 
 senses are but variants of the meaning of the word as 
 used by Spenser (F. Q. II, vii, 4) in the phrase " woven 
 with antickes and wild imagery " ; which again is but 
 a special, development of " antique." Any reader with 
 the least judgment in word history would see at a glance 
 that the word could not be new for Shakespeare. And 
 while speculation nught be natural as to " abruption " 
 and " assubjugate," which are certainly not common 
 forms, it is again astonishing to find any professed student 
 assuming that Shakespeare invented " cerements," " con- 
 flux," "credent," " deracinate," " derogate," " dolours," 
 and " incony." " Deracinate " is not a classic word at 
 all : it is simply an adoption of the French desraciner, 
 found in Cotgrave. It has not, I believe, been traced 
 before Shakespeare; but it is highly likely to have 
 been used. Is it remotely likely, to begin with, that 
 a dramatist would in serious speeches present entirely 
 new words on the stage ? Supposing him to invent 
 " conflux " and " credent," or even " deracinate," he 
 might indeed expect educated hearers to divine at once 
 his meaning ; but how could he expect comprehension of 
 " cerements " if the word had never been used before ? 
 " Credence," a word of Chaucer's, is used in Elyot's 
 GovERNOUR (iii, 6) as a common term, and constantly 
 appears in later Tudor writers. " Credent " would 
 * Shakespeare Studies, p. 385. 
 
268 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 be an easy coinage from that ; but what scholar would 
 beUeve that it was left for Shakespeare to coin ? Know- 
 ing that " dolorous " was an old word, what reader could 
 suppose " dolours " to be a new one about the close of 
 the sixteenth century ? And what sensible student 
 would infer that " conflux," stated to be used by Drayton 
 in 1612 and by Selden in 1614, was first coined by Shake- 
 speare, merely because the Oxford Dictionary gives no 
 earUer instance ? Jonson has " confluctions " in the 
 Induction to Every Man out of his Humour (1599) : 
 is it to be supposed that the singular was not also 
 current ? 
 
 In this connexion it may sufl&ce to give a few more 
 illustrations. 
 
 1. " Incony " was a common EHzabethan term, of 
 the same force as " coney," in vulgar use. The variorum 
 edition mentions that it occurs in The Two Angry 
 Women of Abington (1599), in Doctor Dodypoll 
 (1600), in Jonson's Tale of a Tub, in Marlowe's Jew of 
 Malta, and in Blurt, Master-Constable (1602). 
 Coidd any rational reader, with these facts before him, 
 suppose that the term was first put in currency by 
 Love's Labour's Lost ? He who will may find " coney," 
 in the sense in question, four times over in Ralph 
 Roister Doister {ante 1553. Arber's rep. pp. 27, 50, 
 56,87). - 
 
 2. Dolour and dolours were common and familiar 
 EngUsh words long before Shakespeare ; and the Oxford 
 Dictionary of course shows as much. " Dolour," which 
 came in with the Normans if not earlier, occurs at least 
 twice in the Coventry Mysteries (Sh. Soc. ed. pp. 
 ^7' 388), which date from about 1450 ; and it remained 
 in constant use. It is used in the third book of the 
 Faerie Queene (c. ii, st. 17), published in 1589, and 
 repeatedly in Spenser's minor poems. It also occurs 
 (sp. dolor) in the first line of Nashe's Christs Teares 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 269 
 
 OVER Jerusalem (1593) and again in the next paragraph 
 (sp. dollour). The Oxford Dictionary cannot be supposed 
 to deny these facts. And the word was equally common 
 on the stage. It is to be found at least three times in the 
 archaistic rhjmie-play Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 
 ascribed to Peele (but probably collaborated-in by Greene), 
 apparently first printed in 1599, but certainly written 
 before 1592. (Dyce's ed. of Peele and Greene, pp. 512; 
 527.) The word is used twice on one page. It is also 
 to be found thiice in Greene's Mamillia (1580-83), and 
 in at least four other places in his works (ed. Grosart, 
 ii, 115, 120, 243 ; iii, 83, 221 ; iv, 14 ; ix, 22). In one 
 place we have the phrase, " spent his doleful days in 
 dumps and dolors" (Card of Fancy, 1587: iv, 14). 
 The word occurs also in Puttenham's Arte of English 
 Poesie, 1589 (Arber's rep. p. 167). If the good Baconian 
 on learning this feels bound to conclude that Bacon 
 wrote the Faerie Queene and Nashe and Puttenham's 
 book (some of them claim as much), and also all the 
 works of Greene and Peele, let him turn to Bishop Bale's 
 Brief Chronicle of the case of Lord Cobham (1544); 
 where he will soon find " dolour " (Parker Soc. rep. p. 
 12, &c.). Or let him peruse Bishop Hooper's Declara- 
 tion OF Christ and His Office (1547. Parker Soc. 
 vol. p. 60) ; or Latimer's Seventh Sermon before King 
 Edward, 1549 (Dent's rep. pp. 192, 193, 199); or the 
 Epistle Dedicatorie to George Gascoigne's Steel Glas 
 (1576) ; or the same vmter's Viewe of Worldly 
 Vanities, 1576 (Cimliffe's ed. of Works, ii, 261) ; or his 
 Flowers {Id. i, 55) ; or his Dan Bartholomew of 
 Bathe {Id. i, 112) ; or Holinshed's Chronicle of Richard 
 III (Boswell-Stone's Sh. Holinshed, p. 378), and he will 
 find it often. Or let him turn, once for all, to Sackville's 
 Induction to The Mirrour for Magistrates where 
 (including the Complaynt of Buckingham) he will find 
 " dolour " and " dolours " five times. (Works ed. 1859, 
 pp. loi, 103, 104, 131, 156). He will also find several 
 
270 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 instances of " dole " and " doleful." A perusal of the 
 
 whole performance, which, dating as it does from 1563, 
 
 can scarcely have been written by Bacon, may help 
 
 him to realise that the EngUsh language, broadly speaking, 
 
 existed before the Armada. He may chance to note, 
 
 in passing, the hnes (p. 133) : 
 
 Much like a felon that, pursued by night. 
 Starts at each bush, as his foe were in sight, 
 
 which will doubtless recall to him those : 
 
 Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind : 
 The thief doth fear each bush an officer. 
 
 3 Henry VI, V, vi, 12 ; 
 
 and the useful question may occur to him whether it 
 was Shakespeare or Bacon or a third penman who thus 
 utilised a familiar commonplace. There may thus open 
 up for him a more profitable path of inquiry than the 
 Baconian. 
 
 3. Derogate was in use long before Shakespeare. 
 
 See below, p. 303. 
 
 4, Antics occurs, in the secondary sense, in Stubbes's 
 Anatomie of Abuses (1583) : " Then have they [in 
 the train of the Lord of Misrule] their hobby-horses, 
 dragons, and other antiques " (Collier's reprint, p. 142) ; 
 and in Drayton and Sir John Davies in 1599 : 
 
 Making withal some filthy antic face. 
 
 Idea, Son. 31. 
 Such toyes, such antikes, and such vanities. 
 
 Nosce Teipsum, st. 32. 
 
 It is thus unnecessary to suppose that Ben Jonson, who 
 uses the word thrice in one play (1600) : 
 
 How antic and ridiculous soe'er. 
 
 Cynthia's Revels, i, i, end ; 
 O, most antick. . . . 
 
 Id. V, 2 ; 
 An antic gesture. . . . 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 271 
 
 — had got it from Shakespeare — or Bacon. Marlowe 
 has it twice, as aforesaid : 
 
 And point like antics at his triple crown. 
 
 Doctor Faustus, iii, i. 
 Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay 
 
 Id. Edward II. i, i. 
 Chapman uses it repeatedly : 
 
 And have an antic face to laugh within. 
 
 Fourth Sestiad of Hero and Leander, 1598. 
 Of all his antic shows. 
 
 Id. Sixth Sestiad. 
 Off with this antic. 
 
 The Widow's Tears, v, 3. 
 
 And it occurs in A Larum for London (published 1599) : 
 
 Shall as an antic in thy sight appear. 
 
 Simpson's rep. p. 61 ; 
 
 and twice in A Woman is a Weathercock {circa 1606) : 
 
 One here, one there, making such antic faces. 
 
 I was almost frantic 
 A modem knight should be so like an antic. 
 
 Act iv, sc. 2 (Mermaid ed. pp. 393, 398). 
 
 Of course Dr. Theobald ascribes Marlowe's plays to 
 Bacon; but why not also Ben Jonson's — and all the 
 rest? 
 
 5. Cerements is probably a variant of " cerecloths ; " 
 but the quartos have " ceremonies " ; and in Julius 
 C^SAR (i, i) we have " decked with ceremonies," in the 
 sense of religious or honorary ornaments, so that the 
 actuality of the word is uncertain. 
 
 6. Extern (as a noun : Sonnet 125). The word 
 occurs only once elsewhere in Shakespeare (Othello, i, i); 
 and there is an adjective, — on a par with " eteme " and 
 many other common formations. 
 
 Other words in the list described as of " first known 
 use in Shakespeare " are dealt with hereinafter, in the 
 course of an examination of Dr. Theobald's Ust of words 
 
272 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of " classic " formation of which the origin is ascribed 
 by him to Shakespeare — that is, Bacon. 
 
 The confutation of that hst as a whole has been accom- 
 pUshed by the late Judge Willis in a work of the most 
 patient and assiduous research.^ wherein the normal 
 pre-Shakespearean currency of nearly every word cited 
 is proved. So far as the leading Baconians are con- 
 cerned, the only effect has been a determined forensic 
 evasion by Dr. Theobald of the whole demonstration. 
 In the preface to a reissue of his book in 1904 he does 
 not scruple to write : 
 
 I give [in ch. xiv] a list of words in which there is a classic sense 
 or a classic aroma, which could not easily arise unless the writer was 
 a good classic scholar. When Mr. Willis points to other writers 
 who have used the same classic phraseology, that only proves 
 that other writers besides Bacon and Shakespeare had their 
 minds saturated with Latin. It does not prove that these words 
 or phrases were not classic, and therefore does not touch my argu- 
 ment in the faintest degree. Nearly the whole of Mr. Willis's no 
 pages i$ therefore entirely pointless and superfluous. 
 
 We here enter on a new phase of the Baconian con- 
 troversy. Hitherto we have contemplated aU manner 
 of fallacy and imperfect induction : now we are faced 
 by equivocation. Dr. Theobald had expressly imder; 
 taken to show " expansion or augmentation " of the 
 English vocabulary in the plays of Shakespeare. The 
 effect of Mr. Willis's book is to show that the " classic " 
 words in question were almost all part of the established 
 English language in what Dr. Theobald declared to be their 
 classic sense ; so that the claim that that sense or aroma 
 "could not easily arise tmless the writer was a good 
 classic scholar" is shown to be simply false. Any 
 Englishman of Shakespeare's day, whether he knew 
 Latin or not, necessarily used those words in the so-called 
 " classic " sense, if he used them at all, simply because 
 
 ^ The Baconian Mint .- its Claims Examined. By William 
 Willis, One of the Masters of the Bench of the Honourable Society 
 of the Temple. Printed by Order of the Masters. . . 1903- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 273 
 
 they had been introduced and adopted in the past by 
 men who were habituated to Latin. Dr. Theobald had 
 clearly compiled his chapter in ignorance of the previous 
 currency of the words : on this being exposed, he seeks 
 to extricate himself as we have seen. The few pseudo- 
 classic words of which Judge Willis did not trace the 
 previous history, and to which Dr. Theobald points 
 afresh, are mostly not words which a good Latinist 
 would have coined. " Reverb," and " immure " as a 
 noun, are instances in point. 
 Continuing his rejoinder, Dr. Theobald writes : 
 
 And even when the use of any words is represented as an 
 ansQCcessfnl attempt to naturalize a Latin word, — [the words 
 given are acknown, aggravate, evitate, immanity, ruinate, and 
 sitnular] — which is the only (!) kind of assertion of novelty 
 which I make in these cases. I scarcely think there is any in- 
 accuracy, even if it be shown thai the same attempt was made by 
 another writer. Indeed I admit this myself in reference to one 
 of these words. [Which ?] 
 
 Dr. Theobald appears to be as impervious to informa- 
 tion as to argument. " Acknown " was, as we have seen, 
 an old English word, in no way derived from Latin. 
 " Aggravate " was used by Shakespeare as by all other 
 Englishmen in his day : the meaning has since partly 
 shifted, though the old sense survives. " Evitate " was 
 not an " attempt " on his part to innovate : the word 
 was current ; it has since dropped, like so many others. 
 " Immanity " was a fairly common word before Shake- 
 speare, and was used long after him. " Ruinate " was 
 quite common in poetry and drama. "Simular" is the 
 one rare word in the list ; but to say that he " attempted 
 to naturalize it " when he foimd it made to his hand is 
 to trifle with the reader. The phrase, " the same attempt 
 was made by another xe/riter," is of the same order. 
 " Another writer " suggests a contemporary. In most 
 cases the words in question were generations or centuries 
 old. 
 
 In so far as Dr. Theobald's reply to Mr. Willis has 
 
 s 
 
274 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 reference to the alleged " coincidences " between Bacon 
 and Shakespeare, as- distinct from the " classicisms " (in 
 regard to most of which no coincidence is shown) they 
 will be dealt with in a later chapter. As regards the two 
 hundred " classical " words of which Mr. Willis has shown 
 the common pre-Shakespearean currency, he makes no 
 better attempt at rebuttal, while professing to examine 
 Mr. Willis's book "somewhat completely," than that 
 above dealt with, save in so far as he complains that 
 over the word " composure " Mr. Willis misrepresented 
 him, and cited against him a use of the word with a 
 meaning quite different from that which he had posited. 
 That might happen without any vmf air intention : Dr. 
 Theobald should be the last person to raise, questions of 
 candour in controversy. He further alleges that in Mr. 
 Willis's book he is " represented as affirming that Bacon 
 invented such words as Act, Fact, Consequence, Per- 
 mission, Inequality, Success, Confine, and a host of such 
 familiar words." This is simply not true. Mr. Willis 
 makes no such representation. He points out that Dr. 
 Theobald is as ill-informed and mistaken in ascribing 
 to Bacon new applications of old words as in imput- 
 ing coinages of new words and new collocations of 
 terms. 
 
 A word of comment should be added on Dr. Theobald's 
 attempt to discredit Mr. Willis's exposure of him by 
 charging upon his critic inadequate knowledge of the 
 literary ground in dispute. " The fact is," he writes, 
 " that whenever Mr. Willis leaves the province of Puritan 
 literature, in which he is an expert, and attempts 
 Shakespearean criticism, in which he is a novice, he is 
 generally pointless, and frequently mistaken." In strict 
 fact, Mr. Willis has not meddled with " Shakespearean 
 criticism " : he has effectually shown, by citations from 
 pre-Shakespearean and later literature, that Dr. Theobald 
 was completely ignorant of precisely the ground he ought 
 to have known. If Mr. Willis's evidence had been con- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 275 
 
 fined, as Dr. Theobald hardily suggests, to Puritan 
 literature, so much the more crushing was his confuta- 
 tion ; for if Dr. Theobald's spurious array of Baconian 
 terms from the plays could be paralleled and stultified 
 by selections from a single section of Tudor literature, 
 the absurdity of the confuted thesis would only be the 
 more clear. But, as it happens, though Mr. Willis had 
 modestly written that he had " become familiar with 
 only a small portion of English literature extant at the 
 time of Bacon's birth — chiefly the writings of divines, 
 ecclesiastical records, and correspondence," he has taken 
 the pains to collate the collections of Richardson's and 
 the Oxford Dictionaries, and thus does in point of fact 
 present the results of a vastly wider range of inquiry 
 than Dr. Theobald's. The Baconian, like most of his 
 sect, has no pretension to acquaintance with the litera- 
 ture of which a knowledge was specially requisite to give 
 him the right to hold his opinion. A tithe of the trouble 
 taken by Mr. WiUis might have cmred Dr. Theobald of 
 his delusion, and saved him from his vain task. 
 
 Judge Willis may have made incidental mistakes, 
 like the rest of us ; but it is not on casual mistakes 
 that he or any of us grounds the indictment of the 
 Baconian theory as set forth by Dr. Theobald, who, 
 broadly speaking, makes nothing but mistakes, in support 
 of an error " gross as a mountain." It is in a manner 
 monstrous that such a mere accTunulation of blimders 
 should have to be disposed of in detail; but if the 
 Baconian delusion is to be dissipated ; if credulous men 
 of culture, with limited reading— who, as Judge WiUis 
 remarks, " seem to have no power to think for them- 
 selves " — are to be saved from the contagion of the 
 method of ignorance, we must deal with this as we have 
 dealt with other manipulations of the myth. After all. 
 Dr. Theobald is on all fours with Lord Justice Campbell 
 and all the rest of the darkeners of counsel on this theme. 
 To the detailed examination, then, let us turn. 
 
276 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 As The Baconian Mint is not generally accessible, 
 I will present summarily the series of words in Shake- 
 speare which Dr. Theobald puts forward as " classically " 
 framed and therefore Baconian, and which Judge Willis 
 shows to have been in current use long before or about 
 1600 ; prefacing them, as does Mr. Willis, with an 
 exposure of a few of the " coincidences "of phrase which 
 Dr. Theobald cites as specially significant of Baconian 
 authorship. Of this last order of phrases Mr. Willis 
 took only a few samples : in a later chapter it will be 
 dealt with more fully. I shall take leave to supplement 
 Mr. Willis's illustrations with some borrowed from Mr. 
 Crawford ; adding yet further instances, in a number of 
 cases; in brackets. In regard to some words, again, I 
 have substituted my own illustrations for those given by 
 the first writer. 1 It is worth noting that Judge Willis 
 wrought his demonstration in the conviction that 
 Shakespeare had classical scholarship, while Mr. Crawford, 
 who deals only incidentally with this point in his valuable 
 essay on " ITie Bacon-Shakespeare Question," * argues 
 to the same effect as Judge Willis in the conviction 
 that Shakespeare was not classically cultmred. 
 
 I. Gross and palpable (M. N. D., V, i, 374 ; I Henry 
 IV, II, iv, 250). 
 
 Grossly and papably ofEended. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity. 
 Gross and palpable. 
 
 BsLnctoit, Platform of Episcopacy. (iS94). 
 ed. 1663, p. 187. 
 Gross and palpable blindness. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin's Sermons on Deuteronomy, by T. W., 1583 : 
 
 Letter to the Reader. 
 
 ^ Judge Willis's book, unfortunately, was imperfectly prepared 
 for the press, and insuflSciently corrected ; and it may be that 
 the references, which are sometimes incomplete, are not always 
 accurate, I have no doubt, however, that they invariably stand 
 for real evidence. The incomplete references are mostly to 
 citations given in the Oxford Dictionary. 
 
 2 In Collectanea, Second Series, 1907. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 277 
 
 Gross and palpable abuses. 
 William Fvike, Answer to the Rhemish New Testament, 1581. 
 
 . . . Sins, whether gross and more palpable or more secret. 
 
 Daniel Dyke, Treatise on Repentance, 1631, p. 161. 
 
 Gross and palpable darkness- 
 Arthur Dent, The Ruine of Rome, 1607. 
 [Add: 
 
 Gross and palpable faults. 
 
 Rosdell, Ep. ded. to ed. of Hooper's Christ and His 
 Office, 1582.] 
 
 2. Starting holes (i Henry IV ; II, iv, 290). 
 
 Said by Dr. Theobald to be " another curious phrase 
 found in both Shakespeare and Bacon." {See below, 
 ch. X.) It was a standing phrase in Elizabethan speech. 
 See it in : 
 
 The translation of Calvin's Commentary on John, 1 584, p. 93 ; 
 on Job, 1584. p. 391- 
 
 Hales' address on an Act of Parliament, Ed . VI, given in Strjrpe's 
 Ecclesiastical Memorials, iv, 361. 
 
 A letter to Thomas Cromwell, by Layton, 1535. 
 
 Mr. Crawford (Collectanea, ii, 136) further points to the 
 phrase in Jonson's The Case is Altered, and in the 
 Discoveries : De Bonis et Malis ; in Peele, Edward I 
 (first draft : Dyce's ed. p. 415) ; and in Gascoigne's 
 Voyage into Holland, 1572. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 a fit cloud to cover their abuse, and not unlike to the starting- 
 hole that Lucinius found. . . 
 
 Gosson, School of Abuse, Arber's rep. p. 41. 
 
 Peradventure some which seek for sterting holes . . . will 
 objecte. 
 
 Elyot, Governour, ii, 9 (Dent's rep. p. 152). 
 
 Smoking this . . . trade out of his starting holes. 
 
 Nashe, Chrisfs Teares, Works, ed. McKerrow, ii, 152. 
 
 Compare Chaucer : 
 
 I hold a mouse's herte not worth a leek 
 That hath but one hole for to sterte to. 
 
 Wife of Bath's Tale, S72-3-^ 
 
278 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 3. Top (metaph. : Tempest, III, i, 38, &c.). 
 
 [See below, ch. ix, for a number of instances of the 
 use of this metaphor. Mr. Willis gives others, mostly 
 from religious writings,] 
 
 4. Sweet, sugared, honey, as applied to words 
 (L.L.L. V, ii, 231 ; i Henry VI, III, iii, 18 ; &c. &c.). 
 
 Mr. Willis gives an instance of " wordes . , . well 
 sugred and honied" from the translation of Calvin's 
 Sermons, 1579, p. 961, I covild fill pages with instances 
 from general literature ; but it should suffice to mention 
 that " sugar " or " sugared " or " sugaring " is thus 
 metaphorically used six times in Sidney's Astrophel 
 AND Stella sonnets alone ; and at least four times 
 in the Jocasta of Gascoigne and his friends (1566). It 
 would probably be difficult to find an Elizabethan poet 
 or dramatist who did not use it. "Honeyed" is no 
 less hackneyed ; and " sweet," as applied to words, 
 is one of the commonest figures in the whole range of 
 literature, in all languages. The citation of such meta- 
 phors as special to Bacon and Shakespeare is sheer 
 folly. 
 
 5. Academe (L.L.L. I, i, 13 ; IV. iii, 303, 352). 
 
 Found in The Book of Good Manners, 1487. 
 Found in Sand3rs' Travels, 1610, p. 275. 
 
 [Be it observed that the scansion of the word in Lo\'e's 
 Labour's Lost is precisely what a good classical scholar 
 would not do with it ; though Marston follows Shake- 
 speare in his Scourge of Villanie, Sat. iii.] 
 
 Academy, needless to say, is common. Judge Willis 
 cites Caxton's Chesse, 1474, p. 86 ; and Greene's Friar 
 Bacon and Friar Bungay, Dyce's ed. p. 155. 
 
 [The lexicographers have not brought out the fact 
 that Greene in his four uses of the word in Friar Bacon, 
 and also in his Maiden's Dream, st. 40, makes it scan 
 Academy, as does Daniel.] 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 279 
 
 6. Acdte. (Used by Shakespeare, jocularly, in the 
 sense of " excite," 2 Henry IV, II, ii, 64. Occurs in 
 Titus Andronicus in the regular sense.) 
 
 Ascited occurs in Fish's Supplication of Beggars, 
 1528 ; in a letter of WilUam Barlow to Thomas Cromwell, 
 April, 1536 ; Accite in Ben Jonson's Underwoods 
 {Execration upon Vulcan), in the phrase (" accite . . . 
 appetite ") which may conform either to the jocular or 
 to the serious meaning. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Afore that Queen I caused to be accited. 
 
 Wyatt's Complaint of Love. 
 Summer. I asyte you in our court to appear. 
 
 Impatient Poverty, 1 560, near end.] 
 
 7. Acknown ("be acknown" = acknowledge : Othello, 
 III, iii, 319). 
 
 {See above, p. 264.) Occurs in Wilson's trans, of Demos- 
 thenes, 1570, p. 98. 
 
 Aknown in Tyndale's Expos, of Matthew, 1532, 
 Parker Soc. rep. i, 80 ; also in Message of the Council of 
 England to Philip II, in Strype, Eccles. Memor., vi, 103. 
 
 So would I not have a translator ashamed to be acknowen 
 of his translation. 
 
 Pattenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589, Arber's rep. p. 260. 
 
 Acknown is also found in Henry Smith, 1591 (no ref .) ; 
 Ben Jonson, Volpone, 1605, v, 4. 
 [Add: 
 
 Yet are they loth to be acknowen of their skill. 
 
 Puttenham, as cited, p. 37. 
 
 Joseph of Arimathea and Nichodemus . . . durst not be 
 acknowen of him [Jesus]. 
 Tyndale, Answer to Sir T. More, 1531. Parker Soc. rep. iii, 38. 
 
 I do not marvel although you will not be acknowen of this 
 marriage. 
 Lady Lumley's Iphigeneya {c. iS5o).Malone Soc. ed. 1. 750. 
 
 But ours [misfortune] of others will not be acknowen. 
 
 Kyd's trans, of Gamier's Cornelia, 1594, Act ii.] 
 
28o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 8. Advertising (as used in Measure for Measure, 
 V. i, 387). 
 
 Compare : To whose doctrine I did me advertise. 
 Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, 1509, v, i. 
 
 [Advertise = apprise is normal and common in Tudor 
 English.] 
 
 9. Aggravate ( = make heavier : Richard II, I, i, 
 43 ; Sonnet 146). 
 
 To aggravate their oath. 
 
 Coverdale, 1549. 
 Aggravate his sins. 
 
 Aggravate this tragical counsel. 
 
 Henry Smith, 1590. 
 Aggravation of offences. 
 
 Adams, Sermon on " The White Devil." 
 Aggravated their discontents. 
 
 Sand3rs' Travels, 1610. 
 
 [" To make heavier " is simply the primeiry and then 
 normal meaning of the word. Compare " aggregge " 
 in Chaucer. The very line in Shakespeare's Sonnet 146, 
 upon which Dr. Theobald f otmds : 
 
 And make that pine to aggravate thy store, 
 is an echo from Daniel : 
 
 Then, O injurious Land, what dost thou gain 
 To aggravate thine own afiSictions store. 
 
 Civil Wars (1595) B. ii, st. 16. 
 Compare : 
 
 I know my pitied love doth aggravate 
 Envy and wrath for these wrongs offered . 
 
 Id. Letter from Octaviato Marcus Antonius, st. 43. 
 Who, ever aggravating that which feeds 
 Their fears. 
 
 Id. Civil Wars. ed. 1602, i, 122. 
 Thereby aggravating the offence to God. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, i, 19 (Dent's rep. p. 85). 
 TuUus, aggravating the matter. 
 North, tr. of Life ofCoriolanus (Sh. Plutarch, p. 27). 
 To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow. 
 
 Daniel, Delia (1592) S. 54. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 281 
 
 But more to aggravate the heavy cares 
 Of my perplexed mind. 
 
 Wilmot, Tancred and Gismunda, 1592, v, i. 
 To aggravate the measure of our grief. 
 
 Troublesome Raigne of King John, Pt. I. 
 Hazlitt's Sh. Library. Pt. II. vol. i. p. 160. 
 You did so aggravate the jest withal. 
 
 Jonson. Cynthia's Revels, ii. i. 
 Aggravating their ofience. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, B. I, ch. xvi. par. i.J 
 
 10. Antres ( = caves : Lat. Antrum : Othello, I, iii, 
 140). 
 
 [? An old French word, from antrum. So all the com- 
 mentators. But it might have come through the Italian 
 antra. It could not conceivably be a new word, thus 
 introduced in a play ; even scholars would be at a loss 
 to associate it, on the sudden, with antrum. But it was 
 certainly not common, and its meaning is not absolutely 
 certain, though all the commentators connect it with 
 Fr. antre a cave. In the Folio the spelling is Antars ; 
 in the first Quarto it is Antrees. It is just possible that 
 the derivation is through Chaucer's entrSe. In Boece 
 (ii, pr. 2) he renders in Jovis limine by " in the entree, or in 
 the celere [v. r. seler} of Jupiter." Elsewhere he translates 
 both adytum and aditum by " entree" (ii, pr. i ; i, pr. 
 6), perhaps knowing that adytum primarily meant a cave, 
 and confusing the two words.] 
 
 11. Artificial ( = skilful, artistic, pertaining to art : 
 M. N. D. Ill, ii, 203 ; Timon, I, i, 37). 
 
 The usual force of the word. 
 
 Very artificial in making of images. 
 
 Haklu5rt's Voyages, 1600. 
 A cunning and artificial graver. 
 
 Barnes's Works. 1541. 
 
 [Compare : 
 
 Rhetorike, which is the science whereby is taught an artificiall 
 form of speaking. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. I, c. 13. 
 
282 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Artificial! speakers. 
 
 Id. ib. (P. 56 of Dent's rep.). 
 Artificial! science or corporal labour. 
 
 Id. lb. i, I ; p. 5. 
 Artificial tears. 
 
 Selimus, 1. 449. 
 A very active and artificial way in driving of a prince's chariot. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber'srep. p. 313. 
 A garden . . . filled with fruitful trees, very orderly and 
 artificially disposed. 
 
 Kyd, The Householder's Philosophie, trans, from Tasso, 
 
 Works, ed. Boas, p. 241. 
 To entertain [deceive] one another with vain hopes and 
 artificial practices. 
 
 Fenton's Guicciardini, 1579, p. 299. 
 Secret and artificial practices. 
 
 Id. p. 602. 
 Artificial and ceremonicd magic. 
 Nashe, Terrors of the Night ; Worlcs, ed. McKerrow.i, 367. 
 
 With all artificial magnificence adorned. Id. p. 379.] 
 
 12. Aspersion ( = dropping of fluid : Tempest IV, 
 i, 18). 
 
 Aspersions of ink. Adams, Sermons, i, 11. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary cites among other instances : 
 
 By the aspersion of the blood of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Foxe's Martyrs, i, 497. 
 She did asperse the place with the waters. 
 
 Caxton, Eneydos (1490) xxiv, 90. 
 
 This was of course the primary meaning of the word, in 
 English as in Latin; the moral application is meta- 
 phorical and secondary. 
 
 13. Cacodaemon (Richard III, I, iii, 143). 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary notes that the word is given 
 and defined, from Plato, in Bartholomew's old encyclo- 
 paedia, the De proprietatibus rerum, of which Trevisa's 
 translation was widely read. It also occurs in Nashe's 
 Terrors of the Night, 1593 (Works, McKerrow's ed. 
 i. 376), and, as Mr. Willis notes, thrice in Adams's 
 Sermons, 1605-25. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 283 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Maketh the image of God the image of Cacodemon. 
 
 Hooper. Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, 1547, 
 
 Parker Soc. rep. p. 137. 
 
 The word had thus a theological currency.] 
 
 14. Capricious ( = goatlike : As You Like It, III, 
 
 U.7)- 
 
 Word so defined in Carew's version of Huarte's Examen, 
 1594. [It is used with this force by T. Heywood : 
 
 What, drawers grow capricious ? 
 
 Fair Maid of the West, iii, 2 ; 
 by Webster : 
 
 A fine capricious, mathematically jealous coxcomb. 
 
 The White Devil, i, i. 
 
 and repeatedly by Chapman in The Widow's Tears, 
 iii, I ; iii, I (capricioMs) ; v, 3.] 
 
 15. Captious ( = " receptive " or " taking " — " cap- 
 tious and intenible sieve " ; All's Well, I, iii, 207). 
 
 So used from 1447. 
 
 . Capcious, crafty in words to take one in a trap. 
 
 Palsgrave, 1530. 
 By captious words to make me do it. 
 
 Three Ladies of London, Hazlitt's Dodsley, vi, 293. 
 
 [Compare : 
 
 [Such captious doom [judgment] as Momus erst did use. 
 Higgins' add. to Mirrour for Magistrates, ed. 1575. 
 
 Rep. of 1 8 ID, p. 90.] 
 
 16. Cist ( = chaste : As You Like It, III, iv, 16). 
 
 Diana . . . the cast goddess. 
 
 Lydgate, 1430. 
 
 17. Casual, casualty (chance, risk : Merchant, II,. 
 ix, 29 ; Lear, IV, iii, 45 ; Pericles, V, i, 93). 
 
 The normal sense of the word in the period. 
 
 A thing hanging on such casualty. 
 
 Jacob and Esau (1555) : Hazlitt's Dodsley, ii, 221. 
 
284 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from James I 
 {Kings Quair) ; Halliwell, 1500 ; Wriothesley, 1548 ; 
 Fabyan, 1494 ; Wolsey, 1530 ; and Tavemer, 1539. 
 See also Casuality. 
 
 18. Circumscribed ( = limited), Circumscription : 
 Titus, I, i, 68 ; Hamlet, I, iii, 22 ; Othello, I, ii, 26. 
 
 Again, the normal meaning of the word. 
 
 Not comprehensible nor circumscribed. 
 
 More, Dialogue of Heresy, 1529. 
 They that thronged to circumscribe him. 
 
 Jonson, Sejanus, v, 10. 
 Circumscribed within the bounds of a certa3me of studies. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. i, c. 14 (Dent's rep. p. 68). 
 [Add: 
 
 Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 
 To one self place. 
 
 Marlowe, Faustus, II, i. 
 
 Look ! a painted board [a co£5n] 
 Circumscribes all. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, iv, i. 
 Not to be circumscribed in servile bounds. 
 
 Heywood, Rape of Lucrece, i, i. 
 The time I hope caimot be circumscribed 
 Within so short a limit. 
 
 Id. i, 3, end.] 
 
 19. Civil : uncivil (in the " Latin " sense, " pertaining 
 to the State," also = civilised, imcivilised : Richard 
 n, III, iii, loi ; 2 Henry VI, III, i, 310). 
 
 Again the fimdamental, and then the normal, meaning 
 of the terms, as still in " civil service," " civil war." 
 Compare : 
 
 Civil society. 
 
 Hooker, Bccles. Pol. 1590, B. i, p. 10. 
 
 Civil life. Civil industry. The civility of other nations. Civil 
 inion. 
 
 Lewkenor's trans, of Contrareno, pp. 34, 35, 41, andpref. 
 Policy and civility. Civil inhabitants. Liberty and civility. 
 Sandys' Travels, 1610 ; ed. 1637, pref. and pp. S3. 60. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 285 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Civil service to their prince and contrie. 
 
 Ascham, Sckolemasier, Arber's rep. p. 135. 
 What's the difference twixt a Christian 
 And the uncivil manners of the Turk ? 
 
 First Part of Sir John OldcasOe, iv, 2. 
 We that have been so long civil and wealthy in peace. 
 
 King James, Counterblast to Tobacco, Arber's rep. p. 100. 
 Civil love of art. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Noctetn. 
 Uncivil outrages. 
 
 Marlowe, i Tamb. I, i. 
 Laws civil. Civil law. Civil policy. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. i, c. 14. 
 Better government and civility. 
 
 Spenser, Present State of Ireland, Globe ed. of Works, p. 609. 
 Very brute and unciviU (^uncivilised). 
 
 Jd, p. 638. 
 Even the other day, since England grew to be civill. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Some barbarous outlaw or uncivil kern. 
 
 He3rwood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, v, i. 
 
 A more civil and orderly life. 
 
 The savage and uncivil, who were before all science or civility. 
 
 The books and studies of the civiler ages. 
 
 The most civil countries and commonwealths. 
 
 The ancient and civil poets. 
 
 All manner of functions civil and martial. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589, Arber's rep. 
 pp. 22, 26, 27, 30. 31. 33.] 
 
 20. Collect (" collect these dangers " = mentally 
 
 gather together : 2 Henry VI, III, i, 34 ; Tempest, I, 
 
 ii. 13)- 
 
 The doctrine that may be collected thereof. 
 
 First Book of Discipline, 1560. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Whereof . . . we have collected after this manner. 
 
 Foxe, Acts and Monuments. Cattley's ed. 1841, i, 96. 
 And all my cares by cruel Love collected. 
 
 Spenser, Epithalamion, 1. 267.] 
 
286 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 21. Collection (same force : Cymbeline, V, v, 429 ; 
 Hamlet, IV. v, 7). 
 
 By a collection and discourse of reason. 
 
 More's Dialogue of Heresy. 
 Your own only probable collection [of doctrine]. 
 
 Hooker, Bccles. Pol. ed. 1823, p. 102. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 As by a brief collection of the whole chapter . . . shall appear 
 
 1579, Fulke, Heskins Pari. 35. 
 Most severe in fashion and collection of himself. 
 
 Jonson, Poetaster, v, i. 
 [Add : 
 
 Not the commandments of God but your own erroneous 
 collections. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. pref. ch. viii, §5. 
 
 Only deduced they are out of Scripture by collection. 
 
 Id. B. I, ch. xiv, §2. 
 All collections speak he was the soldier. 's&Ssi 
 
 Chapman, The Widow's Tears, v, 3.] 
 
 22. Comfort (legal sense, aiding or helping: Lear, 
 III, V, 21 ; Titus, II, iii, 209). 
 
 See above, p. 77, as to the currency of the term in 
 proclamations and in old English. 
 
 Neither aiding nor comforting (in an assassination). 
 
 Grafton's Chronicle, 1568, ii, 74. 
 [Latimer has : 
 
 Thou shalt first kill the great Turks, and discomfort and thrust 
 them down. 
 
 Second Sermon on the Card.] 
 
 23. Complement ( = completing, filling up : Othello, 
 I. i. 61). 
 
 For complement and execution of justice. 
 
 Hakluyt's Voyages, ix, iS3- 
 Compare Faerie Queene, B. Ill, c. v, st. 55. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 All the rare qualities humours, and complements of a gentleman. 
 Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, i, i.] 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 287 
 
 24. Composition ( = coherence, consistency : Othello 
 I, iii, i). 
 
 Disordered composition. 
 
 Thynne's Animadversions, 1597. 
 
 [The Oxford Dictionary gives 26 senses of this word, 
 putting the Othello passage as a case by itself. It is 
 really a case of the logical appUcation of the term = 
 sjmthesis. Bacon does not so use it, but it was current 
 in the schools, in the teaching of logic, arithmetic, and 
 mathematics. There is no coinage in the matter.] 
 
 25. Composure ( = composition : Antony, I, iv, 22 ; 
 Troilus, II, iii, 251). 
 
 Demosthenes in the composure of . . . his orations. 
 
 Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, i, i. 
 [See also Every Man out of his Humour, ii, i.] 
 The harsh composure and conveyance of the style. 
 
 R. Johnson, Kingdom and Commonwealth, 1603 (N.E.D.). 
 
 [Add : 
 
 Marston (The Malcontent, ii, 4) has "composure" 
 
 for " ingredients." Compare : 
 
 And yet even this doth the divine inspiration render vast, 
 illustrious, and of miraculous composure. 
 
 Chapman, Ep. Ded. to trans, of Odyssey. 
 
 Dr. Theobald protests (pref. to 1904 ed. p. vii) that 
 Mr. Willis's instances do not meet his case, contending 
 that, by the testimony of the Oxford Dictionary, the 
 word as used in Troilus has a wider meaning than that 
 of literary composition. It is really a mere case of using 
 the idea of " structure " or " composition " in different 
 applications. Obviously one sense is no more " classic" 
 than another; and it was the classic derivation of the 
 word that Dr. Theobald was arguing for. The thesis of 
 "augmentations of meaning" becomes a chimera in his 
 hands.] 
 
 26. Compound ( = arrange, settle, as a quarrel : 
 John, II, i, 281, &c.). 
 
 The regular force of the word. Instances needless. 
 
288 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 27. Concent ( = harmony : Henry V, I, ii, 180). 
 
 Sing with one concent. 
 
 Fairfax's trans, of Tasso's Jerusalem, B. xviii, st. 19. 
 
 In true concent meet. 
 
 Dra3H»n, Barons' Wars, iii, 1 14. 
 
 That concent . . . which doth draw things together. 
 
 Id. Eclogue vii, 177. 
 [Add: 
 
 For love is a celestial harmony 
 
 Of likely hearts composed of stars' concent. 
 
 Spenser, Hymn in Honour of Beauty. 
 Therefore are they called the Muses' birds, because they follow 
 not the sound so much as the consent. 
 
 Lilly, Buphues and his England, Arber's rep. p. 262. 
 O sweet consent between a crowde [fiddle] and a Jewes harpe. 
 
 Id. Campaspe, ii, i. 
 As in music divers strings cause a more delicate consent. 
 
 Id. ib. iii, 4. 
 Sung . . . with sweet concent. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, III, xii, 5. 
 A sweet consent, of Musick's sacred sound. 
 Gascoigne, The Steel Glas. Cunliffe's ed. of Works, ii, 152. 
 O divine Apollo, O sweet consent ! [in Apollo's song]. 
 
 Lilly, My das, iv, i. 
 My lute, though it have many strings, maketh a sweet consent. 
 
 Id. Love's Metamorphosis, iii, i.] 
 
 28. Conduce ( = educe or " be conducted," " occur " : 
 " Within my soul there doth conduce a fight." Troilus, 
 V, ii, 147 ; also = lead to, promote : Troilus, II, ii, 168). 
 Merely variants of the fundamental meaning : 
 
 The conducing and setting forth of amity and peace. 
 
 Letter of Wolsey to Henry VIII, 1527. 
 [Compare : 
 
 That Ccin so conduce him from the rocks on that side. 
 
 More, Dialogue of Comfort, rep. p. 213.] 
 
 29. Conduct (noun, = guidance : Troilus, II, ii, 61). 
 
 By conduct of some star. 
 
 Spenser, Sonnet 34- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 289 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Ye have also this word Conduict, a French word, but well 
 allowed of us, and long since usual ... it is applied only to the 
 leading of a Captain. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 159. 
 
 The conducted policies of wise and expert captaines. 
 
 Elyot, Govemour, i, 11. 
 
 And lead thy thousand horse with my condiict. 
 
 Marlowe, i Tamb. i, 2. 
 
 To wend with him and be his conduct true. 
 
 Spenser, F. Q. VI. xi, 35. 
 For conduct of all which. 
 
 Chapman, tr. of Iliad, i, 144.] 
 Other instances in N. E. D. 
 
 30. Confine { = boundary : Hamlet, I, i, 154 : 
 derivations in other passages). 
 A perfectly normal word, usually in the plviral : 
 
 Princes have less confines to their wills. 
 
 "^ Strype, Eccles. Mem. iv, 370. 
 
 The countries which confine there together. 
 
 North's Plutarch. 
 
 Also Hall's Chronicle, ii, 171 b. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Sir, said the King, I have divers confinS and neighbours. 
 
 Elyot, Govemour, B. i. c. 20. 
 
 He removed his camp as far from their confines as he could. 
 North, Life of Coriolanus (Shakespeare's Plutarch, p. 29). 
 
 Leaving the confines of fair Italy. 
 
 Locrine, I, i. 
 
 To which confines [of Wales] ... we will amain. 
 
 Peele, Edward I, Ed. Dyce, p. 386. 
 
 Other nations that us here confine. 
 
 Fairfax's tr. of Tasso's Jerusalem, B. v, st. 50. 
 
 Is the Sophi entered our confines ? 
 
 Selimus, 1. 959. 
 Fill all the confines with fire, sword, and blood. 
 
 Id.l. 1376. 
 To set thy feet within the Turkish confines. 
 
 Id.l. 2451. 
 T 
 
290 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Those tracts divine 
 That are the confines of the triple world. 
 
 Chapman, Eugenia, Indue. 1. 9. 
 Ye are at this present in the confines and borders of Babylon. 
 Philpot, Letter of iSSS- Parker Soc. vol. p. 239. 
 Even in the confines of mine age. 
 
 Daniel, Cleopatra, 1594, 1. 175. 
 In confines of the dead. 
 
 Id.l. 331. 
 We durst not continue longer so near her confines. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. pref. ch. viii, §1. 
 The confins of Rome. . . . The jurisdictions of confins. 
 
 Fenton's Guicciardini, 1579, p. 7. 
 We fight not, we, t'enlarge our scant confines. 
 
 Kyd, trans, of Gamier's Cornelia, v, $. 
 Ere this, I would have taught thee to usurp 
 Upon our confines. 
 
 The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (1600) iv, i. 
 And in your confines, with his lawless train, 
 Daily commits uncivil outrages. 
 
 Marlowe, i Tamb. i, i.] 
 
 31. Congreeing (Henry V, I, ii, 180). 
 
 Dr. Theobald observes that this is "a new word, 
 classically constructed if not classically derived. It is 
 probably an echo of congredior (congressus) or of con- 
 geno." (?) Mr. Willis rationally suggests that it is made 
 by combining " con " and " gree " = " agree " ; that is 
 to say, it is a pseudo-classical coinage, not the work of a 
 scholar. But the very existence of the word is doubtful. 
 The Quarto of 1608 has congrueth ; and the earlier 
 editors surmised that the Folio word was a misprint for 
 " congruing." Still, " congreeing " was a quite possible 
 coinage for one not restrained by scholarly usage. 
 
 32. Congruent ( = appropriate, suitable : L. L. L. I, 
 ii, 14). 
 
 Not agreeable nor congruent to his Majesty. 
 
 Elyot, Governour. 
 Good congruity. 
 
 Tyndale ; Parker Soc. ed. p. 337- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 291 
 
 [Add: 
 
 It is therefore congruent and according that . . . 
 
 Elyot, B. i, c. I, p. 5. 
 First, it is of good congruence that . . . 
 
 Id. B. i, c. 3, p. 17. 
 It shall not be incongruent to our matter. 
 
 Id. B. i, c. 13, p. 57. 
 Easy and congruent to his strength. 
 
 Id. B. i, c. 27, p. 112. 
 Of good reason and congruence. 
 
 Id. B. iii, c. 22.] 
 
 33. Consign ( = subscribe, ratify, jdeld : 2 Henry 
 IV, V, ii, 143 ; Henry V, V, ii, 326 ; Song in Cymbeline, 
 IV. ii). 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 My father hath consigned and confirmed mc. 
 
 T3mdale, Works, 457. 
 Laying their hands upon them and consigning them with holy 
 chri^. 
 
 Strype, Eccles. Mem. I, App. Ixxxviii, 245. 
 So that by baptism we are initiated and consigned into the 
 worship of one God. 
 
 Tyndale, Lord's Supper, 44. 
 Have all the prizes consigned into their hands 
 
 Wriothesley (1528) in Pocock, Rec. Ref. I, xii, 80. 
 
 34. Consist ( = Lat. consisto, to take a stand, &c. — 
 " Consist upon " : 2 Henry IV, IV, i, 185). 
 
 Quite common. The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 The English imperie consisteth on sure pillars. 
 
 ' Polydore Vergil, trans, circa 1534. 
 Parallelograms consisting upon equal bases. 
 
 -, Billingsley (1570) Euclid, I, xxxvi, 46. 
 This temple seemed to consist upon pillars of porphyry. 
 
 Segar (1602) Hon. Mil. and Civ. Ill, liv, §3, 197. 
 To think that the commonwealth consisted on his safety. 
 
 Greene, Pandosto, 1588. 
 
 35. Constringed (Troilus and Cressida, V, ii, 173). 
 
 Constringed with a muscle. 
 
 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy. 
 
292 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives " constringent " from Sir 
 C. Heydon in 1603, and " constringeth " from T. Wright 
 in 1604. The word was clearly current before Shake- 
 speare, though certainly rare. 
 
 36. Contain ( = contineo, restrain or encompass. 
 Shrew, Ind. I, 100 ; Troilus, V, ii, 180, &c.). Content 
 (from same root : Troilus, I, ii, 320). 
 
 Words used in these and various other senses long before 
 Shakespeare. See Oxford Dictionary, s. v. 
 
 37. Continent (sanie derivation) ; as in 
 
 The rivers have o'erbome their continents. 
 
 Mid. Night's Dream, II, i, 92. 
 
 So used by Bacon : " then is the continent greater than 
 the content." Hallam {see above, p. 253), cited and sup- 
 ported by Mr. G. Greenwood (Shakespeare Problem 
 Restated, p. 125), pointed to Shakespeare's use of this 
 word as an indication of "classical" knowledge. It 
 might or might not have been a reminiscence, but it is 
 certainly not a proof thereof. As a matter of fact, the 
 phrase " whereof the continent exceedeth the thing 
 contained " occurs in North's Plutarch, 1579 ; also in 
 Field's play A Woman is a Weathercock (1609), and 
 in Adams's Sermons (1612 : preached long before that 
 date). 
 
 [Further, the word is used in the sense of " bounds " 
 by Marlowe : 
 
 Afric and Europe bordering on your land, 
 And continent to your dominion. 
 
 I Tatnburlaine, i, 2. 
 
 Between this sense and the normal use of continent for 
 " that which contains," there is no room for ascribmg any 
 innovation to Shakespeare. 
 Compare : 
 
 Hark how loud the Greeks laugh, who did take 
 Thy fair form for a continent of parts as fair. 
 
 Chapman, trans, of Iliad, iii, 430 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 293 
 
 38. Contraction ( = drawing together, as in marriage : 
 Hamlet, III, iv, 45). 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 The mutual contractipn of a perpetual league. 
 
 Hakluyt's Voyages. 1598, i, 180. 
 The city of Palma, where there is great contraction for wines. 
 
 Id. II, ii. 316. 
 The merchants do leave their contractions and trafickes. 
 
 Parke's trans, of Mendoza's History of China 
 (1588) p. 74. 
 
 39. Contrive ( = pass away time : Taming of the 
 Shrew, I, ii, 276). 
 
 Tarry and abide here to contrive your time. 
 
 Painter's Palace of Pleasure, i, 1 16 b. 
 In travelling countries we three have contrived 
 Full many a year. 
 
 Edwards, Damon and Pithias. Hazlitt's Dodsley, 
 iv, 26. 
 
 [Compare Puttenham's title : " The Arte of English 
 Poesie contrived into three Bookes."] 
 
 40. Conveniences (= agreements. Othello, II, i, 234) 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 There is no convenience between Christ and Belial. 
 
 T. Sampson, in Strype's Eccles. Mentor. (1554) III, 
 App. xviii, p. 52. 
 This kind of man created God of a marvellous convenience with 
 all other manner of creatures. 
 
 SirT. More (1534), Works, 1274, i. 
 For the conclusion of such conveniences as were drawn and 
 articulated between the D. of Somerset and the said company. 
 
 (1551) Strype, II, xxix, 243. 
 The convenience of both their ages and estates. 
 
 Grafton's Chronicle (1568) ii, 772. 
 [Compare : 
 
 Again every sin, a remedy convenient. 
 
 Medwall's Interlude, Nature (c. 1490), Farmer's 
 Lost Tudor Plays, p. 123. 
 
 The word is constantly used with this force by Tudor 
 writers.] 
 
294 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 41. Convent (vb. from convenit : Twelfth Night, 
 V, i, 391). 
 
 This again is one of the primary and common uses 
 of the word. The Oxford Dictionary gives many 
 instances : 
 
 Unneth the Christians could safely convent in their own houses. 
 
 Foxe, Martyrs (1563-87). 
 Crescentius with the people conventing against the said 
 Gregorie. 
 
 Id. 
 The king conventing his nobles and clarkes together. 
 
 Grafton's Chronicle, ii, 56. 
 
 And each one to a divers sect convents. 
 
 Warner, Albion's England, ix, liii. 
 
 42. Conversation (used of thoughts or mental life: 
 All's Well, I, iii, 238). 
 
 As a consultation of the Concordance to the Bible 
 would soon make clear to any one, this word in Shake- 
 speare's day had a much wider range of meaning than it 
 now retains. " Walk and conversation " did not mean 
 " walk and talk." E.g. : 
 
 To him that ordereth his conversation aright will I show the 
 salvation of God. Ps. 1, 23. 
 
 Compare : 
 
 Both men and women whose conversation in old times was 
 beautified with singular gifts of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Miles Coverdale's pref . to Letters of Martyrs. 
 [Add : 
 
 In all conversation, deeds, laws, bargains, covenants, ordinances 
 and decrees of men. 
 
 Tjmdale's Answer to More, Parker Soc. rep. p. 56. 
 
 Andrew, being conversant in a city of Achaia called Patrae. 
 
 Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Cattley's ed. 1841, 
 i, 96. 
 
 The misorder of life and conversation. 
 
 Id. i, 4- 
 The life and conversation of the court of Rome. 
 
 Id. p. 6. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 295 
 
 To lay down their old conversation. Id. p. 74. 
 
 There is made conversant amonge men in authoritie a vice 
 very ugly and monstruouse . . . this monstre is called in 
 englysshe Detraction. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. iii, c. 27. 
 
 They that have their conversation in heaven under an undefiled 
 faith. 
 
 Bale, The Image of Both Churches, c. 1540. Parker Soc. 
 rep. p. 432. 
 
 Which shall in those da}^ live and be among men conversant. 
 Id. Pref. to First Exam, of Anne Askewe, rep. p. 137. 
 
 Sithence the time that the blessed Apostles were here conversant. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. pref. iv, §1. 
 
 To be reasonable . . . through all our moral conversation. 
 
 Pecock, Repressor of Over Much Blaming, Pt. iv, ch. 
 9 (Rolls ed. ii, 472). 
 
 To Christes Gk)spell jrour conversacyon apply. 
 
 Bale, Interlude of John the Baptist, Harl. Misc. rep. 
 1808, i, 207. 
 
 Your conversacyon, which is in a sore decay. 
 
 Id. p. 205. 
 He that bendeth to follow his own inclination 
 Must needs live a wicked and vile conversation. 
 
 Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, 1567, Percy 
 Soc. rep. p. 16. 
 
 And those that be thankful in their conversation. 
 
 Id. p. 27.] 
 
 Dr. Theobald connects Shakespeare's use of " conversa- 
 tion " with Bacon's phrase, " a man's tossing his thoughts," 
 concerning which Edward Fitzgerald said, " I know 
 not from what metaphor Bacon took his ' tosseth.' " 
 As usual, we are dealing with a common Elizabethan 
 phrase : 
 
 The cause is debated and tossed to and fro. 
 
 Rhemish New Testament, p. 89. 
 
 In tossing it often with myself to and fro. 
 Edwards, Damon and Pithias, Hazlitt's Dodsley, iv, 65. 
 
 And while he talked, great things 
 Toss'd in bis thought. 
 
 Fairfax's Tasso, ed. 1624, p. 326. 
 
296 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 [Add: 
 
 After often tossing it up and down in the mind. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. iii, c. 24, Dent's rep. p. 277. 
 
 With much and long deliberation to be resolved and tossed in 
 the mind. 
 
 Id. c. 28, p. 291. 
 Spend four or five years in tossing all the rules of grammar in 
 common schools. 
 
 Ascham, The Scholemaster, Arber's rep. p. 95. 
 
 Tossing and troubling young wits (making Latin verses). 
 
 Id. p. 10 1. 
 The mind . . . occupied in turning and tossing itself many 
 wa5rs. Id. p. no. 
 
 In his breast a thousand cares he tossed. 
 
 Fairfax's Tasso, B. v, st. 92. 
 
 He left him tossing in his thought 
 A thousand doubts. 
 
 Id. B. vi, St. 101. 
 I tost my imaginations a thousand wales. 
 Nashe, Pierce Penilesse ; Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 158. 
 
 Thus my conscience being tossed in the waves of a scrupulous 
 mind. 
 
 Heniy VIII, cited in Hdinshed's Histoiy. 
 
 Toss'd and tormented with the tedious thought. 
 
 Sackville, Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates, 
 St- 33- 
 
 Whose dryer brain 
 Is tost with troubled sights and fancies weak. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, B. i, c. i, st. 42. 
 
 That troublous dream gan freshly toss his brain. 
 
 Id. ib. St. SS- 
 With seven years' tossing necromantic charms. 
 Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Dyce, p. 172. 
 
 The fearful tossing, in the latest night. 
 Of papers full of necromatic charms. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 175- 
 The tempests of tossing fantasy. 
 Gascoigne, Adventures of F. J., Cunliffe's ed. of 
 Works, i, 421. 
 
 Tossing their light opinions to and fro. 
 
 Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 1599. ed. Grosart, i, 27.] 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 297 
 
 43. Convicted, Convince ( = defeat, overcome : John; 
 III, iv, 2 ; Macbeth, I, vii, 63). 
 
 Them to convince by force of arms- 
 Preston's Cambyses, 1570 : Hazlitt's Dodsley, iv, 174. 
 Hippolita being convicted by Theseus, for her singular stout- 
 ness and courage was married to him. 
 
 Pilgrim Princes, 1607. 
 
 ["Convince" for "convict" was a standing usage. 
 See the Authorised Version, Job, xxxii, 12 ; John, viii, 
 46 ; xvi, 8 ; Acts xviii, 28 ; i Cor. xiv, 24 ; Tit. i, 9 ; 
 James, ii, 9 ; Jude, 15. Could not the Baconians consult 
 even this source for Elizabethan and Jacobean English ? 
 Of course Bacon used the word, like every one dse. 
 Convict = overcome is equally common, and convince 
 thus = overcome. In the Coventry Mysteries we have : 
 
 By the fruit of your [Mary's] body was convycte his [Satan's] 
 vyolens. 
 
 Sh. Soc. ed. p. 388. 
 
 So in the old morality play. Mankind, c. 1475 (Farmer's 
 
 Lost Tudor Plays, pp. 18-19) : 
 
 My father, Mercy, advised me to be of a good cheer. 
 And again my enemies manly for to fight. 
 I shall convict them, I hope, every one. 
 
 " Conviction," with this force, occurs in Chapman's 
 
 C£SAR AND PoMPEY, V, I. 
 
 Compare : 
 
 Bom slavish barbarism to convince. 
 Chapman, Sonnets appended to trans, of Homer, 13. 
 
 Chimera the invincible, he sent him to convince. 
 
 Id. trans, of Iliad, vi, 182. 
 
 Come ye to convince the mightiest conqueror ? 
 
 Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, 1567, Percy 
 Soc. rep. p. II. 
 For surely there was no great need to detect and convince the 
 flattery of Melanthius . . . 
 
 Holland's trans, of Plutarch's Moralia. Dent's 
 selection, p. 41. 
 By what different marks shall he be known and convinced . . . 
 
 Id. p. 45. 
 
298 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 When they [the Catilinarians] were convinced in open Senate. 
 North, trans, of Life of Ccssar. Skeat's Sh. 
 Plutarch, p. 48. 
 These backbiters and slanderers must be convinced. 
 
 Latimer, Third Sermon before Edward VI. Dent's 
 rep. p. 112. 
 I must stop their mouths, convince, refel, and confute. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Now you look finely indeed. Win ! this cap does convince. 
 
 Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, i, i. 
 Our Persian monarch makes his frown convince 
 The strongest truth. 
 
 Daniel, Philotas, 1. 1804. 
 Whose wit . . . 
 Secret conspiracies could well convince. 
 
 Greene, A Maiden's Dream, 1591, st. 17.] 
 
 44. Crescive (Henry V, I, i. 65). 
 
 " When Shakespeare was a child of three years of age," 
 remarks Judge Willis, " Drant [trans, of Horace] was 
 writing : ' The dragons, with proper breasts, do nurse 
 their cresyve young.' " 
 
 45. Crisp ( = curling or waving : Tempest, IV, i, 
 130 ; I Henry IV, I, iii, 106 ; Timon, IV, iii, 183). 
 
 Common. The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from 
 Cooper's Thesaurus, 1565-73 ; T. Watson, 1583 ; 
 Gerard's Herbal, 1597 ; Higden, 1432, &c. 
 
 [Compare : 
 
 Canst drink the waters of the crispdd spring ? 
 
 Patient Grissel, i, i ; again in iv, 2. 
 Thy dainty hiair so curled and crisped now. 
 
 Drayton, Idea, 8. 
 Her hair disordered, brown, and crispdd wiry. 
 
 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, son. 13. 
 Young I'd have him too, and fair. 
 Yet a man ; with crispdd hair. 
 
 Jonson, Underwoods, ix. 
 Crisp4d Germans (" Curi'd Sicambrians," four lines later). 
 
 Id. Sejanus, iii, i- 
 
 Crispfid groves. 
 
 Id. The Devil is an Ass, ii, 2.] 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 299 
 
 46. Decimation (" a tithed death " : Timon, V, iv, 31). 
 It is needless to go further for this than North's 
 
 Plutarch, used by Shakespeare : 
 
 Antonius executed the decimation. For he divided his men 
 by ten legions, and then of them he put the tenth legion to death. 
 
 47. Defused ( = confused. Lear, I, iv, i). 
 See Oxford Dictionary for many instances. 
 
 [The variorum edition gives instances from John 
 Maplet's A Green Forest, or A Natural History, 
 1567 ; Greene's Farewell to Folly, 1591, and 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's Passionate Man. Add : 
 Greene's Planetomachia : Works, ed. Grosart, v, 126 ; 
 Edward III (sp. diffused) v, i, 126.] 
 
 48. Degenerate (implying loss of caste or status, as 
 in Troilus and Cressida, II, ii, 154). 
 
 The primary and then common sense of the term. 
 
 Do degenerate from the nobleness of their stock. 
 
 Lewkenor, trans, of Cardinal Contrareno's Republic 
 of Venice. 1 599, p. 1 1 1 . 
 
 Degenerate from the examples of our elders. 
 
 Foxe's trans, of the Emperor's letter against 
 Luther, 1560. 
 Nothing degenerating from so worthy a father. 
 
 Camden. 1603. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 That for an evil member two or three, 
 Or more or less, that be degenerate, 
 And fallen from their office and degree. 
 
 Thynne, Debate between Pride and Lowli- 
 ness (c. 1570) Sh. Soc. rep. p. 45.] 
 
 49. Deject (adj. = dejedus : also verb : Troilus, II, 
 ii, 49, 121). 
 
 A perfectly common usage. 
 
 Be not of a deject mind for these temptations. 
 
 Letter of the Martyr Philpot, 1555. 
 
 Christ dejected himself. 
 
 Udal, trans, of Erasmus' Paraphrase. 
 
300 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Good writers deject me too too much. 
 
 Florio's Montaigne. 
 
 [Compare : 
 
 Is't possible that Stukly, so deject 
 
 In England, lives in Spain in such respect. 
 
 The Play of Stucley, Simpson's rep. Sch. of Sh. i, 
 pp. 234-S- 
 Dejected [= deposed] lady. You do forget yourself. 
 
 You are not wise, dejected [=deposed] as you are. 
 
 No-Body and Some-Body, vol. last cit. pp. 303, 315. 
 
 Her authority began immediately to be dejected. 
 
 Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini, 1579, P- 12. 
 
 Where there is a true and perfect merit 
 There can be no dejection. 
 
 Jonson, The Poetaster, 1601, v. i. 
 
 I cannot too much diminish and deject myself. 
 
 Chapman, pref . to trans, of Iliad. 
 
 Men deject. Gold and his dejections. 
 
 Id. Hymns In Noctem and In Cynthiam.] 
 
 50. Delated, and delation (? = delivering over, 
 accusing : Hamlet, I, ii, 36). 
 Judge Willis cites : 
 
 Delated to the Presbyterie. 
 
 Res. Kirk of Scotland, March 7, 1575. 
 
 [The word was thus used in Scotch legal and ecclesiastical 
 procedure for centuries. But, according to Steevens and 
 Malone (notes on Othello, III, iii, 124, var. ed.) it was 
 not so used in England ; and the word in Hamlet is 
 read by most commentators as == dilated. (See No. 56, 
 below.) That is the actual reading of the Folios, " de- 
 lated " being foimd only in the Quartos. And " delated 
 articles " would be a blundering use of the Roman term, 
 adopted in Scots law. The word had at that date no 
 English legal currency in the Roman sense. Drummond 
 in his Conversations makes Ben Jonson say that " he 
 was delated by Sir James Murray to the King for writing 
 . . . against the Scots in . . . Eastward Ho;" but 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 301 
 
 that may be Drummond's own use of a Scots law term, 
 though Jonson in Volpone (ii, 3) has : 
 
 Yet, if I do it not, they may delate 
 My slackness to my patron. 
 
 Volpone is dated 1605 ; and the word may have come 
 in with King James. Dr. Theobald is obUvious of the 
 fact that Bacon never uses " delate " in that sense, 
 whereas he does use it in the sense of " conveyance " 
 of sound and Ught — an extension of the force of " dilate." 
 It is probable that if Shakespeare wrote " delated " he 
 meant " dilated " ; and in his use of that word he made 
 no " classical " innovation.] 
 
 51. Demerits ( = merits : Othello, I, ii, 24). 
 
 For his demerits called the good Duke of Gloucester. 
 
 Hall's Chronicle, 1348, p. 151. 
 [Add: 
 
 Demonstrations of prowez and valoure diverslic distributed 
 according to the qusilities and worthines of the parsons de- 
 mereting the same. 
 
 Herald's document of 1568, cited by Dyce in 
 biog. idtrod. to Middleton's Works, 1840, i, p.x.] 
 
 52. Demise (Richard III, iv, 246). 
 
 Claimed by Dr. Theobald as " a legal term used once 
 by Shakespeare and by no other poet " — a random asser- 
 tion based, not on any study of Elizabethem poetry, but 
 on the simple fact that the Oxford Dictionary gives no 
 other poetic instance ! 
 
 53. Depend (Cymbeline, IV. iii, 22 ; Othello I, iii, 
 
 369). 
 
 [An unintelligible claim. All the meanings of "de- 
 pend ' ' are close to the primary. The sense in Cymbeline 
 is the common one of " pending."] 
 
 54. Deprave, depravation ( = slander. Troilus and 
 Cressida, V, ii, 130). 
 
 Dr. Theobald actually notes this as the primary 
 meaning. As such it was then in common use. 
 
;02 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The word is used in this sense by Chaucer (CoM- 
 'LEYNT OF Mars, 1. 207) ; and it remained fixed. 
 [Compare : 
 
 I kam nought to chide 
 Ne deprave thi persone. 
 
 Piers Plowman, 1. 1714. 
 Misjudging and depraving other men. 
 
 More's Diaiogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, 
 1534, Dent's rep., p. 223. 
 
 Then sought they to deprave [ = defame] the translation, 
 aotes, etc. 
 
 Foxe, Ep. ded. to Acts and Monuments ; Cattley's 
 ed. i. 503. 
 
 Easier to deprave all things than to amend anything. 
 
 Stubbes, Ep. ded. to Anatomic of Abuses, 1583. 
 
 Even such a man as Homer wanted not his malicious depravers. 
 Chapman, Ep. ded. to trans, of Achilles' Shield. 
 
 Homer, ... an host of men against any depraver of any 
 principle he held. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 The worse depraving [ = slandering] the better. 
 
 Id. Ep. ded. to trans, of Hesiod. 
 
 Herodotus is unjustly said to praise only the Athenians, that 
 all Grecians else he might the more freely deprave. 
 
 Id., A Justification of ' Perseus and Andromeda.' 
 
 He to deprave and abuse the virtue of an herb so generally 
 received ! 
 
 Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, iii, 2. 
 
 As distant from depraving another man's merit as proclaiming 
 his own. 
 
 Id. Cynthia's Revels, ii, i. 
 To malign and deprave him. 
 
 Pref. to Latimer's Second Sermon before Edward VI, 1549. 
 
 Lewdly thou my love depravest. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, V, vii, 32. 
 
 They honoured their benefactors, we deprave and deface them. 
 Hutchinson, First Sermon, Of Oppression, &c. 
 Parker Soc. rep., p. 309. 
 
 Depravers of those that be good. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528, Whitting- 
 ham's rep. p. 72. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 303 
 
 I merveyll that ye can this wise him deprave. 
 
 Comish or Heywood, Interlude of The Four 
 Elements, Percy Soc. rep. p. 18.J 
 
 55. Derogate (adj.), derogation (Lear, I, iv, 302 ; 
 Cymbeline, II, i, 48). 
 
 [Another common use of a term. Derogate is used as 
 = derogated. The sense here is not " classical " at all. 
 As Malone pointed out, the idea is "shrunken." Lear 
 is speaking of a withered or shrunken body — a meta- 
 phorical appUcation of the term. Bullokar's English 
 Expositor, 1616, gives for "derogate" the meaning 
 ." impair, diminish." So Hutchinson : 
 
 This endless punishment of the wicked is no derogation to 
 God's great mercy. 
 
 The Image of God. or Layman's Book, 1550, ch. xi. 
 
 Compare Tyndale (or Frith) : 
 
 An3rthing that should derogate, minish or hurt his [God's] glory. 
 The Supper of the Lord, Parker Soc. rep. of T)mdale, 
 iii, 232. 
 It includeth repugnance, and derogateth his glory. Id. ib. 
 Hooper : — ^This ungodly opinion . . . doth derogate the mercy 
 of God. 
 
 Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker Soc. rep. p. 131. 
 Elyot : — ^Whereby no law or justice should be derogate. 
 
 The Governour, B. ii, 6 ; Dent's rep. p. 1 39. 
 Hooker : — We should be injurious unto virtue itself, if we did 
 derogate from them whom their industry hath made great. 
 
 Eccles. Pol. pref . ch. ii, §7. 
 Latimer : — What dishonour is this to God ? or what derogation 
 is this to heaven ? 
 
 Sermon of the Plough. 
 Doth this derogate an3rthing from his [Christ's] death ? 
 
 Id. Seventh Sermon before Edward VI. (Several times.) 
 Tjmdale, 1533 : — ^Doth not derogate or minish the honour of 
 the order. 
 
 Trans, of Erasmus' Enchiridion, Methuen's rep. p. 22.J 
 
 56. Dilated (All's Well, II, i, 58 ; Troilus, II, 
 
 iii. 259)- 
 An ordinary use of the word. 
 By urgent cause erected forth my grief for to dilate. 
 
 Preston's Cambyses (1566) : Hazlitt's Dodsley, iv, 192. 
 
304 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 [Add: 
 
 These and suchlike things I have dilated and expounded unto 
 you in the pulpit. 
 
 Latimer, First Sermon on the Lord's Prayer, ed. 1582. 
 Here I might dilate the matter. 
 
 Id. Seventh Sermon before Edward VI. 
 Which through all the world is dilated. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528, preamble. 
 If we would dilate, and were able to declare . . . 
 
 More, Dialogue of Comfort, rep. p. 348. 
 Which being spread and dilated both wide and broad to the 
 edifpng of the hearers. 
 
 T3aidale, trans, of Erasmus' Enchiridion, 1533. 
 Methuen's rep. p. 61 . 
 Were able to increase and dilate, to colour and garnish, any 
 manner thing never so barren, simple, or homely. 
 
 Id. p. 148. 
 I lack tyme to dylate matter here. 
 
 J. Heywood's Dialogue on Wit and Folly, Percy 
 Soc. rep. p. II.] 
 
 57. Discoloured (K. John, II, i, 305). 
 
 [Again a perfectly ordinary use. Dr. Theobald notes 
 
 it in Marlowe, for him = Bacon. But it occurs also in 
 
 Peele: 
 
 Enamell'd with discoloured flowers, 
 
 David and Bethsdbe, Sc. i, 
 
 where the phrase has the same force as '.'. parti-coloured 
 
 flowers " in Locrine; ii, i. 
 
 And it is frequent in Spenser : 
 
 All in a kirtle of discoloured say. 
 
 F. Q. I, iv, 31. 
 In garments light. 
 Discoloured like to womanish disguise. 
 
 Id. III. X, 21. 
 Her [Ids'] discoloured bow. 
 
 Id. Ill, xi, 47. 
 
 Also in Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, V, ii, twice.] 
 
 58. Dissemble (Twelfth Night, IV, ii, 5-6). 
 
 Mr. Willis remarks that the word was in universal 
 use long before 1590. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 305 
 
 DDr. Theobald seems to suppose, with Cowden Clarke, 
 
 that to speak of " dissembliag " by way of a material 
 
 disguise is a remarkable reversion to classic usage. It 
 
 was really common, notably through many stories of 
 
 disguised personages. Greene has : 
 
 Dissembling yourself a shepherd. 
 
 Menaphon ; Works, vi, 144 ; 
 
 and " cloked dissimulation " occurs in Rede me and be 
 
 NOTT Wrothe, 1528.] 
 
 59. Distract : distraction ( = dividing, breaking up. 
 Othello I, iii, 323 ; All's Well, V, iii, 34 ; Antony, 
 
 III, vii, 42, 77). 
 
 Shunning that distraction of jwrsons wherein Nestorius went 
 awry. 
 
 Hooker, Ecdes. Pol. V, 52, §4 ; 53, §2. 
 
 60. Document ( = teaching or example : Hamlet, 
 
 IV, v, 178). 
 
 [Dr. Theobald cites the special use of documentum = 
 example, by Tacitus, Agric. ii, 3. Having consulted the 
 Oxford Dictionary or a commentator, he avows that 
 " the word is similarly used by Spenser," (" heavenly 
 documents did preach," F. Q. I, x, 19,) and by Raleigh 
 (in the phrase "stoned to death as a docmnent to 
 others "), but claims that " Shakespeare's use of the word 
 corresponds more exactly to the classic sense." 
 
 This is not the fact; but in any case Shakespeare 
 was using the word as it had been used on the stage. 
 In the Interlude of The Trial of Treasure, 1567, it 
 occurs f ovir times : 
 
 Sapience. Truthe, indeed, and therefore, your name being 
 Juste, 
 With me and my documentes must be associate. 
 
 Juste. Seeing Sapience consisteth in heavenly document. 
 And that heavenly document consisteth in Sapience. 
 
 Time. . . . And you shall beholde the same in this glasse 
 As a document both profitable and safe. 
 
 Percy Soc. rep. pp. 18, 20, 40. 
 u- 
 
3o6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 See also Greene : 
 
 Her [Theology's] documents are severity. 
 
 Greene's Vision, 1592 ; Works, xii, 279, 
 
 Daniel : 
 
 You [library and lands] the happy monuments 
 Of Charity and Zeal . . . are documents 
 To shew what glory hath the surest hold. 
 
 Dedicatory lines to Works, folio, 1601 ; 
 
 and Painter : 
 
 A goodly document to men of like calling to moderate them- 
 selves [the case of Appius]. 
 
 Palace of Pleasure, 1566, Tom. i, Nov. 5, end.] 
 
 61. Double (" as double as " : Othello, I, ii, 92), 
 See the New Oxford Dictionary for instances. [Compare : 
 
 So double was his pains, so double be his praise. 
 
 Spenser, F. Q. II, ii, 25. 
 Be he never so first in the commission of wit. 
 
 Jonson, Barth. Fair, Induction.] 
 
 62, Eminent ( = physically lofty : All's Well, I, 
 ii, 41). 
 
 The primary and normal meaning ! Compare " an 
 eminence." 
 
 If a person shall be excommunicate, he shall sit in a public 
 place and eminent. 
 
 Res. Kirk of Scotland, 1569. 
 Two piked rocks lift up their eminent heads. 
 
 Sandys' Travels, 1610. 
 The super-eminent mountain. 
 
 Id. p. 221. 
 [Add: 
 
 He made . . . trees of a more eminent stature than herbs. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour. i, i. 
 My lord's eminent shoulder. 
 
 Jonson, Sejanus, v, 9. 
 The most high and eminent part of the temple. 
 
 Fenton's Guicciardini, i Sjg, p- 4- 
 Was his father of any eminent place or means ? 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, i, i- 
 Men of eminent places. 
 
 Chapman, Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, iv, i.J 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 307 
 
 63. Epitheton (L.L.L. I, ii, 14). " A word not likely to be 
 used except by a classical scholar," says Dr. Theobald. 
 
 [It is a word that might have been used by a schoolboy 
 who had heard it from his master ; and it might or might 
 not be used by scholars; because "epithet," though 
 it occurs thrice in Shakespeare and is used by Jonson 
 (Poetaster, iv, i), was still in process of being naturalized. 
 Gascoigne indeed uses it repeatedly (pref . ep. to The 
 Posies, 1575 ; Certayne Notes of Instruction ; 
 and first ed. of The Adventures of Master F. J. — 
 Cunliffe's ed. of Works, i, 5, 465, 493) ; and King James 
 has Epithetis (Scot. pi. = Epithets) in his Replis and 
 Cautelis of Scottis Poesie, 1585 (Arber's rep. p. 64) — 
 both probably cop5dng a French usage. Puttenham, 
 who had been educated abroad, and often follows French 
 forms, has Epithete and Epithet as well as Epitheton 
 (Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. pp. 187, 188, 
 193, 261, 262) ; and Chapman, the scholarly, has 
 " epethite," rhyming with light (Third Sestiad of Hero 
 AND Leander ; also in verses To the Author of Nennio, 
 1595 ; Shepherd's ed. of Minor Poems, pp. 49, 71). 
 But the Greek form was also crnrent.] 
 
 Epitheton was certainly in EngUsh use before the writing 
 of Love's Labour's Lost : 
 
 E.g. : Divers thought Theophilus to be a name appellative . . . 
 but the epitheton . . . that is joined with it difEereth from that 
 opinion. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin's Harmony, 1584, p. i. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary g^ves instances from Hooper, 
 Foxe, HoUnshed, and the Douay Bible. 
 [Add: 
 
 Your Epitheton or qualifier . . . serves also to alter and enforce 
 the sense. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 193. 
 
 Which natural and proper quality [moisture] in my judgment 
 caused the ancient poets to attribute this Epitheton unto 
 Venus : Alma, ab alendo. 
 
 Greene, Planeiomachia. 1585 : Works, v, loi. 
 
3o8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 These epithetons that Homer assigned to Ulysses. 
 
 Greene's Mourning Garment, 1590 : Works, ix, 130. 
 
 The hip is not simply the red berry on the briar, unless you add 
 this epitheton and say. . . 
 
 F. Th3ame's Animadversions on Speight, 1599. in 
 Todd's Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer, 18 10, 
 
 P-4S- 
 With some sweet-smelling pink epitheton. 
 
 Marston, Satires, iii. 
 This blade . . . 
 May very well bear a feminine Epitheton. 
 
 Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, I, iii, 77.] 
 
 64. Err, errant, erring ( == roving : Othello, I, iii, 
 362 ; Hamlet, I, i, 154). 
 Again a perfectly common use : 
 
 Errand, vagabond, wavering persons. 
 
 King on Jonah, 1594, p. 141- 
 Erring or wandering stars. 
 
 Adams' Sermons, 1605 to 1620. i, 10. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 An erringe pylgrym in the servyse of . . . God. 
 
 Lay Folks' Mass Book, 1400. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 The erring stars. 
 
 Chapman, Epist. ded. to trans, of Odyssey. 
 The erring dolphin. 
 
 Id. Eugenia : Inductio. 
 Cynthia, lowest of the erring stars. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, v, i, 1. 2. 
 
 An " arrant rogue " was simply an " errant " or wander- 
 ing rogue. Compare " most errant traitors." Bale, 
 Process against Cobham, Works, Parker Soc. ed. p. 50- 
 See Extravagant, below. No. 77.] 
 
 65. Evitate (Merchant, V. v, 241). 
 
 " An attempt, not successful, to introduce a new word,' 
 says Dr. Theobald, with his usual fatal confidence. It 
 occurs in Parker's trans, of Mendoza's History of 
 China, 1588. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 309 
 
 66. Exempt ( = excluded, banished : Comedy of 
 Errors, II, ii, 173). 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives inter alia : 
 
 Exempted from Sathan, to live forever with Christ. 
 
 T. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (1553). 39- 
 Exempted and banished (as it were) from the House of the 
 Lord. 
 
 1563. Homilies, II. 
 He hist ; for nature now had cleane exempt All other 
 speech. 
 
 Golding's Ovid, Metam. iv, 97 (1593). 
 I'll exempt them [flowers] all from my smell. 
 
 Greene, Arcadia, 1589. 
 
 Themselves [the Thebans] only exempted, from -treaty of 
 peace. 
 
 North's Plutarch, Agesilaus. 
 [Compare : 
 
 A quarter not altogether exempted from witches. 
 
 Nashe, Terrors of the Night ; Works, ed. McKeirow, 
 
 i. 382. 
 See also the passage from Beggars' Petition, under 
 No. 177, hereinafter.] 
 
 67. Exhaust (" from fools exhaust [ = draw out] 
 
 their mercy " : Timon, IV, iii, 118). 
 
 Innumerable sums of money, craftily exhausted out of this 
 realm. 
 
 Act 32 Hen. VIII, c. 29. 
 
 Charges enforced have exhaust the most part of }rour 
 substance. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour. 
 [Add: 
 
 By little and little exhaust by the negligence and folly of 
 ignorant emperors. 
 
 Id. B. iii, c. 23. 
 
 Compare our phrase " to exhaust the air ' ' from a receiver.] 
 
 68. Exhibition ( = maintenance : Two Gentlemen, 
 L iii. 68). 
 
 In constant use in this sense before Shakespeare. See 
 
310 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Oxford Dictionary. Latimer uses the word in his 
 Sermon on the Plough. 
 
 69. Exigent, sb. (i Henry VI, II, v, 8). 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives, inter alia : 
 
 These by degrees passed to the last exigent. 
 
 A. Day, English Secretary, 1586. 
 Driven her to some desperate exigent. 
 
 Dr. DoddypoU, iv, 3. 
 The duke seeing himself to be driven to such an exigent. 
 
 Holinshed, Chron. 1577, ii, 3. 
 Also Sidney's Arcadia (1580), B. iv, ed. 1622, p. 413. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Now was Zelmanc brought to an exigent. 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, B. ii, ed. 1627, p. 98.] 
 
 70. Exorcist, exerciser ( = one who calls up spirits : 
 Julius Cesar, II, i, 323 ; Cymbeline, IV, ii, 276) ; 
 Exorcism (2 Henry VI, I, iv, 4). 
 
 I do conjure you smd do exorcise you . . . that you do come 
 unto me. 
 
 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1589. 
 
 This ghost of Tucca . . . was raised up by new exorcisms. 
 
 Dekker, Satiromastix. 
 
 71. Expedient (= expeditious : K. John, II, i, 60); 
 Expedition (Macbeth, II, iii, 116, &c.). 
 
 In our ways we be expedient. 
 
 Digby Mysteries, 1485 : 1882 rep, iii, 817. 
 The King shall showe his good grace and favour in the expedision 
 thereof. 
 
 Paston Letters, 1464, No. 493. 
 
 72. Expostulate ( = postulate, inquire, discuss : Hamlet, 
 II. ii, 86). 
 
 Having at large expostulated my true meaning. 
 
 A. Day, English Secretary, 1586. 
 
 The Ambassador hearing and expostulating the matter . . . 
 
 Sandys' Travels, 1610, ed. 1637. p. 86- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 311 
 
 [Add : 
 
 Nay, stand not to expostulate : make haste. 
 
 Trtie Tragedie of Richard Duke of York, Morley's 
 
 ed., with Richard III, p. 155. 
 Line varied in First Part of the Contention, Morley's 
 ed., with 2 Henry VI, p. 191. 
 Nor gave he him [Christ] any Commission to expostulate 
 proudly of injuries. 
 
 Nashe, Chrisfs Teares over Jerusalem, 1593, Sthpar. 
 
 Gentlie expostulated their ill dealing. 
 
 Id. ib. 6th par.] 
 
 73. Expulsed (= expelled : i Henry VI, III, iii, 25). 
 A very common word : 
 
 Satomus, expulsed of Jupiter his son. 
 
 Higden. 1432. 
 
 Adam our first parent was expulsed from Paradise. 
 
 Stubbes. Anatomie of Abuses, ii. 49. 
 
 Almighty God expulsed sin. 
 
 Fisher, Seven Penitent Psalms, 1505 : Works, 
 p. 115. 
 Isabel Queen of Naples being expulsed the realm. 
 
 Strype, Eccles. Memor. iv, 369. 
 
 Of whom but a woman was it 'long on 
 That Adam was expulsed from Paradise ? 
 
 Calisto and Melebea, circa 1530, II. 175-6- 
 They which should honour thee shall expulse thee. 
 
 Henry Smith, ed. 161 1, p. 186. 
 
 Sandsrs' Travels, 1610, has the word seven times. Ed. 1637, 
 PP- IS. 36. 107, 142, 144, 145, 222. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 They expulsed it from thence. 
 
 Roye. Rede me and be nott Wrothe. 1528. Whitting- 
 ham's rep. p. 140. 
 
 The expulsdd Apicata. 
 
 Jonson, Sejanus, v, 10. 
 
 God found just matter and justification to expulse the inhabi- 
 tants of that land. 
 
 Hooper, Declaration of the Ten Commandments, 
 1550. pref. 
 
312 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 They shall seek occasion to expuise me out of this city. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. ii, 12 ; Dent's rep. 
 P- ^73- 
 The apostles and disciples expulsed out of Jewry. 
 
 Bale, Image of Both Churches : Works, Parker 
 Soc. ed. p. 336. 
 Whyles those th3mges be expulsed and voyded. 
 
 Robinson's trans, of More's Utopia ; Dent's rep. 
 P-77- 
 Expulsed were we with injurious arms. 
 
 Fairfax's trans, of Tasso's Jerusalem, iv, 12.] 
 
 74. Extenuate ( = make less, take away from : M. N, D., 
 I. i, 120). 
 
 Merely an application of the ordinary term to some- 
 thing not a fault — ^in which latter sense the modem use 
 is weakly restricted. In the trans, of Calvin's Harmony 
 OF THE Gospels, 1584, we have " extenuate the God- 
 head." Compare : 
 
 Extenuating, annulling their virtues ; aggravating their 
 imperfections. 
 
 Huish on the Lord's Prayer (1623). Lect. 18, p. 11. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances of " extenuate " 
 in the physical sense from Elyot (1533), Hakluyt's 
 Voyages (1599), Stubbes (1583), Morwjmg (1559), Chester 
 (1601), and Holland's Pliny (1601). 
 
 [Add: 
 
 To hide or extenuate the judgment of God against sin. 
 
 Hooper, Declaration of Christ and his Office, Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. 92. 
 
 They . . . extenuate God's ire and displeasure against idolatty 
 too much. 
 
 Id. Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, p. 151.] 
 
 75. Extirp (= extirpate, M. for M., Ill, ii, 109). 
 Perfectly common. 
 
 Extyrpe all heresy. 
 
 Wm. Barlow to Henry VIII, 1533. 
 Extirping ... of vyce and sin. 
 
 Act 27 Hen. VIII. c. 28. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 313 
 
 Extirping out all popery. 
 
 Latimer, Sermons on the Lord's Prayer, vi. 
 [Add: 
 
 That may extirpe or raze these tyramiies. 
 
 Kyd, Cornelia, Act iv, Sc. 2, 178. 
 He shall extiip and pluck away altogether. 
 
 Latimer, First Sermon before Edward VI.] 
 
 76. Extracting (" a most extracting frenzy," Twelfth 
 Night, V, i, 288). 
 
 [" Used in a singularly classic way," says Dr. Theobald. 
 It is doubtful whether the word is not a misprint for 
 (distracting ! But Malone cites from the old Hystorie 
 OF Hamblet the phrase : "to try if men of great accoimt 
 be extract out of their wits." This is pre-Shakespearean 
 and popular : the story must have been printed before 
 1608, the date of the only surviving copy, as it is demon- 
 strably anterior to the play.] 
 
 77. Extravagant (Hamlet, I, i, 54). 
 
 Rogues, extravagants and stragglers. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, 1583. 
 [Add: 
 
 This extravagant and errant rogue. 
 
 Chapman, Byron's Tragedy, 1608, v, i.J 
 
 The cant term " stravagant," with the force of " vaga- 
 bond," appears in several old pla3rs. The term was 
 evidently in official use, and popularly curtailed.] 
 
 78. Facinorous (= wicked : All's Well, II, iii, 35). 
 
 Facinorous and vile persons. 
 
 Str3rpe's Annals, ed. 1824, vii, 133. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives another instance from 
 
 Hall's Chronicle, 1548. 
 
 [Compare : 
 
 AU facinorous acts that could be named. 
 
 Jonson, The Silent Woman, ii, i.] 
 
 79. Fact (= act : Macbeth, III, vi, 10). 
 
 As Judge Willis remarks, " fact " in this sense is in 
 
314 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 absolutely universal use in Tudor literature. Only on 
 entirely ignorant of that literature could cite it as specia 
 to Shakespeare and Bacon. 
 
 80. Fatigate (= fatigued : Coriolanus, II, ii, 121). 
 Occurs at least six times in Elyot's Governour ! 
 
 81. Festinate (Lear, III, vii, 9). 
 
 " Festination " occurs frequently : Elyot, The Imagi 
 OF Governance, 1541 ; The Disobedient Child (Haz 
 litt's Hodsley, ii. 310 ; Chapman, Jonson, and Marston 
 Eastward Ho, ii, i. 
 
 [Painter's Palace of Pleasure, T. i, Nov. 4 ; rep 
 1813, p. 18 ; Interlude Respublica, 1553 : Farmer's 
 Lost Tudor Plays, p. 204.] 
 
 .82. Fine ( = the end : All's Well, IV, iv, 35 : 
 Hamlet, V, i, 115). 
 
 A particularly absurd instance of " innovation." The 
 word occurs scores of times in Chaucer, who uses it sis 
 times in a single stanza of Troilus and Criseyde (v, 262). 
 
 83. Frustrate (Antony, V, i, i : Tempest, III, iii, 
 10). 
 
 The ordinary force of the word . Instances unnecessary. 
 
 84. Gratulate (Titus Andronicus, I, i, 221). 
 
 An extremely common word in Elizabethan drama. 
 Occurs frequently in Greene and Peele and other play- 
 wrights before Shakespeare ; also in Spenser. 
 
 85. Illustrate ( = illustrious : Love's Labour's Lost, 
 IV, i, 65 ; V, i, 128). 
 
 Mr. Willis gives several instances of the inj&nitive to 
 illustrate in the sense of = " make famous." The parti- 
 ciple occurs in the epistle dedicatory to Chapman's trans. 
 of the Iliad, 1594 : 
 
 Her substance yet being too pure and illustrate to be discerned 
 with ignorant and barbarous sense ; 
 also in the translation, B. iv, 74, &c. ; also in the phrase 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 315 
 
 "her illustrate brightness " in Jonson's Ode ivdova-iaariKv. 
 In Chester's Love's Martyr. The word is altered by 
 Gifford in his edition to " illustrious.") 
 
 86. Immanity (= immanitas : i Henry VI, V, i, 13). 
 Occurs in one of the non-Shakespearean plays. Dr. 
 
 Theobald, more suo, pronovinces it " evidently an un- 
 successful attempt to anglicise a Latin word." If so, 
 the attempt was not Shakespeare's. It occurs in Dent's 
 RuiNE OF Rome, 1590, p. 112 ; and in Adams's Sennons. 
 These writers were not likely to adopt a play-house 
 coinage. And the word is used by Fielding in Joseph 
 Andrews. • 
 
 [See it also in Fleming's Continuation of Holinshed's 
 Chronicle, 1587, iii, 1557 ; in the " Declaration of the 
 Favourable Dealings of Her Majestie's Commissioners 
 appointed for the Examination of Certaine Traitours," 
 1583 (Rep. in Harl. Misc. ed. 1808, i, 515) ; and in the 
 play A Warning for Faire Women (1599), ii, 2. Chap- 
 man has " immane " at least twice : Postscript to trans, 
 of Hymns of Homer, 1. 5 from end ; Ep. ded. to A Justi- 
 fication OF A Strange Action of Nero.] 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from Foxe's 
 Martyrs, 1563-70, ed. 1684, iii, 649) and from North's 
 translation of Guevara's Diall of Princes, 1557 ; and 
 mentions that the word is used by Fotherby in 1619, and 
 by Bentley. [Add that it occurs at least half a dozen 
 times in Daniel's Collection of the History of 
 England (1612-18), and the scope of Dr. Theobald's 
 erudition will be broadly gauged.] 
 
 87. Imminent (Julius C^sar, II, ii, 81, &c.). 
 Normal use of the word. See Oxford Dictionary. 
 
 " Imminence," says Dr. Theobal<f, " occurs only once, 
 and is evidently coined by the poet " (Troilus, V, x, 13). 
 
 88. Immures (noim : Troilus and Cressida, Prol. 8). 
 The word occurs in a prologue which has long been 
 
3i6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 held by critics to be non-Shakespearean, It is a bad 
 coinage in any case, being framed by mere imitation 
 from " mures." 
 
 89. Impertinency, impertinent (Lear IV, vi, 178; 
 Merchant, II, ii, 146). 
 
 The primary and at that time the ordinary meaning of 
 the word. It is as old as Chaucer, Prologue. 
 
 go. Implorator (Hamlet, I, iii, 129). 
 Probably a legal usage, from the French. See ch. vii, 
 above, p. 230. 
 
 gi. Imponed (Hamlet, V, ii). 
 
 Used in State Papers, Hen. VIII, ii, 130 (1529). 
 
 [The passage shows that the word was current.] 
 
 92. Imposed (M. for M., I, iv, 40) ; Imposition 
 (Merchant, III, iv, 32). 
 
 Absolutely normal use. E.g. : 
 
 Wherein, she which did impose was holy. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. pref. ch. iii, § 15. 
 The imposition of this law upon himself [God]. 
 
 Id. B. i, ch. ii. § 6. 
 If any law be now imposed. 
 
 Id. B. viii (Frag, of Sermon : ed. 1850, ii, 583). 
 
 93. Incense ( = stir up, excite, persuade : Merry 
 Wives, I, iii, 109). 
 
 [Mr. WiUis gives some instances which are either not 
 strictly relevant or later than 1600. But the word in the 
 sense noted was conunon. E.g. : 
 
 They shall thereto [to study] be the more incensed. 
 
 Elyot, Governour, B. i, c. 14, Dent's rep. p. 68. 
 He being advertised and incensed hy light persons about him. 
 
 Id.. B. ii, 6, p. I39- 
 Secretly incensing Virginio . . . not to consent. 
 
 Fenton's Guicciardini, 1579, P- 9- 
 He knew well that Isabell . . . would use a perpetual diligence 
 to incense her grandfather. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 317 
 
 Who being also secretly incensed. 
 
 Id., p. II. 
 Incensed into lust and lightness. 
 
 Patericke's trans, of Gentillet on Machiavelli, 1577, 
 Ep. Ded. 
 Only incensed by the means of folly. 
 
 Greene, Debate between Folly and Love : Works, 
 iv, 218. 
 
 The example of their light regarding. 
 Vulgar looseness much incenses. 
 
 Daniel, Tragedy of Cleopatra, 1594, 1. 1230. 
 
 Incensed his father's heart against him thus. 
 
 Id. Philotas, 1. 2177 (V, ii). 
 Agamemnon then 
 To mortal war incenseth all his men. 
 Chapman. Arg. to B. ivof trans, of Iliad (1598). 
 Incense the people in the civil cause 
 With dangerous speeches. 
 
 Jonson, Sejanus, iii, i. 
 
 Elyot has the form " mcende." B. i, c. 23. near end ; 
 B. ii. 5] 
 
 94. Incertain (M, FOR M. Ill, i, 126). 
 [A perfectly normal Elizabethan form : 
 
 So variable and miserable is the destiny of man ; and so 
 incertain to every one what will be his condition in time to 
 come. 
 
 Fenton's Guicciardini, 1579, p. 243 (end of lib. 4). 
 
 Not curious of incertain chances now. 
 
 Lodge. Wounds of Civil War, 1594, near end. 
 
 Incertainty of treasure. 
 
 The Triall of Treasure. 1567, Percy Soc. rep. p. 37.] 
 
 95. Include (" includes itself " = is included : 
 Troilus, I, iii, 119). 
 
 An application of the primary meaning. Compare : 
 
 The tombs are no . . . larger than fitting the included bodies. 
 
 Sandys' Travels, p. 63. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 O that I were included in my grave. 
 
 Green, James the Fourth, ii, 2. 
 
3i8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from Higden, 
 Dunbar, Haward, Billingsley, Digges, and Fraunce— all 
 before 1588.] 
 
 96. Inclusive (All's Well, I, iii, 232 ; Richard III, 
 IV, i. 61). 
 
 [Occurs in 15 15 in the modem form " from the day . . . 
 inclusive." See Pitcaim's Criminal Trials, i, 261. 
 Also in a sixteenth-century almanack. See N. E. D.] 
 
 97. Indigest (John, V, vii, 25). 
 
 In common use. See Oxford Dictionary for instances 
 from Trevisa (1398), Starkey's England (1538), and 
 Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland, ed, 
 1846. i, 333- 
 
 [Without going to these sources, Shakespeare had the 
 word to his hand in the old True Tragedie of Richard 
 Duke of York (near end), and twice in Chapman's 
 Hymnus in Noctem, 1594.] 
 
 98. Indign (Othello, I, iii, 274). 
 Classic English : 
 
 Indigne and unworthy. 
 
 Chaucer, The Clerkes Tale, 359.' 
 
 She herself was of his grace indigne. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, IV, i, 30. 
 
 The most indigne and detestable thing. 
 
 Joye, Exposition of Daniel VI, 1546. 
 
 [In his Addenda, Mr, Willis by oversight gives a quota- 
 tion with the word endynge (" ending ") for indign.] 
 
 99. Indubitate (Love's Labour's Lost, IV, i, 67). 
 Classic EngUsh. Compare : 
 
 Eugene the fourth . . . was very and indubitate pope. 
 
 Caxton's Chronicle, 1480. 
 The indubitate son of the first Clothaire. 
 
 Fabyan's Chronicle, V, cxiii, loi. 
 * This, given in Tjrrwhitt's edition, is now superseded by the 
 reading " undigne." But it was the old printed reading. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 319 
 
 The very indubitate heir-general to the crown of France. 
 
 Hall's Chronicles of Henry V. 
 
 100. Inequality (M. for M., V, i, 59). 
 
 The word is used only once in Shakespeare, and then 
 obscurely. What excuse is there for ascribing here any 
 classical peculiarity ? 
 
 loi. Infest (Tempest, V, i, 246). 
 "The classic sense of the word," says Dr. Theobald, 
 " is certainly implied." The classic sense is the sense ! 
 
 102. Infestion. Word not in the plays. Dr. Theo- 
 bald, following Farmer, conjectures that "infection " in 
 Richard II (II, i, 44) is a misprint for " infestion." But 
 there is no Latin word infestio ! There is only the post- 
 classical infestaiio. The case thus collapses. 
 
 103. Inform ( = fashion, shape : Coriolanus, V. iii, 
 70). 
 
 This again was the primary, the old, and still a usual, 
 meaning. 
 
 To inform their judgments. 
 
 Adams' Sermons II, 43. 
 [Add: 
 
 Enform them well ... sin to forsake. 
 
 Coventry Mysteries, Sh. Soc. ed. p. 41. 
 For to enforme and teche any other persoone a bileeve and a 
 feith of any certain article. 
 
 Pecock, Book of Faith, Pt. i, ch. 2, p. 129, ed. 
 Morison. 
 Infinite shapes of creatures men do find 
 Informed in the mud [of Nile] on which the sun hath shined. 
 
 Spenser, F. Q., Ill, vi, 8. 
 
 To inform their mind with some method. 
 
 Hooker, Ecdes. Pol., B. I, ch. xvi, par. i. 
 She hath him with her wordfes wise 
 Of Cristas faith so full enformed 
 That they thereto ben all conformed. 
 Gower, Confessio Amantis, B. II, Morley's ed. 
 p. 104. 
 
320 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Informed, reformed, and transformed from his original 
 cynicism. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 2.] 
 
 104. Inhabitable ( = not habitable : Richard H, I, 
 i, 164). 
 
 A common usage. Dr. Theobald admits that it occurs 
 in the Catiline (V, i, 54) of Ben Jonson, "who was 
 classic to the point of pedantry." It would seem to 
 follow that it is pedantically used by Shakespeare. But 
 it occurs in Fairfax's tr. of Tasso. Compare Wiclif's 
 Bible, Jer. ii, 6. 
 [Add: 
 
 Lest that thy beauty make this stately town 
 Inhabitable like the burning zone. 
 The Taming of A Shrew, 1 594, Hazlitt's Sh. Lib.VI, 531.] 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from Fish, 
 Supplication of Beggars (1529) and Stubbes (1583). 
 
 105. Inherit, Inheritor (Richard II, V, i, 85; 
 Romeo, I, ii, 30 ; Tempest, II, ii, 179 ; IV, i ; L. L. L., 
 II, i, 5, &c.). 
 
 [Shakespeare uses the word in various senses — " make 
 heir," " acquire," " possess " ; of all of which see instances 
 in N. E. D. The " all which it [the globe] inherit " 
 passage is not cited in the Dictionary as giving an unusual 
 instance of the force of the term ; and it is clearly not 
 specially classical. The sense of " possess," which is 
 commonly ascribed to the word in that passage, was 
 clearly common, as in the gospel phrase " inherit the 
 earth ' ' (Matt, v, 5) . Tyndale translates the same passage, 
 " possess the earth " (Exposition of Matthew, 1531)- 
 Latimer repeatedly uses the phrase " true inheritors of 
 hell " (First Sermon on the Card).] 
 
 106. Insinuation ( = thrusting in, intervention : Hamlet, 
 V, ii. 58). 
 
 Another common usage : 
 
 Insinuate themselves in the company of flatterers 
 
 LiUy's Euphues, Arber's rep. p. iZA- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 321 
 
 Insinuate and wind in with their ranks and files. 
 
 Holland's Livy, 1600, p. 1 197. 
 A serpent he was in Paradise, winding and insinuating himself 
 into the very bosoms of our ancestors. 
 
 Huishon the Lord's Prayer, Lect. 18, p. 13 (1623). 
 Winding and insinuating themselves into our thoughts. 
 
 Id. Lect. 19, p. 59. 
 Insinuate themselves into thy presence. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 3. 
 
 [Add : 
 
 To insinuate with my young master. 
 
 Id. Every Man in his Humour, ii, 2. 
 Such a ready insinuation of present prattle. 
 
 Greene's Mourning Garment : Works, ix, 131. 
 To insinuate in our secrets. 
 
 He3nvood, The English Traveller, i, 2.] 
 
 107. Insisture, Insisting (Coriolanus. Ill, iii, 17 ; 
 Troilus, I, iii, 87). 
 
 There is no point whatever in the citation of " insisting." 
 
 " Insisture " occurs once only in all the plays. It is 
 
 not a " classic " coinage, having no classic original. It 
 
 is further of quite uncertain meaning, and is as likely 
 
 as not to be a typographical corruption. 
 
 108. Instant (" instant way " : Troilus, III, iii, 153). 
 Merely a variant of the common-sense "immediate." 
 See N. E. D. for others, before Shakespeare. 
 
 109. Insult, Insultment (" insult on " : Titus, III, 
 ii, 71 ; " insult o'er," 3 Henry VI, I, iii, 14 ; " insult- 
 ment," Cymbeline, III, V, 145). 
 
 Thus to insult over simple men. 
 
 Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 1576, p. 174. 
 Because they insist so much and so proudly insult thereon. 
 
 Hooker, Ecdes. Polity. B. V, c. xxi, §4. 
 
 Violence and rapine insultmg o'er all. 
 
 Sandys' Travels, 1610, pref. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 And with a light-wing'd spirit insult o'er woe. 
 
 Middleton, Blurt, Master-Constable (1602) i, i. 
 
 X 
 
322 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Do not insult upon calamity. 
 
 Daniel, Philotas, 1605, 1. 1503. 
 
 " Insolency " is frequently used in the sense of arro- 
 gance. E.g. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Collier's 
 rep. p. 59.] 
 
 no. Intend ( = plan, head for, or direct : Antony, 
 V, ii, 200, &c.). 
 One of the usual senses of the word in the period : 
 
 Eretikes there are that entenden the subversion of the Christian 
 faith. In R3raier's Fcedera. x, 474. 
 
 Leisure to intend such business. 
 
 Harvey's Four Letters, 1592, p. 13. 
 
 I£E ye entende hyddre word [hitherward]. 
 
 Paston Letters, No. 7y6. 
 [Add: 
 
 An exact parallel to the use of the word in Antony 
 occurs in Hooper : 
 
 For faith intendeth and always maketh haste unto this port. 
 Declaration of Christ and his Office, 1547, Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. 77. 
 Compare : 
 
 Intend well, and God will be your adjutory. 
 
 Interlude of Mankind, c. 1475, Fanner's Lost Tudor 
 Plays, p. 12. 
 
 The will intendeth rather to command than obey. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, 1587, 
 ed. 1604, p. 94. 
 We ought not to tend or intend to any other than him. 
 
 Id. p. 3CX). 
 while you intend circumstances of news. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, 1599, i. i- 
 Look only forward to the [study of] law : intend that. 
 
 Id. Poetaster, j6oi, i, i-] 
 
 III. Intentively ( = attentively : Othello, I, iii, i54)- 
 " Used in this sense from 1290 downwards," remarks 
 Judge WiUis. 
 [Compare : 
 
 The conningest of you 
 That serveth most ententifelich and best. 
 
 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, i, 332. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 323 
 
 That thou go longe trewely 
 Hast served so ententifly. 
 
 Id. House of Fame, 616. 
 Mark their life intentifely. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and he nott Wrothe, 1528 : Whitting- 
 ham's rep. p. 98. 
 Intentifly. 
 
 Twice in Elyot's Governour : i, 20 ; iii, 18 ; Dent's 
 rep. pp. 89, 289. 
 Fulgence, an ententive doctor. 
 
 Bale, Examination of William Thorpe, Parker Soc. 
 vol. p. 93. 
 
 Is not Chrysostom an ententive doctor ? 
 
 Id. p. 113. 
 With eyes intentive to bedare the sun. 
 
 Peele, David and Bethsabe. 
 Why are you so intentive to behold . . . 
 
 Greene, James the Fourth, v, i. 
 His too intentive trust to flatterers. 
 
 Id. ii, 2.] 
 
 112. Intrinse, intrinsecate (Lear II, ii, 79 ; Antony, 
 V,ii). 
 
 " Intrinse " is a " freak " word. The Quartos read 
 
 " to intrench " ; the folio " t' intrince." " Intrinse " 
 
 is neither Latin nor English. " Intrinsecate " is pre- 
 Shakespearean : 
 
 An intrinsecate matter which they understand not. 
 
 Whitehome, Arte of Warre, 1560, p. 409. 
 Intrinsecate strokes and words. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v. 2. 
 
 Marston, girding at Jonson or another, speaks of " new- 
 minted epithets, such as real [used by himself], intrinse- 
 cate," Delphic, &c. — thus giving them further currency. 
 (Scourge of Villanie, 1598.) 
 
 113. Mere, merely (Othello, II, ii, 3 ; Macbeth, 
 IV, iii, 152). 
 
 The primary and common meaning of the words. E.g. : 
 
 Of our certain knowledge and mere motion. 
 
 Commission of Edward VI to his Council, 1552. 
 
324 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Mere grace : mere mercy : mere liberality : mere goodness. 
 Trans, of Calvin On Deuteronomy, pp. 270, 322, 323. 
 [Add : 
 Bestoweth his tnercedes of his own mere motion {i.e. unsolicited]. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 302. 
 Of his own mere motion and fantasy. 
 Latimer, First Sermon on the Card, 1 529. Dent's rep. p. 2. 
 An argument to ravish and refine 
 An earthly soul, and make it mere divine. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Cynthiam, 1594. 
 Of his owne mere mocion only, without sute of fryndes. 
 
 The Vocacyon of John Bale, in Harl. Misc. 1808, i, 330. 
 
 I esteem 
 Mere amity, familiar neighbourhood. 
 The cousin-german unto wedded love. 
 Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abington, i, i. 
 For meere compassion and verie ruth that pearsed his sorrowf ull 
 hart. 
 
 Holinshed, in Boswell Stone's Sh. Holinshed, p. 37. 
 
 We ... of our especial grace, certaine knowledge, and mere 
 motion, did, &c. 
 
 King's authorization, pref. to Constitutions and 
 Canons Ecclesiasticall, 1604. 
 Sprung from no man, but mere divine. 
 
 Chapman, trans, of Iliad, vi, 183. 
 Keep us mere English. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B. v, st. 88.] 
 
 114. Merit (= that which is deserved : Richard II, 
 I, iii, 156). 
 
 [This meaning is implicit in the theological use of the 
 term, as in " the merits of Christ's passion," used thrice 
 in one page by Foxe, ed. Cattley, i, 72. Hooper has " the 
 merits of Christ's passion," " the merits of the mass," 
 •' the merits of such viri:ues," &c. (Christ and His Office; 
 1547 • Parker Soc. rep. pp. 52, 55, 60). Middleton has: 
 
 My love's merit was most basely sold to him by the most false 
 Violetta. 
 
 Blurt Master-Constable, v, 1. 
 Jonson has : 
 
 I shall never stand in the merit of such bounty, I fear. 
 
 Cynthia's Revels, iv. i. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 325 
 
 Daniel has : 
 
 Though she deserved no merit. 
 
 Cleopatra, 1. 293. 
 To pay this thy injustice her due merit. 
 
 Id. 1036. 
 A lingring death with thee deserves no merit. , 
 
 Id. 1159.] 
 
 Hooker notes that " The ancient Fathers use meriting for 
 obtaining, and in that sense they of Wittenberg have in 
 their Confession : . , . " Good works ... by the free 
 kindness of God . . . merit their certain rewards " 
 Sermon II, § 21). 
 
 115. Modesty, (= moderation, sobriety: Hamlet, II, 
 ii, 461, &c.). Cited by Dr. Theobald as an illustration 
 of " the poet's large Latinity," and " a reflection of the 
 Baconian philosophy." It was current English, then as 
 now : 
 
 Whereupon the Consuls . . . went to speak unto the people 
 . . . and used great modesty in persuading them. 
 
 North, tr. of Life of Coriolanus : 
 
 Skeat's Sh. Plutarch, p. 18. 
 
 They seemed to pass the bounds of modesty in abusing some 
 men. 
 
 Wilson's trans, of Demosthenes* third Philippic (1570). 
 
 God doth by such institutions teach the faithful modesty. 
 Trans, of Calvin's Harmony of the Evangelists, 1584, p. 623. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 If it be cold and temperate, the style also is very modest. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 161. 
 The meane and modest mind. Id. ib. 
 
 Which modest measure of beauty. 
 
 Eastward Ho, 1605, i, i. 
 
 She humbled herself as she might with modesty. 
 
 Greene, Menaphon : Works, vi, iii. 
 
 Let not your words pass forth the verge of reason. 
 But keep within the bounds of modesty. 
 
 Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abington, i, i. 
 
 Within some bounds of modesty and subjection. 
 
 More's Life of Richard III, Murray's rep. p. 194. 
 
326 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Whom afterward by a more modest name men called 
 philosophers. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, 1587, 
 ed. 1604, p. 9.] 
 
 116. ObUged (" obliged [ = pledged] faith " : Mer- 
 chant OF Venice, II, vi, 7). Obligation = a legal in- 
 strument (Troilus, IV, V, 122 ; Merry Wives, I, i, 9 ; 
 &c.) 
 
 Both old usages. Compare Wiclif (1382) : 
 
 Taak thin obligacion and sitte doon and write fifti. 
 
 Trans, of Luke xvi, 6. 
 [Add: 
 
 We dare not oblige us thus to be bounden to you. 
 
 Bale, Examination of William Thorpe (1382), pub. 
 1544, Parker Soc. rep. p. 86. 
 
 A strong bond, a firm obligation, good in law, good in law. 
 
 King Leir and his Three Daughters (1594), in 
 Hazlitt's Sh. Library, Pt. II, vol. ii, p. 337. 
 
 The forfeit of an obligation. 
 Greene and Lodge. Looking-Glass for London, Sc. 3. 
 
 He hath bound and obligated his church. 
 Hooper, Christ and his Office, 1547. Parker Soc. rep. p. 31. 
 
 Confirmed with obligations sealed interchangeably. 
 
 Id. Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, p. 136. 
 
 Sealed me an obligation. 
 
 Lilly, Mother Bombie, v, 3. 
 The copy of that obligation 
 Where my soul's bound in heavy penalties. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, iv, i. 
 
 As it were, obliged themselves by obligation to the devil. 
 
 Stnbbes, Anatomic of Abuses, Collier's rep. p. 62. 
 
 Some tyme this world was so stedfast and stable. 
 That mann6s word was obligacioun. 
 
 Chaucer's Balade, Lak of Stedfastnesse. 
 
 And in an obligacyon I had him bound 
 To paye me at a certain daye. 
 
 Impatient Poverty, 1560 ; Farmer's rep. p. 12.] 
 
 117. Occident (Richard II, III, iii, 65 ; Cymbeline, 
 IV, ii, 372). 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 327 
 
 As old as Chaucer, Man of Lawe's Tale, 1. 295. Also 
 in Caxton's Golden Legend : 
 
 The Sonne, moone, sterres, and plajiettes move from th' oryent 
 to th' occidente. 
 
 Yet again, twice, in Cornish or Heywood's interlude. 
 The Four Elements; Haditt's Dodsley, i, 18, 38. 
 (Percy Soc. rep. pp. 16, 39.) 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Over all the world, from east to Occident. 
 
 Lydate, cited in Ben Jonson's English Grammar. 
 That brave with streams the watery Occident. 
 
 Greene, Orlando Furioso, Dyce's ed. p. 103. 
 What worlds in th' yet miformM Occident 
 May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours. 
 
 Daniel, Musophilus, 11. 961-2.J 
 
 118. Oppugnancy (Troilus, I, iii, no). 
 
 Bacon has " mainly oppugn " ; and Dr. Theobald 
 afl&rms that " mere oppugnancy " and " mainly oppugn " 
 are evidently the coinage of one mint. Oppugnancy, 
 he asserts, " is not EngUsh at all." 
 
 " Oppugn " was current English. See it in Bradford's 
 Letter of July 4, 1553 (Bickersteth, ed. of Letters of 
 Martyrs, p. 19), and in Hooker, Eccles. Pol. B. v, Ed. 
 1823, ii, 10. ["Oppugnancy," by whomsoever coined, is 
 exactly analogous to " repugnancy," found in Sidney and 
 Gelding's trans, of De Momay (1587), ed. 1604, p. 143 
 and elsewhere.] 
 
 119. Ostent, ostentation (Merchant, II, ii, 205 ; Much 
 Ado, IV, i, 206). 
 
 The first passage, says Dr. Theobald, " reflects Bacon's 
 theory of behaviour." It reflects a well-worn common- 
 place. For the word " ostent " and the " theory " see 
 Elyot, GovERNOUR, Croft's ed., Glossary. Compare : 
 
 The papists ostent their merits on earth. 
 
 Adams' Sermons, ii, 563. 
 Their ostentate charity. 
 
 Id.p.ST- - 
 
328 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The Temple then shall jrield a dire ostent. 
 
 Sand3rs' Travels. 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 Which miraculous ostent . . . was sent of God. 
 
 Foxe, Martyrs ; ed. 1684, ii, 94 ; 
 
 and adds instances from Chapman, Argimient to Sestiad 
 iv of Marlowe's Hero and Leander ; trans, of Iliad, ii, 
 280. 
 
 Dr. Theobald afiinns that Shakespeare's use of " osten- 
 tation " (" ostentation of despised anns "; "a mourning 
 ostentation"; "some delightful ostentation or show ") 
 is " exclusively classic." It is simply the primary and 
 then normal force of the word. Compare : 
 
 In the ostentation of his lucky wit. 
 
 Adams' Sermons, i, 90-91. 
 [Add: 
 
 With such other false ostentations of immanitie. 
 
 Declaration as to treatment of Catholic traitors, 
 1583. Rep. in Harl. Misc. ed. 1808, i, 545. 
 
 Wise Jove is he hath shown 
 All the dire ostents of Jove. 
 Chapman, trans, of Iliad, v (Shepherd's ed. p. yj b). 
 Can ostent or show a high gravity. 
 
 El5rot, The Governour, B. ii, 14 ; Dent's rep. p. 192.] 
 
 120. Paint, painted. 
 
 " Painted," says Dr. Theobald, " is a favourite meta- 
 phor with Shakespeare." It is ! Also with nearly 
 every other Elizabethan writer. [See below, p. 419.] 
 
 121. Palliament (TiTUS, I, i, 182). 
 
 [The word is Peek's : Honour of the Garter, 1. 92. 
 See the present writer's Did Shakespeare write ' Titus 
 Andronicus ' ? p. 64. j 
 
 122. Part (vb., Julius C^sar, V. v, 80 ; Richard 
 III, V, iii, 26). Party, partial, &c. 
 
 Ordinary Tudor English. 
 
 123. Perdition ( = loss, not eternal : Tempest, I, ii, 
 30). 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 329 
 
 The original meaning. The modem is secondary. 
 Hooker speaks of endless perdition and Raleigh of eternal 
 perdition. " Perdition of their treasure " occurs in 
 The Golden Boke [of Marcus Aurelius: Bourchier's 
 trans, of Guevara's Spanish version, 1534 and 1546], 
 Let. ii. cited by Richardson. In the same section occurs 
 the sentence : 
 
 The cause gooeth to such loss and pardicion that these mis- 
 chievous people are our homely and familiar enemies. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 Loss and perdicion of so many noble captains and strong 
 soldiers. 
 
 Hall, Chron. Henry VII (1548) 27 b. 
 
 [And " my ovm perdition " in Gascoigne's Supposes 
 (Cunliffe's ed. of Works, i, 214) means " my own harm."] 
 
 124. Perdurable (Henry V, IV. v, 7). 
 
 [Common in Chaucer. See above, p. 266, and compare : 
 
 Triumphant Arks, of perdurable might. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, V, 176.] 
 
 125. Peregrinate (put as a fantastic term : L. L. L., 
 V. i, 14). 
 
 See under Peregrine, Peregrination, Peregrinator in 
 N. E. D. 
 
 126. Permission (" of the will " : Othello, I, iii, 339). 
 [" Clearly a reflection of the Latin word fermissus or 
 
 permissio, which is very frequently used by Bacon in 
 his philosophical writings," says Dr. Theobald, who gives 
 a page to the proposition. The passage is perfectly 
 intelligible in itsdf without any such illustration : " Per- 
 mission " means " letting loose," " letting go " ; and to 
 call this ." the Latin sense " is mere mystification.] 
 
 127. Pernicious (= provocative : L. L. L., IV, i, 66). 
 [Accepting the derivation of the word from Lat. pernix; 
 
 Dr. Theobald describes that as " derived probably from 
 
330 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 per and nitor — much struggling ; hence brisk, nimble 
 (net to be got rid of, troublesome)," adding " much 
 striving is the sense in Shakespeare " (Much Ado, I, i, 
 130). " But probably," he concludes, with an unusual 
 misgiving, " the word is used in a sort of slang style in 
 these passages." He refers to Horace, Epod. ii, 42, 
 pernicis uxor Aptdi, concerning which his cousin, Mr. 
 William Theobald,^ defines pernix as " active." The 
 simple solution of all this puzzling is that the common 
 Latin words pernix (= vdox), pernicior, pernicitas, and 
 perniciter had given " pernicious " the secondary force 
 of " swift," and the tertiary force of " provocative " or 
 " inflammatory." So in Milton : 
 
 Pernicious with one touch to fire . . . 
 
 Paradise Lost, vi, 521. 
 
 This is the sense of the word in Love's Labour's Lost ; 
 and this sense occurs frequently in Elizabethan Uterature. 
 The term had first been made common by Catholic 
 controversiahsts, who used it in the sense (moral) of 
 " incendiary." Then it became general. E.g. : 
 
 Yet their disorder in our civil streets 
 May be pernicious ajid breed mutiny. 
 
 A Larum for London, Simpson's rep. p. 46. 
 
 Go to the Achive fleet, 
 Pernicious dream [vision, in ist ed.]. 
 
 Chapman, tr. of Iliad, ii, 8. 
 
 It is expressly used in this sense by Elyot (1533) : 
 
 There is nothing to the strength of man's body more profitable 
 than wyne, ne to voluptuouse appetites more pernicious. 
 
 Governour, B. iii, c. 32.] 
 
 128. Perpend (Hamlet, II, ii, 104 ; Merry Wives, 
 II, i, 119 ; &c.). 
 
 " The word [in Shakespeare] is used," says Dr. Theo- 
 bald, " only by pedantical speakers or professional fools." 
 How this supports the thesis of the dramatist's classical 
 
 * The Classical Element in the Shakespeare Plays, 1909, p. 42- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 331 
 
 proclivity, he does not explain. Judge Willis justly 
 remarks that " the word was used by grave writers before 
 Shakespeare wrote, and in the sense in which he used it." 
 For instances : 
 
 I desire you therefore to perpend. 
 
 Bale, Apologie, p. 17. 
 Let this also be perpend. 
 
 Foxe, Martyrs, sub. ann. 975. 
 [Add: 
 
 Herein the intent of the law is to be perpended. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Collier's rep. p. 123. 
 
 Confer the times, perpend the history. 
 
 T. Newton " To the Reader." pref. to Higgins' add. 
 to the Mirrowr for Magistrates, ed. 1587. 
 
 I began to perpend within myself. 
 
 Feme, The Blazon of Gentrie, 1586, Ep. Ded. 
 
 It is finally impossible here to see what Dr. Theobald is 
 driving at. He has not made even the semblance of a 
 case.] 
 
 129. Persian (Lear III, vi, 84). 
 
 " This," says Dr. Theobald occultly, " is not unlike 
 the Horatian exclamation, Pcrsicos odi, puer, apparatus, 
 which Mr. Gladstone translates, " OfE with Persian gear, 
 I hate it." The commentator Steevens had previously 
 observed, with equal prof imdity, that the passage alludes, 
 "perhaps, to Clytus refusing the Persian robes offered 
 him by Alexander." The classicists have their choice ! 
 
 130. Person ( = persona, part sustained : 2 Henry 
 IV, IV. vii, 73). 
 
 Bacon, Dr. Theobald. points out, used the word in a 
 similar sense. So did many other Elizabethan writers. 
 Compare : 
 
 When any man is sent by a Prince, in an embassy, he must speak 
 in such sort that men may well perceive he dissembleth not ; 
 because he knoweth whose person he sustaineth. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin's Sermons, 1597, p. 18. 
 
332 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The Apostle, speaking, as it seemeth, in the person of the 
 Christian Gentile. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 The Patripassians and Sabellians, and after them Photinus, 
 and of late Servetus, define a peison to be a certain condition 
 and difference of ofl&ce :) as when we say, Roscius sometime 
 sustained the person of Achilles and sometime of Ulysses. 
 
 Hutchinson, Image of God, c. 21 ; Parker Soc. rep. p. 121. 
 He was contented to travell [travail] in it as in the person of a 
 man regulated. 
 
 Fenton's Guicciardini, 1579, p. 299. 
 
 Dr. Theobald does not seem to reflect that the classic 
 meaning of person is implicit in the historic description 
 of the Christian Trinity.] 
 
 131. Pervert ( = divert, turn aside : Cymbeline, 
 n, iv, 151 ; M. FOR M., IV, iii, 152, &c.). 
 
 The only imcommon usage in the passages cited is that 
 from Cymbeline, fervert = tvm [anger] aside, divert. In 
 this there is nothing more " classical " than in the various 
 other senses of the word. The idea of " turn aside " 
 underlies all uses of it. Compare the instances in the 
 Oxford Dictionary from Chaucer (Boece, B. ii, pr. i) ; 
 Rolls of Parlt. 1483 (vi, 240-2) ; and Nashe, " pervert 
 foundations " (Christ's Teares, 1593). Mr. Willis cites : 
 
 But seeing they pervert all order. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin's Sermons, 1579, p. 662. 
 
 132. Plant ( = sole of the foot : Antony, II, vii, i). 
 There is no classic innovation here. The word was 
 
 vernacularly used : 
 
 Knotty legs and plants of clay 
 Seek for ease or love delay. 
 
 Jonson, Masque of Oberon. 
 
 The variorum edition cites, further : 
 
 Grinde mustarde with vineger, and rubbe it well on the plants or 
 soles of the feete. 
 
 T. Lupton, Third Book of Notable Things, bk. i. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 333 
 
 Even to the low plants of his feet, his form was altered. 
 
 Chapman, trans, of Iliad, xvi.] 
 [Add: 
 
 In the Tenne Tragedies of Seneca, a version which 
 runs much to the vernacular, we have the lines : 
 
 Hangde was I by the Heeles 
 Upon a tree, my swelling plants the fruit thereof yet feeles. 
 
 Thebais, p. 46 a. 
 Again we have it in Nashe : 
 
 You Pilgrims, that . . . weare the plants of your feete to the 
 likenesse of withered roots. 
 
 Christ's Teares over Jerusalem ; Works, ed. 
 McKerrow, ii, 63.] 
 
 133. Port (Antony, I, iii, 45). 
 
 Dr. Theobald thinks the word here means gate. It 
 probably does not : Sextus held the sea power. But 
 port = gate is conmion old and Tudor English. 
 
 Dayly were issues made out of the city at divers ports. 
 
 Hall, Chron. Henry V. 
 
 The word occurs in this sense thrice in Fairfax's Tasso, 
 B. xii, St. 48, 49, 51. [Also B. iii, st. 12 and 49.J 
 
 [Port was the word for city-gate in Edinburgh , from 
 ancient times down to the disuse of the walls. 
 
 Chapman uses the word constantly in his trans ations : 
 
 The Scaean ports [of Troy]. 
 
 Trans, of Iliad (1598), iii, 280. 
 
 The ports and far-stretched walls [of Troy]. 
 
 Id. iv, 64. 
 The seven-fold ported Thebes. 
 
 Id. iv, 433. 
 Seven-ported Thebes. 
 
 Trans, of Hesiod, B. i. 
 To come within the ports. 
 
 Iliad, vi, ^j. 
 
 By this had Hector reached the ports of Scaea, and the towers. 
 
 Id. vi, 248. 
 
 This said, brave Hector through the ports . . . made issue. 
 
 Id. vii, I. 
 
334 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Compare : 
 
 Though strait the passage and the port be made, 
 
 Marlowe, i Tamb. ii, i. 
 Till Phoebus with his beams so bright 
 From out the fiery port. 
 
 Ballad of True Lovers (before 1597), Sh. Soc. Papers, 
 1844, vol. ii, p. 14.J 
 
 134. Port ( = bearing, status : Merchant, III, ii, 
 282). 
 
 So in Fairfax's trans, of Tasso, often. 
 [Add: 
 
 From Princely Port to tumble down into poor servile state. 
 Tenne Tragediejs of Seneca, 1581 ; Thebais, p. 53a. 
 With stately bissopes a greate sorte, 
 Which kepe a mervelous porte. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 Honourable port and majesty. 
 
 Elyot, Governour, ii, 2. 
 No princely port, nor wealthy store. 
 William 'Byrd, Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs, 1588. 
 Cast yourself to bear such a port 
 That, as ye be, ye may be known. 
 H. Medwall, Nature (c. 1490). Farmer's Lost 
 Tudor Plays, p. 65. 
 Their decayed port. 
 
 Nashe, Anatomte of Absurditie : Works, ed. 
 McKerrow, i, 33. 
 
 With an imperial port 
 Gath'ring his spirits he rises from his seat. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B. vii, (1602) st. 6j.] 
 
 135. Portable (Macbeth, IV, iii, 8g ; Lear, III, vi, 
 
 115). 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 A portable ynke to be carried in the forme of a powder. 
 
 Piatt, Jewell-House, 1 594, iii, 36. 
 A little portable case. 
 
 Guillemeau's French Chirurgeon, iS97- 
 
 [The form "importable" = intolerable, insupportable, 
 is common : 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 335 
 
 Be relieved and eased of many importable charges. 
 
 Publisher's pref . to Latimer's Second Sermon before 
 Edward VI. 
 
 To avoid his importable displeasure. 
 
 Hooper, Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. no. 
 
 outrageous and importable arrogancy of man. 
 
 Philpot. trans, of Curio's Defence of Christ's Church 
 (c. 1550) in Writings, 1842, p. 356.] 
 
 136. Prefer ( = bring forward, produce : Shrew, I, 
 i, 96 ; I Henry VI, III, i, no) . 
 
 Their cartel in defiance they prefer. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars. 
 
 1 . . . my vows and prayers to thee preferr'd : 
 
 3andys' Travels, 1610. 
 Furtherers, preferrers, and defenders on the King's behalf of 
 the said cause. 
 
 Foxe, Acts and Monuments. 
 [Add: 
 
 To prefer bills of accusation. 
 
 Str3rpe, Mem. of Cranmer, ed. 1848, i, 248-9. 
 Her goddess, in whose fane she did prefer 
 Her virgin vows. 
 Chapman, Third Sestiad of Hero and Leander, 1 598.] 
 
 137. Premised ( = sent in advance : 2 Henry VI, V, 
 
 ii. 141). 
 
 In his Addenda Mr. Willis cites (from the Oxford 
 Dictionary) Burnet's History of the Reformation, 
 Pocock's ed. v, 173 : " Upon pain and peril premised." 
 This is an inadequate parallel ; but the Dictionary cites 
 from the 1540 translation of Polydore Vergil : 
 
 The King premised certain horsemen to beset all the sea coast ; 
 and from Bishop Barlow (1609) : 
 
 There was a premission of him [Joseph] into Eg5^t, 
 which prove the usage. 
 
 138. Preposterous (=" behind before": M. N. D. 
 Ill, ii, 120 ; Othello, I, iii, 330). 
 
 Certainly this is the " classic " meaning of the term. 
 
336 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 And as certainly it was commonly so used in English 
 before Shakespeare and Bacon. 
 
 Is not this gear preposterous, that Alexandria, where Mark 
 . . . was bishop, should be preferred before Ephesus, where 
 John the Evangelist taught and was bishop. 
 
 Bradford to Lady Vane, 1 553, in Letters of Martyrs, 
 1837. P- 313- 
 Christ does not deny this to be a preposterous order, that the 
 unlearned common people should first celebrate . . . the 
 coming of the Messias. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin's Harmony, 1584, p. 568. 
 
 It is preposterous that men, being bom to a better life, do 
 wholly occupy themselves in earthly things. 
 
 Id.p.2iS. 
 
 They deal preposterously, which busy themselves in small 
 matters when they should rather begin at the chiefest. 
 
 Id. p. 617. 
 
 [The word was as current, in its strict sense, in literary 
 as in theological writing. Thus Puttenham writes : 
 
 Ye have another manner of disordered speech, when ye . . . 
 set that before which should be behind, et & converse. We 
 call it in English proverb, the cart before the horse : the 
 Greeks call it histeron proteron : we name it the Prepos- 
 terous. . . . One describing his landing upon a strange 
 coast, said thus preposterously : " When we had climbed the 
 cliffs and were ashore " 
 
 Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 181. 
 A preposterous order, to set the cart before the horse. 
 
 Hooper, Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker 
 Soc. vol. p. 147. 
 
 The word occurs frequently in Tyndale's translation of 
 Erasmus' Enchiridion, 1533. Methuen's rep. pp. 26, 
 155, 169, 181, 188.] 
 
 139. Prevent, Prevention ( = go before, anticipate : 
 
 Jul. Cms. V, i, 104). 
 As normal in that day as " let " for " hinder." 
 See the Collect at end of the Communion Service, 1547. 
 
 which Dr. Theobald actually quotes. Why then did he 
 
 put the word as a classicism ? 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 337 
 
 140. Probation ( = proof : Hamlet, I, i, 54 ; Othello, 
 III, iii. 365). 
 
 The old and common use of the word, to which the 
 sense of " trial " is secondary. It exists to this day in 
 the technical term " probate," which is found in Hall's 
 Chronicle, Henry VIII, an. 17. Compare : 
 
 Bryng forth your honest probacyons and ye shall be heard. 
 
 Bale's Apologie, fol. 92. 
 For the more evident probation whereof. 
 
 Foxe's Martyrs, ed. 1846, p. 12. 
 True and sufficient probation grounded upon the Scripture. 
 
 Id. iv, 287. 
 [Add: 
 
 Let it be admitted for the probation of this . . . 
 
 Latimer, First Sermon on the Card, 1529. 
 I dare saye unable he was 
 Of one erroure to make probacion. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 A more plain token and evident probation. 
 
 Tyndale's trans, of Erasmus' Enchiridion, 1533 ; 
 Methuen's rep. p. 166. 
 By this probation and argument. 
 
 Id., p. 272.] 
 
 141. Proditor (i Henry VI, I, iii, 31). 
 
 An established term, used in official documents. The 
 Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 In resistence of your Proditours, Rebelles, and Adversaries'. 
 
 1436. Rolls of Parliament, iv, 500-2. 
 As manifest enemy and proditour to the Cristen State. 
 
 1546. State Papers. Henry VIII, xi, 95. 
 
 [The word "prodition" occurs in such popular works 
 as Henry Medwall's interlude Nature, circa 1490 : 
 
 That thou be not deceived by false prodition. 
 
 Farmer's Lost Tudor Plays, p. 48, 
 
 and Roye's Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528 ; and 
 Daniel (Civil Wars, B. iii, st. 78) has " proditorious 
 wretch." A passage in Bale's Brief Chronicle concern- 
 ing Lord Cobham suggests that semi-punning phrases 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 about proditors had long been current. Bale speaks 
 (Parker Soc. rep. p. i6) of " the general proctors, yea 
 rather betrayers of Christ." The passage in i Henry VI 
 runs : " Thou most usurping Proditor, and not Pro- 
 tector." Bale's phrase seems an interpretation of 
 " proctors, yea rather proditors," for the " yea rather " 
 as it stands is rather pointless.^] 
 
 142. Propend, Propension ( = to be inclined to : 
 Troilus, II, ii, 190, 132). 
 
 There is no innovation here. "Propension" is an 
 old form of " propensity," the form which has survived. 
 Compare : 
 The forwardness and propension of his mind. 
 
 King on Jonah, 1594, ed. 1611, p. 116. 
 Propensity of heart. 
 
 Foxe, Martyrs, sub axm. 1535. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary give instances of propend from 
 
 Reynold, 1545, and Sandys, 1599 '» ^md of propension 
 
 (also prepensed) from Wolsey, 1530, and Barington, 1580. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Women prepense and inclinable to holiness. 
 
 Hooper, Eccles. Pol. pref. ch. iii, §13.] 
 
 143. Propugnation (Troilus, II, ii, 136). 
 
 [Mr, WiUis gives no instances, but the Oxford Diction- 
 ary does : " Propugnation " in Feme's Blazon of 
 Gentrie, 1586, ii, 62 ; and " Propugnatour " in The 
 MiRROUR OF Salvacioun, 1450, and The Complaynt of 
 Scotland, 1549, ^P- ded., p. 4.] 
 
 144. Pudency (Cymbeline, II, v, 11). 
 
 Mr. Willis justly remeirks that this word, of which there 
 is no other recorded instance, is a very simple formation 
 
 * The habit of aspersive alliteration was common. Latimer 
 has " Bishops ! nay rather Buzzards " {First Sermon before 
 Edward VI) ; and he tells of much excitement in London over 
 the phrase " Burgesses ! nay. Butterflies ! " (Sermon oj the 
 Plough). 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 339 
 
 from " impudency." [It is not a " classic " adaptation ; 
 there is no Latin word pttdentia, though there is pudens.'\ 
 
 145. Questant, Questrists (All's Well, II, i, 15 ; 
 Lear, III, vii, 16). 
 
 Admittedly not yet traced in pre-Shakespearean writers. 
 
 But they are merely variants of old words such as 
 quester or quaestor (q.v., N, E. D.). In Pecock's Repres- 
 sor OF Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (Roll's Ser. 
 ii. 516, 540) we have Questmongers ( = informers — ^the 
 same thing as quaestor) or jurjmien. Questmen were 
 regularly elected annually to assist churchwardens in 
 matters of ecclesiastical pohce. The " quest-house " 
 was the chief watch-house of a parish. See HaUiwell's 
 and Nares' Dictionaries. There is no real " coinage " in 
 the matter. 
 
 146. Recordation (Troilus, V, ii. 116). 
 
 He [Xerxes] wept in recordation of their mortality. 
 
 Rainold's Lect. on Obadiah, 1584. Nicholl's ed. 
 1864, p. 35- 
 Fair and sacred recordations. 
 
 Holland's tr. of Plutarch's Moraiia, 1603, p. 940. 
 
 147. Reduce ( = bring back, restore : Rich. Ill, 
 V, V, 35). 
 
 If the noble King Edgar had not reduced the monarchy to his 
 pristinate estate and figure. ... It [England] shall be 
 reduced . . . unto a public weal excelling all other 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, i, 2. 
 
 To reduce the seduced from their errors. 
 
 Sand3rs' Travels, 1610, ed. 1637, p. 86. 
 
 [A very common usage. Compare : 
 
 To reduce not only him but also his substance to their former 
 state of freedom and liberty. 
 
 Rosdell's Ep. Ded. to ed. of Hooper's Christ and 
 His Office. 1582. 
 
 To reduce him that erreth into the trayne of virtue. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, ii, 9. 
 
340 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Reduced . . . the Romans . . . to their pristinate moderation 
 and temperance. 
 
 Id. iii, n. 
 Healed and reduced to his perfection. 
 
 Id. iii, 26. 
 Alas, I see, nothing hath hurt so sore. 
 But time in time reduceth a return. 
 Surrey, first poem in Tottel's Miscellany, 1557, 
 Arber's rep. 
 Then we shall show that he may be reduced into health. 
 
 Philpot, trans, of Curio's Defence of Christ's Church 
 (MS. c. 1550), 1842, p. 376. 
 Goeth about to reduce them into the way. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 393. 
 How often would I have revokt, reduced, and brought you 
 into the right way. 
 
 Nash, Christ's Teares over Jerusalem, 1593. Works, 
 ed. McKerrow, ii, 21. 
 Whom Ijrving, thejrr preaching might have reduced. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 26. 
 Let her reduce the golden age again. 
 
 Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587, V. ii, 23. 
 To seek Philomela and to reduce her from banishment. 
 
 Greene, Philomela, 1592. Works, 3d, 193. 
 When his reason had reduced 
 His fl3ring thoughts back to some certain stand. 
 
 Daniel, Philotas, 1605, 11. 235-6.] 
 
 148. Refelled ( = rebutted, refuted : M. for M., V, i, 93). 
 A widely current Elizabethan word. 
 
 Unless mine adversaries with true and sufficient probation!! 
 . . . C8U1 . . . refel mine errors. 
 
 Townshend ed. of Foxe's Martyrs, iv, 287. 
 Refel positions. 
 
 Hooker's Sermon on Justification, 
 I stand not to refel absurdities. 
 
 Henry Smith (d. 1591), Sermon at Clement Dane's. 
 [Add: 
 
 I must stop their mouths, convince, refel, and refute. 
 
 Latimer, Third Sermon before Edward VI. 
 Strong proofs brought out. 
 Which strongly were refell'd. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B. iii, st. 13. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 341 
 
 That which I say in company see thou refell not openly. 
 
 T. Kendall, Flowers of Epigrams, 1577. Spenser 
 Soc. rep. p. 197. 
 
 The lesser [objections] then are easily refelled. 
 
 A Larutn for London, Simpson's rep. p. 46. 
 A plea so strong 
 As cannot be refelled. 
 Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, sc. 6. 
 The devilishness of this new doctrine of theirs shall be refelled 
 in my books. 
 
 Bale, First Examination of Anne Askewe. Parker 
 Soc. ed. of Works, p. 171. 
 
 Paul himself doth refel such great treacheries easily. 
 
 Philpot, trans, of Curio's Defence of Christ's Church 
 (MS. c. 1550), 1842, p. 371. 
 Witness how clearly I can refel that paradox, or rather 
 pseudodox. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, ii, i. 
 This argument no t3n:ant can refell. 
 
 Daniel, Philotas, 1. 2044 (2134).] 
 
 149. Religious-ly ( = scrupulous-ly : All's Well; II, 
 iii, 189 ; Henry V, I, ii, 9). 
 
 Dr. 'Theobald refers this force of the word to the Latin 
 religiosus. By limiting his quotations he keeps out of 
 sight the fact that Shakespeare's metaphorical use of it 
 is simply an implication of the common force of the 
 word as " devout "=" earnest." E.g. : 
 
 Religious in mine error, I adore the sun. 
 
 AlPs Well, I, iii. 211. 
 A most devout coward, religious in it. 
 
 Twelfth Night, III, iv, 424. 
 Compare : 
 
 Among the gifts of the temple which they would have regarded 
 religiously and scrupulously. 
 
 Udal on Matthew, c. 27. 
 [Add: 
 
 Let mortals learn 
 To make religion of ofiending heaven. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 3, near end. 
 I see you make religion of your word [ -= promise]. 
 
 A Larumfor London, 1599, 1. 24. 
 
342 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Lxjyal, religious in love's hallowed vows. 
 
 Porter, Two Angry Women of Abington, ii, i. 
 Do you thiuk him honest ? 
 Religiously ; a true, most zealous patriot. 
 
 Chapman, The Admiral of France, iii, 3. 
 The opinion of Faeries and elfes is very old, and yet sticketh 
 very religiously in the minds of some. 
 
 E. King's G/osse to Spenser's Shepheard's Calender, 
 June. 
 Albe of Love I alwa3rs humbly deemed 
 That he was such an one as thou dost say. 
 And so religiously to be esteemed. 
 Spenser, Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 11. 328-30. 
 But we . , . 
 
 Do make religion now we rashly go 
 To serve that God [Cupid] that is so greatly dred. 
 
 Id. 1. 797. 
 Thy most even and religious hand, 
 Great Minister of Justice 
 
 Daniel, Certaine Epistles, 1601-3 : To Sir T. 
 Egerton, 11. 198-9.] 
 
 150. Remonstrance (substantially = demonstration: 
 M. FOR M., V, i, 394). 
 
 This was the sense of the word in the period. 
 
 With strong and invincible remonstrance of sound reason. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. B. par. v, 10. 
 
 The manifest odds . . . are remonstrances more than sufficient 
 [to show] . . . 
 
 Id. par. 76. 
 I will remonstrate [ «= esqwund] to you. 
 
 Jonson, Every man out of his Humour. 
 
 Your son shall make remonstrance of his valour. 
 
 Bamabe Barnes, The Devil's Charter, i, 4. 
 
 151. Renege (from med. Lat. renego : Lear, H, ii, 79)- 
 The fact that renego is mediaeval Latin would have 
 
 put any one not a Baconian on his guard. The forms 
 " reneague " and " renay," which come from that, are 
 common in Middle and Tudor English. 
 
 Reneyedj 
 
 Piers Plowman. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 343 
 
 Those hath he reneagued and put away from the inheritance 
 of the promises. 
 
 Udal on Luke i . 
 In the mean season while Peter reneagueth. 
 
 Id. on c. 22. 
 A plain renaying of Christ's faith. 
 
 Sir T. More. Works, p. 179. 
 [Add: 
 
 Renyinge God allthough they saye naye. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528.] 
 
 152. Repugn, Repugnancy, Repugnant (i H. VI, IV, 
 i, 94 ; TiMON, III, V, 42 ; Hamlet, II, ii, 491), 
 As old as Wiclif. See Croft's Glossary to Elyot's 
 
 GOVERNOUR. 
 
 Repugnant to his will. 
 
 Cranmer's Letter to Queen Mary, in Letters of 
 Martyrs, p. 2. 
 His authority . . . repugneth to the crovni imperial. 
 
 Id. p. 3. 
 That discontinuance doth not repugne with the prophecy of 
 Jacob. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin's Harmony, 1584, p. 5. 
 Whether that which our laws do permit be repugnant to those 
 maxims. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. B. v, par. 81. 
 
 Repugnancy or contradiction. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 A law contrariant or repugnant to the law of nature. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 [Add: 
 
 To withstand and repugn against the truth. 
 
 Marg. note to trans, of Erasmus' Enchiridion, 1533. 
 Methuen's rep. p. 27- 
 Rebel, repugne, lash out and kick. 
 
 The Trial of Pleasure, 1567. Percy Soc. rep. p. 42. 
 I have suaged the old repugnance. 
 And knit them together. 
 Medwall's Interlude of Nature {c. 1490), Fanner's 
 Lost Tudor Plays, p. 43. 
 
 Nature repugn3mg. 
 
 Elyot, Governour, i, 14. 
 
344 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 To repugne again reason. 
 
 Id. iii, 25.] 
 
 153. Repute (Titus, I, i, 366 ; i Henry IV, V, i, 54), 
 Absolutely normal Tudor English. 
 
 The Church of Rome doth not repute the one oblation of 
 Jesus Christ . . . to be perfect. 
 
 H. Smith (d. 1591), God's Arrow Against Atheists, 
 ed. 161 1, p. 80. 
 
 Word so used in Sandys' Travels (1610), 4th ed. pp. 91, 
 107, 124, 145. 
 [Add : 
 
 Our wrong reputed weakness. 
 
 Daniel, Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, 
 1599, St. 15- 
 Nor could she yet repute herself secure. 
 
 Harington, trans, of Orlando Furioso, 1591, B. i, 
 St. 33-] 
 
 154. Retentive (in the physical sense : Timon, III, 
 iv, 81). 
 
 What words (said she) fly your retentive powers. 
 
 Chapman, trans, of Odyssey, B. xix. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives examples from Chaucer 
 (Parson's Tale, § 76, sent. 913 ; Holland's Pliny, II, 
 under Words oj Art, &c.) 
 
 [Compare : 
 
 Retention and ejection in her powers 
 Being acts alike. 
 
 Chapman, Third Sestiad of Hero and Leander.] 
 
 155. Reverb (Lear, I, i, 155). 
 
 Not traced by Mr. Willis. Steevens noted the word 
 as perhaps of Shakespeare's own coining. However that 
 may be, it is obviously not a classicism : it is a curtail- 
 ment of a Latin word, such as a good scholar would not 
 commit. 
 
 156. Rivage (Fr. : Chorus to Henry V, Act III). 
 Foimd in Pseudo-Chaucer, Chaucer's Dreame,1. iio5- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 345 
 
 Also in Gower, B. viii ; in Hall ; and in Holinshed, B. iv, 
 c. 24. Also in Spenser, Faerie Queene, IV, vi, 20. 
 
 157. Rmnate (3 Henry VI, V, i, 8). 
 
 Dr. Theobald on this word remarks that " Shakespeare 
 
 often turns nouns into verbs." Judge Willis errs in 
 
 denjnng this in general : the practice was common to 
 
 the period. But he is right in denying that Shakespeare 
 
 made " ruinate " in that fashion. It was a standing 
 
 verb : 
 
 Till all was subverted and ruinated. 
 
 Henry Smith (d. 1591), Sermons, ed. 1613, p. 62. 
 
 The verb is found twice in the old play. The Downfall 
 OF Robert Earl of Huntingdon (HazUtt's Dodsley, 
 vol. viii, pp. 158, 184) ; in Bancroft's Platform of Episco- 
 pacy (1594), in Lewkenor's trans, of The Commonwealth 
 OF Venice (1599), &c. &c. 
 
 [Add : Spenser, Faerie Queene, II, xii, 7 ; (adj. V, x, 
 26) ; Sonnet 56 ; Greene's Selimus, 11. 150, 878 ; Pery- 
 MEDES the Blacksmith, 1588 : Works, vii, 45 ; Friar 
 Bacon, sc. 8 : ed. Dyce, p. 168 ; Kyd's trans, of Gamier's 
 Cornelia, Act iv ; Daniel, Philotas, 1. 696 ; Chapman, 
 trans, of Iliad, iv, 42.] 
 
 158. Sacred (" Sacred wit " : Titus, II, i, 120). 
 
 [Dr. Theobald, following the commentators, takes this 
 term in this place to mean " accursed." It probably did 
 not. Peele, who probably wrote the bulk of the play, 
 has " sacred wit " in his Arraignment of Paris, IV, i, 
 285. But the word occurs with the " classic ' ' significance 
 in Massinger, Emperor of the East, iv, 5. J 
 
 159. Scope ( = skopos, view, or mark or aim : Timon; 
 
 I, i, 72)- 
 
 Cursed Night that reft from him so goodly scope. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, III, iv. 52. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 So huge a scope at first him seemed best. 
 
 Id. Ill, ix, 46. 
 
346 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Shooting wide do miss the marked scope. 
 
 Id. Shepheard's Calender, November. 
 Ere they come unto their a.yva^ scope. 
 
 Id. F. Q. VI, iii, s. 
 To aim their cotmsels to the fairest scope. 
 
 Id. Mother Hubbard's Tale, 1. 960. 
 But whither am I carried all this while 
 Beyond my scope. 
 Daniel, Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, 
 IS99, St. SI. 
 But since it hath no other scope to go 
 Nor other purpose. 
 Id. To the Angell Spirit of . . . Sidney, 11. 45-46. 
 
 160. Sect (= a cutting : Othello, I, iii, 335). 
 
 [Mr. Willis suggests that sect here may be a misprint 
 for set ( = setting), which is unhkely, though Dr. Johnson 
 suggested that reading. The word seems to be used with 
 the same force in the old play of King Leir and his 
 Three Daughters : 
 
 Till I have rooted out this viperous sect. 
 
 Hazlitt's Sh. Library, Pt. II. vol. ii, p. 376. 
 
 Gascoigne again has : 
 
 And all good haps that ever Troylus' sect [lovers] 
 Achieved yet above the luckless ground. 
 
 Adventures of Master F. J. ; Cunliffe's ed. of Works, 
 i, 426. 
 
 The term had in fact the sense of " sort," " set," or 
 "species." Wiclif constantly applies it to the friars 
 (Treatise, chs. 2, 3, 4, 28, &c.), frequently in the plural, 
 signifying "groups." Pecock speaks of "Sarrasene 
 secte " and " Cristen sect " (Book of Faith, Pt. I, ch. 2, p. 
 131, ed. Morison) ; and Hooper has : ". neither the one 
 secte of people called papists, neither the other called 
 gospellers" (Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, 
 Parker Soc. rep. p. 137). 
 
 Compare Spenser : 
 
 And by the name of soldiers us protect. 
 Which now is thought a civil begging sect. 
 
 Mother Hubberd's Tale, 11. 246-7 ; 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 347 
 
 and Jonson : 
 
 But in this age a sect of writers are. 
 
 The Silent Woman, prol.] 
 
 In his Addenda Mr. Willis cites : 
 
 As if we and they had been one sect. 
 
 Hazlitt's Dodsley. v, 303. 
 
 161. Secure, Securely, Security (= unconcerned or 
 heedless : Merry Wives, II, ii, 314 ; Macbeth, III, 
 V, 32 ; Richard II, II, i, 265). 
 
 Common usages. See Spenser, F. Q. Bk. VI, Canto v ; 
 and Daniel, Civil Wars, B. i : " lived secure." 
 
 [Add : EuPHUES, Arber's rep. p. 63 ; Selimus, 1. 367 ; 
 A Larum for London (Simpson's rep. pp. i, 43, 46, 50) ; 
 Marlowe, trans, of Lucan, 1. 135 ; Lilly, Endimion, ii, 
 I ; Woman in the Moon, ii, i ; Lodge, Wounds of 
 Civil War, 1. 41 ; Gascoigne, The Spoyle of Antwerp 
 (Cunhffe's ed. of Works, ii, 594; Daniel, Cleopatra, 
 1- 533 '> Jonson, Sejanus, ii, 2 ; iii, 2. Dr. Theobald 
 actually notes the use of " securely " in Pro v. iii, 29, and 
 in Ben Jonson. The citation is thus to no purpose.] 
 
 162. Segregration (= separation : Othello, II, i, 10). 
 Richardson's Dictionary gives instances from Sir T. 
 
 More, Feltham's Resolves, and Wotton ; and the N. E. D. 
 one from Philpot, 1564. Judge Willis adds : 
 
 Segregated themselves from the Church of Rome. 
 
 Foxe, Martyrs (1560) ed. 1843, *. P- xxvi. 
 
 163. Semblable (adj. = similar ; sb. = resemblance : 
 2 Henry IV, V, i, 72 ; Hamlet, V, ii, 24). 
 
 " Either a French word or from the Latin similis," 
 says our Baconian philologist. It hapf)ens to abound in 
 Chaucer ! " Semblable " and " semblably " are two of 
 the commonest words in Elizabethan didactic books. 
 They occur hundreds of times, for instance, in Elyot and 
 in Holland's Plutarch. The passage from adjective to 
 noun is exactly as in " equal." 
 
348 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 164. Sensible ( = perceptible to the senses : Haml£t, 
 I, i. 56, &c.). 
 
 The meaning of the word in that period. E.g. : 
 
 Eternal damnation of sensible pain in the fire of hell. 
 
 Sir T. More, Works, p. 1281. 
 [Compare : 
 
 To what purpose were the senses without the sensible things ? 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, 1587. 
 Ed. 1604, p. 7. 
 The sensible powers. The sensible wits and natural motions. 
 The sensible powers, that is to say, the five wits. The sensible 
 wits. Thy sensible wits. Our sensible wits. 
 
 T}mdale's trans, of Erasmus' Enchiridion, 1533, 
 Methuen's rep. pp. 89, 105, 139, 140, 141, 144. 
 Sensible pleasure and sensible pain. 
 
 J. Hejnvood, Dialogue on Wit and Folly, Percy 
 Soc. rep. p. 19. 
 Sensible signs. Sensible things. Sensible sacraments. 
 
 T3mdale, Supper of the Lord : Works, Parker Soc. 
 ed. iii, 265. (Thrice in a page.)] 
 
 165. Septentrion (3 Henry VI, I, iv, 133). 
 Occurs several times in Chaucer : 
 
 Both east and west, north [slip for south] and septemtrioim. 
 
 The Monk's Tale, 477. 
 
 Septentrional and septentrionalis, in The Astrolabe ; 
 and in Boece (B. ii, pr. 6) " the colde sterres that highten 
 the vii Tryones (that is to seyn . . . the partye of the 
 north)." 
 
 166. Simular (Lear, III, ii, 54). 
 
 As Christ in the Gospel . . . called them h5rpocrites, that is 
 to say, simulars and painted sepulchres. 
 
 Tjmdale, prol. to Romans. 
 
 "Simulate (= simulated) chastity" occurs in Bale, 
 English Votaries, Pt. II. 
 
 [" Dissimulers " occurs in Tyndale {Answer to Sir T. 
 More. Works, Parker Soc. ed. iii, 45), who also has the 
 verb to " simule," i, 341.J 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 349 
 
 167. Solemn (= ceremonial or stately: "solemn 
 hunting " : Titus, II, i, 112). 
 
 The solempne day of Pask. 
 
 Wiclif, trans, of Luke ii. 41. 
 
 Same term in the Rhemish New Testament, 1580. 
 
 Upon ane solempne day As custom was. 
 
 Chaucer [really Henryson], Testament of Creseide, 
 11. 112-113. 
 [Add: 
 
 An assembly so honourable and solemn. 
 
 Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini, 1579, p. 6. 
 A£fable and courteous at meals and meetings, in open assemblies 
 more solemn and strange. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. 
 p. 298. 
 Solemne feasts. Solemn plays. Times of solemnity. 
 
 T. He3rwood, Apology for Actors, 1612, Sh. Soc. rep. 
 PP- 54. 56. 60. 
 A solemne oration. Solemn feasts. 
 
 Gosson, School of Abuse, 1579, Sh. Soc. rep. pp. 13, 15. 
 
 A day of mirth and solemn jubilee. 
 
 Webster and Rowley, A Cure for a Cuckold, sc. i. 
 
 Triumph, and solemnize a martial feast. 
 
 Marlowe, i Tamb. iii, 3, end.] 
 
 168. Sort ( = SOTS, a lot : Troilus; I, iii, 374).] 
 
 Were it by aventure or sort or cas [ = chance]. 
 
 Chaucer, Knight's Tale. 1. 844. 
 
 [The word occurs also thrice in Troilus and Creseyde, 
 ii, 1754 ; iii; 1047 > iv, 116) and elsewhere in Chaucer.] 
 
 169. Speculation (phys. sense : Macbeth, iv, 95 ; 
 Troilus, III, iii, 109 ; Henry V, IV, ii, 31). 
 
 Word occurs thus in Hooker, Eccles. Pol. V, and in 
 Holland's trans, of Pliny, B. xviii, c. 28. 
 [Add: 
 
 When thei loken hem in the speculation or loksmge of the 
 devyne thought. 
 
 Chaucer, Boece, B. V, pr. 2i 
 
350 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Compare : 
 
 To be confined to the speculation of a death's head. 
 
 Chapman, The Widow's Tears, iii, i.] 
 
 170. Stelled (" stell6d fires " : Lear, III, vii, 59 ; 
 stell'd : LucRECE, 1443). 
 
 [Dr. Theobald pronotinces the word in Lear to be 
 derived from steUa, a star. If it were, it would be a most 
 unscholarlike coinage. It is really the same word as 
 occm-s in Lucrece ; and the derivation of that is not, 
 as Mr. Theobald supposes, from oreXXw, but from A. S. 
 steUan.'\ 
 
 171. Substituted ( = placed under, in rank : 2 Henry IV, 
 I, iii, 84). 
 
 And they did also substitute other which were known heads 
 also. 
 
 Sir T. More, Works, p. 821. 
 [Compare : 
 
 Have thrust out proud Octavlan's substitute. 
 
 Day, Humour out of Breath, 1608, v, 2. 
 Be you joint governors of this my realm : 
 I do ordain you both my substitutes. 
 The Weakest goeth to the Wall (anon. pr. with 
 Webster), i, i. 
 
 So they pay their yearly tribute 
 Unto his dyvlishe substitute, 
 
 Official or commissary. 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 Great Soliman, heaven's only substitute. 
 
 Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, i, 5. 
 Honoured because they are the substitutes of the King. 
 
 Gascoigne, Glasse of Government, 1575, ii, i-] 
 
 172. Success ( = sequence, result : e.g. " vile success," 
 Othello, III, iii, 221). 
 
 Dr. Theobald gravely remarks that " Bacon also 
 follows the Latin." Judge Willis comments : " In the 
 sixteenth century every writer with whom I am ac- 
 qu^^inted xises the word success in the same way." This 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 351 
 
 is the fact {see above, p. 256) ; and Dr. Theobald's citation 
 in this case might alone serve as the proof of his compre- 
 hensive inacquaintance with Elizabethan literature. 
 
 173. Suspire : Suspiration (John, III, iv, 79 ; Hamlet, 
 
 I. ii. 79)- 
 Suspiring and sighing. 
 
 Sir T. More. 
 The long suspired Redeemer of the world. 
 
 Reliquiee Wottonianee, p. 269. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 Throw forth sad throbs and grievous suspires. 
 Break, heart, with sobs and grievous suspires. 
 
 Locrine, v, 4. 
 As they do that enchant the water of the font, and chafe it 
 with many a suspire and deep-fet breath. 
 
 Hooi>er, Declaration of the Ten Commandments, 
 
 1550, Parker Soc. rep, p. 345. 
 And suspirable death of so brave soldiers. 
 
 Kyd, Cornelia, v, 287.] 
 
 174. Tenable (" tenable in your silence " : Hamlet, 
 I. ii, 247). 
 
 In this ostensible sense ("retained") the word is not 
 found elsewhere ; and there is much reason to believe 
 it a misprint. If intended, it is incongruous English. 
 FoUos 2 and 3 read treble. " Tenable," used of a fortress, 
 is foimd in Haklu5rt's Voyages, i, 614, and in Howell's 
 Letters, B. xi, let. 4. 
 
 175. Terms (= limits : All's Well, II, iii, 173). 
 
 Eche'chaunge hath his special end and terme [whereunto], and 
 therefore accordjmge to tenne and ende hath . . . 
 
 Bishop Gardiner's Explanation of the Presence,iol. 109. 
 
 A perfectly normal usage. 
 
 176. Translate (physically remove : M. N. D., Ill, 
 
 ii. 31). 
 A very common usage : 
 
 When the Romans had translated to themselves the tribute. 
 Trans, of Calvin's Harmony, 1584, p. S4S- 
 
352 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 This translation of faults from ourselves to others. 
 
 King on Jonah, 1594, ed. 1611, p. 128. 
 Thither was the seat of the prince translated. 
 
 Lewkenor's trans, of Contrareno's Commonwealth oj 
 Venice, 1598. p. Si- 
 [Add: 
 
 Thanne is thUke money precyous when it is translated into 
 other folk. 
 
 Chaucer, Boece, B. ii, pr. 5. 
 If kingdoms be translated for unrighteousness, they are 
 preserved by righteousness. 
 
 Hutchinson, Tke Image of God, Works, ed. Parker 
 Soc. p. 71. 
 Whole kyngdomes . . . bee so soone translated from one 
 manne unto another. 
 
 More, Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, 
 Dent's rep. p. 275. 
 By turning, translating, and removing these marks. 
 
 Robinson's trans, of More's Utopia, Dent's rep. 
 p. 49. 
 Is it [obedience] not altogether translated and exempted from 
 your Grace unto them. 
 
 Beggars' Petition against Popery, 1538, Harl, 
 Misc. 1808, i, 221. 
 This ... is all the cause of translation of your kingdom so 
 fast into their hands. 
 
 Id. p. 223. 
 Dreams, extraordinarily sent from [heaven to foreshew the 
 translation of monarchies. 
 
 Nashe, Terrors of the Night ; Works, ed. McKerrow, 
 i. 362. 
 In the same year 1269 he [Henry III] translated with great 
 solemnity the body of King Edward the Confessor into a new 
 chapel. 
 
 Stow, Survey of London, 1 598. Morley's rep. p. 417. 
 Thither hath God translated the body of Christ 
 
 Hooper, Declaration of Christ and his Office, Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. 67. 
 
 Useth no purgation nor translation of his sin. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 136. 
 To abide perpetually to his crowne, without translatynge 
 heeroff to any other use. 
 
 Fortescue, Governance of England, 1476, ch. 11.] 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 353 
 
 177. Umber'd ( = Shadowed, from Lat. umbra :■ 
 Henry V, iv, Chorus, 9). 
 
 Old English. Steevens gives the instances : 
 
 Under the umbre and shadow of King Edward. 
 
 Caxton's pref. to Tully on Old Age. 
 Under the umbra of ver37te. 
 
 Old poem. The Castell of Labour. 
 
 178. Umbrage ( = shadow or image : Hamlet, V. ii, 
 124). 
 
 The word is used fantastically, and certainly not 
 classically ! It is remarkable in how many instances Dr. 
 Theobald contrives to find in Shakespeare an expression 
 which a classical scholar would not use, save facetiously. 
 
 In an Appendix, Mr. Willis deals Avith more than 
 twenty words passed over by him in the main body of his 
 book ; and makes some ad^tions to his former examples. 
 Some of these I pass over here. 
 
 179. Abruption (Troilus, III, ii, 69). 
 
 Dr. Theobald admits that the word " is not really 
 English." Mr. Willis cited " dark abrupted ends " from 
 Ford's Love's Sacrifice, III, iii ; and instances of 
 abrupt and abruptly. But the plain fact is that the 
 word in Troilus is sportively used. It counts for 
 nothing, then, for Dr. Theobald's purpose. 
 
 180. Admiration ( = Lat. admiratio, wonder : Henry 
 VIII, V, v, 40 ; Hamlet I, ii, 192). 
 
 Quite common in the period. E.g. Hooker, Eccles. 
 Pol. B. v. c. yj, sec. 13, &c. ; A Merry Knack to 
 Know a Knave : HazUtt's Dodsley, vi, 544. 
 
 [In Shakespeare's day " I admire " often meant collo- 
 quially " I wonder." {E.g. Jonson, Every Man in his 
 Humour, i, 3 ; Chapman, The Widow's Tears, i, i). 
 The ordinary reader is supposed to know the text, " when 
 I saw her [the scarlet woman] I wondered with great 
 admiration " (Revelation, xvii, 6). This form could not 
 
 z 
 
354 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 have been used in the Authorised Version of 1611 if it 
 were not still regular and familiar, though " admiration " 
 had then come to bear its modem sense also. The old 
 usage persisted down to the time of Scott (Woodstock, 
 ch, 25), and is even foiind in Sir William Hamilton 
 (Discussions; p. 14). In Shakespeare's day it was 
 normal. Compare : 
 
 Lordings, admire not if your cheer be this. 
 
 Greene, Friar Bacon, sc. 9 : ed. Dyce, p. 169. 
 
 For, if thy cunning work these miracles, 
 England and Europe shall admire thy fame. 
 
 Id. sc. 2 : ed. Dyce, p. 155. 
 
 Chrysostom with admiration saith, Miror si aliquis rectorum 
 potest saivari : " I marvel if any ruler can be saved." 
 
 Latimer, First Sermon before Edward VI., Dent's 
 ed. p. 83. 
 
 Some judgments slave themselves to small desert 
 And wondemise the birth of common wit . . . 
 Perhaps such admiration wins her wit. 
 
 Porter, The Two Angry Women ofAbington, iii, 2. 
 
 And make her an example to the world. 
 For after ages to admire her penance. 
 Leir and his Three Daughters, Hazlitt's Sh. Lib. 
 rep. p. 365. 
 
 Yet are generally all rare things and such as breede marvell 
 and admiration somewhat holding of the undecent. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. 
 p. 294. 
 
 This last writer, under the rubric " Paradoxon, or the 
 Wondrer " (p. 233), gives the word again the same force : 
 
 Many times our Poet is caried by some occasion to report of a 
 thing that is marvelous, and then he will seem not to speake 
 it simply but with some signe of admiration.] 
 
 181. Argentine ( = silvern : " Goddess Argentine " : 
 Pericles, V, i, 251). 
 
 Word used in Hall, Chron. Henry VIII, ann. 12. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives instances from Holme, 
 1537 ; Lyte, 1578 ; and Holinshed, 1577. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 355 
 
 182. Determine, Determinate, Determination (CoRio- 
 LANUS, III, iii, 43 ; Antony, IV, iii, 2 ; Richard II, I, 
 iii, 150, &c.). 
 
 Dr. Theobald finally quotes : 
 
 My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy. 
 
 Twelfth Night. II, i. 11, 
 
 with the comment : "In this line there are three Latin 
 words, only intelligible by the help of a Latin Dictionary." 
 As Mr. Willis observes, all three were common words. 
 " Mere " was particularly so. See No. 113. " Deter- 
 minate " is in Chaucer, Frere's Tale, 1. 161. 
 
 183. Extravagancy. A word formed on ordinary 
 lines, as ignorancy (Hooper, Works, Parker Soc. ed. 
 pp. 52, 108), impudency, temperancy (Hooper, p. 78), &c. 
 
 184. Generosity ( = family pride or character; 
 CoRiOLANUS, I, i, 215) ; Generous (M. for M, IV, vi, 
 
 14). 
 Generosity piognate, and come from youratavite progenitonis. 
 
 Leache, Letter to Throckmorton, 1570. 
 [Add: 
 
 Nobility began in thine ancestors and endeth in thee ; and the 
 Generosity that they gained by virtue thou hast blotted with 
 vice. 
 
 Lilly, Euphues, Arber's rep. p. 190. 
 
 Like to the eager but the generous greyhound. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, i, 2. 
 iThe nobilities and armes of generositie. 
 
 Feme, The Blazon ofGentrie, 1586, Ep. Ded. 
 Noblenesse and generositie [of birth] hath this privilege. 
 
 Id. p. 81. 
 
 Feme's title-page runs : 
 
 The Blazon of Gentrie | divided into two parts | The first 
 named | The Glory of Generositie | &c. 
 
 Compare : 
 
 Tis pity one so generously derived 
 
 Should be deprived his best inducements thus. 
 
 T. Heywood, Rape of Lucrece, i, a.] 
 
356 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 185. Infortunate (John, II, i, 177 ; 2 Henry VI, 
 IV, ix, 18). Mr. Willis refers to Richardson's Dictionary 
 for early examples. The Oxford Dictionary gives 
 instances from Gower, iii, 375, and Hall's Chron. 
 Edward IV (1548), 239 b. 
 
 [The word occurs also in Roye's Rede me and be nott 
 Wrothe, 1528 ; Sheet c in Whittingham's rep. of ed. 
 1583 ; and in Holinshed (Boswell-Stone's Shakespeare's 
 HoLiNSHED, p. 350), where probably Shakespeare found 
 it. But it is also found in J. Heywood's Interlude, 
 A Dialogue on Wit and Folly, Percy Soc. rep. p. 20 ; 
 and in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, torn, ii, nov. 27 ; 
 Haslewood's rep. p. 447. 
 
 " Infortune " was also current. See Boswell-Stone's 
 Shakespeare's Holinshed, p. 4354.] 
 
 186. Ingenious (from ingenium, natural ability : Lear, 
 IV, vi, 286 ; Hamlet, V, i, 269). 
 
 To be captious, yirtuoug, ingenious. 
 
 Hazlitt's Dodsley, v, 363. 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 Ingenious wit of the French. 
 
 Hall, Chron. Edward IV. 231. 
 
 Ingenious — ingenuous or noble. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. 
 [Compare : 
 
 Curtesie is a free, spontaneous and ingenious quality. 
 
 Fulbroke, cited in N. E. D. 
 
 Mine own earnest and ingenious love of him [Homer]. 
 
 Chapman, pref. to trans, of Iliad, 1598. 
 
 Most ingenious and inimitable characters. 
 
 Id., Comm. on B. i. 
 He is of an ingenious and free spirit. 
 
 Jonson, List of Characters to Every Man Out, 1. i.] 
 
 187. Lethe (Julius C^sar, III, i, 205). 
 
 Dr. Theobald remarks that " If lethe [sic] represents 
 the Latin word letum or lethum, death, it is the solitary 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 357 
 
 instance of such usage; but Shakespeare uses Latin 
 so freely and inventively that there is no antecedent 
 improbabihty in this interpretation of the word; and 
 it is more suitable to the context than the sense of Lethe 
 as the river of oblivion, which is not crimson at all." 
 
 Neither reading is really tenable. Mr. WUlis quotes 
 the statement of Steevens that " Lethe is used by many 
 of the old translators of novels for death. " But Steevens' 
 one instance does not prove this, since there Lethe = 
 obUvion. " Lethe " = letJmm, for death, would be a 
 bad coinage, and a poor proof of scholarship. The 
 passage is in all likelihood corrupt. The actual reading 
 of the Folio is " Lethee." Some editors have plausibly 
 taken it as a misprint for " death " — ^which in Tudor 
 books is often spelt " dethe," 
 
 188. Office, Officious ( = duty, serviceable : Othello, 
 III, iv. 113 ; Titus, V, ii, 202). 
 
 [Dr. Theobald thoughtfully notes that " Cicero's 
 treatise on Ethics is entitled De Officiis ; " but does not 
 mention that that work was translated into English 
 early in the sixteenth century (1533) by R. Whittington; 
 under the title The Three Bokes of Tullius Offyce. 
 Of this the fourth edition appeared in 1553. This or 
 another translation was issued in 1582 under the title 
 TuLLiES Offices in Latin and English, and again in 
 1591 ; Grimalde's translation, entitled Marcus Tullius 
 Cicero, Three Bookes of Duties, appeared first in 
 1555, and was reprinted in 1556, 1558, and 1574. Thus 
 no Latin classic was more widely known in Elizabethan 
 England ; and the classic force of " office " was familiar 
 to thousands of non-academic readers. The word in that 
 sense is really old, occurring in Chaucer's Parlement of 
 FouLES, 1. 236. Elyot, unaware of this, wrote in 1531 
 that for the De Officiis "yet is no propre englisshe 
 word to be given " (Governour, i, 11), and suggested 
 *' dueties and maners." But Whittington's translation 
 
358 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of 1533 would make current both the word and the 
 meaning. 
 It is a normal term : 
 
 In your Majestie hath been orderly fulfilled all lawes and 
 offices of a devout Neutrality. 
 
 Ep. Ded. to Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini. 1579; 
 
 and the theologians used it regularly. E.g. : 
 
 It is the office of a Christian to know what God can do by the 
 word of God. 
 
 Hooper, Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. 168. 
 
 The prelate, the preacher, hath many diverse offices to do. 
 
 Latimer, Sermon of the Plough.] 
 
 For instances of all the various meanings of the 
 word and its derivatives, see the Oxford Dictionary. 
 " Oflftcious " in the sense of " serviceable " was common : 
 that was in fact the usual meaning of the word : 
 
 Shew thyself officious and serviceable still. 
 
 Marriage of Wit and Science, Hazlitt's Dodsley, ii, 339. 
 
 [Add: 
 
 They make three sorts of lies, jocosum, pemiciosum, officiosum, 
 " jesting lies," " pernicious," and " officious " [ ■= friendly or 
 serviceable]. 
 
 Hutchinson, The Image of God'. Works, Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. $1. 
 (Hutchinson has " office " = " duty." on p. 332.) 
 Assist me to make good the door with your officious tyranny. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 2. 
 
 Officiously ( = helpfully) insinuate themselves into thy 
 presence. 
 
 Id. V. 3. 
 Not altogether indutiful, though not precisely officious. 
 
 Spenser, Ep. Ded. to Colin Clout's Come Home Again.] 
 
 189. Periapts (from Gr. ireplairrov, amulet: 1 Henry 
 VI. y, iii. 2). 
 
 This is from a non-Shakespearean play. But the word 
 is used in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, 
 1584, p. 230. &c. : Nicholson's rep. pp. i85t-i88. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 359 
 
 190. Replete (L. L. L., V. ii, 853 ; Sonnet 113). 
 A very common word, from Chaucer onwards. See 
 examples in Richardson's Dictionary, and : 
 
 I am replete with joy and felicity. 
 
 Calisto and Melebea, Hazlitt's Dodsley, i, 87 ; 
 Malone Soc, rep. 1. 945. 
 
 My heart with blasphemy and cursing is replete. 
 
 A Woman is a Weathercock, Hazlitt's Dodsley. xi. 13. 
 [Add: 
 
 I am the prophete called Isaye, 
 Replett with Godys grett influens. 
 Coventry Mysteries : VII. The Prophets. Sh. Soc. 
 ed. p. 65. 
 
 Replete with yre. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 Replete with mischievous vengeance. 
 
 Id. 
 With replete spirit went I to my bed. 
 Hoccleve, La Male Regie de T. Hoccleve, 1. 315. 
 
 A man 
 With all good so replete. 
 
 A Woman is a Weathercock, i, i. 
 
 His wordes are demure, replete with wholsom bless3mges. 
 
 Bale's Interlude. John the Baptist, 1538. Rep. in 
 Harl. Misc., ed. 1808, i, 209. 
 
 The earth was replete with iniquity. 
 
 Latimer, Last Sermon before Edward VI. 
 
 With holy, humble and chaste thoughts replete. 
 
 Chapman. The Amorous Zodiac, 1595. st. 17. 
 
 Replete with men, stored with munition. 
 
 Locrine, ii, 3. 
 
 So replete with the inconstant behaviour and manifest vices of 
 Englishmen. 
 
 Macdufi's speech in Holinshed : Boswell-Stone's 
 Sh. Holinshed, p. 41. 
 
 And where repleat with virgins I erect thy temples may. 
 
 Higgins' add. to Mirrour for Magistrates, 1575. 
 Rep. of 1810, p. 79. 
 
 And every way replete with doubtful fear. 
 
 Heywood, i Edward IV, v, 1. 
 
36o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Repleth by all experience. 
 Chester Plays : The Fall of Lucifer, Sh. Soc. rep. p. 15. 
 
 That am repleath with heavenlye grace. 
 
 Id. ib.] 
 
 191. Seen (" well seen " : Shrew, I, ii, 133). 
 
 Dr. Theobald gravely records that " Bacon often uses 
 ;he word in this way," and, finding it also twice in 
 Marlowe (Faustus, i, 137 ; Massacre of Paris, i, 8) 
 s the more convinced that Bacon wrote both Shake- 
 speare and Marlowe ! It is simply a common Eliza- 
 aethan idiom : 
 
 Though they be seen in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. 
 
 Tyndale, Expos, of Matthew, 1531 ; Parker Soc. 
 rep. p. 13. 
 
 Sir, you seem well seen in women's causes. 
 
 The Four P's (1520) ; Hazlitt's Dodsley, i, 381. 
 [Add: 
 
 Fell to discourse, as one well seen in philosophy. 
 
 Greene, Menaphon (1589), Arber's rep., p. 58. 
 
 Those that are better seen in the tongues than I. 
 
 Tyndale, Prol. to trans, of New Testament. 
 
 Well experienced and seen in the knowledge of many countries. 
 Robinson's trans, of More's Utopia, Dent's rep. 
 p. 83. 
 
 This monke, monke-like, in Scriptures well scene. 
 
 Proemium of 1600 to the Chester Plays. 
 
 Not so well seen in the English' "tongue as perhaps in other 
 anguages. 
 
 E. King's Epistle pref. to Spenser's Shepheard's 
 Calender, Globe ed., p. 442. 
 
 Weening it perhaps no decorum that shepherds should be seen 
 n matter of so deep insight. 
 
 Id. General Argument, p. 443. 
 
 He, well seen in the world, advised. 
 
 Chapman, tr. of Iliad, i, 251. 
 
 A man not seen in deeds of cirms. 
 
 Id. B. V. 
 But I that am in speculation seen. 
 
 Greene, James the Fourth, v, 5. • 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 361 
 
 He's afiable, and seen in many things 
 
 He3rwood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ii, i . 
 Finding myself unfurnished of learning and barely seen in the 
 arts liberal. 
 
 Church3rard's Spark of Friendship, 1588, in Harl. 
 Misc., 1909, ii, III. 
 In sondiy sciences he is sene. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528 (Rep. p. 40). 
 Good wits seen and studied in all sciences. 
 
 Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini, 1579, p. 2.] 
 
 There is appended to Judge Willis's " Addenda " a 
 list of fourteen of the words founded on by Dr .Theobald, 
 of which he has not been able to find instances before 
 Shakespeare. They are : Incarnadine, Cadent; Can- 
 didatus, Qrcum-mure, Confix, Ex-sufSicate, Fracted, 
 Intrinse, Maculate, Questant, Questrists, Sequent, Sup- 
 pliance, Unseminar'd ; and he adds a further list of four 
 " used in an unusual sense," which he has not met with 
 in Bacon. These are : 
 
 " Factious, meaning busying oneself : active. 
 
 Name „ Debt. 
 
 Pernicious ,; Much striving. 
 
 Plague ',; Snare." 
 
 These have now to be reckoned with. 
 
 192. Incameidine. Dr. Theobald's position in regard 
 to this word is remarkable. Mr. Willis, unable to trace 
 it outside of Shakespeare, stated that it is the only word 
 in the Folio " which cannot be found elsewhere, and 
 unconnected with another word." After the publica- 
 tion of Mr. Willis's book. Dr. Theobald learned from 
 Mr. Stronach, who had gone to the Oxford Dictionary, 
 that " as an adjective it is foxmd in Sylvester (1591)," 
 and in a number of other writers after Shakespeare. 
 Whereupon Dr. Theobald, in his preface of 1904, com- 
 ments : " Yet Mr. Willis gravely informs us that it is 
 the only word which cannot be found elsewhere." Mr. 
 
362 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Willis of coiirse meant " before Shakespeare," later 
 instances having no bearing on the problem. And now 
 Dr. Theobald, whose own case is destroyed by the cita- 
 tion from Sylvester, without a word of admission or 
 apology, assumes to exult over Mr. Willis's failure to 
 discover the Sylvester passage, and proceeds to impute 
 to him an assertion that no candid reader would. Finally 
 Dr. Theobald announces : " I have no intention of 
 discussing these words in detail " ; yet he leaves the 
 " incarnadine " to pose as a Baconian " classical " 
 coinage in his text. 
 
 As the commentators noted long ago; the word is 
 simply an Anghcising of the Italian word incarnatino— 
 a thing very likely to be done in that age apart from 
 literature. As Steevens pointed out, " carnadine is the 
 old term for carnation " : 
 
 Grograms, satins, velvets fine. 
 The rosy-colour'd caxnadine. 
 
 Anything for a Quiet Life. 
 
 There is no classical coinage in the case. At most 
 Shakespeare may have made a verb out of an adjective. 
 
 193. Cadent ( = falling : " cadent tears," Lear, I, iv; 
 
 307)- 
 
 Mr. Willis had forgotten to consult the Oxford Dic- 
 tionary, which cites : 
 
 If the part of fortune be cadent from the Ascendant. 
 Lupton's Thousand Notable Things, 1586 (Ed. 1675, p. 201). 
 
 It appears to have been a term in astrology, like " retro- 
 grade." 
 
 194. Candidatus (Titus i; i). A Latin word, un- 
 adapted, pedantically used in a non-Shakespearean play. 
 [By Peele : see the author's Dm Shakespeare write 
 ' Titus Andronicus ' ?] 
 
 Shakespeare did not know the Roman usage. See 
 above, p, 192. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 363 
 
 195. Circununure (Measure for Measure, IV, i, 28). 
 
 Likely to be a word of Greene's, who has " counter- 
 mure " in EuPHUES HIS Censure to Philautus : Works, 
 vi, 218. 
 
 196. Confixed (Measure for Measure, V, i, 232). 
 
 A bad coinage, if not a corruption. It may or may 
 not be Shakespeare's : it has not siu~vived. Chapman 
 has " infixed." 
 
 197. Ex-sufflicate (Othello, III, iii, 182). 
 
 No other author has yet been cited for this word. 
 It may stand for what it is worth ! It is certainly not 
 "classic." 
 
 198. Fracted (Henry V, II, i, 130 ; Timon, II, i, 22). 
 The fact that in his first use of the word the dramatist 
 
 puts it in the mouth of Pistol (" his heart is fracted and 
 corroborate") might have suggested to Dr. Theobald 
 that it could not have been a classical neologism. Why 
 not cite " corroborate " to the same purpose ? The 
 serious use of " fracted " in Timon was no innovation. 
 The word occurs in Boorde's Breviary of Health 
 (1547)1 § 32I1 cited in N. E. D. Boorde also has " fract." 
 
 199. Intrinse. See above. No. iii. 
 
 200. Maculate : Maculation (L. L. L. I, ii. 96 ; 
 Triolus, IV, iv, 66). 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives "maculated" from 
 Higden and from Caxton's Godfrey and Eneydos. 
 In the latter also occmrs : 
 
 Maculate and full of filth. 
 
 Again in Barclay's Ship of Fools (1509) we have : 
 
 With vices maculate. 
 
 Ed. 1570, p. 144. 
 
 Other instances occur between 1509 and 1586. 
 [Elyot has the verb " macidate " ; The Governour. 
 B. i, c. 26. So has Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, 
 
364 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 1. 81 ; so has Northbrooke, Against Dicing, Dancing, 
 &c. 1577 : Sh. Soc. rep. p. 131 ; so has Marston, Satires, 
 iii. Maculation occurs at least twice in the Coventry 
 Mysteries (c. 1450) : Sh. Soc. ed. pp. 142, 193.] 
 
 201. Questant and Questrists. See above, p. 339. 
 
 It is possible that these are but variants, in all likeli- 
 hood used in common speech, of the old word " quest- 
 monger," found in Piers Plowman and repeatedly used 
 by Bale in The First Examination of Anne Askewe 
 (Index and text : Parker Soc. rep. pp. 146, 149, 151), 
 and by Latimer (Fourth Sermon on the Lord's 
 Prayer). It is applied by Bale to the members of the 
 " wicked quest " (p. 167) or jury. But " quest " had 
 other meanings, as in the Morte Darthur and in the 
 ordinary sense of " seeking for," and on that basis too 
 there would be developments. 
 
 202. Sequent (= successive : Othello, I, ii, 40; 
 = a follower : L. L. L. IV, ii, 142). 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary gives : 
 
 Their words fall in, one after the other, like sequents. 
 
 Blount, Horte Subseciva (1620), 49. 
 And scho in hand ane letter had, quhairon 
 Hir charge echo red, qhais tennour is sequent. 
 
 Holland, Court of Venus, 1560, 1. 810. 
 
 The word comes through the French, and is given by 
 Cotgrave. " Sequence " is old. 
 
 203. Suppliance. 
 
 Found in Chapman's trans, of the Iliad, ix. 
 
 204. Unseminar'ed (Antony, I, v, 10). 
 
 An analogue to " tmschooled," in the common taste 
 of the time. There is no such Latin word. But Nashe 
 has " seminariz'd " (Christs Teares : Works, ii, 60). 
 
 205. Factious (= active: Richard III, I, iii, 127; 
 Julius C^sar, I, iii, 118). 
 
 It is not clear why Judge Willis should have felt any 
 difficulty in this case : the word is used in a quite obvious 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 365 
 
 sense, " active /or a faction." In the sense of " trouble- 
 making " we have Chapman's 
 
 No need have we of fax:tious Day 
 To cast, in envy of thy peace. 
 Her falls of discord in thy way. 
 Fifth Sestiad of Hero and Leander : Epithalamion Teratos ; 
 
 and Jonson's 
 
 Instruct 
 Others as factious to the like oflEence. 
 
 Sejanus, iii, i . 
 
 206. Name (As You Like It, II, v, 21 ; Comedy of 
 Errors, III, i, 44). Alleged by Dr. Theobald to stand 
 for nomen = debt. 
 
 There is nothing " classic " in the matter. " Name " 
 in these passages does not and could not mean " debt." 
 In the first cited, the meaning simply is that the speaker 
 takes no note of the names, as a trader woidd not enter 
 on his books names of non-debtors ; in the second there 
 is no shadow of groimd for suggesting any connec- 
 tion with nomen = a bond. Judge Willis was merely 
 mystified. 
 
 207. Pernicious (L. L. L., IV, i, 66 ; Much Ado, 
 I, i, 130). 
 
 See above, No. 127. Dr. Theobald's definition will 
 not stand. 
 
 208. Plague ( = snare ? Lear, I, ii, 2). 
 
 In putting down this word as a classical innovation. 
 Dr. Theobald avows his knowledge that the Clarendon 
 ed. connects it with the Prayer Book version of Psalm 
 xxxviii, 17 : " And I, truly, am set in the plague," 
 which follows Jerome's Latin, Quia ego ad plagam paratus 
 sum. Yet he claims that " It is a curious passage, and 
 cannot well be explained without going outside the 
 vernacular sense of the word." Then what is the sense 
 of the word in the Prayer Book ? If that were not a 
 current phrase, how could any dramatist have ventured 
 
366 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 to use " plague " in the sense of " snare " and count on 
 being understood ? 
 
 Again and again has Dr. Theobald thus inserted in 
 his list words which even he, by some chance, has dis- 
 covered to be current English before Shakespeare's day. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 There remain to be noted a few words in Dr. Theobald's 
 list which Mr. WiUis has overlooked. 
 
 209. Act ("act of fear" = action: Hamlet, I, ii, 
 205 ; Henry V, I, ii, 188 ; Othello, II, i, 229 ; III, 
 iii, 326). 
 
 Dr. Theobald observes that this is " a sense which, 
 though rather medieval than classic, is foimd in Bacon's 
 Latin." It must be common in the Latin of a great 
 many other men of that time ! In English, act = 
 action is of old standing. The Oxford Dictionary cites 
 Fabyan's Chronicle, 1494, vii, 579 ; and Drajrton's 
 
 Wise in Conceit, in Act a very sot. 
 
 Idea, 860. 
 
 The phrases " in act to " and "caught in the act" are 
 idiomatic. " Action ' ' in Shakespeare's day was applied, 
 among other things, to the acting of a play. See 
 Webster's pref. to his White Devil. But the alleged 
 " classical " sense of " act " comes out clearly here : 
 
 Tliere is in it [the soul] a nature and abilitie of working, and as 
 it were a mere act, whereby it liveth and giveth life. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay on The 
 Trewnesse of Christian Religion, 1 587, ed. 1604, p. 62. 
 
 Compare : 
 
 That . . . they be induced unto the continual act. 
 
 Elyot, Governour, B. iii, c. 23. 
 His limbs so set 
 As if they had some voluntary act. 
 Without man's motion. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, 1601, iii, 2. 
 True learning's act 
 And special object is . . . 
 Chapman, Shepherd's ed. of Minor Poems, p. 158. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 367 
 
 Preparing or going about these . . . not in present act with 
 them. 
 
 Id. Comm. on B. iii of trans, of Iliad. 
 Retention and ejection in her powers 
 Being acts alike. 
 
 Id. Third Sestiad of Hero and Leander, 1598. 
 
 210. Consequence (Hamlet, II, i, 44; Macbeth; 
 I, iii, 124 ; vii, 2). 
 
 "The classic sense," sajrs Dr. Theobald, "gives depth, 
 richness, and fulness to the meaning." There are many 
 classic senses, and they are all implicit in English usage. 
 The logical sense occurs in Chaucer's Boece. 
 
 211. Fortitude (strength of a place : Othello; 
 I, iii, 222). 
 
 This is certainly not a conunon usage ; but it is pre- 
 cedented in the non-Shakespearian i Henry VI (II, i, 
 17): 
 
 Despairing of his own arm's fortitude ; 
 
 and in Eden's Treatise of the Newe Indl/^ (i553 : 
 Arber's rep. p. 15) where there is praise of the " forti- 
 tude and strength " of the elephant. For this there is 
 " classic " precedent : for appljdng the word to a fortress 
 there is not. But Latimer translates the vulgate fortitudo 
 by " strength." 
 
 212. Fraction (TiMON, II, ii, 220 ; Troilus, II, iii, 
 107; V,ii, 158). 
 
 Common : see the Oxford Dictionary for instances. 
 
 213. Gentle, Gentility (of birth : Cymbeline, IV, ii; 
 39 ; As You Like It, I, i, 21). 
 
 Mr. Willis might well pass over words so absolutely 
 common as these. " Gentles " was a customary form 
 of stage address, and variants of the word meet us every- 
 where, from Chaucer onwards : 
 
 To make a blaze of gentry to the world. 
 Nor stand so much on your gentility. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, i, I. 
 
368 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Good steps to gentility too, marry. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, v, i. 
 If thou claim gentry by pedigree, practise gentleness by thine 
 honesty. 
 
 Lilly, Euphues, Arber's rep. p. 190. 
 (" Gentleman " occurs six times on the next page.) 
 Art thou a gentle ? live with gentle friends. 
 
 Gascoigne, The Steele Glas, 1576. 
 
 But we waste time on such a demonstration. 
 
 214. Influence (Hamlet, I, i, 118 ; Tempest, I, ii, 
 181 ; Sonnet 78). 
 
 Says Dr. Theobald : " In the exact sense required by 
 its Latin derivation this word is used, in an astrological 
 sense, to express the stream of power that flows from 
 stars or planets." Quite so — only the idea goes further 
 than stars or planets. And it was absolutely universal 
 in Tudor times and long before. It is astonishing that 
 even Dr. Theobald should ignore the text : " Canst 
 thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades ? " in the 
 Authorised Version (Job, xxxviii, 31), which here follows 
 the Geneva Bible of 1560. See the Oxford Dictionary 
 for the history of the word. It occurs in Lydgate's 
 " sixteen staves of metre royal " composed for a London 
 " maying " in the reign of Henry VI : 
 
 Mightie Flora . . . 
 
 Made buddes springen, vdth her sweete showres^ 
 By the influence of the sunnSshine. 
 Quoted by Stow, Survey of London, Morley's rep. p. 124. 
 
 in the old Interlude entitled Nature (c. 1490) : 
 
 There is in earth no manner thing 
 
 That is not partner of my [Nature's] influence. 
 
 Farmer's Lost Tudor Phys, p. 44- 
 
 And in Francis Thyime's Debate between Pride 
 AND Lowliness (c. 1570) : 
 
 Where but he [the husbandman] mark the heavens' influepce, 
 Instead of com oft shall he gather dust. 
 
 Shakespeare Society's rep. p. SS- 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 369 
 
 Compare the line above cited (under Replete) from the 
 Coventry MYSXEfUES, and : 
 
 Who addeth to the sun 
 Influence and lustre. 
 
 Jonson, Poetaster, v. i . (Again in same scene.) 
 And Jove, the Sun. and Mercury denied 
 To shed their influence in his fickle brain. 
 
 Marlowe, i Tatnb. i, i. 
 Should . . . the earth be defeated of heavenly [physical] 
 influence. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol. B. i, ch. iii, §3 (iS94)- 
 The starres, their influence, quantities, consents. 
 
 Histvio-Mastix, I, i, ^7. 
 If heavens had vowed, if stars had made decree. 
 To show on me their froward influence. 
 Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay : Ed. Dyce, p. 171. 
 What churlish influence deprives her mind ? 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, i, i . 
 I [Jupiter] will inforce my influence to the worst. 
 Lest other planets blame my regiment. 
 
 Id. ib. ii, I. 
 Here, Venus, sit, and with thy influence 
 Govern Pandora. 
 
 Id. ib. iii, 2. 
 Now other planets' influence is done. 
 
 Id. ib. V, I. 
 Let fall a wreath of stars upon my head 
 Whose influence may govern Israel. 
 
 Peele, I>avid and Bethsabe, iii, 5. 
 
 Which bodies lend their influence by fire. 
 
 Id. iv, 2. 
 Fall stars that govern his nativity. 
 And summon all the shining lamps of heaven 
 To . . . shed their feeble influence in the air. 
 
 Marlowe, 2 Tamb. v, 3. 
 This celestial influence 
 That govemeth and guides our days. 
 Kyd's trans, of Garnier's Cornelia, 1 594, Chorus at 
 
 end of Act ii. 
 Heaven's influence was ne'er so constant yet. 
 
 Id. Act ii. 
 Blest be heaven, and guider of the heavens 
 From whose fair influence such justice flows. 
 
 Id. Spanish Tragedy, i, 2. 
 2 A 
 
370 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Yes, heavens are just, but thou art so corrupt 
 That in thee all their influence doth change. 
 
 Id. Soliman and Persada, ii, i. 
 
 By theyr influens and constellacyons 
 
 They cause here corruptions and generacyons. 
 
 Cornish or Heywood, The Four Elements, Percy 
 Soc. rep. p. 8. 
 
 Of the sterris and pianettes, by whose influence 
 The see is compellyd to ebbe and flowe dayly. 
 
 Id. p. II. 
 Celestial influence preordinate by providence divine. 
 
 Elyot, Governour, B. ii, 12 ; Dent's rep. p. 171. 
 
 215. Mirable (Troilus, IV, v, 142). 
 
 The word occurs in the Coventry Mysteries (c. 1450) : 
 
 A ! myrable God, meche is thy myth. 
 
 Assumption of the Virgin, Sh. Soc. ed, p. 389. 
 
 which the Stratford actor may well have seen played in 
 his youth. The N. E. D. also gives an instance from the 
 MiROUR OF Salvacioun, 1450 ; and cites the forms 
 mirahilists (1599) and miraUliaries (1600). Bacon has 
 mirabilaries (1605). 
 
 216. Mure, Mural ( = Wall : 2 Henry IV, IV, iv, 
 118 ; M. N. D. v, i, 209). 
 
 The Variorum ed. gives t 
 
 A long mure of ice. 
 D. Settle's Last Voyage of Captain Frobisher, 1577. 
 
 The Oxford Dictionary adds instances from Caxton, 
 1471 ; and LeIand, 1552 ; and instances of the verb 
 "to mure" from Maundey, 1440; Fabyan's Chronicle, 
 1494 ; and Hawes, 1503. In the sense of " to block up " 
 again, we have instances from Barbour, 1375 ; Bemers' 
 Froissart. 1523 ; and Muleaster, 1581. Compare Spenser, 
 F. Q. VI. xii, 34. 
 
 217. Naso. 
 
 A pun possible to any schoolboy. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 371 
 
 218. Plausibly (= applaiisively : Lucrece, 1. 1854). 
 The ordinary meaning of the word in Elizabethan 
 usage: 
 
 Every one received him plausibly, and with great submission 
 and reverence. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, 1583. Collier's rep. p. 48. 
 
 Greene uses " plausible " with this force <Jways : 
 
 Smiling at my labours with a plausible silence. 
 Ded. to The Spanish Masqverado, 1589 : Works, v, 241. 
 
 Would deliver up a hundred verses, though never a one plausible. 
 
 Ded. to Menaphon : Works, vi, 7. 
 
 Having ended his tale with a plausible silence of both paxts. 
 Euphues his Censure to Philantus : Works, vi, 199. 
 
 Compare : 
 
 Affirming that I deserved a laurel garland, with sundry other 
 plausible speeches not here to be rehearsed. 
 
 Gascoigne, Ep. ded. to The Droomme of Doomesday. 1576. 
 
 So much the more plausible to those princes, by how much they 
 were convenient for their service. 
 
 Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini, 1579, p. 235. 
 
 A plausible [= laudable] and vertuous conversation. 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589, Arber's rep. p. 25. 
 
 The dacHlis . . . most plausible of all when he is founded upon 
 the stage. Id. p. 139. 
 
 Somewhat sour and of no plausible [<= commendatory] utter- 
 ance. Id. p. 153. 
 
 Old men . . . speak most gravely, wisely, assuredly, and 
 plausibly. ' Id. p. 154. 
 
 A condition so happy, plausible, and well governed. 
 
 Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini, 1579, p. 2. 
 
 The souls of such as lived implausible. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Cynthiam, 1594. 
 
 With the like plausible alax:ritie received. 
 
 Stubbes, as cited, p. vi. 
 
 So excellent and plausible in the sight of . . . 
 Painter, Palace of Pleasure, tom. ii, nov. 26 ; Rep. p. 395. 
 
 Think it plausible to answer me by silent gestures. 
 
 Jonson, The Silent Woman, ii, 3. 
 
372 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 2ig. Remotion (= removal: Lear, H, iv, 115; 
 TiMON, IV. iii, 345). 
 
 An old word. Lydgate has it in the sense of remote- 
 ness (Chron. Troy, ii, xx, ed. 1555). The Oxford 
 Dictionary further shows it in official use in the fifteenth 
 century, and thereafter, in the sense of removal : 
 
 For the.remotion of such ydelness and the preferment of labour 
 
 1449. Rolls of Parliament, v, 167/1, Cp. 561/2 : 1464. 
 The remotion of the monks. 
 
 State Papers Henry VIII, i, 540. 
 Remocion of the faute. 
 
 L. Cox, Rhetor ike, c. 1530 (ed. 1899, p. 22). 
 Negatives or Remotions. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay. 
 Add: 
 
 Set in absolute remotion [= remoteness]. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Cynthiam, 1594. 
 I dreamt Mercy was hanged : this was my vision 
 And that to you three I would have recourse and remotion. 
 
 Mankind, c. 1475 (Farmer's Lost Tudor Plays, p. 29). 
 
 220. Roscius (3 Henry VI, V, vi, 10 ; Hamlet, II, 
 ii, 410)- 
 
 Mr. Theobald gravely comments : " Roscius : equiva- 
 lent to an Actor. A skilful personator or hypocrite is 
 called a Roscius. This was a classic usage." 
 
 It was a usage made known in England at least by 
 Camden, who spoke of Burbage as Roscius alter. Dr. 
 Theobald either does or does not meaui to imply that 
 the name and its generic significance were not likely to 
 be known to all Elizabethan actors. If he does not, his 
 ;itation is the worst waste of time in his entire enterprise, 
 [f he does, it may suffice to say that tag references to 
 Roscius abound in Elizabethan literature, dramatic and 
 )ther. E.g. : 
 
 stately tragedies, 
 Strange comic shows, such as proud Roscius 
 Vaunted before the Roman emperors, 
 
 Greene's Friar Bacon, sc. 6 ; ed. Dyce p. 163. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 373 
 
 Not Koscius nor Aesope, those admired tragedians, that have 
 hved ever since before Christ was born, could ever perform more 
 in action than famous Ned Allen. 
 
 Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse's Supplication to the DiveU, 
 1 592 . Works, ed . McKerrow. 
 
 Greene in Never too Late, 1590, makes Roscius the 
 representative actor. Lodge in his Defence of Stage 
 Plays, 1580, writes that " when Rossius was an actor," 
 the " Musitian in the Theater " played before his entrance ; 
 and again : " Surely we want not a Rossius, neither are 
 their great scarcity of Terence's profession " (Shake- 
 speare Society Papers, vol. ii, 1845, p. 162). Gosson in 
 Ms School of Abuse, to which Lodge's tract was a reply, 
 had spoken of " the cunning of Roscius himself " (Sh. 
 Soc. rep. p. 30). Northbrooke in his Treatise Against 
 Dicing, Dancing, &c., (1577) makes one of his inter- 
 locutors tell of Roscius, of Cicero's praise of him, and of 
 his rewards (Sh. Soc. rep. p. 84). No theatrical 
 allusion coidd have been more familiar. 
 
 221. Salve (L. L. L. Ill, i, 71-83). 
 A trivial pun ! 
 
 222. Stuprum (Lat. — ^TiTUS, IV, i, 18). 
 
 Like candidatus, a Latin word, unadapted, pedantically 
 introduced, in a non-Shakespearean play. One might 
 say that this is exactly the kind of thing that Shakespeare 
 would not do. But even this would be no proof of 
 "scholarship." In Latimer's Third Sermon before 
 Edward VI we have the Vulgate quotation, Auditur 
 inter vos stuprum, with the translation. 
 
 223. Unsisting ("unsisting postern": M. for M., 
 IV, ii, 91). 
 
 Dr. Theobald comments : " Latin sisto. stand still : 
 with negative prefix ; unsisting therefore means, never 
 at rest,*'— here following Blackstone. On any possible 
 interpretation, the word as it stands is an utterly un- 
 defensible coinage. No one knows what it means. 
 
374 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Johnson thought the intention might be " unfeeling," 
 which is alien to the et5miology. The earlier editors 
 substituted "unresisting," which spoUed the scansion. 
 Hamner tried "unresting"; and Steevens suggested 
 " unlist'ning " or " imshifting." So much for the 
 alleged influence of classical scholarship on the drama- 
 tist's diction ! The thesis ends, as it began, in utter 
 futiUty. 
 
 • • « > • 
 
 With this item we fitly close our examination of Dr. 
 
 Theobald's compilation of two hundred and more ^ 
 
 words alleged to prove the scholarly knowledge and 
 
 practice of the writer of the plays. I see no reason why 
 
 it should not have run to two thousand, with neither 
 
 more nor less futility : the list 
 
 Might, ods-bobs, sir ! in judicious hands. 
 Extend from here to Mesopotamy. 
 
 The patient reader who has taken the trouble to follow 
 the examination can pronounce for himself on the result. 
 Cited to prove the dramatist's classical knowledge, the 
 two himdred words prove only Dr. Theobald's contented 
 ignorance of Elizabethan English, in which his " classic " 
 terms were nearly all demonstrably current. We have 
 seen the long array collapse down to the forlorn handful 
 of apparent neologisms, all trivial : — " confix," " con- 
 greeing," " ex-sufflicate," " reverb," " insistm-e," any or 
 all of which may be traced to-morrow by some more 
 vigilant and more industrious reader. To impute scholar- 
 ship on that basis is beyond the courage of even the 
 Baconian. 
 
 Dr. Theobald winds up his weary survey with the 
 pronouncement that " It is scarcely necessary to give 
 articulate voice to the argument arising out of this copious 
 and refined Latinity — this large and comprehensive 
 familarity with classic language, classic literature, classic 
 
 ' Dr. Theobald's numbers go to 230. Some of his words have 
 been bracketed together in the foregoing survej'. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 375 
 
 history, classic antiquity. If such accomplishments 
 could be the product of education in a remote country 
 grammar-school of the sixteenth century, we have 
 certainly suffered most lamentable deterioration during 
 the last three hundred years." The summing-up is 
 worthy of the evidence. What Dr. Theobald, in his 
 infatuation, sees as " copious and refined Latinity," 
 large and comprehensive knowledge of classic antiquity, 
 consists in the use of some two hundred and twenty 
 words already current, nearly all of them for generations 
 if not for centuries, in English books, and likely to be 
 heard any day from the contemporary stage or pulpit. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE IN SHAKESPEARE 
 AND BACON 
 
 §1. The Evidential Problem 
 
 OF the three main lines of the Baconian case— 
 the argument from legal phraseology, that 
 from classical allusions, and that from paral- 
 lelisms of phrase — ^we have above reviewed 
 the first and second. It remains to deal with the 
 third. 
 
 To the majority of vmprepared readers this is perhaps 
 the most seductive. Men of general culture, even men of 
 legal training, little acquainted with the literature of the 
 Tudor and early Stuart periods apart from Shakespeare, 
 are apt, on a mere perusal of a list of parallelisms of phrase 
 between Shakespeare and Bacon, to grant inferences of 
 which even a smattering of the necessary literary know- 
 ledge might show them the fallacy and the absurdity. 
 The levity with which such readers in many cases accord 
 their assent is one of the most significant aspects of the 
 entire controversy. Inasmuch, however, as they are kept 
 in coimtenance by a judge of such distinction as the late 
 Lord Penzance, it seems necessary to expose their and his 
 hallucination with an amount of argument and illustra- 
 tion which for an instructed reader would be supereroga- 
 tory and tedious beyond measure. 
 
 Of this line of Baconian argument, Mr. Ignatius 
 Donnelly, of cryptogranunatic fame, appears to be the 
 most generally esteemed exponent. Dr. R. M. Theobald 
 pronounces that Mr. Donnelly's first volume, of which 
 two-fifths are " devoted to Parallelisms," " is the most 
 
 376 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 377 
 
 masterly and convincing statement of the Baconian case 
 ever published." ^ 
 
 It should be mentioned in this connection that both 
 Mr. Donnelly and Dr. Theobald have drawn upon the 
 earlier labours of the assiduous judge Nathaniel Holmes; 
 who, though like them unconcerned to check his pre- 
 suppositions by a study of Elizabethan literature in 
 general, did most of the pioneer work for the Baconians in 
 collocating passages of Bacon and Shakespeare. Their 
 recent disregard of him is probably due to the fact that he 
 repelled in advance the inference to which they are 
 fatally drawn, that Bacon wrote a great deal more of the 
 Elizabethan drama than Shakespeare. " No writer of the 
 time," he declares, " ndther Ben Jonson, nor Marlowe, 
 nor Raleigh, nor Wotton, Donne, or Herbert, whose 
 poetry approaches nearest, perhaps, of any of that age to 
 the Shakespearean vein, can be brought into any doubtful 
 comparison with this author." * As Dr. Theobald has 
 given Marlowe to Bacon, and others of the faith have 
 given him a great deal more. Holmes becomes suspect of 
 a fatal leaven of orthodoxy. That being so, we may 
 thankfully put aside his laborious treatise, and deal with 
 the accepted demonstrators. And first as to Mr. Donnelly. 
 
 As Mr. Donnelly is shown in the present chapter to 
 have been grossly and ludicrously ignorant of Elizabethan 
 literature in general, we have at the outset a measure of 
 the knowledge in virtue of which Dr. Theobald confers 
 his panegjnic. But as Dr. Theobald is at pains to preface 
 his own contribution to the same thesis with a discussion 
 of the evidential force of the kinds of parallelism in 
 question, it may be well to examine that before coming 
 to concrete matters. Opponents of this method, says 
 Dr. Theobald, are wont to 
 
 select one or two weak or doubtful cases, and smuggle in the assump- 
 tion that the whole case rests upon these, and is defeated by their 
 overthrow. Nothing can be more grossly unfair. The evidence 
 1 Shakespeare Studies, ed. cited, p. 223. 
 * The Authorship of Shakespeare, 3rd ed. 1875, p. 305. 
 
378 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 derived from parallels is cumulative, and in such an argument 
 even the strongest instance may be spared, and yet the weakest 
 may possess some value as one of the gossamer threads which 
 contribute to the construction of a cable strong enough to resist 
 the most violent efforts to break it. The argument is not like a 
 chain which is only as strong as the weakest link : it is like a 
 faggot, the mass of which cannot be broken, though every single 
 stick may be brittle ; or like a rope, made by the accumulation of 
 a great number of slender fibres which ... in their combination 
 can resist the greatest force . I do not think the Calculus has yet been 
 invented ^ which will enable us to cast the sum of an indefinite 
 series of small arguments. But it must be included in that 
 branch of Inductive Logic which deals with circumstantial 
 evidence, — and it is well known how the detective import of such 
 evidence may be constituted by a collection of facts of which 
 each singly would prove nothing — ^yet each of which lends some 
 atom of force to the entire mass, and the resultant conclusion may 
 be as well sustained as if it rested on direct documentary evidence ; 
 and perhaps even better. For documents may be forged or 
 fictitious [crjrptograms, for instance ?] and can generally be dis- 
 puted : — ^this kind of circumstantial evidence consists of in- 
 controvertible and indestructible facts.* 
 
 The hollowness of this pretended rebuttal is plain at 
 two points. To say nothing of the folly of assuming that 
 any cable or faggot is unbreakable — a typical case of the 
 logical dangers of metaphor^we have not merely sw^- 
 pressio vert but suggestio falsi. The opponents of the 
 Baconian argimient from parallels do not merely " select 
 one or two weak or doubtful cases. ' ' They have presented 
 hundreds of cases as to which there can be no rational 
 doubt whatever, and' of which the full presentment con- 
 victs the Baconians of entire ignorance of precisely those 
 facts which are vital to the dispute. Mr. Donnelly 
 claimed to make a case out of " identical expressions, 
 metaphors, opinions, quotations, studies, errors, unusual 
 
 *■ In his preface to The Classical Element in the Shakespeare 
 Plays, by his cousin Mr. William Theobald, Dr. Theobald afl5nns 
 that " by the integration of a number of small or doubtful resem- 
 blances, a real, finite [sic] result is secured, the rules of the 
 mathematical calculus having strict affinity with those of the 
 literary one " (p. 8). 
 
 * Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light, ed. 1904, p. 224. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 379 
 
 words," and so on. When it is shown that the words 
 alleged to be unusual are perfectly common for the period; 
 and that the cited expressions, metaphors, opinions, 
 errors, and quotations are in the same case, Mr. Donnelly's 
 thesis is anliihilated. 
 
 Upon this issue Dr. Theobald commits his second 
 sophism. His analogy between what he calls " weak " 
 items in a " cumulative " argtonent and the weakness of 
 rods in a faggot, or fibres in a rope, is pure paralogism. 
 Ropes and fibres are not in this connection rationally to be 
 styled " weak " at all. Unless they are all alike rotten — 
 in which case neither faggot nor rope can possibly be 
 " strong " — each is valid for its own purpose to the 
 extent to which it could be. But Mr. Donnelly's and 
 Dr. Theobald's "weak cases" are pure nullities. They 
 are, in their handling of them, demonstrable imtruths. 
 To present coincidences of phrase in Bacon and Shake- 
 speare as special to them, when such coincidences are 
 universal, is to bear false, howbeit ignorant, witness. 
 Now, so far from a series of proved falsities being valid 
 items in a " cimaulative argument " in support of a 
 general proposition, they have a rapidly progressive force 
 in discrediting that proposition. Even Lord Penzance, I 
 suppose, would upon challenge have admitted this.* Dr. 
 Theobald sophistically claims that in a case of circum- 
 stantial evidence the charge may be made out " by a 
 collection of facts each of which singly would prove 
 nothing, yet each of which lends some atom of force to 
 the entire mass." True ! But when a long series of the 
 alleged facts are conclusively shown to be sheer falsehoods, 
 each falsehood has given the jury an increasing right to 
 suspect the remaining alleged facts. If, again, the person 
 charged with having committed a number of peculiar and 
 suspicious actions can show that they are one and 
 
 * Mr, Donnelly, for his own purposes, used against the editors 
 of the Folio the maxim " False in one thing, false in all." This 
 is folly ; but compare it with the argument of Dr. Theobald I 
 
38o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 all actions daily committed in similar circumstances by 
 all his neighbours, the case against him simply falls. 
 
 The only possible plea left open to the Baconians, after 
 the contrary evidence has been led, as hereinafter, is to 
 claim that not every one of Mr. Donnelly's borrowed 
 hundreds of alleged parallels has been dealt with. Prob- 
 ably no human being will ever take the trouble of adding 
 to my exposure of a multitude of the literary follies of 
 Mr. Donnelly and Dr. Theobald a similar exposure of all 
 the rest. But when it is once shovm that both writers, 
 through sheer ignorance of the literatmre of which some 
 knowledge was the first requisite to their having any 
 right to an opinion on the question, have in scores of 
 cases asserted " peculiar " coincidence in respect of words 
 and phrases in universal use in the Tudor period, all men 
 save those determined to stick to the Baconian theory at 
 any cost of violation of truth and reason will cease to give 
 it further attention. 
 
 The reader will see that in the following confutation 
 there has been no mere picking out of " weak or doubtful 
 cases." Lord Penzance, acting as special pleader, has 
 selected from the mass of Mr. Donnelly's items those 
 which seemed to him the strongest. I have proceeded — 
 with two or three exceptions — upon Lord Penzance's selec- 
 tion. Dr. Theobald, in turn, in his chapter on " Echoes 
 and Correspondences," puts forward eighty heads. Of 
 these I have dealt with forty seriatim, missing none : of 
 the remainder I have selected eighteen, passing over a 
 number that seemed too trivial for discussion. 
 
 There is another section of the argument from 
 parallelisms, from the examination of which I am happily 
 dispensed by the notably thorough refutation supplied in 
 Mr. Charles Crawford's essay on " The Bacon-Shakespeare 
 Question." ^ Mr. Crawford, while glancing usefully at 
 the " classical " thesis, and at some of the parallelisms of 
 Dr. Theobald, has specially devoted himself to the 
 
 * In Collectanea, Second Series. Stratford-on-Avon, 1907. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 381 
 
 Baconian contention that the multitude of commonplaces 
 collected by Bacon in his Promus of Formularies and 
 Elegances, not intended for pubUcation, were gathered 
 for use by him in the plays. With their fatal facility in 
 error, the Baconians — ^led in this matter by Mrs. Pott — 
 have maintained that the Promuss entries are not repro- 
 duced in Bacon's published works, and that they are 
 embodied in the Shakespearean plays. With overwhelm- 
 ing force, Mr. Crawford demonstrates (i) that they are 
 abundantly reproduced in Bacon's works ; and (2) that 
 in a multitude of instances they and other Baconian 
 passages are closely, sometimes exactly, paralleled in the 
 writings of Ben Jonson. Thus once more we see how the 
 Baconian fallacy thrives on lack of observation and on 
 incomplete induction. I invite the reader who can 
 appreciate exact learning and the vivacious use of it to 
 turn to Mr. Crawford's contribution to the Baconian con- 
 troversy. Whether the Baconians have noted it, and 
 whether or not they have in general proceeded from it to 
 the conclusion that Bacon wrote Jonson, I cannot tell. 
 
 §2. Lord Penzance and Mr. Donnelly 
 
 That an English Judge, accustomed to the sifting of 
 evidence, should have produced a book imdertaking dis- 
 passionately to establish the Baconian case after a survey 
 of the debate, was naturally a groimd for elation in the- 
 Baconian camp. Those readers, however, who have 
 followed our examination of the treatise of Lord Campbell 
 will not be unprepared to discover that another judge has 
 undertaken to prove or pronoimce upon a proposition in 
 regard to which he had not even begun to realise the scope 
 of the issue, and has put forth as evidence a qiiantity of 
 matter of which the very citation is proof positive of 
 vital ignorance on the part of the propounders. It is as 
 if the judge in his own sphere had delivered a judgment 
 in terms of common law without knowing what common 
 law is. Knowing practically nothing of Elizabethan 
 
382 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 literature outside Shakespeare and Bacon, he has staked 
 everything on the compilation of Mr. Donnelly, who knew, 
 if possible, less. 
 
 Lord Penzance, professing to present a " judicial sum- 
 ming-up " of the debate, has not only attempted no 
 comparative investigation of the parallelisms put forward 
 by Mr. Donnelly : he has not taken note of a single 
 argument adduced against the inference founded upon 
 them. Under the name of " summing up," the (in 
 hterature) unlearned judge has presented the merest ex 
 parte statement ; and to examine it is to reaUse once for 
 all his lack of qualification for the inquiry he had under- 
 taken. He could see the entire futility of Mr. Donnelly's 
 pretence to have found a " cipher " in the Plays : and 
 he evidently realised the nugatoriness of many of the 
 " parallels " in Mr. Doimelly's list, since he makes a 
 selection from which many of the most insignificant are 
 excluded. He does indeed say * that " to do justice to this 
 branch of our subject you should study the complete 
 compilation to be foimd in that gentleman's book " ; but 
 any reader who will take that trouble will find that the 
 passages omitted are the most worthless of all. And yet 
 how worthless are those actually selected ! The first two 
 are these : 
 
 Shakespeare. Bacon 
 
 It is very cold. Whereby the cold becomes 
 
 It is a nipping and an eager more eager. 
 
 air. Natural History, § 688. 
 
 Hamlet, i, 4. 
 Light thickens, and the crow For the over-moisture of the 
 Makes wing to the rooky brain doth thicken the 
 
 wood. spirits visual. 
 
 Macbeth, iii, 2. Id. § 693. 
 
 Even an ex parte advocate of any literary culture might 
 have been expected to ask, what Mr. Donnelly seems to 
 have been incapable of considering, whether eager in this 
 sense is not an established word in medieval and Eliza- 
 
 ' P. 168. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 383 
 
 bethan English. A glance into the New English Dic- 
 tionary woxild have revealed to Lord Penzance that it is 
 used by Chaucer (as in " egre bataile," " more myghty 
 and more egre medic5me/' &c,), by intermediate writers, 
 and by Holland in Shakespeare's day, in both the physical 
 and moral senses in which Shakespeare applies it. Any 
 commentator would have informed him that it is simply 
 the French word aigre, in which spelling it appears in 
 1531 in Elyot's Boke of the Governour, in the phrase 
 " fierce and aigre " (B. iii, c. 9). With that force' it was 
 long a standing term in orc^ary EngUsh, as in The 
 
 VOCACYON OF JOHAN BaLE (1553) : 
 
 I was sick again, so eagerly, that no man thought I should 
 have lived. 
 
 (Rep. in Harl. Misc. ed. 1808. i, 341) ; 
 
 and in Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie (Arber's 
 rep. p. 32) in the phrase " very sharpe and eger," in 1586. 
 Harington has : 
 
 Such eger fight these warriers was betweene, 
 
 in his translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, 1591, 
 
 B. i, St. 62 ; and Daniel has : 
 
 Altar of safeguard whereto affliction flies 
 From the eager pursuit of severity, 
 
 in his Certaine Epistles, 1601-3 (To Sir Thomas 
 Egerton, U. 65-^) ; and 
 
 Men running with such eager violence, 
 in his MusoiBiLUS, 1. 744. Greene has " far more egar 
 rage" (Alleyn MS. of Orlando Furioso, ed. Dyce, 
 p. 107). As well might the word " nipping," if found 
 in any two authors, be cited as a proof of their identity. 
 In the second instance, what is relied on is the analogy 
 between the use of " thicken " on the one hand in regard 
 to light and on the other in regard to the " spirits visual." 
 But Bacon was using the regular terminology of the 
 physicians of the period, which he seems to have had at 
 his fingers* ends ; and the really significant fact is that 
 
384 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Shakespeare not only never uses the expression " visual 
 spirits," but only once (Romeo and Juliet, iv, i) uses 
 the much commoner " vital spirit," and seldom even uses 
 "spirits" in the general physiological sense, in which 
 Bacon uses it constantly in the Natural History. ^ 
 Shakespeare employs the word himdreds of times in the 
 senses of unembodied being or ghost, energy, " good 
 spirits," courage, &c., almost never in the sense in which 
 Bacon applies it as many hundreds of times. 
 
 The parallel is worse than futile for the Baconian's 
 purpose : it points the way of disillusionment to any who 
 will follow. A simple perusal of the Natural History, 
 which so few of the rank and file of the Baconians attempt, 
 might alone open one's eyes to the vastness of the error 
 of ascribing that book and the Plays to the same hand. It 
 exhibits a dozen preoccupations of which the Plays show 
 no trace ; it is packed full of observations of a kind at 
 which they hardly ever hint ; it is inspired by a scientific 
 bias of which they are devoid; and in every page it 
 presents a number of words which they do not contain. 
 It would be quite safe to imdertake to produce from 
 Bacon many hundreds of words not found in the Plays, as 
 will be shown in a later chapter. 
 
 As regards the coincidences, nine out of ten are as 
 irrelevant as the first above cited. Mr. Donnelly finds 
 evidence of common authorship in the use of expressions 
 that must have been used in every Elizabethan pulpit. 
 The fact that Shakespeare and Bacon speak, one of 
 " troublers of the world's peace," the other of " troublers 
 of the world " was for him an electrifjdng discovery. 
 Devoid of knowledge of secular Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 literature, he did not even know that " the troubler of 
 Israel " is a phrase in the authorised translation of the 
 Bible, which here follows the Bishops' Bible of 1560- 
 Other BibUcal allusions to " troubling Israel " gave the 
 
 ^E.g. §§22,23, 30.60.66, 75,98, 114,294,-6.-7,-9, 301,-3-4. 
 -6, 3i2,-i3,-i4,_i5,_i6, 354, 6oi,&c.&c. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 385 
 
 expression a universal vogue, as may be seen from a 
 number of old discourses. ^ Shakespeare and Bacon alike 
 employed household words. 
 
 In the same way Mr. Donnelly finds evidence of common 
 authorship in the mere use of such related words as 
 " rough-hew " and " rough-hewn," " corrosive " and 
 " corrosion ; " such every-day Tudor words as " quality," 
 " fantastical ; " such common metaphors as " weeds " and 
 " weed-out " for moral evils and their extirpation; and 
 the metaphorical uses of " sea," " ocean," " garment " — 
 apart from any further coincidence of phrase. If there 
 are three words more imiversally used than others by 
 way of emphasis and metaphor in Elizabethan literature 
 of every kind, they are " infinite," " swelling," and 
 " sea " ; and these are among the words fastened on by 
 Mr. Donnelly as serving to identify Bacon with Shake- 
 speare. The commonest tags and idioms are for him 
 pregnant with mysterious evidential force when he can 
 find them in both authors. The simple collocation " mild 
 and gentle " is eagerly italicised in such a case ; the idiom 
 " the top of," which was as common in Elizabeth's day 
 {e.g. " the top of judgment " or " of human desires ") as 
 " the height of " in the same sense then and to-day, is 
 paraded, without even one case of coincidence in the 
 completion of the phrase. One finds it everywhere in 
 contemporary drama and poetry : 
 
 Are we so much below you 
 That, till you have us, are the tops of nature ? 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Wit voithout Money, iii, i. 
 
 The top of their felicity. 
 
 Painter, Palace of Pleasure, torn, ii, nov. 26 : Hasle- 
 wood's rep. p. 393. 
 
 In the top of all thy pride. 
 
 Lodge, Wounds of Civil War, 1. 316. 
 
 We must ascend to our intention's top. 
 
 Chapman, Byron's Tragedy, i, i. 
 
 * See illustrations hereinafter, p. 430. 
 
 2B 
 
386 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The top of his house. 
 
 Id. The Widow's Tears, i, i, 
 I that whilom was 
 The top of my house. 
 
 Massinger, The Maid of Honour, iv, 5. 
 The top of woman. 
 
 Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, iv, i. 
 His worshipful ambition, and the top of it 
 The very forked top, too ! 
 
 Id. lb. ii, I. 
 My worshipful kinsman, and the top of our house. 
 
 Id. The Staple of News, ii, i. 
 The highest top of honour. 
 Brandon, The Vertuous Octavia, 1598 (Malone Soc. rep. 1. no). 
 
 The highest top of their (poets') profession. 
 
 Sidney, Apologiejfor Poetrie, Arber's rep. p. 34. 
 
 So ignorant was Mr. Donnelly of Elizabethan literature, 
 and so blind was he to the plainest duty in the way of 
 research, that any word with which he was unf amiUar — and 
 they were legion — served him at once as serious evidence 
 when he could find it both in Bacon and in the Plays, and 
 still more when he found it also in Florio's translation of 
 Montaigne. Thus he notes that Shakespeare and Mon- 
 taigne {i.e. Florio : Mr, Donnelly seems to have regarded 
 the translation as an original English work !) " both used 
 those strange words gravelled and quintessence," and again 
 " that strange word eternhing, found both in Bacon and 
 in Shakespeare." Blundering could no further go. The 
 verb " eternize," in various flections, is common in 
 Spenser, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Jonson, Lodge, 
 and Drayton, to say nothing of Hejrwood and other later 
 dramatists. Instances could be given by the score. 
 " Quintessence " was a standing term in alchemy, and is 
 found in Marlowe (i Tamb. v. 2) ; twice in Sir John Davies 
 (NoscE Teipsum, ed. Grosart, i, 40, 43) ; often in Jonson, 
 VoLPONE, ii, I ; The Poetaster, iv, 6 (7) ; The Al- 
 chemist, i, I ; Every Man out of his Humour, ii, i ; 
 The Devil is an Ass, ii, 3 ; The New Inn, ii, 21) ; in 
 Fairfax's translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 387 
 
 (B. X, St. 14) ; in Greene (A Quip for an Upstart 
 Courtier ; Works, ed. Grosart, xi, 217) ; in Heywood 
 (The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Pearson's Hey- 
 wood, ii, 18) ; twice in one play of Chapman (All 
 Fools, i, i ; v, near end) ; again in another (Bussy 
 d'Ambois, iii, i) ; and yet again in the Hymnus in 
 NocTEM in The Shadow of Night, and in the epistle 
 dedicatory to his translation of the Iliad; often in 
 Lilly (Mydas i, i ; Gallathea, ii, 3 ; Endimion, iv, 3 ; 
 Sapho and Phaon, i, 4 ; Love's Metamorphosis, ii, 2) ; 
 in King James's translation of Du Bartas' Uranie 
 (Arber's rep. p. 25) ; at least ten times in six pamphlets 
 by Nashe (Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 135, 194, 280, 351, 
 373. 381 ; ii, 10, 149, 265, 311) : in the epistle dedicatory 
 to Willobie and his Avisa (1596) ; in Marston's 
 Satires, iv, 1. 49 ; twice in Sidney's Astrophel and 
 Stella (28, 'ji) — everywhere, in short, in Elizabethan and 
 early Stuart literature. We find it in theology — c.%. in 
 Sidney and Golding's translation of De Momay on the 
 Christian Religion (1587 ; ed. 1604, p. 89). It was 
 familiar to every playgoer. Massinger puts the word in 
 the mouth of a cook in A New Way to Pay Old Debts 
 (ii, 2) — a realistic play ; and in that of a waiting-maid in 
 The Fatal Dowry (ii, middle). 
 
 " Gravelled " is so common a vernacular word that it 
 is astonishing to find even Mr. Donnelly surprised by it, 
 Taylor, the Water Poet, avowing his lack of learning, 
 tells that. 
 
 Having got from possum to posset, 
 
 I there was gravelled, could no further get. 
 
 Taylor's Motto, near end. 
 
 It occurs in so well known a book as Ascham's Schole- 
 master : " Any labor may be sone gravaled " (Arber's 
 rep. p. 41) ; and twice in one page of Sidney and Golding's 
 translation of De Momay on the Christian Religion (1587) : 
 
 This . . . graveleth Plutarke more than all the rest. 
 
 So sore graveled in this consideration. 
 
 Ed. 1604, p. 286 ; 
 
388 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and again : 
 
 Utterly amazed and graveled. 
 
 Id. p. 2$g. 
 
 In Ford's short tract. Honor Triumphant (1606), I find 
 " gravelled " in the second sentence of the epistle dedica- 
 tory, " quintessence " twice, in two successive lines of the 
 text (Sh. Soc. rep. p. 15) and " gravel'd " again (p. 25). 
 Turning to Marlowe for " quintessence," I chance upon 
 
 Gravelled the pastors of the Gennan church. 
 
 Faustus, i, I. 
 I will spare the reader further instances. 
 
 Before dealing with Mr. Donnelly's other parallels it 
 may be worth while to note the commonness alike of 
 reiteration and real copying of phrase and word in 
 Elizabethan letters, and the varying significance of it. 
 Such echoings serve at times as clues to authorship, some 
 writers being much given to repeating phrases and words 
 of their own. When the repetition is one of non-signifi- 
 cant phrase, a mere trick of speech, it may be a very 
 useful clue — a kind of thumb-print. But men have also 
 tics or mannerisms in the way of reiterating saws or 
 commonplaces. On the other hand, many writers cer- 
 tainly echo and imitate others. Bacon did it freely. 
 Has not Mr. Donnelly put to his fellow Baconians the 
 dilemma : " Either Francis Bacon wrote the Essays of 
 Montaigne, or Francis Bacon stole many of his noblest 
 thoughts and the whole scheme of his philosophy (!) 
 from Montaigne." ^ So reasons the monomaniac. 
 Scholars deal with such problems rationally, without 
 talking of "steahng." l/k. McKerrow, whose edition 
 of the Works of Nashe is a model at once of accuracy 
 and of erudition, points to, and abundantly illustrates 
 in his notes, Nashe 's " habit of almost hteral— but un- 
 acknowledged — quotation." Nashe, in prose, indulged 
 only a little more freely in the conmion habit of the poets 
 
 1 Cited by Mrs. Stopes. The Bacon-Shakespeare Question 
 Answered, 2nd ed. 1889, p. 218. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 389 
 
 and dramatists of the time. Marlowe deliberately copies 
 Spenser in a long and fine passage, and frequently in 
 shorter passages. Greene often echoes Spenser, Marlowe, 
 Lilly, and himself ; Pede imitates Marlowe and Spenser 
 and Ferrex and Porrex, but oftener himself; and 
 Shakespeare at times copies Marlowe and others. Chap- 
 man in his first play. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria 
 1596), has Marlowe's line (near end) : 
 
 None ever loved but at first sight they loved, 
 which Shakespeare avowedly quotes in As You Like It 
 (iii, 5). In his Blind Beggar Chapman perceptibly 
 imitates Marlowe, Pede, and Greene ; and his line. 
 
 Kings in their mercy come most near the Gods, 
 may be an echo of Pede. 
 
 Shakespeare at times imitates without avowal. The 
 passage in 2 Henry IV (IV, iv) about the labour of the 
 mind wearing its covering 
 
 So thin that life looks through and will break out, 
 
 copies ^ Danid's Civil Wars (ed. 1595 : Dissension. 
 B. iii, St. 116) : 
 
 Wearing the wall so thin, that now the mind 
 Might weU look thorough, and his frailty find. 
 
 The echo is not exactly an improvement. Nor does 
 
 Shakespeare improve, in Troilus and Cressida (ii, 2), on 
 
 the " mighty line " of Marlowe, on 
 
 The face that launched a thousand ships, 
 
 ^ See the Variorum ed. in he. as to Hurd's fallacious assump- 
 tion that it was Daniel who copied Shakespeare. In several 
 instances Shakespeare echoes Daniel. See above, ch. viii, p. 280, 
 No. 9 ; and compare Shakespeare's line : 
 
 Lest the wise world should look into your moan, 
 
 Sonnei 71, 
 with Daniel's : 
 
 Cannot the busy world let me alone, 
 
 To bear alone the burthen of my grief. 
 But they must intermeddle with my moan ? 
 Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, 1599, st. 44. 
 
390 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 which he certainly had in mind ; as he may have had 
 Sidney's sentence about 
 
 a gentle South-west wind which comes creeping over flowery 
 fields and shadowed waters, 
 
 Arcadia, p. 2, 
 
 " if and when " he wrote, in Twelfth Night, 
 
 the sweet South ^ 
 Tha1^breathes upon a bank of violets. 
 
 It would certainly seem that the words of Antonio : 
 
 The world . . . 
 A stage where every man must play a part 
 And mine a Scid one. 
 
 Merchant, I, i, 78-79, 
 reproduce Sidney's sentence : 
 
 For her, she found the world but a wearisome stage unto her, 
 where she played a part against her will. 
 
 Arcadia, ed. 1627, p. 208. 
 
 In the Sonnets (94 and 142) Shakespeare copies two lines 
 of the play Edward III : 
 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 
 
 That have profaned their scarlet ornaments. 
 
 Even in Macbeth, at the height of his power, he notice- 
 ably echoes passages of the second-rate Warning for 
 Faire Women (1599). That (ii, 2) has the Unes : 
 
 Oh, sable night, sit on the eye of heaven. 
 That it discern not this black deed of darkness. 
 
 ■ • • • 
 
 Be thou my coverture, thick ugly night ; 
 which he thus twice transmutes : 
 
 Come, thick night. 
 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. 
 That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, 
 Nor-heaven peep through the blanket of the dark. 
 
 i. S- 
 Come, seeling night 
 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day. 
 
 lii, 2. 
 
 ^ Sound in the Folio. It was probably the passage in Sidney 
 that led Pope to substitute " South." Sound does not " steal 
 and give odour." But perhaps Shakespeare wrote " sough." 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 391 
 
 As the Warning was played by his company, it is highly 
 probable that he had acted in it, and that, as in plots, so 
 in diction, he spontaneously evolved upon his remini- 
 scences something more intense and masterlike. ^ So he 
 did when at one stroke he reduced to comparative 
 ineptitude the ambitious line of Marston, 
 
 Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be, 
 
 by the thunder-roll of 
 
 The multitudinous seas incarnadine.* 
 
 To assmne that all these " echoes and correspondencies " 
 signify the pervading presence of one writer would be to 
 miss fatuously the whole lesson of literary history. 
 Whether the process be one of betterment, as when the 
 absurdity of " sit on the eye of heaven " is partly rectified 
 by "scarf up the eye of day," or whether it be one of 
 more or less successful reproduction of a remembered 
 music, it is all in the normal way of poetcraft, as Roger 
 
 ^ Professor MacCallum (Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies, 1912, 
 p. 171) has noted further echoes from the same play in Julius 
 Casar. The Warning has a passage in which a murderer speaks 
 of having given his victim fifteen wounds " which will be fifteen 
 mouths. ... In every mouth there is a bloody tongue, which 
 will speak." That idea is twice duplicated, with the words 
 italicised, in Antony's speeches, III, i, 259 ; III, ii, 228. I 
 cannot say that there is any improvement here, as Antony's 
 " dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips to beg the voice " of his 
 tongue. The double repetition of such matter in Julius Casar, 
 I confess, strengthens my lifelong suspicion {see above, p. 190. 
 that that play proceeds upon or takes up other men's work, 
 Baconians, I suppose, will prefer the inference that Bacon wrote 
 the Warning for Faire Women. 
 
 * I am assuming that Marston's Insatiate Countess, though not 
 published till 1613, was written before Macbeth. See Montaigne 
 and Shakespeare, pp. 125, 238 sq., 256 sq. The problem, however, 
 is a very difficult one. Marston was certainly an imitator of 
 Shakespeare ; but if he wrote his " sanguinolent " line to rival 
 Shakespeare's he failed egregiously. What is clear is that the 
 dramatists of the day discussed each other's diction . See Jonson's 
 Poetaster, passim, and Marston's Scourge of Villanie, pref. prose. 
 
392 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Ascham noted long before Shakespeare.^ So did Virgil 
 irnitate Homer, and Horace Pindar; so did a hundred 
 later poets imitate Virgil and Horace ; so did Spenser 
 imitate Chaucer, who imitated so many ; so did Milton the 
 translation of Du Bartas and other poems of Sylvester,* 
 Spenser's Faerie Queene, and the verse of the two 
 Fletchers,^ as well as many a passage of the dassics ; so 
 did Gray jewel his verse with a score of reminiscences ; so 
 did Wordsworth borrow from Spenser his line about 
 Triton's wreathed horn ; * so did Tennyson, in our age, 
 reproduce alike classical and Enghsh phrases in many a 
 poem ; and so did Poe echo Mrs. Browning, as she in her 
 turn had echoed Coleridge and as he in turn had echoed 
 Sir John Davies.^ To surmise identity of hand in such 
 cases of copying, even among contemporaries, would 
 visibly be the height of folly. Spenser repeated thrice; 
 with variations, his own charming trope : 
 
 Upon her eyelids many Graces sate 
 Under the shadow of her even browes.^ 
 
 This is copied by Drayton (Idea, 4) : 
 
 Blest star of beauty, on whose eyelids sit 
 
 A thousand nymph-like and enamoured Graces. 
 
 But no critic would dream of arguing that this last 
 repetition must also be Spenser's own, whether or not he 
 
 1 The Scholemaster, B. ii : Imitation. Macrobius, of course, 
 bad in antiquity made the matter notorious as to Homer and 
 Virgil. Ascham notes how Virgil and Cicero repeat themselves. 
 
 * See Dunster's Commentaries on Milton's early reading, and 
 the Prima Stamina of his Paradise Lost, 1800. 
 
 » See H. E. Cory's Spenser, the School of the Fletchers, and 
 Milton. Univ. of CaUfomia Press, 1912. 
 
 * Spenser, Colin Clout's Come Home Againc, 1. 245 ; Words- 
 worth, Sonnet The World is too much with us. 
 
 * See Grosart's ed. of Davies, i, p. xcvii. A number of such 
 echoes are noted in an old paper by the author in vol. ii, of 
 Criticisms. 
 
 ' -F. Q. II, iii, 25. Cp. Sonnet 11 ; Hymne in Honour ofBeautic, 
 St. 5 from end ; and King's Glosse to the Shepheards Calender : 
 June. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 393 
 
 knew that the idea is derived from. Musaeus. Such a 
 conception of poetic authorship is outside of argument. 
 Yet it Would be less absurd than to identify the author 
 of the Shakespeare Plays with Bacon on the score of 
 parallelisms of phrase such as are founded on by Mr. 
 Donnelly. Far closer parallels are to be found between 
 the Shakespeare Plays and those of subsequent drama- 
 tists, — for instance, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher. 
 Take a handful of Webster's imitations : 
 
 I will wear him in my heart's core. 
 
 Hamlet, III. 2. 
 the secret of my prince, 
 Which I will wear on the inside of my heart. 
 
 Duchess of Malfy, iii, 2. 
 I'll put a girdle round about the earth. 
 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, ii, 2. 
 He that can compass me and knows my drifts. 
 May say he hath put a girdle 'bout the world.* 
 
 Duchess of Malfi, iii, i . 
 'tis the eye of childhood 
 That fears a painted devil. 
 
 Macbeth, ii, 2. 
 
 Tenify babes, my lord, with painted devils. 
 
 The White Devil (Dyce, p. 22). 
 He doth bestride the narrow world 
 Like a Colossus. 
 
 Julius Cecsar, i, 2. 
 The high Colossus that bestrides us all. 
 
 Appius and Virginia, iii, i. 
 
 Richer than all his tribe. 
 
 Othello, V, 2. 
 More worth than all her tribe. 
 
 Appius and Virginia, iv. i. 
 
 My opei-ant powers their functions leave to do. 
 
 Hamlet, iii, 2. 
 This sight hath stiffen'd all my operant powers. 
 
 Appius and Virginia, v, 3. 
 
 * Mr. Harold Bayley {The Shakespeare Symphony, 1906, p. 259) 
 has pointed out that this " girdle " phrase, which occurs twice in 
 Bacon as a namc/for the Equator, is poetically used by Chapman, 
 Massinger, Shirley, Ford, and Beaumont and Fletcher, as well as 
 by Webster. 
 
394 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 'Tis in my memory locked, 
 Ard you yomself shall keep the key of it. 
 
 Hamlet, i, 3. 
 
 You shall close it (a promise of secresy) up like a treatise of 
 your own, and yourself shall keep the key of it. 
 
 Northward Ho, i, i . 
 
 Tke Chapman parallels,^ if less numerous, are no less 
 noteworthy : 
 
 When sorrows come, they come not single spies. 
 But in battalions. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 Afflictions 
 Do fall like hailstones, one no sooner drops. 
 But a whole shower does follow. 
 
 Chapman, Revenge for Honour, ii, i. 
 
 Spacious in the possession of dirt. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 Rich in dirt. 
 
 All Fools, i, I. 
 
 Let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer. 
 
 Macbeth. 
 The breaking of so great a thing should make 
 A greater crack. The bound of the world 
 Should have shaked lions into civil streets. 
 
 Julius Cessar. 
 Methinks the frame 
 And shaken points of the whole world should crack. 
 
 Chapman, Bussy D'Ambois, v, i. 
 
 Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world 
 Like a Colossus. 
 
 Julius Casar. 
 A Colossus 
 What (? That) could so lately straddle o'er a province. 
 
 The Admiral of France, iv, i. 
 
 A Colossus, 
 And can stride from one province to another. 
 
 Id. ib. ii, I . 
 Unskilful statuaries, who suppose. 
 In forging a Colossus, if they make him 
 
 1 Apart from echoes of phrase, compare D'Olive's account of 
 his following {Monsieur D' Olive, v, end) with Falstaff's descrip- 
 tion of his ragged regiment. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 395 
 
 Straddle enough, strut, and look big, and gape. 
 Their work is goodly. 
 
 Id. Bussy D'Ambois, i, i. 
 
 Similarly the visibly Shakespearean Une : 
 
 The silver livery of advised age, 
 
 in 2 Henry VI (V, ii, 47), is echoed in one of A Larum for 
 London (Simpson's rep. p. 62) : 
 
 The silver cognisance of age, 
 and again in the Court Prologue to Dekker's Old For- 
 
 TUNATUS : 
 
 Clothed in the livery 
 Of silver-handed [? headed] age. 
 
 Some of these phrases were probably current formulas ; 
 but it can hardly be doubted that some are real echoes ; * 
 and similar identities can be noted between Webster and 
 other contemporaries. There is not the shghtest groimd, 
 however, for any mystification on this score as to plays 
 published by their authors, save where there may be 
 reason to surmise collaboration or re-casting : we are 
 simply dealing with conscious or unconscious imitation. 
 The same verdict holds good of such parallels as these 
 between Shakespeare and Heywood : 
 
 I must be cruel only to be kind. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 Blanda. Indeed you are too cruel. 
 Young Lionel. Yeg, to her. 
 
 Only of purpose to be kind to thee. 
 
 The English Traveller, i, 2. 
 
 Heap Pelion upon Ossa. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 Heap Ossa upon Pelion. 
 
 The English Traveller, iv, 3. 
 
 Such phrases may have been current tags : Kyd has : 
 
 To bear up Peleon or Ossa. 
 
 Soliman and Perseda, i, 3 ; 
 
 » It is not impossible that Shakespeare's " Colossus " is an 
 echo from a previous Casar which he worked over. 
 
396 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 or one pair may be the echo of the other. The resemblance 
 between Hamlet's reproaches to his mother (iii, 4) and 
 those of yomig Geraldine to Wincott's wife, however, 
 suggests actual reminiscence upon Heywood's part. In 
 any case, no competent critic will suspect identity of 
 authorship, any more than in respect of the paradlels 
 between Shakespeare's Plays and those of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher : 
 
 There's such divinity doth hedge a king, 
 
 That treason can but peep to what it would. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 But there is 
 
 Divinity about you [the King] that strikes dead 
 
 My rising passions. 
 
 Maid's Tragedy, iii, i . 
 
 [That passage in Hamlet, as I have elsewhere noted, 
 seems to echo one in Montaigne's essay Of the Incom- 
 MODiTY OF Greatness. 1 It is again echoed in the 
 anonymous play Nero (1624) : 
 
 The beams of toyal majesty are such 
 
 As all eyes with it are amazed and weakened, 
 
 But it with nothing, (v, i.) 
 
 The poet may as well be echoing Montaigne as Shake- 
 speare; or he — and Shakespeare before him — may 
 instead have followed Sidney, who before Montaigne 
 wrote of eyes " So incredibly blinded with the over-bright 
 shining of his royalty." * Beaumont and Fletcher suggest 
 only Shakespeare,] 
 
 My pulse iis thine doth temperately keep time. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 Alas, my lord, your pulse keeps madman's time. 
 
 Philastcr, iv, i . 
 Hast thou no medicine for a mind diseased ? 
 
 Macbeth. 
 
 ^ See Montaigne atid Shakespeare, second edition, p. 57. 
 
 2 Arcadia, B. ii, ed. 1627, p. 207. Sidney wrote the bulk of 
 the Arcadia in 1580-1 ; and Montaigne's third book, containing 
 the essay Of the Incommodity of Greatness, appeared only in 
 1 588. The idea, of course, goes back to Augustus. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 397 
 
 Nature too unkind 
 That made no medicine for a troubled mind. 
 
 Philaster, iii, i. 
 Hast thou no medicine to restore my mts 
 WTien I have lost 'em ? 
 
 Id. ih. near end. 
 
 Tlie last two citations may or may not be echoes of 
 Shakespeare : the tag, a medieval commonplace,^ is older 
 than Macbeth in Elizabethan drama. ^ In the Spanish 
 Tragedy (iii, 8) we have : 
 
 Ah ! but none of them will purge the heart ! 
 No ! there's no medicine left for my disease. 
 
 In Ben Jonson, again, we have a passage which may 
 tell either of conversations between himself and Shake- 
 speare, or of recollection of Hamlet's advice to the 
 players : 
 
 That the glass of custom, which is comedy, is so held up to mo 
 by the poet, as I can therein view the daily examples of 
 men's lives, and images of truth in their manners. . . . 
 
 The Magnetic Lady, ii, i, end. 
 
 Yet it may be that both alike had but echoed a common 
 saw, for in the old interlude Impatient Poverty (1560) 
 we have the line : 
 
 It is but a mirror vice to exclude. 
 
 Farmer's rep. 1909, p. 35 ; 
 
 1 Gosson has " the surfeit of the soul is hardly cured." School 
 of Abuse, Arber's rep. p. 30. And Greene has : 
 
 But griefs of mind by salves are not appeased. 
 
 James IV. 
 
 ^ So with another ancient saw : 
 
 Extreme diseases 
 Ask extreme remedies. 
 
 Chapman, All Fools, v, i. 
 
 Diseases desperate grown 
 By desperate appliance are relieved. 
 
 Hamlet, iv, 3. 
 
 This had occurred earlier in Lilly (twice) and in Nashe. 
 
398 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and the " mirror " metaphor was in universal use. 
 
 Another echo almost certainly stands for reminiscence. 
 
 The lines : 
 
 Dear Angelo, you are not every man, 
 But one whom my election hath designed 
 As the true proper object of my soiU, 
 
 The Case is Altered, i, 2, 
 
 cannot fail to recall Hamlet's 
 
 Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice 
 And could of men distinguish, her election 
 Hath sealed thee for herself. 
 
 Similarly, the speech of Hippolito, the melancholy lover 
 in Dekker's Honest Whore (Pt. I, iv, i), on a skull, is 
 almost certainly an imitation of Hamlet's musings on the 
 skull in the grave-digger's scene. The lines beginning 
 Perhaps this shrewd pate was mine enemy's, 
 
 with the allusion to 
 
 His quarrels, and that common fence, his law, 
 
 tell of Shakespearean suggestion. It was inevitable, in 
 
 fact, in an age of sentientous writing, when playwrights 
 
 moralised Uke everybody else, that some should echo 
 
 Shakespeare as he echoed others.^ But these parallels 
 
 never set up in a rational reader any perplexity. To 
 
 every student it is clear that there is no ground, in such 
 
 cases, for surmising community of authorship. Yet 
 
 Mr. Donnelly actually builds on the remote resemblance 
 
 between Shidcespeare's 
 
 doth bestride this narrow world 
 Like a Colossus, 
 
 and Bacon's phrase, " For this giant bestrideth the sea," 
 when we actually have the closer parallels above noted 
 between Shakespeare's phrase and those of Chapman and 
 Webster ; and, again, he brackets Shakespeare's " such 
 
 * Poets as well as dramatists echoed him. See the echoes 
 in Samuel Nicholson's Acolastus, 1600, cited in Ingleby's Centurie 
 of Pray se, \, 33. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 399 
 
 divinity doth hedge a king " with a Baconian phrase about 
 " the law which is the hedge and fence about the hberty 
 of the subject," when, as we have seen, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher wrote of the " divinity about " the king. If we 
 say on such evidence that Bacon wrote the Sksdcespeare 
 Plays, we are committed to crediting him with those of 
 Webster and Chapman and Beaumont and Fletcher also. 
 It is plain folly in any of these cases to suppose any 
 identity of authorship whatever. We are simply dealing 
 with current tags. 
 
 A very real ground, indeed, for assigning non-Shake- 
 spearean authorship to work ascribed to Shakespeare does 
 arise in a number of plays, long recognised by most critics 
 as doubtful or as based upon older work. Thus we can 
 trace the original Hamlet of Kyd here and there, in 
 Shakespeare's play, by such remnants of Kyd's diction as 
 the 
 
 I will consent, conceale, 
 
 of The Spanish Tragedy (iv,-i), foimd in the first quarto 
 (sc. xi. 1. 106), and in other phrases preserved in the final 
 text.* But the three plays of the Henry VI group, Titus 
 Andronicus, and The Taming of the Shrew are the 
 chief cases in'point, apart from the various plays printed 
 with his name, but not included in the Folio, and Pericles 
 and Henry VIII, aow generally recognised as composite. 
 In regard to the Henry VI plays and Trrus, but especially 
 the latter, we have such groimds for diagnosing alien 
 authorship as would have been held by the Baconians to 
 be absolutely decisive if they had related to Bacon. The 
 latter play contains a round score of the most marked 
 verbal identities with passages in the signed works of 
 Peele; and a less number of equally marked identities 
 with passages in the signed works of Greene. In Peek's 
 work in particular, the significant passages are not mere 
 proverbs or conmionplaces such as any writer might use; 
 
 1 See Sarrazin's Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis, 1892, pp. 106-8. 
 
400 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 but tricks and peculiarities of style and phrase which tell 
 of one hand. The Baconians have never done anj'thing 
 so useful as to follow clues like these : one and all, they 
 have heedlessly accepted the whole traditional Shake- 
 pearean canon, imputing the entire mass to Bacon. 
 Should they chance to collate the Peelean and Greenean 
 passages in Titus, far from hesitating about the validity 
 of their methods, they would in all likelihood proceed in 
 a body to ascribe the entire performance of those poets 
 also to Bacon. 
 
 And the imbroglio does not end there. Over and above 
 the problem of actual repetitions of non-Shakespearean 
 diction in the plays recognised as doubtful, we have that 
 of the signal parallelism of style, rhj^hm, and idea (rather 
 than of phrase) between the chorus-prologues to Henry V 
 and Troilus and Cressida and those to Acts II and IV 
 of Dekker's Old Fortunatus and Act V of Heywood's 
 Fair Maid of the West. Precisely because the two 
 " Shakespearean " prologues cited are not in the style of 
 the plays to which they are attached, or of any other play 
 of Shakespeare, we are moved to suspect the hand of 
 either Dekker or Heywood in them, Dekker's for choice. 
 This is the more reasonable because Dekker at times 
 wrote for the Lord Chamberlain's Company, which was 
 Shakespeare's.^ We are not here concerned to do more 
 than indicate the problem, and to note the difference 
 between such a real ground for surmising an alien hand 
 in choruses attached to genuine Shakespearean plays, and 
 the visionary grounds given by Mr. Doimelly and his 
 tribe for ascribing those plays in the lump to Bacon. He 
 might quite as plausibly ascribe to Bacon the whole of 
 the later Elizabethan drama. 
 
 And this, it will be remembered, several Baconians have 
 
 1 In this connection it is noteworthy that Henslowe has an 
 entry, Jan. 12, 1601-2, of a payment of ids. to Dekker " for a 
 prologe and a epiloge for the playe of ponesciones pillett " — i.e. 
 Pontius Pilate. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 401 
 
 done, even as Mr. Donnelly ascribes to Bacon Burton's 
 Anatomy of Melancholy and Florio's translation of 
 Montaigne's Essays — here diverging from others of the 
 faith who ascribe to Bacon the French original, leaving 
 Florio the credit of the translation. Lord Penzance, it 
 should be observed, withholds these items from his 
 readers, saying nothing of the parallels discovered by 
 Mr. Donnelly between the Essays, Bacon, and the Plays. 
 He could not but apprehend that the obtrusion of the 
 whole Baconian Ccise would make more laughers than 
 converts, and he simply suppresses the more startling 
 details. Still, what he does present may suffice, when 
 critically considered, to satisfy most readers that a judge's 
 judgment on a literary issue may be worth very little. 
 
 Mr. Donnelly's remaining parallels may be classed imder 
 three heads : 
 
 A. Pseudo-Baconian citations from the essay Of Death 
 posthumously published as Bacon's in the voliraie of 
 Remaines in 1648, but deliberately rejected by Dr. 
 Rawley, who afterwards republished other things from 
 the same volume. 
 
 That this essay is not Bacon's was the confident 
 decision of Spedding, in which, probably, all critics now 
 share ^ who are not of the faith of Mr. Donnelly. That 
 writer presents a series of fomleen parallels between 
 Shakespearean passages and this non-Baconian essay; 
 concerning which he does not once hint that there is any 
 doubt as to its authenticity. Lord Penzance, Joiowing 
 nothing else about it than Mr. Doimelly had told him, 
 included these foiirteen illicit parallels in his selection 
 from Mr. Donnelly. And even these parallels are worth- 
 less. 
 
 B. A number of more or less trivial parallels of phrase; 
 common to the propaganda of the whole Baconian school; 
 of which samples have been given above. I have 
 
 "• The style is singularly like that of Sir Thomas Browne, as 
 Spedding observed. 
 
 2 C 
 
402 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 " paralleled " only the more plausible. Mr. Donnelly 
 finds significant parallels in the use of such phrases as 
 Shakespeare's " Shake patiently my great affliction ofE," 
 and Bacon's " The soul having shaken off her flesh " ; 
 " He is winding up the watch of his wit " and " To wind 
 down the watch of their life " ; " You're a fair viol " and 
 " this harp of a man's body " ; " fret the string " and 
 " struck upon that string " ; " The fingers of the powers 
 above " and " The soul shows what finger hath enforced 
 her " ; " feast of death " and " death's banquet." Over 
 such " parallels," and coincidences of phrase such as 
 " infirm of purpose," " piece of nature," " base and 
 bloody," " soft and tender," &c., which can be found by 
 the hundred as between Bacon and any other Elizabethan 
 writer, I do not propose to spend time. Their value may 
 be gathered from the lists which I shall give below of 
 instances from other writers of words specified by Mr. 
 Donnelly as specially affected by Bacon and Shakespeare. 
 Of more plausible parallels, however, there remain a few 
 which may here be briefly dealt with. 
 
 I. Such proverbial phrases or moral maxims as " To 
 thine own self be true " are hardly worth tracing. The 
 speech of Polonius to Laertes contains half a dozen 
 indisputable echoes of phrase from Euphues' cotmsel to 
 Philautus in Euphues and his England.^ The "to 
 thine own self be true " maxim is on a par with the 
 others ; and the Baconian claim is equally applicable 
 to Lilly. Daniel has : 
 
 and 
 
 I made myself unto myself untrue. 
 Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, 1599, st. 5 ; 
 
 How that deceit is but a caviller, 
 And true unto itself can never stand. 
 
 Musophilus, 1603, 11. 894-5. 
 
 1 Pointed out by Rushton, in Shakespeare's Euphuism, pp., 
 46. 47. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 403 
 
 2. Any one but a Baconian would divine that Shake- 
 speare's 
 
 Love 
 Must creep in service where it cannot go, 
 
 and Bacon's " Love must creep where it cannot go," are 
 simply citations of a proverb. It is given in Hazlitt's 
 English Proverbs : 
 
 Love creepeth where it cannot go, 
 
 from Rowland's Tis Merry when Gossips Meet (1602). 
 There is further an old Scotch proverb : " Kindness will 
 creep where it canna gang." It was evidently current 
 long before 1600. Greene in Friar Bacon (sc. 5 : ed. 
 Dyce, p. 161) has : 
 
 Love ought to creep as doth the dial's shade ; 
 and in Menaphon (Arber's rep. p. 39) : 
 
 Love creepeth on by degrees. . . . Love . . . should enter 
 into the eye, and by long gradations pass into the heart. 
 
 The argument from such a quotation for Bacon's author- 
 ship of Hamlet would make him author of : 
 
 What is love I will you show : 
 
 A thing that creeps and cannot go. 
 
 Hejnvood, Rape of Lucrect, 1608, ii, i. 
 
 3. Shakespeare has " majestical roof [of heaven] fretted 
 with golden fire/' and Bacon suggests that if the deity 
 had been of a h\mian disposition he would have cast the 
 stars in works and orders " like the frets in the roofs of 
 houses." It is not impossible that one of those expres- 
 sions may really have suggested the other. But if this be 
 made an argument for Bacon's authorship of Hamlet, it 
 entails by parity of reasoning the claim that Bacon wrote 
 the dedication to himself of Chapman's translation of 
 Hesiod's Works and Days (1618), which contains the 
 clause : " wherein your Lordship may find more honour 
 than in the fretted roofs of the mighty." Chapman's 
 signed dedication is emphatically in Chapman's style ; 
 but that need not trouble Baconians. 
 
404 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 4. Shakespeare's passage (Richard IH, ii, 3) about men's 
 minds " by a divine instinct " anticipating danger as 
 
 The waters swell before a boisterous storm, 
 
 is paralleled in Bacon by a phrase comparing commotions 
 in States to " secret swelling of the sea before a tempest." 
 Here again Bacon might very well be reproducing what 
 he had heard in the theatre. But all students are aware 
 that the plajrwright was simply reproducing a passage of 
 Holinshed : 
 
 Before such great things, men's hearts of a secret instinct of 
 nature misgive them, as the sea without wind swelleth of himself 
 some time before a tempest. 
 
 Cited in Boswell-Stone's Shakespeare's Holinshed, p. 353. 
 
 A similar expression occurs in Hall's Chronicle. Bacon 
 may have echoed either the chronicles or the play ; or 
 the phrase may have had proverbial currency. 
 
 5. The last is obviously the explanation of the metaphor 
 of " shunning a rock," that of a parasite acting as ivy on 
 a tree, and that of a man being " limed " like a bird, which 
 Mr. Doimelly gravely adds to his Ust of parallels. He 
 does not blench at bracketing, as from the same hand, 
 Shakespeare's 
 
 By that sin [ambition] fell the angels, 
 and Bacon's 
 
 The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall — 
 
 a homiletic sajdng which must have been uttered by 
 thousands of men and preachers many thousands of times 
 in that generation. The fall of Lucifer and his angels 
 through pride is one of the outstanding episodes in both 
 the Coventry and the Chester Mysteries ; in the old 
 interlude Nature, by Henry Medwall (c. 1490) it is 
 described in the lines : 
 
 For pride and presumption, 
 
 Lucifer, which sometime was a glorious angel. 
 
 For that his offence had such correction 
 
 That both he and eke many a legion 
 
 Of his order was cast down to hell. 
 
 (Farmer's Lost Tudor Plays, p. 123) ; 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 405 
 
 and similar formulas could be cited from a score of books 
 and sermons. 
 
 6. Bacon has the figure : " High treason is not written 
 in ice " ; and Shakespeare has : " a figure trench'd in 
 ice, which . . . dissolves to water;" and " their virtues 
 We write in water." This for Mr. Doimelly goes to prove 
 identity of authorship. Then Bacon wrote also Daniel's 
 MusoPHiLUS (1601), where we have : 
 
 Then where is that proud title of thy name 
 Written in yce of melting vanity ? (11. 129-130). 
 
 7. Wolsey's lines in Henry VIII about venturing on 
 a sea of glory. 
 
 Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, 
 
 are bracketed by Mr. Donnelly with a passage in Bacon 
 advising the man " that seeketh victory over himself " to 
 begin cautiously, " and at the first . . . practise with 
 helps, as swimmers do with bladders." There is no 
 coincidence whatever in the sentiment of the two passages, 
 in one of which the use of bladders in swimming is meta- 
 phorically put as the taking of a great risk, while in the 
 other it is put as the cautious way of going to work. The 
 every-day allusion to the use of bladders in swimming is 
 the one point the two passages have in common. But a 
 more serious difficulty for the Baconian is the fact that by 
 nearly all critics the speech of Wolsey is recognised as the 
 work of Fletcher, not of Shakespeare. This incidentally 
 raises the question as to how Bacon contrived to col- 
 laborate with Fletcher without endangering his " secret." 
 But probably the Baconian solution will be that Bacon 
 wrote Beaumont and Fletcher. 
 
 Others of Mr. Donnelly's phrase-parallels are dealt with 
 in the next chapter, as reproduced by Dr. Theobald. 
 
 C. For the rest, I have thought fit to deal in some 
 detail, and at some cost of time and trouble, with his 
 unspeakable list of citations of mere words, used meta- 
 phorically or otherwise, in the Plays and Works, held by 
 
4o6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 him to be significant of single authorship. No other part 
 of the Baconian propaganda, I suppose, reveals such 
 moniunental ignorance of everj^hing that a student of 
 Elizabethan literature might be expected to know. We 
 have seen above how Mr. Donnelly is thrilled by the dis- 
 covery that both Bacon and Shakespeare use such 
 " strange " words as " quintessence," " eternize," and 
 " gravelled." But there is no limit to his faculty for 
 surprise. He solemnly italicises such words as mortal, ape, 
 infinite, scour, fantastical ; such metaphors as sea, ocean, 
 scum, dregs, cloud, wilderness, and so on, which lie thickly 
 scattered over the whole territory of Tudor literature. 
 The portent of Mr. Donnelly's ignorance in these matters 
 transcends my powers of comment. But inasmuch as 
 iminformed readers are found to be no less impressed by 
 his word-parallels than by his phrase parallels, I have put 
 together one-and-twenty sets of illustrations of the com- 
 mon use in the sixteenth century of words which Mr. 
 Donnelly takes to be so special to the style of Bacon- 
 Shakespeare as to stand for idiosyncrasies of vocabulary. 
 If the enlightened reader's gorge should rise at such 
 demonstrations as that " morted man " was an expression 
 in universal use, let him remember that if I have tried 
 him much I have spared him more. And he is free to skip. 
 But it may be worth his whDe to realise what Baconians 
 are capable of putting down as " coincidences " : 
 
 I. Ape. 
 
 The ape of form. 
 
 O Sleep, thou ape of death. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Custom ... an ape of nature. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 Blind chance, the ape of counsel and advice. 
 
 Chapman, All Fools, i, near end. 
 
 Make their native land the land of apes. 
 
 Id. An Humorous Day's Mirth. 
 (Shepherd's ed. p. 32. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 4^7 
 
 In all things his sweet ape. 
 
 Id. The Gentleman Usher, iv, i. 
 Is he [the devil] not the ambitious ape of God's majestie ? 
 
 Nashe, Christ's Teares over Jerusalem : Works, ed. 
 McKerrow, ii, 40. 
 
 The painteis, being the poets' apes. 
 
 Lilly, Love's Metamorphosis, ii. 
 Man is God's ape. and an ape is Zany to a man . . . 
 So are women men's she-apes. 
 
 Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins of London ; c. 8 : 
 Apishness, Arber's rep. p. 36. 
 They that draw shapes 
 Are but God's apes. 
 
 Id. The Honest Whore, iv, i. 
 2. Axle-tree. 
 
 The axle-tree on which heaven rides. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 The axle-tree whereupon I have turned. 
 
 Bacon, Letter to Essex, 1600. 
 The poles and axle-trees of Heaven, upon which the conversion 
 is accomplished. 
 
 Adv. of Learning, B. ii. 
 
 Compare 
 
 The axle-tree of Heaven. 
 
 Marlowe, 2 Tamb. i, i. 
 When heaven shall cease to move on both the poles. 
 
 Id. I, 3. 
 The adverse poles of that straight line 
 Which measureth the glorious frame of Heaven. 
 
 Id. iii, 4. 
 The axis of the world. 
 
 Id. V, 3. 
 Jointly move upon one axle-tree 
 Whose terminus is termed the world's wide pole. 
 
 Id. Faustus, ii, 2. 
 
 The axle-tree about which Heaven hath his motion. 
 
 Chapman, Ep. Ded. to trans, of Iliad. 
 And may both points of heaven's straight axle-tree 
 Conjoin in one, before thyself and me. 
 
 Chapman, Bussy D'Ambois, end. 
 
 His [night's] ebon car. 
 Whose axle-tree was jet enchased with stars. 
 
 Peele, The Order of the Garter, 23-4. 
 
4o8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Fire, fire about the axle-tree of heaven. 
 
 Id. Batlle of Alcazar, V, -prol. 
 
 The axel tree of Heav'n. 
 
 ■ Heaven's axeltree. 
 
 Davies, Orchestra, 1596, stt. 36. 64. 
 
 3. Bowels. 
 
 The bowels of the land. 
 The bowels of the battle. 
 The bowels of ungrateful Rome. 
 The bowels of the deep. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 The bowels of morality. 
 
 Factions erected in the bowels [of the state]. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 A civil war . . . within the bowels of that estate. 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, B. i, ed. 1627, p. 6. 
 
 Farewell all learning which is not sprung from the bowels of 
 the Holy Bible. 
 
 Lilly, Euphues : The Anatomy of Wit (ch. on 
 Euphues and his Ephoebus), Arber's rep. p. 156. 
 
 Thirty years together suffered she [France] her bowels to be 
 torn out. . . . 
 
 Id. c. 7, Arber's rep. p. 47. 
 The wealthy mines 
 Found in the bowels of America. 
 
 Locrine (before 1595), i, i. 
 
 Ope earth, and take thy miserable son 
 Into the bowels of thy cursed womb. 
 
 Peele, David and Bethsahe, 1594, iii, 4- 
 
 The bowels of a freezing cloud. 
 
 Marlowe, i Tamburlaine, iv, 2. 
 
 And rent [= rend] the bowels of the middle earth. 
 
 Greene, " Ditty " in Perimedes the Blacksmith, 1588. 
 
 The silver streams 
 That pierce earths bowels. 
 
 Peele, David and Bethsabe, i, i. 
 
 That have . . . ript old Israel's bowels with your swords. 
 
 Id. ib. Ed. Dyce, p. 482. 
 And rend the bowels of this mighty realm. 
 
 Selimus (pub. 1594), 1- 1044. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 409 
 
 The bowels of this commonwealth. 
 
 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, Cattley's ed. 1841, i, 164. 
 The bowels of these mysteries. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Cynthiam. 
 The bowels of the earth. 
 
 Id. Ep. ded. to Ovid's Banquet of Sense. 
 The bowels of the earth. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, CoUier's rep. p. 28. 
 This church, in the bowels whereof . . . 
 
 Hooker, Ecdes. Polity, B. TV, ch. vi, § i. 
 The bowels of the earth. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, I, i, 39. 
 The hallowed bowels of the silver Thames. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, EpUogue. 
 Within the bowels of these elements. 
 
 Marlowe, Faustus. ii, i. 
 
 4. Cloud. 
 
 The clouds that lowered upon our houses. 
 How is it that the cloud still hangs on you ? 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 This cloud hangs over the house. 
 
 The cloud of so great a rebellion hanging over his head. 
 The King . . . willing to leave a cloud upon him. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 A fit cloud to cover their abuse. 
 
 Gosson, School of Abuse, (1579) Arber's rep. p. 41. 
 
 A cloud of passionate affection. 
 
 Essaies Politick and Morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608, 
 fol. 4 recto. 
 
 The misty cloud that so eclipseth fame. 
 
 Greene, verses in Penelope's Web, 1587. 
 
 The cloud of mortal things. 
 
 Chaucer, Boece, B. I. Prosa ii. 
 
 The cloud of ignorance. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Those clouds that eclipse her [virtue]. 
 
 Chapman, Ep. Ded. to trans, of Hesiod. 
 
 This black cloud 
 Of swollen hostility. 
 
 A Larum for London, Simpson's rep. p. 62. 
 
410 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 With sorrow's cloud eclipsing our delights. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, i, i. 
 
 With sullen sorrows cloud her brain. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Swelling clouds that overcast my brain. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Cloudy mists of discontent. 
 
 Patient Grissil, v, 2. 
 
 Cloud of prejudice, or mist of passionate afEection. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, pref. ch. vii, § i. 
 5. Dregs. 
 
 Drep of the storm. 
 
 Dregs of conscience. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Dregs of this age. 
 
 Bacon to Queen Flizabeth. 
 
 Compare 
 
 The fresh supply of earthly dregs. 
 
 Marlowe, 2 Tanib. iii, 2. 
 The massy dregs of earth. 
 
 Id. iv, 2. 
 
 I'll be paid dear even for the dregs of my wit. 
 
 The Return from Parnassus (1602), sc. 3. 
 
 To pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit. 
 
 Nashe, Four Letters Confuted : Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 287. 
 The fecis and dragges of the sayd noble doctrines. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. i. c. 14 (Dent's rep. p. 65). 
 The world judges such to be . . . peasants and dregs. 
 
 Roger Hutchinson, Parker Soc. rep. p. 302. 
 They who know what quality and value the men are of will 
 think ye draw very near the dregs. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Pol., pref. ch. iv, § 5. 
 An infinite rabble of such dirty dotages and filthy dregs. 
 
 Bale, The Image of Both Churches, ch. vi, § $. 
 Wit hath his dregs as well as wine. 
 
 Nashe, Ep. ded. to Christ's Teares over Jerusalem. 
 The dregs and dross of mortality. 
 
 Id. Christ's Teares : Works, ed. McKerrow, ii, 41. 
 Dregs of men. 
 
 Chapman, De Guiana, Carmen Epicum. 
 The very dregs of servitude. 
 
 Heywood i Edward IV ii. 3. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 411 
 
 Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought. 
 
 Sidney, Sonnet in English Garner, ed. 1904, p. 135. 
 The stream 
 Of vulgar humour, mixt with common'st dregs. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, Act i, near end. 
 
 6. Fantastical. 
 
 EUgh fantastical. 
 
 A mad fantastical trick. 
 
 A fantastical knave. 
 
 Fantastical lies. Shakespeare. 
 
 A fantasticfd spirit. 
 Fantastical learning. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 For as well Poets as Poesie are despised . . . for commonly 
 whoso is studious in the art or shews himself excellent in it, they 
 call him in disdain a phantasticall ; and a light-headed or 
 phantasticall man (by conversion) they call a Poet . . . ; and 
 M^iatsoever device be of rare invention they term it phantas- 
 ticall . . . ; and among men such as be modest and grave, and 
 of little conversation . . . they call him in scorn a Philosopher 
 or Poet, as much as to say as a phantasticall man, very injuriously 
 (God wot). . . . 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 1589, 
 Arber's rep. p. 34. 
 
 Fantastical fools. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, 1531, B. i, c. i. Dent's rep. p. 4. 
 
 Fantastical apparitions. 
 
 More, Dialogue of Comfort, Dent's rep. p. 220. 
 
 Fantastical dreams. 
 
 Nashe, Anatomie of Absurditie : Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 1 1. 
 
 Fantastical of her mind. 
 
 Lilly, Mother Bombie, i, i . 
 Fantastical heads. 
 
 Gosson, School of Abuse, Arber's rep. p. 28. 
 
 Fantastical objections and reproofs. 
 
 Chapman, Ep. ded. to trans, of Achilles' Shield. 
 
 Another sort, as fantastical as the rest. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Collier's rep. p. 52. 
 
 Another sort of fantastical fools. 
 
 Id. p. 143. 
 
412 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Fantastical preachings. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 
 Fantastical devices. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, ed. 1604, p. -339. 
 
 Fantastical satirisme. 
 
 Nashe, Christ's Teares over Jerusalem, Pref. To the Reader. 
 
 This phantasticall treatise. 
 
 Id. Ep. ded. to The Unfortunate Traveller. 
 
 Dream the most fantastical. 
 
 Marston, The Malcontent, i, i. 
 
 To be fantastical or scrupulous. 
 
 The Weakest goeth to the Watt, iii, i. 
 
 Phantastically attjrred. 
 
 Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins, Arber's rep. p. 35. 
 
 Phantastical apishness. 
 
 Id. p. 36. 
 
 For such fantastical and fruitless jewels. 
 
 Chapman, An Humorous Day's Mirth (Shepherd's ed. p. 24). 
 
 "Tis pretty fantastical. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 35. 
 Too fantastical. 
 
 Id. Monsieur D'Olive, iii, i. 
 
 Fantastical opinions. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Wit without Money, iv, i. 
 
 A strange fantastical birth. 
 
 Id. The Spanish Curate, ii, i . 
 
 New fantastical fevers. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 (Twice within a dozen lines) 
 
 The papists in their fantastical religion. 
 
 Letters of Bishop Philpot, ISSS ; Parker Soc. rep. 
 of Examinations and Writings, 1842, p. 222. 
 
 The dyvel ... by his fantastical apparitions. 
 
 More, Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulacion, B. ii, 
 Everyman's Lib. ed. p. 220. 
 A fantastical body. 
 
 Hooper, Declaration of Christ : Works, Parker Soc. 
 ed. p. 62 ; also p. 193, &c. 
 
 A fanteistical imagination. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 70. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 413 
 
 7. Infinite. 
 
 Conclusions infinite. 
 
 Fellows of infinite tongue. 
 
 Infinite jest. 
 
 Nature's infinite book of secresy. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 Occasions are infinite. 
 Infinite honour. 
 Infinite flight of birds. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 We have assembled infinites of men. 
 Hejrwood, The Golden Age, 161 1, Pearson's ed. of Works, iii, 36. 
 With infinite commands. 
 
 Id. Fair Maid of the West, iii, 5. 
 Infinite sorts of people. 
 
 Spenser. Faerie Queene, I, iv. 6. 
 Infinite remembrance. 
 
 Id. II. ix, 56. 
 Infinite riches in a little room. 
 
 Marlowe, Jew of Malta, i, i.. 
 Knowledge infinite. 
 
 Id. I Tanib. ii, 7. 
 
 As those are, so shall these be infinite. 
 
 Dekker, Old Fortunatus, i, 1. 
 
 In this small compass lies 
 Infinite treasure. 
 
 Id. ib. ii. 3. 
 That infinity of strangers. 
 
 Jonson. The Devil is an Ass, v, i. 
 
 Yon are infinitely bound. 
 
 Id. ib. iv, I. 
 They (fucuses) are infinite. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Country madams infinite. 
 
 Id. A Tale of a Tub. i, 4. 
 
 Infinite variety of matter of all kinds. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, B. I, ch. xiv. § i. 
 
 The difierences between them grew ... in a manner infinite. 
 
 Id. pref. ch. viii, § 7. 
 
 Infinite bodies and infinite movings. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, ed. 1604, p. i. 
 
414 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 And as my duties be most infinite, 
 So infinite must also be my love 
 
 Gascoigne, Jocasta, i, i. 
 Infinite virtues. 
 
 Lilly, Endimion, i, i. 
 Infinite are my creatures. 
 
 Id. ii, 2. 
 Examples infinite. 
 
 Id. iii, I . 
 Infinite millions of them [devils]. 
 Nashe, Terrors of the Night : Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 349. 
 
 It were an infinite thing. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Infinite thanks (twice in a page) . 
 
 Hutchinson, First Sermon on Lord's Supper, 1560. 
 
 Infinite jeopardies. 
 
 Id. First Sermon of Oppression. 
 Sin in gathering head grows infinite. 
 
 Knack to Know an Honest Man, 1. 757. 
 An infinite multitude of sheep. 
 
 Robinson's trans, of More's Utopia, Dent's rep. p. 24. 
 
 Infinite controversies in the law. Id. p. 44. 
 
 Infinite are my creatures. 
 
 Lilly, Endimion, I, ii. 
 
 Of ripe years and infinite virtues. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Infinite thanks. 
 
 Id. V, I. 
 An infinite number of books. 
 
 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, Cattlay's ed. 1841, i, 
 521. (Pref. on " The Utility of this Story.") 
 Sects and fraternities of infinite variety. 
 
 Id. p. 517. 
 It were too long, and a thing infinite. 
 
 Id. text, p. 10. 
 An infinite number daily do perish. 
 
 Stubbeg' Anatomic of Abuses. Collier's rep. p. 33. 
 
 Neither can this infinite power . . . stand without infinite 
 great dangers. 
 
 Jewel, Controversy with Harding, Parker Soc. ed. of 
 Works, p. 371. 
 
 These places, and infinite other like. 
 
 Id. p. 378. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 415 
 
 An infinite number of people. 
 
 Trans, of Calvin on Ephesians, fol. 113. 
 
 An infinite number of other such. 
 
 Holland's trans, of Plutarch's Moralia : Dent's ed. p. 32. 
 
 We have infinite poets and pipers. 
 
 Gosson, School of Abuse, 1579, Arber's rep. p. 27. 
 
 Pleading infinite causes before the Senate and judges. 
 
 Elyot, The Govemour, B. i, c. 14 (Rep. p. 67). 
 
 Reasons and examples, undoubtedly infinite. 
 
 Id. i, 3, p. 15, 
 Infinites of dreadful enemies. 
 
 Chapman, Ceesar and Pompey, i, i 
 
 An infinite number of thousands of fighting men. 
 
 North, Life of Ceesar (Skeat's Sh. Plutarch, p. 66). 
 
 Bale hath mistaken it. as he hath done infinite things in that 
 book. 
 
 Thjoine, Animadversions on Speight, (1599) in Todd's 
 Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer, 1810, p. 23. 
 
 Whereof infinite examples might be produced. 
 
 Id. p. 50. 
 Infinite in good wits. 
 
 Fenton's trans, of Guicciardini, 1579, p. 2. 
 
 Your Majesty's other virtues which God hath made infinite 
 in you. 
 
 Id. Ep. ded. 
 In footmen infinite. 
 
 Id. p. 21. 
 
 Men infinite in multitudes. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Of infinite report for shape and virtue. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. The Chances, i. i . 
 
 An infinite of ills. 
 
 Id. Monsieur Thomas, iii, i . 
 
 Of Albion's glorious isle . . . the pleasures infinite. 
 
 Drayton's Polyolbion, 11. 1-2. 
 
 8. Mortal. 
 
 Mortal men. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Mortal men (thrice). 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
4i6 
 
 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Compare 
 
 Chaucer, Trans, of Boethius, B. ii, prosa 3. 
 
 Id. ib. prosa 4. 
 
 Id. ib. B. iii, prosa 2. 
 
 Id. ib. metrum 6. 
 
 Daniel, Cleopatra, ii, 268. 
 
 Id. 1. 1406, V, ii. 
 
 Id. The Queenes Arcadia. 1. 371 (II. i). 
 
 Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 25. 
 Mortal men. 
 More, Dialogue of Comfort, &c. B. iii. Dent's rep. p. 354. 
 
 Mortal life. 
 
 Ferrex and Porrex, i, i. 
 Mortal wight. 
 
 Sackville, Induction to The Mirrour for Magistrates, st. 27. 
 Mortal men (thrice). 
 
 Gascoigne, Works, ed. Cunliflfe, ii, 21, 43, 261. 
 Mortal men. 
 
 Peele. Old Wives' Tale (Morley's Peele, p. 185). 
 Mortal man. 
 
 Id. Arraignment of Paris, iv, 1. 
 
 Mortel thinges 
 Mortel folk. 
 Mortel folk. 
 Mortel folk. 
 Mortal hand. 
 Mortal man. 
 Mortal eye. 
 Mortal eyes. 
 
 Mortal men. 
 Mortal men. 
 
 Mortal mankind. 
 One mortal man. 
 
 Dekker, Old Fortunatus, v, 2. 
 Id. ib. Epilogue (two successive pages). 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, B. ii, 3rd sent. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. i, c, 3. 
 Mortal man. 
 
 Hooper. Christ and His Office, Psurker Soc. rep. p. 25. 
 Mortal man. 
 
 Id. Answer to Bishop of Winchester, p. 169. 
 Mortal men (twice). 
 
 Nashe, Christ's Teares over Jerusalem : Works, ed. 
 McKerrow. ii, 23, 60. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 417 
 
 9. Mountain. 
 
 A mountain of afiection. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 Mountains of promises. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 A great mountain of tribulation. 
 
 Sir T. More, Dialogue of Comfort, &c., B. i, c. 2. 
 Dent's rep. p. 133. 
 
 To promise mountains and perform molehills. 
 
 Greene. Card of Fancy : Works, iv, 106. 
 You promise mountains. 
 
 Daniel, Philotas, 1. 1576. 
 
 Who shall remove the mountain from my breast. 
 
 Chapman, Bussy D'Ambois, v, i. 
 
 Have plucked this mountain of disgrace upon me. 
 
 Massinger. The Bondman, v, 3. 
 
 An atom 
 To the mountain of affliction I pull'd on me. 
 
 Id. The Emperor of the East, v, 2. 
 
 Mountains of vexation. 
 
 Id. Believe as You List, iv, 2. 
 
 Thy promises 
 Of many golden mountains to ensue. 
 Hejrwood, Edward IV, Pt. I, Pearson's ed. of Works, i, 34. 
 
 Increased this molehill 
 Unto that mountain which my father left me. 
 
 Id. A Woman Killed with Kindness, iii, i. 
 
 Mountain heaps of milkwhite sacrifice. 
 
 Marlowe, Dido, i, i. 
 This mountain of my shame. 
 
 Patient Grissil, ii, 2. 
 Mounts of mischief. 
 
 Sackville, Complaynt of Buckingham, st. 11. 
 
 Now shall the blood of Servius fall as heavy 
 As a huge mountain on your tyraxA heads. 
 
 He3rwood, Rape of Lucrece, v, 2. 
 
 10. Ocean. 
 
 An ocean of his tearsi 
 
 An ocean of salt tears. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 2 D 
 
4i8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The ocean of philosophy. 
 The ocean of history. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 Are not our lives with mischief's ocean bounded ? 
 
 Brandon, The Vertuous Octavia, I. 182 1. 
 
 An ocean of my teaxs. 
 
 The Spanish Tragedy, ii, 5. 
 
 To what sea owe these streams their tribute, but to your 
 lordship's ocean ? 
 
 Chapman, Epist. ded. (to Bacon) of trans, of Hesiod. 
 
 In endless ocean of expected jojrs. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, ii, i. 
 
 Drowned in the ocean of his love. 
 
 Field, A Woman is a Weathercock, iii. 3. 
 
 Within the heart's-blood-ocean. 
 
 Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abington, i, i. 
 
 Broad bottomless ocean sea-full of evils. 
 
 Beggars' Petition, 1538, Harl. Misc. ed. 1808, i, 221. 
 
 Our ocean shall these petty brooks devour. 
 
 Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat, Sc. i. 
 
 Oceans of delight. 
 
 Sidney. Astrophel and Stella, 69. 
 Unto the boundless ocean of thy beauty. 
 
 Daniel, Delia, i. 
 The boundless ocean of your worth. 
 
 Prologue to The Maydes Metamorphosis, .1600. 
 The ocean of new toils. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B. iv. st. 96. 
 The ocean of all-drowning Sov'iaintie. 
 
 Id. B. vii, st. 12. 
 An unknown ocean of absolute power. 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, ed. 1627, p. 206. 
 II. Paint. 
 
 A painted devil. 
 
 Gilded loam or painted clay. 
 
 Painted word. Shakespeare. 
 
 But paintings. 
 
 Titular and painted head, Bacon. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 419 
 
 Painted observance. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be noil Wrothe, i ; f 
 
 And paint ten thousand images of loam 
 In gaudy silken colours. 
 
 Dekker, Old Fortunatus. i, i. 
 Beauty is but a painting. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 This painted idol. 
 
 Id. ib. sc. 2. 
 I could paint o'er my cheeks 
 With ruddy-coloured smiles. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Bid him come in and paint some comfort. 
 For surely there's none lives but painted comfort. 
 
 Spanish Tragedy, iii, I2A. 
 
 God affects not any painted shape. 
 
 Peele, David and Bethsabe, iii, 5. 
 
 Paint his countenance with his heart's distress. 
 
 Id. ib. iv, 2. 
 Not painted yet in angels' eyes. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Painted flowers. 
 
 Id. ib., i 3. 
 Wealth and painted honours. 
 
 Webster, The Duchess of Malfi. iii, 2. 
 
 When in my face the painted thoughts would outwardly 
 appear. 
 
 Surrey, in Toitel's Miscellany. Afber's rep. p. 6. 
 
 Pish I these are painted causes. 
 
 Field, A Woman is a Weathercock, iii, 2. 
 
 The very face of woe 
 Painted in my beclouded stormy face. 
 
 Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 45. 
 
 My pen . . . shall paint our joy. 
 
 Id. 70. 
 Fit words to paint the . . . face of woe. 
 
 Id. I. 
 So lively painted forth in all things. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, Of the Trewnes 
 of the Christian Religion, 1587, ed. 1604, p. i. 
 
 He hath 90 painted out his glory. 
 
 Id. p. 5. 
 
420 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 This doctrine is not bred of man's braine, though it be painted 
 there after some sort. 
 
 Id. p. 63. 
 
 It [the existence of God] is so many ways and so lively painted 
 forth in all things. 
 
 Id. p. I. 
 Pleasant fields ... so painted. 
 
 F. Th3mne, The Debate between Pride and Lowliness 
 (c. 1570), Sh. Soc. rep. p. 8. 
 By nature painted thus. 
 
 Patient Grissil, iii, i. 
 Fainting speech. 
 
 Chapman, Casar and Pompey, i, i. 
 Death's the best painter. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, iv, i. 
 Rather living virtues than painted Gods. 
 
 Lilly, Enditnion, iv, 3. 
 The papists, who make so much of their painted sheath. 
 
 Foxe, pref. to Acts and Monuments, Cattley's ed. 
 1841, 1, 519 (prolegomena). 
 Others which sufficiently have painted out to the world the 
 demeanour of these holy votaries. 
 
 Id. i, 384 (text). 
 This painted light. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Noctem. 
 When Tellus' herbals painted were. 
 
 Id. The Amorous Contention of Philis and Flora. 
 
 Examples . . . painted before your eyes in enterludes and 
 ■plays. 
 
 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Collier's rep. p. 140. 
 
 Every one nowadayes, almost, covet to deck and paint their 
 bodies. 
 
 Id. p. 36. 
 That he be never so gallantly painted or curiously perfumed. 
 
 Id. p. 41. 
 12. Scour. 
 Scour the English hence. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 The scouring of some noblemen from her Majesty's presence. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 To scour the sea of the pirates. 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, B. i, ed. 1867, p. 46. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 421 
 
 Scoured and wasted the country where they went. 
 
 Nashe, Pasquill's Return to England. Works, 
 Ed. McKerrow, i, yj. 
 Scoured the narrow seas. 
 
 Id. Lenten Stuff. Works, iii, 158. 
 Scouring along as if he would besiege them 
 ^th a new wall of fire. 
 
 Hesrwood, // you know not me, you know Nobody, 
 Pearson's Heywood, i, 340. 
 Sirra, go you and scour about the hill. 
 
 Id. The Foure Prentises of London, Pearson, ii, 190. 
 Thou, Prince of Wales, and Audley, straight to sea. 
 Scour to Newhaven. 
 
 Edward III. II, ii, 204-5. 
 Now merrily sail these gallant Greeks to Troy, 
 And scour the seas. 
 
 Peele. The Tale of Troy (1589), 1. 255. 
 We see the glistering fishes scour along. 
 
 Id. Honour of the Garter, 1. 41. 
 Scour all before them like a scavenger. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Monsieur Thomas, iii, i. 
 
 And fearless scours in danger's coasts. 
 
 Kyd, trans, of Gamier's Cornelia, Act. iv. Chorus. 
 
 Did scour the plaines in pursuit of the foe. 
 
 Id. V, 1. 79. 
 The adverse navy sent to scour the seas. 
 
 Id. 1. 296. 
 Out of the troops that scoured the plains. 
 
 Massinger, The Bashful Lover, iii, 2. 
 Choice troops of horse 
 Scour o'er the neighbour plains. 
 
 Id. The Duke of Milan, iv, i. 
 I scour the street. 
 And over-tumble every man I meet. 
 
 Chapman, The Gentleman Usher, i, i. 
 
 Five hundreth sail of warlike ships he brings, 
 Wherewth the frothing Ocean he scours. 
 
 Brandon, The Vertuous Octavia, 1589 (Malone Soc. 
 rep. 11. 1806-7). 
 Scour the marches with your Welshmen's hook?. 
 
 Peele, Edward I. Ed. Dyce, p. 384. 
 
 Now scour the streets and leave not one alive 
 
 Selimus, 1. 1241. 
 
422 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Who after her as hastily gan scour. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, B. I, c. ii, st. 20. 
 Hoisting up sails ... we scoured and returned home. 
 
 Greene's Metamorphosis, Works, ix, 85. 
 leviathan that scours the seas- 
 Greene and Lodge, A Looking Glass for London, 
 Dyce's Greene and Peele, p. 135. 
 To send and over-scour the earth in part. , 
 
 Greene, Friar Bacon, sc. 15. 
 And so scours the squadrons orderly. 
 
 Chapman, trans, of Iliad, iv, 245. 
 These are they that scour 
 The field so bravely towards us. 
 
 Id. B. V. 
 13. Sea. 
 
 A sea of joys. A sea of air; A sea of care. A sea of glory. 
 Seas of tears. Sea of blood. Sea of woes. Sea of troubles. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 A sea of multitude. A sea of air. Vast seas of time. A sea 
 of quicksilver. A sea of baser metal. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 The bittre sea of this lyi. 
 
 Chaucer, Boece, B. I, Prose iii. 
 This sea of fortune. 
 
 Id. B. I, Metre v. 
 Here they draw in a sea of matter. 
 
 Hooker, Pref . to B. I of Eccles. Polity, ch. viii, §11. 
 Seas of heinous faults. 
 
 Gascoigne, Jocasta, 1566, i, 1. 
 Seas of sweet delight. 
 
 Id. i, 2, Chorus. 
 The overwhelming seas of fortune. 
 
 Daniel, Cleopatra, 1. 140. 
 A whole sea of examples. 
 
 Sidney, Apologic for Poetrie, Arber's rep. p. 59. 
 Seas of care. 
 
 Higgins, Mirrourfor Magistrates, rep. of ed. 1587, 
 Author's Induction, st. 5. 
 One turbulent sea of fear. 
 
 Heywood, English Traveller, ii, 2. 
 A sea of pleasure and content. 
 
 Id. Wise-Woman of Hodgson, iv, i. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 423 
 
 You axe the powerful moon of my blood's sea. 
 
 Dekker, Witch of Edmonton, ii, 2. 
 Is he a prince ? ah no, he is a sea. 
 
 Greene, Selimus, I. 190. 
 Yon swelling seas of never-ceasing care. 
 
 Id. 1. 1 761. 
 A sea of blood. 
 
 Fairfax, trans, of Tasso's Gerusalemme, x, 50. 
 Shed seas of blood. 
 
 Field, A Woman is a Weathercock, iii, 2. 
 In this life's rough seas tossed. 
 
 Id. Chapman's pref. verses. 
 A sea of sins. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy, iii, i. 
 The sea of happiness that from me flows to you. 
 
 Massinger, The City Madam, ii, 2. 
 This sea of marriage. Call it rather 
 A whirlpool of afflictions. 
 
 Id. ii, 3. 
 These two arms 
 Had been his sea. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, The Scornful Lady, iii, i . 
 
 Against the sea of every lewd assault. 
 
 A Knack to know an Honest Man, 1S96, 1. 705. 
 Malone Soc. rep. 
 
 The sea of bloody tragedy. 
 
 Id. 1. 47. 
 To stable and strength the walls of our hearts against the 
 great surges of this tempestuous sea. 
 
 More's Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, 
 1534. Dent's rep. (with Utopia), p. 127. 
 
 A sea of blood. 
 
 Mucedorus (pr. 159.8), Induction, 59. 
 
 Sweet seas of golden humour. 
 
 Chapman, The Shadow of Night. 
 That dead sea of life. 
 
 Jonson, Underwoods, 88. 
 
 Seas too extreme 
 Your song hath stirr'd up, to be calmed so soon. 
 
 Chapman, A Justification of" Perseus and Andro- 
 meda," ad init. 
 
 Shed a sea of tears. 
 
 Massinger, Believe as You List, i, i. 
 
424 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Embarked myself on a rough sea of danger. 
 
 Id. The Emperor of the East, iv, i . 
 
 See how it [law] runs much like a turbulent sea. 
 
 Chapman, Bussy D'Arnbois, ii, i. 
 Swells to her full sea. 
 
 Id. Byron's Conspiracy, iv, i. 
 
 See that maiden-sea of majesty. 
 
 Id.ib. 
 Your mitigations add but se£is to seas. 
 
 Id. Revenge for Honour, iii, i. 
 Calm his high-going sea. 
 
 Id. The Admiral of France, v. 
 
 Oh what a second ruthless sea of woes. 
 
 Id. Monsieur D'Olive, i, i. 
 Our State's rough sea. 
 
 Id. ib. ii, I. 
 - 14. Sinews. 
 
 Sinews of our plot. 
 
 Sinew of our fortune. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Intercept his [the King of Spain's], treasure, whereby we shall 
 cut his sinews. 
 
 Bacon, Letter to Essex. 
 Sinews and springs of industry. 
 
 Nov. Org. i. 
 
 Compare 
 
 Lycurgus was wont to say that the laws were the sinews of a 
 kingdom. 
 
 Greene, The Royal Exchange (1589-90) : Works, ed. 
 Grosart, vii, 234. 
 The sinews of his dominions. 
 
 Greene, Menapbon, 2nd sent. 
 The sinews of war. 
 
 Lilly, Mydas, i, i. 
 Gold is the glue, sinews, and strength of war. 
 
 Peele, The Battle of Alcazar (1594), i, 2. 
 Policy, 
 The sinews and true strength of chivalry. 
 
 Peele, The Tale of Troy, ed. 1604, 1. 363. 
 Gold is the strength, the sinews of the world. 
 
 Dekker, Old Fortunatus, i, i. 
 The sinews of the imperial seat. 
 
 Marlowe, 2 Tamb. iii, i. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 425 
 
 A King 
 Whose welfare is the sinews of his realm. 
 
 Hey wood. Pt. II of Fair Maid of the West, Pearson's 
 Heywood. ii, 347. 
 
 The sinews of our war. 
 
 Massinger, The Bondman, i, 3. 
 
 The nerves and sinews of your war. 
 
 Id. Believe as you List, i, 2. 
 Familiarity and conference. 
 That were the sinews of societies. 
 
 Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament ; Works, 
 ed. McKerrow, iii, 271. 
 
 Some other sinews there are from which that overplus of 
 strength in persuasion doth arise. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity. Pref. to B. I, ch. viii, 10. 
 
 Plato named anger the sinews of the soul. 
 
 Holland's trans, of Plutzirch's Moralia (1603). 
 Rep. in " Everyman's Lib." p. 21. 
 
 The sinews of trafficke and marchandise. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, ed. 
 1604, p. 102. 
 
 Blood, strength, and sinews of my happiness. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man out of bis Humour, i, i . 
 
 15. Sovereign. 
 
 The Sovereign'st thing on earth. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Sovereign medicines. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 The sovereyn cure of all mortal folk. 
 
 Chaucer, Trans, of Boethius, B, II, Prose IV. 
 
 Sovere]m blisfulnesse. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Sovereyn good. [Twice.] 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Soverejm comfort. 
 
 Id. B. Ill, Prose i. 
 
 Sovereyn good . [Twelve times.] 
 
 Id. B. Ill, Prose ii. 
 
 Beauty soverayne. 
 
 Spenser, F. Q., I, vi, 12. 
 
426 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Sovereign bliss. 
 
 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. 
 p. 44. 
 
 Sovereign beauty. 
 
 Calisto and Melebea, 1. 22. 
 
 Tlie soveraigne bewtie tliat me bound. 
 
 Surrey, in Tottel's Miscellany, Arber's rep. p. 24, 
 Beauty's sovereign power. 
 
 Draj^on, Idea, 50. 
 Sovereign balm. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, v, 2. 
 Sovereign balm. 
 
 HeyTvood, Pt. II of King Edward IV, (Works, 
 ed. Pearson, i, p. 167). 
 Sovereign magic. 
 
 Dekker, Old Fortunatus, iii, i . 
 Sovereign poets. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Noctem, 1594. 
 Sovereign help. 
 
 Piers Plowman, 1. 317. 
 Sovereign for the soul. 
 
 Id. 1. 6026. 
 Sovereign book. 
 
 Id. I. 6033. 
 Sovereign good. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, ed. 
 1604, p. 293 ; again p. 301- 
 Sovereign welfare. 
 
 Id. p. 296 ; twice on p. 297 ; four times on p. 299 
 Sovereign balm. 
 
 Heywood, 2 Edward IV., iv, 3 
 The most sovereign and precious weed. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, iii, 2 
 Sovereign light. 
 
 Daniel, Sonnets after Astrophel, 3 
 Sovereign grace. 
 
 Drasrton, Idea, son. 43 
 Preparations most sovereign. 
 
 Medwall, Nature (c. 1490), Farmer's Lost Tudor 
 Plays, 1907, p. 122. 
 Sovereign cordial. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 12$. 
 Sovereign knowledge. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour. B, i, 23. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 427 
 
 16. Spice. 
 
 This spice of your hypocrisy. 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 A spice of madness^ 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 A spyce of heryse. 
 
 Interlude of Calisto and Melebea, c. 1530. 
 Obsequentia, &-c. Malone Soc. rep. 1. 138, 
 A spice of idolatry, 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, i, 19 (Dent's rep. p. 86). 
 A spice of justice. 
 
 Chapman, Bussy D'Atnbois, ii, i. 
 Bites too hotly of the Puritan spice. 
 
 Id. ib. iii. i. 
 Retain 
 A spice of his first parents. 
 
 Id, ib. V, near end. 
 A spice of the green sickness. 
 
 Jonson, The Magnetic Lady, i, i. 
 Any spice of rashness, folly, or self-love. 
 
 Id. Discoveries. 
 A spice of idolatry. 
 
 Id. Bartholomew Fair, i, i . 
 Some spice of religion. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay, ed. 1604, p. 9. 
 A spice of the sciatica. 
 
 Chapman, The Widow's Tears, ii, 2. 
 17. Swelling. 
 
 The snivelling act. 
 The swelling scene. 
 Noble swelling spirits, 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 Such a swelling season, 
 
 Bacont 
 
 Compare 
 
 Behold all Persia swelling in the pride of their own power. 
 
 Lilly, Alexander and Campaspe, iii, 4. 
 Swelling phrases. 
 
 Sidney, Apologie for Poetrie, Arber's rep. p. 67. 
 The proudest outside that most swells with things without him. 
 Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D'Atnbois, i, i. 
 
428 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 ne 
 
 Massinger, The Picture, i, 2 
 
 jhts. 
 
 Lodge 
 
 Swelling tides 
 
 Can that swell me 
 Beyond my just proportion ? 
 
 Swelling thoughts. 
 
 Lodge, Wounds of Civil War. 1. 68, 
 
 Id. 1. 1054. 
 
 Swells your spleen so high ? 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, v, 2. 
 
 Those golden piles 
 Which in rich pride shall swell before thy feet. 
 
 Id. Old Fortunatus. i, i. 
 
 As the bright moon swells in her peaxldd sphere. 
 
 Id. ib. i, 3. 
 
 Swelling thoughts. 
 
 Lilly, Endimion, v, 2. 
 
 Id. V, 3. 
 
 Gascoigne, Jocasta. 1, i. 
 
 Id. i, 2. 
 
 Id. ii, chorus at end. 
 
 Id.m, I. 
 
 Id. Epilogue. 
 
 Feele. Battle of Alcazar, II, iii, 3. 
 
 Swelling pride. 
 
 Swelling wrath. 
 
 Swelling hate. 
 
 Swelling pride. 
 
 Swelling sorrows. 
 
 Swelling hates. 
 
 Swelling heart. 
 
 Swelling pride. 
 
 A Larum for London, Simpson's rep. p. 52. 
 
 Swelled with ire. 
 
 Fairfax, trans, of Tasso, ii, ig. 
 Our swelling mountain. 
 
 Lilly, prol. to Campaspe. 
 
 Love doth not frowardly, swelleth not . . . 
 
 Tsmdale's trans, of i Cor. xiii, 1525 and 1535. 
 
 Methinks I see his envious heart to swell. 
 
 Sackville, Ferrex and Porrex, i, i . 
 Swelling pride. 
 
 Id, ii, I. 
 Swelling breast. 
 
 Id. ii, 2, Chorus. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 429 
 
 Swelling pride. 
 
 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. cit,, i, 33. 
 Some wits are swelling and high. 
 
 Jonson, Discoveries : Ingeniomm discrimina. Not. i. 
 With pride so did she swell. 
 
 Spenser. F. Q., I, iv, 11. 
 Swelling seas. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, I. 9. 
 Swelling thoughts. 
 
 Lodge, Wounds of Civil War, 1. 68. 
 Their swelling veins. 
 
 Chapman, May-Day, iv, 2. 
 Thy titles, and swelling offices. 
 
 Id. The Admiral of France, i, i. 
 Swelling favour. 
 
 Id. ib. iv, end. 
 
 18. Tide, current. 
 
 A tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood . . , 
 
 We must take the current when it serves. 
 
 Shakespeare, 
 
 . . . I set down reputation, because of the peremptory /t<Zesafu2 
 currents it hath ; which (/ they be not taken in their due time, 
 are seldom recovered. 
 
 The tide of any opportunities , . . the periods and tides of 
 estates. 
 
 The tides and currents of received errors. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 Compare 
 
 The tide tarrieth no man. 
 
 Heywood's Proverbs. 
 
 Tide and wind stay no man's pleasure. 
 
 Southwell, St. Peter's Complaint, 1595. 
 
 What avails to strive against the tide. 
 
 Higgins, Mirrour for Magistrates : King Albanact, 
 St. 72. 
 
 Carried with full tide and wind of their wit. 
 
 Ascham, Scholemaster, Arber's rep, p, 116, 
 
 The current of a man's reputation, being divided into so many 
 rivolets; must needs grow weak. 
 
 Dekker. Ep. Ded. to The Seven Deadly Sins of 
 London. 
 
430 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The inconstancy of love that . . . had every minute ebbs and 
 tides, sometimes overflowing the banks of Fortune , . , 
 otherwhiles ebbing. . , . 
 
 Greene, Menaphon, Arber's rep. p, 24, 
 
 Honest against the tide of all temptations. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. Valentinian, i, i. 
 Borne by the hasty tide of short leisure. 
 
 Sidney, Arcadia, ed. 1627, p. 208. 
 The current of her sway. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B, v, st. 70. 
 
 And now that current witb main fury ran. 
 
 Id. St. 89. 
 Borne with the swelling current of their pride. 
 
 Id. B, vi, St. 78. 
 
 19. Troubler. 
 
 The troubler of the poor world's peace. 
 
 The troublers of the world. 
 
 Compare 
 
 Achar, the troubler of IsraeL 
 Lest ye trouble the camp of IsraeL 
 Art thou he that troubleth Israel. 
 I have not troubled IsraeL 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 Bacon. 
 
 I Chron. ii, 7. 
 
 Josh, vi, 18. 
 
 I Kings xvlii, 17. 
 
 Id. V, 18. 
 
 That troubler of the public peace. 
 
 Bale, Examination and Death of Cobham, Parker 
 Soc. ed. of Works, p. 19. 
 
 Distroublers of holy Church. 
 
 Id. Examination of Thorpe, p. 75. 
 Distroubled the communalty. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 84. 
 They [friars] say that they [good clerks] distrouble the world. 
 
 Wiclif, Treatise against the Friars, c. 26. 
 Trouble her that troubles a whole empire . 
 
 He3n!TOod, Rape of Lucrece, i, 2. 
 Troubleth our estate. 
 
 Marlowe, Massacre of Paris, i, 3. 
 The troublers of the commonwealth. 
 
 North; Life of Casar (Sh. Plutarch, p. 68). 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 431 
 
 Busied the whole State 
 Troubled both foes and friends. 
 
 Jonson, Underwoods, 88. 
 Troubler of the Christen Church. 
 
 Vocacyon of Johan Bale. Harl. Misc. 1808. i, 361. 
 
 20. Weed. 
 
 We'll weed them all at last. 
 
 The caterpillars of the commonwealth 
 
 Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away, • 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 A manls nature runs either to herbs or weeds : therefore . . . 
 water the one and destroy the other. 
 
 Bacoti, Of Nature in Man. 
 
 Compare 
 
 Weeds and briers in me. 
 
 Dekker, Witch of Edmonton, iii, 2. 
 
 Thus do weeds grow up whiles no man regards them. 
 
 Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (Works, i, 175). 
 
 We'll, join to weed them out. 
 
 Jonson; Alchemist, v, 1. 
 
 Would jrield more fruit than all the idle weeds 
 That suck up your rain of favour. 
 
 Massinger, The Picture, iv, 4. 
 
 But men themselves, instead of bearing fruits. 
 Grow rude and foggy, overgrown with weeds. 
 
 Chapman; Byron's Trajedy, iv, i. 
 
 The greatest worldly hopes ... ye seek utterly to extirpate 
 as weeds. 
 
 Hooker, Pfef . to B. I of Eccles. Polity, oh. viii, 3. 
 
 I'll follow ye, and ere I die, proclaim ye. 
 The weeds of Italy, the dross of nature. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Valentinian, iv, 4. 
 
 Weeds of superstition. 
 
 Foxe, one of the prefaces to Acts and Monuments, 
 Cattley's ed. 1841, i, 515. 
 
 Pluck up these weeds [rebels]. 
 
 Fairfax's tr. of Tasso's Jerusalem, 1600, B. iv, 
 St. 16. 
 
432 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 21. Wilderness. 
 
 A wilderness of sea. 
 A wilderness of tigers. 
 A wilderness of monkeys. 
 
 The greatest wilderness of waters. 
 
 Compare 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 Bacon. 
 
 A wide wilderness of waters deep. 
 
 Spenser, Muiopotmos, 1. 288. 
 
 The errant wilderness of a wonM,n's face. 
 
 Chapman, Bussy D'Ambois, v, i. 
 
 Ha I is my house tnm'd 
 To a wilderness. 
 
 Massinger, The Picture, v. 3. 
 
 I must admire thy beauty's wilderness. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, ii, 1. 
 A wilderness of seas. 
 
 He3rwood, Fair Maid of the West, iv, 4, end. 
 
 My heart, a wasteful wilderness forsaken. 
 
 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Son. 99. 
 
 It is perhaps unnecessary to add that any other of the 
 tropes cited by Mr. Donnelly as being significantly conunon 
 to Bacon and Shakespeare may be similarly demonstrated 
 to be part of the common phraseology of their age. One 
 of his words, " shadow," is as universally used in metaphor 
 as any of those above exampled. Any student can 
 satisfy himself on the point by a little investigation, if 
 he needs satisfying. But I think the matter has been 
 above decided for every rational reader. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 
 
 ii. Dr. R. M. Theobald 
 
 SO obviously unqualified was Mr. Donnelly for any 
 inquiry involving acquaintance with Tudor and 
 Stuart literature that one turns to any later 
 Baconian attempt of the same kind with the 
 hope of finding some developed caution, some concern 
 for circumspection and research in a task in which he 
 showed so little. And though Dr. Theobald's handling 
 of the " classical " argument has yielded us so little sign 
 of any such development, one still turns to his handling 
 of " coincidences " in the hope of finding something 
 better than the parade of ignorance presented by his 
 predecessor. He has at least some perception of the 
 nature of the logical issue involved ; and he has actually 
 sought to save himself from the force of some rebuttals. 
 
 The issue is, in a word. Are there such repeated co- 
 incidences of e3cpression, whether in idea or in mere turn 
 of phrase, in the Plays and in Bacon's writings, as can 
 justify prima facie the h3rpothesis of identity of author- 
 ship ? Both kinds of coincidence, we have seen, occur 
 as between Shakespeare and other writers ; and there 
 can be nothing surprising in finding some as between 
 him and Bacon, in an age so given to the reiteration of 
 sententious sajdngs, proverbs, and tropes. But is there 
 any such tissue of coincidences of mere phrase, say, as 
 is found in Titus Andronicus and the works of Peele ? 
 It will be found that nothing of the kind is ever produced. 
 Coincidences of maxim and sentiment there are, such as 
 Mr, Crawford has produced in much larger number from 
 
 433 2E 
 
434 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the writings of Bacon and Jonson. On the Baconian 
 principles, either Bacon wrote Jonson, or Jonson Bacon. 
 Similar occasional identities of sentiment in the Plays 
 and in Bacon prove nothing more than in the case of 
 Jonson. But of any general coincidence of doctrine 
 between the plays and Bacon's writings there is and can 
 be no pretence. Bacon, like so many Elizabethan writers, 
 repeats himself many times without misgiving ; but of 
 doctrines and theses which so possessed him that he was 
 never tired of reproducing them, there is no trace what- 
 ever in the Plays. All that the Baconians can produce 
 is a sorry harvest of verbal parallels, nine-tenths of which 
 can have no evidential significance whatever. 
 
 Those which can reasonably challenge attention evoke 
 at once the query. How did such coincidences in general 
 come about ? The answer is obvious. Other dramatists 
 who echo Shakespeare either were copying previous 
 writers whom he had followed, or had heard or read, or 
 heard quoted, Shakespeare's plays. Such echoes must 
 have taken place, in the ordinary course of things ; and 
 when we find duplications of thought in Bacon and Jonson 
 we similarly infer, either verbal conMnunication — ^which 
 we know took place between them— or the reading or 
 hearing by one of things said or written by the other. 
 If the reader, rather than adopt this kind of explanation, 
 proceeds to surmise that Bacon wrote the works of 
 Jonson — and, as regards similar coincidences with other 
 writers, their works also — he need not further follow this 
 argument, which is not framed for his order of judgment. 
 As we reason in regard to other coincidences, so do we 
 reason in regard to any real coincidences between Bacon 
 and Shakespeare. If Jonson, Chapman, Webster, and 
 Beaumont and Fletcher remembered and echoed Shake- 
 spearean sayings, so might Bacon. If an occasional 
 •identity of idea and expression be a. ground for surmising 
 his authorship of the Shakespearean plays, equally must 
 it be a ground for surmising their authorship. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 435 
 
 To give Dr. Theobald every advantage, I will deal 
 first with what he evidently regards as his very best 
 instance, since he puts it forth with special jubilation 
 in the preface to his cousin's posthumous work on The 
 Classical Element in the Shakespeare Plays. This 
 it is. Shakespeare frequently introduces the idea of 
 reactions and relations between the greater and the less — 
 the greater " hiding " or overshadowing or obscuring or 
 absorbing the other, as in the case of lights, griefs, 
 maladies, or sea and river (Two Gentlemen, III, i, 353 ; 
 Cymbeline, IV, ii, 244 ; Lear, III, iv, 8 ; Pericles, II, 
 iii,.4i ; Merchant, V, i, 89 sq.). In the Izist-cited case, 
 Portia remarks to Nerissa (i) that the greater glory dims 
 the less,: as a king his substitute, who (2) in the king's 
 presence loses his state as does a river entering the sea. 
 Bacon, in turn, in one passage has : 
 
 The greater should draw the less. So we see (i) when two 
 lights meet, the greater doth darken and drown the less, and 
 (2) when a smaller river runs into a greater it loseth both the 
 name and the stream {Life and Letters, iii, 98). 
 
 Here the force of the coincidence lies mainly in the collo- 
 cation of the two ideas. Either, singly, is quite common: 
 
 Let that high swelling river of their fame 
 
 Leave humble streams, that feed them yet their name. 
 
 Daniel, Philoias, 1718-19 (IV, ii). 
 [Rivers] that have made their graves 
 And buried both their names and all their gold 
 Within his [Thames'] greatness to augment his waves. 
 [Whereafter he, the Thames, is] swallowed up in ocean. 
 
 Id. Civil Wars. 1595, B. ii, st. 7. 
 
 Noting that the collocation is exceptional— though 
 obviously likely — we have two hypotheses open. Either 
 both writers copied a previous one — as they may very 
 well have done — or Bacon, writing in the year 1603, 
 recalled some notable lines he had heard at the theatre 
 about 1596-98, or had read in or after 1600. What 
 could be more natural ? This is the obvious answer to 
 
436 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Dr. Theobald's challenge : " If any one can explain such 
 a coincidence as this . , . by anything except identical 
 authorship, I should like to know the alternative explana- 
 tion and the process of reasoning by which it is reached." 
 The process of reasoning is simply that set up by the 
 multitude of similar coincidences in other EHzabethan 
 writers, of which Dr. Theobald has apparently no know- 
 ledge. He is in effect denying that one author can ever 
 copy or plagiarise from another. 
 
 A friend, he tells us, actually suggested to him that 
 " Bacon may have heard or read the Merchant of 
 Venice " — adding unnecessarily that " without any 
 conscious plagiarism, he may have reproduced the imagery 
 of the passage." To this Dr. Theobald replies : " I can 
 confidently appeal to any unbiased reader whether such 
 an explanation as this is not infinitely more difficult to 
 accept or even conceive than the Baconian one of common 
 authorship." If this asseveration has regard solely to 
 the phrase "without any conscious plagiarism," it has 
 some excuse ; but that qxialification is as needless as it 
 is indecisive. In the Elizabethan age, nobody troubled 
 himself about plagiarism : all naen, broadly speaking, 
 practised it freely, though they at times charged others 
 with similar offences. Bacon in his Promus positively 
 heaped up saws, proverbs, maxims, phrases for use or 
 comparison ; and in his writings he is perpetually quoting; 
 with or without acknowledgment. And if Dr. Theobald 
 means to affirm the inconceivableness or even the im- 
 probability of Bacon's hearing or reading and recollecting 
 a passage in a finely poetic play, one can but dismiss his 
 denial as idle. Let us but take a few of the precise co- 
 incidences between Bacon and Jonson, pointed out by 
 Mr. Crawford : 
 
 If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth is as much as to 
 say that he is brave towards God, and a coward tow"ards men. 
 For a lie faces God, and shrinks from men. 
 
 Essay Of Truth. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 437 
 
 I like such tempers well as stand before their mistresses with 
 fear and trembling ; and before their maker like impudent 
 mountains. 
 
 Every Man out of his Humour, iii, 3. 
 
 Here Bacon echoes Montaigne, and Jonson one or other. 
 
 Reading maketh a full man. 
 
 Essay Of Studies. 
 
 An exactness of study, and multiplicity of reading, which 
 maketh a full man. 
 
 Jonson's Discoveries : iv. Lectio. 
 
 Here Jonson echoes Bacon, as he does in many other 
 places in the Discoveries, at much greater length ; and 
 again in the phrase : 
 
 Sufirages in parliament are numbered, not weighed, 
 
 which had been used by Bacon in 1589. In all this there 
 is no mystery : the learned man echoes another, in some 
 respects less learned ; and so many of the phrases in the 
 Promus are found in the Discoveries that one wonders 
 whether Jonson may not have done some of the collecting 
 for Bacon. But on the Baconian principle Bacon torote 
 the Discoveries, as well as all the Jonsonian plays in 
 which Bacon's favourite stories are used, and, by conse- 
 quence, all the rest 1 
 
 Rejecting that line of inference; we reject the other. 
 Upon the most obvious reproduction of ideas, no in- 
 ference of conununity of authorship is rationally to be 
 founded where (i) the general circumstances are wholly 
 repugnant to the hjTpothesis, and (2) copying was perfectly 
 probable. Community of authorship is rationally to be 
 surmised — of course it must in any case be supported 
 by many other considerations before it can be taken as 
 proved — where in two performances there are found a 
 number of those small coincidences which could arise 
 from unconscious mannerism, but which are not mere 
 cases of universal usage. It is reasonable, for instance, 
 to guess prima facie at Peele's authorship of an unsigned 
 play circa 1590, which contains the phrase "sandy 
 
438 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 plains," because he used that phrase in season and out 
 of season. But to get a step beyond a guess we should 
 have to test for (i) general resemblances in rhythm; 
 (2) resemblances in style and sentiment, (3) resemblances 
 in versification. That something might be proved in this 
 way is recognised by Dr. Theobald when he attempts 
 to reply to Judge Willis's exposure, in The Baconian 
 Mint, of his most confidently cited parallels. As we 
 have seen,* he attempts to confute Judge Wilhs by argu- 
 ing that a phrase might be " curious " even if used by 
 everj'body. He goes on to deny that he cited the 
 " curious " phrase " starting-holes " as one " coined at 
 the Baconian Mint." 
 
 Not at all [he goes on] : on the contrary, it was not likely 
 to be used by Bacon unless it was already intelligible by more or 
 less frequent usage. It did not certainly belong tp the highwa)^: of 
 literaiy resort, and as a somewhat slangy phrase the use of it in 
 common by Bacon and Shakespeare is worth notice ; that's all ! 
 It is merely an application of one of the laws of speech which I have 
 elsewhere stated (p. 470) : " No two writer? help themselves 
 in precisely the same way to the current phrases and notions that 
 may be floating in the air at the time. Some individuality is 
 shown even in these points of correspondence." ' 
 
 Where then is the alleged individuality in the cases 
 under notice ? Absolutely no hint is offered on the 
 subject. Bacon, we are shown; uses " starting-holes " 
 twice, but he does it just as everybody else did— ^Ise 
 how would the phrase be so intelligible as Dr. Theobald 
 now says it must have been ? The plain fact is that 
 Dr. Theobald had not been aware of the currency of the 
 phrase, else he would not have cited the occasional use 
 of it by any two writers as a noteworthy " echo " or 
 "coincidence." He does reluctantly admit that Mr. 
 Willis proves him to have been mistaken " in the coupUng 
 of the words gross and palpable. But in this case," he 
 absurdly goes on; " the Oxford Dictionary is as erring 
 as I am "—as if the Oxford Dictionary claimed to be a 
 
 * Above p. 272. * Preface to work cited, ed. 1904. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASfe 43^ 
 
 dictionary of phrases, with all instances of their use| 
 He is disingenuous enough to add that "the learned 
 judge overshoots the mark by giving in most of his refer- 
 ences . . . not the coupled but the separate words, 
 which of course prove nothing." The learned judge, as 
 we have seen, actually gave six instances of the coupled 
 words : the other instances were illustrative of the vogue 
 of the terms. And Dr. Theobald, be it noted, had 
 solemnly affirmed* that the phrase " gross and palpable " 
 is "one of Bacon's many contributions to verbal cur- 
 rency. It was a new coin when it issued from his affluent 
 mint. . . . Any one using it in the early part of the 
 seventeenth century would have felt almost obliged to quote 
 Bacon while employing it." A more flagrant example of 
 the method of ignorance it would be hard to find. And 
 it is by the confident application of this method that Dr. 
 Theobald finds Bacon to have written Marlowe as well 
 as Shakespeare. 
 
 How it works in. detail we shall see in examining Dr. 
 Theobald's presentment of the mass of his case — largely 
 compiled as it is from previous Baconian writers. The 
 series of " echoes and correspondencies " in his twelfth 
 chapter is made up indiscriminately of parallels in idea 
 and parallels in phrase or idiom. Lest I be accused of 
 unfair selection, I deal with half of them seriatim, abridg- 
 ing, of necessity, the presentment of some, but giving, 
 I think, the full force of the argument in every case : 
 
 I. Comments on "the danger attending too much 
 success in public service." 
 
 The main point is that " all immoderate success extin- 
 guisheth merit, and stirreth up distaste and envy " 
 (Bacon to Essex, Letter in Spedding's Life, ii, 129), The 
 idea is fully expressed in a speech of Ventidius, Antony 
 AND Cleopatra, III, i, 11 sq.; and less directly in 
 CoRiOLANUS, I, i", 1267 sq. 
 
 As Dr. Theobald himself partly indicates, this is a 
 » Work cited, p. 264. 
 
440 tTHE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 standing commonplace, ancient and modern. Following 
 Lewis Theobald, he cites Quintus Curtius, i, i, adding : 
 " It is not unlikely that the poet had this passage in mind 
 when he was writing the drama of Antony and. Cleo- 
 patra." There is no more reason to suppose that the 
 dramatist had read Quintus Curtius than that he had 
 written the letter to Essex. The reflection that distin- 
 guished success elicits envy and detraction is one of the 
 most obvious in the whole range of human experience. 
 In this case Dr. Theobald can suggest no correspondence 
 of diction between Bacon and Shakespeare. On the 
 other hand, the idea is common in Tudor and Jacobean 
 literature. E.g. : Elyot, The Governour, B. iii, ch. 27 ; 
 Of Detraction ; Holland's trans, of Plutarch's Moralia 
 (1603) ; Of Envy and Hatred. Compare : 
 
 Envy doth aye true honour's deeds despise. 
 
 Peele, Welcome to the Earl of Essex. 
 Yet in the House of Fame, and courts of Kings, 
 Envy will bite, or 3narl and bark at least. 
 
 Id. Honour of the Garter. 
 
 Cicero. Great honours are great burdens, but on whom 
 They are cast with envy, he doth bear two loads. 
 His cares must still be double to his joys 
 In any dignity ; where, if he err. 
 He finds no paidon, and for doing well 
 A most small praise. 
 
 Jonson, Catiline, III, i, 1-6. 
 
 Sabinus. When men grow fast 
 Honour'd and loved, there is a trick in istaAe 
 Which jealous princes never fail to use. 
 How to decline that growth, with fair pretext . . . 
 To shift them forth into another air 
 Where they may purge and lessen, etc. 
 
 Id. Sejanus, I, i. 
 [Envious great men] armed with power and Princes' jealousies. 
 Will put the least conceit of discontent 
 Into the greatest rank of treacheries. 
 That no one action shall seem innocent . . . 
 But this is still the fate of those that are ' 
 By nature or their fortunes eminent. 
 Who, either carried in conceit too far 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 441 
 
 Do work their own or others' discontent. 
 Or else are deemed fit to be supprest. 
 Not for they are, but that they may be ill. 
 Daniel, Tragedy of Philotas, 1605, Chorus at end of Act II. 
 
 Such the rewards of great emplo3mients are. 
 Hate kills in peace, whom Fortune spares in war. 
 
 Id. ib. 11. 1738-39 (III, ii). 
 
 2. Bacon's amplification of the text in Proverbs : " As 
 dead flies do cause the best ointment to stink, so does 
 a Uttle folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and 
 honour." This is amphfied in the De Augmenhs, with 
 express reference to the Bible text ; and variants on the 
 idea occur in Bacon's speech to the judges in 1617 (Life, 
 vi, 213) and his Reply to the Speaker in 1620 (Life, vii, 
 178). " It is important to remark how these singularly 
 subtle and, as thus expounded, original sentiments, are 
 reproduced in Shakespeare," in the rebuke of Mortimer 
 to Hotspur (i Henry VI, III, i, 180 sq.), and in Hamlet's 
 " So oft it chances in particular men " speech (Hamlet, 
 I, iv, 17). 
 
 Here one of the most often quoted sayings of the Book 
 of Proverbs, familiar in every EngUsh household, is 
 claimed as " singularly subtle and original " in its essential 
 and obvious meaning ; and Bacon is credited with Shake- 
 speare's development of the common theme, though 
 Bacon refers to the text and Shakespeare does not ; and 
 though there is no coincidence in their diction. As 
 before; we are dealing with apphcations of a common- 
 place such as must have been made thousands of times 
 by contemporaries. 
 
 3. In one of Bacon's Meditationes SACRE,andinhis 
 speech at the trial of Lord Sanquhar for murder, there 
 are allusions to the legendary magnanimity of the lion 
 towards a yielding foe; with a quotation from Ovid; 
 Corpora magnanimo satis est prostrasse leonem (Tristia, 
 III, V, 33). Shakespeare has the idea in Love's Labour's 
 Lost (IV, i, 90) and in Troilus and Cressida (V, iii, 37)- 
 
442 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Irrelevant parallels are cited by Dr. Theobald from other 
 plays. 
 
 As usual, we are dealing with a standing commonplace. 
 If Dr. Theobald had read Puttenham he would know the 
 story, probably then a household word in England, of 
 Queen Elizabeth's answer to the knight who had been 
 insolent to her before her accession and craved pardon 
 when she was queen : "Do you not know that we are 
 descended of the hon, whose nature is not to harm or 
 prey upon the mouse, or any other such small vermin ? " ^ 
 If he had read Greene, he would have found this instance 
 of the sajTing : 
 
 The king of beasts, that harms not yielding ones. 
 
 James IV, V, iii, 24, 
 with the variant, in the same scene : 
 
 I, eagle-like, disdain these little fowls. 
 And look on none but those that dare resist. 
 
 If he had read Edward III, he would have seen the line, 
 (IV.ii,33:) 
 
 The lion scorns to touch the yielding prey. 
 
 If he had consulted Donee's Illustrations of Shake- 
 speare he might have read that 
 
 in The Cboise of Change, containing the divinitie, 
 PHiLosoPHiE, AND POETRiE, &c. (1585, 4to), a work evidently 
 constructed on the model of the Welsh triads, we find the following 
 passage : — " three things shew that there is a great clemencie in 
 lions : they will not hurt them that lie grovelling," &c. Bartholo- 
 maeus [trans, by Batman, 1582, folio] sajrs, "their mercie'jis 
 known by many and oft ensamples : for they spare them that lie 
 on the ground." * 
 
 Perhaps this may convince even Baconians that Dr. 
 Theobald has found a mare's nest. Inasmuch as some 
 Shakespearean critics have ascribed Edward III to 
 
 1 Arte of English Poesie, 1589, Arber's rep. p. 303. 
 
 * Work cited, ed. 1839, p. 190. See the passage given more at 
 length in Seager's Natural History in Shakespeare's Time, 1896, 
 p. 183. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 443 
 
 Shakespeare; Dr. Theobald and the Baconians will doubt- 
 less do as much — ^meaning Bacon. Some of them, I 
 know, ascribe to Bacon the work of Puttenham. But 
 they can hardly father on Bacon Bartholomew's early 
 encyclopaedia, the De proprietatibus rerum, written 
 in the thirteenth century, translated in 1397 by John 
 of Trevisa, and printed in 1495 ; or The Choise of 
 Change, cited by Douce. And I suppose even Sir 
 Edwin Duming-Lawrence would hardly ascribe to Bacon 
 a poem published in 1557, with the line : 
 
 The fierce lyon will hurt no yelden things. 
 
 Wjratt, To his Lady cruel over her yelden Lover ; 
 
 to say nothing of Lilly's 
 
 Lions spare those that couch to them. 
 
 Euphues and his England, Arber's rep. p. 377. 
 
 4. Thrice over. Bacon says of Aristotle that after the 
 Ottoman fashion he could not feel secure in his kingdom 
 of philosophy till he had slain his brothers. Shakespeare 
 does not say this of Aristotle ; but he makes Heruy V 
 on his accession reassmre his brothers with the remark 
 that 
 
 Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds. 
 But Hany, Harry. 
 
 2 H. IV, V, ii, 46. 
 
 Dr. Theobald regretfully admits that Bacon nowhere 
 names Amurath ; but stands all the same for his parallel I 
 The historic fact* is that in 1596 the eldest son of Amurath 
 III murdered his brethren on his accession. But there 
 had been previous episodes of the kind. In Kyd's 
 SoLiMAN AND Perseda (1592), Amurathi brother of 
 Soliman, kills his brother Haleb, and is then killed by 
 Soliman (i, 5) ; and in Peele's Battle of Alcazar (i594)i 
 which begins with a dumb-show of the murder of the son, 
 two young brothers, and the uncle of " the Moor " Muly 
 Mahamet, the name Amurath occurs many times. Thus 
 
 ^ See note in loc. Variorum ed. 
 
444 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the practice and the name were already matters of 
 theatrical as well as general comment. There is not the 
 slightest ground for connecting Bacon's allusion with 
 that in the play as to authorship. 
 
 5. Dr. Theobald repeats Mr. Donnelly's citation of the 
 phrase " troublers of the world," noting that it is used 
 with " much the same technical (!) meaning " by Shake- 
 speare. As to this nugatory suggestion see p. 430 supra. 
 
 6. " In a very early State paper of Bacon's," says 
 Dr. Theobald, ".dating about the end of the year 1584; 
 and which was not published in any form till 165 1/' 
 there occur the phrases " fair enamelling of a terrible 
 danger" and "giving him a bastinado with a little 
 cudgel." Shakespeare speaks of a snake's " enamell'd 
 skin," and makes other allusions to snakes as dangerous 
 things ; he also speaks of giving " the bastinado with 
 his tongue," adding : " our ears are cudgell'd." Dr. 
 Theobald infers that " Bacon had in his mind the metallic 
 lustre of a deadly snake " ; and that the idea of a 
 bastinado with the tongue "kept lasting hold on his 
 mind," inasmuch as Shakespeare twice speaks of words 
 as strokes. Comment seems mmecessary; but it may 
 be noted that the whole thing happens to be a historical 
 mare's nest. The State paper in question is not and 
 could not have been by Bacon, who in 1584 was in no 
 position to ofEer State counsel to Queen Elizabeth. . It 
 figures for historicad students as Lord Burleigh's Advice 
 TO Queen Elizabeth (Harl. Misc. 2nd ed. ii, 277). 
 Did Lord Burleigh then write Shakespeare ? 
 
 7. Bacon tells the story of " Anaxarchus, who; when 
 questioned under tortvu-e, bit out his own tongue, and 
 spat it in the face of the tyrant." Shakespeare, in turn, 
 makes Bolingbroke in Richard II speak of doing as 
 much, without reference to Anaxarchus or Leaena or any 
 other precedent. Dr. Theobald incidentally reveals that 
 the story is a classic commonplace, being related by 
 Diogenes Laertius, Pliny, and Valerius Maximus. He 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 445 
 
 might have added that Plutarch tells it of Zeno. But 
 as " it is not very likely that WiUiajn Shakespeare had 
 read any of the classic authors " first named, Richard II 
 must have been written by Bacon ! The actor, Dr. 
 Theobald thinks, might have been equal to the idea 
 " bite my tongue out," but not to the stroke of spitting 
 it out ! As usual. Dr. Theobald is unaware that the 
 story is told by Boethius, without name; and was made 
 known to English readers by the translations of Chaucer, 
 Richard (1525) and Colville (1556). As little is he aware 
 that it is told of Zeno, after Plutarch, by Lilly (Euphues, 
 Arber's rep. p. 146). If he had but read so familiar an 
 Elizabethan work as The Spanish Tragedy, he would 
 have been aware that the act in question is made to take 
 place in that play. So that even the Stratfordian actor 
 had necessarily heard of the conception ! 
 
 ja. In this connection, again resorting to the fountain- 
 head of Mr. Donnelly, Dr. Theobald notes that Bacon 
 and Shakespeare both use " top " metaphorically for 
 ne plus uUra or acme of achievement or quality. As 
 we have seen (above, p. 385), everybody else in that day 
 did the same. The '' coincidence " is another mare's 
 nest. 
 
 8. Bacon speaks of the basilisk and the cockatrice 
 respectively as killing by a glance those who do not see 
 them first. So do fifty other writers of the period : the 
 basilisk is a standing tag of the essa3dsts and the play- 
 wrights. Shakespeare speaks of "the fatal balls of 
 murdering basilisks " (H. V, V, ii; 14), with a double 
 reference to "eye-balls and cannon-bjJls," and several 
 times elsewhere speaks of basilisks and cockatrices as 
 killing by their gaze, and puns about I and eye. It does 
 not occur to Dr. Theobald to note that a dozen other 
 authors of the time did the same thing ; and that Bacon 
 does not. Shakespeare's pun must for him be Bacon's 
 because Bacon " never could pass by a joke." Thus 
 does Dr. Theobald construct his " cable." 
 
446 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 g. Bacon has allusions to the pure fire of the stars, 
 fire in " the heaven," and so foiih ; while Shakespeare 
 makeis Coriolanus swear " by the fires of heaven " ; makes 
 Hanilet write, " doubt that the stars are fire " ■; and 
 makes other characters speak of stars as fires. Dr. 
 Theobald has apparently met with no other allusions 
 to star-fire in Elizabethan literature. Yet they occur 
 in such numbers that we are driven as usual to our conclu- 
 clusion that he linaits his reading to the authors he is 
 concerned to identify. 
 
 In Peele's Tale of Troy, pubUshed in 1589, we have 
 
 a. 28): 
 
 Glistening like stars of pure immortal fire. 
 
 In Spenser's Hymne in Honour of Love, we find the 
 lines : 
 
 Kindled at first from heaven's life-giving fire. 
 Some sparks remaining of that heavenly fire. 
 
 th' immortal flame 
 Of heavenly light. 
 The flaming light of that celestial fire — 
 
 four instances in two pages. In the next of the " Foure 
 Hymnes " — ^An Hymne in Honour of Beautie — 
 besides various metaphorical allusions to fire, we have 
 a stanza telling how when the soule did pass 
 
 Down from the top of purest heavens height 
 To be embodied here, it then took light 
 And lively spirits from that fairest star 
 Which lights the world forth from his fiery car. 
 
 Perhaps the stanza in the fourth hymn (Heavenly 
 Beauty) about the further heavens, beyond the visible,— 
 
 That need no sun t' illuminate their spheres 
 But their own native light far passing theirs — 
 
 may be deemed irrelevant ; but it would very well have 
 served Dr. Theobald's end had he found it in Shakespeare ; 
 as would the lines about the divine light : 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 447 
 
 In sight of whom both Sun and Moon are dark . . , 
 
 That all about him sheddeth glorious light . . . 
 
 . . . that immortal light which there doth shine. . , . 
 
 and so on. The same idea appears in Sir John Davies' 
 Orchestra (1596) : 
 
 Next her [the Moon] the pure, subtile and cleansing Fire 
 . Is swiftly carried in a circle even. 
 
 In Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1601) we have : 
 
 Ay me, that virtue, whose brave eagle's wings 
 Wth every stroke blow stars in burning heaven . . . 
 
 For thine own good, fair Goddess, do not stay. 
 Who would engage [= gage] a firmament of fires 
 Shining in thee, for me, a falling star ? 
 
 Act iv. sc. 6. 
 
 The conclusion reached by the true Baconian I presume, 
 will be that Bacon wrote Peele and Spenser and Davies 
 and all the rest. If, however, the open-minded reader 
 will yet a little further extend his reachng to the poetical 
 works of Greene, Peele, Spenser, Drayton, Sidney, and 
 Daniel, he will not merely begin to real^e the tmiversality 
 of the modes of expression supposed by Dr. Theobald 
 to be specialties of Bacon, but will gather some such 
 knowledge of Elizabethan poetic diction in general as 
 will make partly clear to bim the fashion in which the 
 poetic faculty, as seen in Shakespeare, handles the 
 material of the scientific or knowledge-seeking faculty, 
 seen speculatively at work in Bacon. 
 
 It is quite likdy that Hamlet's line in his quatrain to 
 Ophelia had reference to the debate, conducted by Bacon 
 and other contemporaries, as to whether the stars are 
 fires. He would find in Greene the contrary theory that 
 
 The stars from earthly hmnours gain their light, 
 
 Melicertes' Madrigal, in Menaphon ; 
 
 and in Marlowe's Faustus he would note the question 
 as to whether there was a sphere of fire. He must have 
 heard at the Mermaid some, mention of the scientific and 
 other speculations of his day. Even actors hear of such 
 
448 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 matters! But to trace his poetic expressions to the 
 speculative physicist who wrote the Novxjm Organum 
 is possible only to those who beUeved the Baconian theory 
 in advance. 
 
 10. By parity of reasoning, Bacon wrote Shakespeare 
 because both speak in metaphor of the mobility of quick' 
 silver, as everybody else did, and does now 1 E.g. : 
 
 As if our veins ran with quicksilver. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, ii, i. 
 
 Starting from his presupposition, the Baconian con- 
 sistently proceeds to assign to Bacon the works of Jonson. 
 And so on ad infinitum. To Bacon also, on that principle; 
 must be assigned the plaj^ of Webster : 
 
 My loose thoughts 
 Scatter like quicksilver. 
 
 The White Devil, iv. 2. 
 He runs as if he were ballassed with quicksilver. 
 
 The Duchess of Malfi, i, 2. 
 
 11. Bacon had noted the occult fact that poisons; and 
 likewise " certain conditions of the mind," often " cause 
 swelling." Shakespeare, again, has the phrase: 
 
 You shall digest the venom of 3raur spleen 
 Though it do split you. 
 
 Jul. Cees. IV, iii, 46, 
 
 — ^which Dr. Theobald thinks is meant to imply a process 
 of swelling ; and the dramatist fmlher speaks of " high- 
 blown pride," " high-swol'n hearts," the swelling of the 
 ambitious ocean; persons swelling in their pride, and so 
 on. It is most true. But as the reader may have noted 
 above (p. 427), the other dramatists of the time, not to 
 speak of the prose-writers, used the same figure with 
 " damnable iteration." If Dr. Theobald had but read 
 a Uttle in the Elizabethan drama, beginning with Ferrex 
 AND PoRREX, he would have met a score of times with 
 such figures as : 
 
 Methinks I see his envious heart to swell. 
 
 Ferrex and Porrex, i, i (1561). 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 449 
 
 When growing pride doth fill the swelling breast. 
 
 Id. a, 2, Chorus. 
 The heat 
 And furious pangs of his inflamed head. 
 
 Id. iii, I. 
 My brother's heart even then repin'd 
 With swollen disdain against mine equal rule. 
 
 Id.iv, 2. 
 For fight I must, or else my gall will burst. 
 
 Lilly, Woman in the Moon, ii. i. 
 Pandora's love, that almost burst my heart. 
 
 Id. ib. V, I. 
 How my heart swells at these miscreants' words. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 O Hasa. to sift that humour from her heart. 
 
 Id. i. I. 
 His heart did eame against his hated foe. 
 And bowels so with rankling poison swelled. 
 That scarce the skin the strong contagion held. 
 
 Spenser, Muiopotmos, 11. 254-6. 
 Or fraught with envy that their galls do swell. 
 
 Id. Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1. 760. 
 That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie 
 So in my swelling breast. 
 
 Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 27. 
 Princes, whose high spleens for emi>eiy swell. 
 
 Dekker. The Honest Whore, Pt. I, ii, 3. 
 Why swells your spleen so high ? 
 
 Id. v, 2. 
 That I could 
 . Contract the soul of universal rage 
 Into this swelling heart, that it might be 
 As full of poisonous anger as a dragon's. 
 
 Chapman, Revenge for Honour, iii, i. 
 
 Thy black tongue doth swell 
 With venom. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, Pt. II, ii, i. 
 The state is full of dropsy, and swol'n big 
 With windy vapours. 
 
 HeyviooA, Rape of Lucrece, i, 2. 
 
 And if he went back to Langland, he would find : 
 
 For whoso hath more than I, 
 Than angreth me soore, 
 
 2F 
 
450 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 And thus I live loveless 
 
 Like a luther dog. 
 
 That al my body bolneth [i.e. swelleth] 
 
 For bitter of my galle. 
 
 Piers Plowman, 11. 2705-10. 
 
 Compare finally the Elizabethan prose of Puttenham : 
 
 Men would and must needs utter their spleens in all ordinarie 
 matters also, or else it seemed their bowels would burst. 
 
 Arte of English Poesie, Arber's rep. p. 68. 
 
 12. Bacon repeatedly uses the phrase " bleed inwardly," 
 — either concretely or metaphorically. So does Shake- 
 speare (2 Henry IV, IV, iv, 58 ; Timon, I, ii, 211). 
 
 So do many other writers — with the same bearing in 
 metaphor — speak of the danger of inward bleeding. 
 Mr. Crawford points at once to. one of the most popular 
 budgets of such sayings, Lilly in Euphues, in one 
 handful of proverbs, has : " the woimd that bleedeth 
 inwardly is most dangerous " (Arber's rep. p. 63). 
 
 12a. In this connection Dr. Theobald cites, as " still 
 more distinctly " appl3dng the metaphor, Hamlet's phrase 
 (IV, iv, 27) about " the imposthume that inward breaks " ; 
 and Bacon in the Promus has a note of *' The launching 
 [= lancing] of the imposthume by him that intended 
 murder." 
 
 These too are pre-Shakespearean cormnonplaces. As 
 Mr. Bayley and Mr. Crawford point out, the chance of a 
 blow breaking an internal imposthume, and so curing 
 it, is dwelt upon in Euphues (Arber's rep. p. 330) ; and 
 Ben Jonson, in his English Grammar, quotes from Sir 
 John Cheke the sentence : 
 
 Sedition is an aposteam, which, when it breaketh inwardly, 
 putteth the state in great danger of recovery ; and corrupteth the 
 whole commonwealth with the rotten fury that it hath putrified 
 with. 
 
 13. Bacon has the phrase " to search the woimds of 
 the realm and not to skin them over," and repeats the 
 idea in similar words in other places. Shakespeare 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 451 
 
 repeatedly puts the same idea (Hamlet; III; iv; 147; 
 M. FOR M. II, ii, 134) ; and has other phrases about 
 searchmg wounds and applying plasters (Titus, II, iii; 
 262 ; As You Like It, II, iv, 44 ; Tempest, II, i, 137 ; 
 Two Gentlemen, I, ii, 114). 
 All this is Elizabethan commonplace. E.g. : 
 
 Such imposthumes as Phantaste is ... . 
 
 We must lance these sores 
 Or all wiU putrify. 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 3. 
 
 I never yet saw hurt so smoothly healed 
 But that the scars bewrayed the former wound : 
 Yea, where the salve did soonest close the skin 
 The sore was oft'ner covered up than cured. 
 Which festering deep and filled within, at last 
 With sudden breach grew greater than at first. 
 
 Hughes. The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587, III, i, 109-114. 
 
 Such sayings are the common stuff of homily. 
 
 14. Shakespeare's phrases about sweet things pro- 
 ducing sourness or loathing in digestion (M. N. D. II, ii; 
 137; Richard II, I, iii, 236) are paralleled in Bacon. 
 So are they a hundred times elsewhere : 
 
 But O I this sweet success, 
 Pursu'd with greater harms, turned soon to sour. 
 
 Hughes, Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587. II, i, S3-S4- 
 
 Such is the sweet of this ambitious power. 
 No sooner had, than turned eftsoons to sour. 
 
 Id. II, iv. Chorus at end. 
 
 Must taste those sowre distates the times do bring 
 Upon the fulness of a cloy'd Neglect. 
 
 Daniel. Musophilus, 1602-3, 11. 169-170. 
 
 Held back something from that full of sweet 
 To intersowre unsure delights the more. 
 
 Id. Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius. 1599. 
 St. 40. 
 
 14a. And so with the derivative metaphor about love 
 and friendship turning to hate (Richard II, III, ii, 335 ; 
 R. AND J., II, vi, II ; Lucrece, 867 ; Sonnet 94). 
 
452 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 This also was a standing commonplace : 
 
 Fortune. Did not I change long love to sudden hate. 
 And then rechange their hatred into love ? 
 
 Soliman and Perseda, Act i, Induction. 
 So, being fonner foes, they waxed friends. 
 
 Spenser, Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1. 851. 
 
 15. Bacon and Shakespeare frequently apply the terms 
 ',' sugar " and " sngared " to words and speech. 
 
 So do nine Elizabethan belletrists out of ten, and many 
 divines to boot ! See above, p. 278. 
 
 15a;. But Bacon has the phrase (Promus, No. i, 219) : 
 " Sweet for speech in the morning " and the Friar in 
 Romeo and Juliet (II, iii, 32) asks : 
 
 What early tongue so sweet saluteth me ? 
 
 And we are asked to recognise the utterance of a single 
 mind! 
 
 156. But, again. Bacon asserts that " sounds are 
 sweeter as well as greater in the night than in the day " 
 (Syl. Syl. 235) ; and Shakespeare has expressions to that 
 effect (Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 166 ; Merchant, V, i, 
 55). If Dr. Theobald found in Elizabethan literature, by 
 any chance, an allusion to the midnight sweetness of the 
 song of the nightingale, he would doubtless recognise the 
 unmistakable hand of Bacon. The greater audibility of 
 sounds in the night is a fact that perhaps escapes frequent 
 literary comment by reason of a notoriety extending over 
 several millenniimis. 
 
 16. " Other scientific ideas (!) which Bacon held about 
 
 sound," says Dr. Theobald, " are clearly reflected in 
 
 Shakespeare " : 
 
 The lower winds in a plain, except they be strong, make no noise ', 
 but amongst the trees the noise of such winds will be perceived. 
 
 Syl, SyL 115. 
 You may as well forbid the mountain pines 
 To wag their high tops, and to make no noise. 
 
 Merchant, IV, i, 75. 
 When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees 
 
 And they did make no noise. 
 
 Id. V, i, I. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 453 
 
 These little coincidences are rare delights for the 
 Baconians ; who never ask whether they might not stand 
 for reminiscences by Bacon of phrases heard by him in 
 plays. Unhappily they occur in other writers. " Ob- 
 serve," says Dr. Theobald, " how the Uttle phrase ' make 
 no noise ' always refers to the movement of wind in the 
 trees." Yet there are such coincidences elsewhere : 
 
 When the least whistling wind begins to sing. 
 And gently blows her hair about her neck. 
 Like to a chime of bells it soft doth ring, 
 And with the pretty noise the wind doth check. 
 
 Chester, Lovers Martyr, 1601. Grosart's ed. p. 10. 
 
 Each noise the wind or air doth cause. 
 
 Haring^on's trans, of Orlando Furioso (1591), B. i, st. 34. 
 
 The use of " noise " for a musical so\md is common; 
 E.g,: 
 
 The spouse of fair Eurydice, 
 That did enchant the waters with his noise. 
 
 Locrine, i. i« 
 
 17. Again, Shakespeare notes, with Bacon, that hearing 
 is more acute by night than by day (M. N. D. Ill, ii, 177). 
 This occult fact has been already commented on. 
 
 18. Shakespeare has a passage on the knots in trees 
 that " by the conflux of meeting sap " divert the tree's 
 growth (Troilus, I, iii, 7) ; and Bacon has one explaining 
 how knots in trees occur " for that the sap ascendeth 
 unequally " (Syl. Syl. 589). Obviously the liieory was 
 a current one; and Dr. Theobald admits that "the 
 Shakespeare passage shows a slight variation." 
 
 19. Bacon in the Promus quotes the proverb : " He 
 that pardons his enemy, the amner [almoner] shall have 
 his goods"; and in the De Augmentis remarks that 
 " None of the virtues has so many crimes to answer for as 
 clemency" (Antitheta on Cruelty; VI, iii, No. 18); 
 repeating the idea more fully in another place (VIII, ii, 
 No. 14). Again, he writes to Buckingham : " Mercy in 
 such a case, in a King, is true cruelty " (Life, vi, 46). 
 
454 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 So Shakespeare : 
 
 Sparing justice feeds iniquity. 
 
 Lucrece, 1686. 
 Pardon is still the nurse of second woe. 
 
 M. for M. II, i, end. 
 
 Compare Richard II, V, iii, 57-99 ; Timon, III, v, 2 ; Romeo. 
 Ill, i, last line. 
 
 Dr. Theobald admits that " this is not a very profound or 
 original axiom." It is not : it was an ancient common- 
 place; often f oimd in EUzabethan hterature : 
 
 He that for every little occasion is moved with compassion . . . 
 is called piteous, which is a sickness of the mind, wherewith 
 at this day the more part of men be diseased. 
 
 Elyot, The Governour, B. ii, c. 7. (Compare c. g.) 
 
 For most oftentimes the omitting of correction redoableth a 
 trespass. 
 
 Id. B. iii, c. 21. 
 
 Wrong, wreakless [— nnrevenged] sleeping. 
 Makes men die honourless ; one borne, another 
 Leaps on our shoulders. We must wreak our wrongs 
 So as we take not more. 
 
 Chapman; Revenge of Bttssy D'Anibois, iii, i. 
 
 Fathers, to spare these men, were to commit 
 A greater wickedness than you would revenge. 
 
 Jonson, Catiline, v, 6. 
 
 It had been put in currency for the stage by Hughes : 
 
 No worse a vice than lenity in kings. 
 Remiss indulgence soon undoes a realm. 
 He teacheth how to sin. that winks at sins. 
 And bids o£Eend, that sufiereth an ofience. 
 The only hope of leave increaseth crimes. 
 And he that pardoneth one, emboldeneth all 
 To break the laws. Each patience fostereth wrongs. . . . 
 Rough rigour looks out right, and still prevailes : 
 . Smooth mildness looks too many viB.ys to thrive. 
 
 Attonement sield [seldom] defeats, but oft defers 
 Revenge : beware a reconciled foe. 
 
 The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587, III, i, 62-74. 
 
 And we have it in Fairfax's translation of Tasso's 
 Jerusalem Delivered (1600) ; 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRA.SE 455 
 
 There must the rule to all disorders sink. 
 Where pardons more than punishments appear. 
 
 B. V, St. 39 ; 
 and in Daniel's Civil Wars : 
 
 Compassion- here is cruelty, my lord; 
 Pity will cut our throats. 
 
 B. vi; St. 65. 
 
 But it should not have been necessary thus to illustrate 
 the vogue of a commonplace sure to be uttered by a 
 thousand lawyers, preachers, and laymen on every 
 occasion of the severe repression of sedition. 
 
 20. Bacon, in his History of Henry VII, quotes 
 Chancellor Morton on " the bastard and barren employ- 
 ment of moneys to usury," and in this connection he 
 repeats the word " bastard " twice. Shakespeare in 
 Venus and Adonis (767) speaks of gold put to use 
 begetting gold, using no term of disparagement ; and in 
 the Merchant of Venice (I, iii) makes Antonio speak of 
 Shylodc taking " a breed for barren money of his friend." 
 Citing an irrelevant passage from Twelfth Night (III; 
 if 54). Dr. Theobald pronotmces that, ** Putting all these 
 things together, Shakespeare's opinion seems to be much 
 the same as Bacon's." The facts are plainly otherwise. 
 Shakespeare puts in Antonio's mouth the standing 
 medieval censure of usury — ^that it was unnatural, in that 
 it made a barren thing " breed." (Compare : " I cannot 
 abide to have money engender," in Dekker's Honest 
 Whore, Pt. II, ii, i ; and the exposition in Kyd's transla- 
 tion of Tasso's The Householder's Philosophy ; Boas' 
 ed. of Works, pp. 279-282.) He does not call it " bas- 
 tard"— that is Bacon's word. The alleged coincidence 
 turns directly against Dr. Theobald's thesis. 
 
 20fl. In this connection. Dr. Theobald notes that Bacon 
 in the late essay on Usury puts forward contradictory 
 views on money-lending— that it " doth dull and damp 
 all industries," but that at moderate interest lent money 
 "will encourage rand edge industrious and profitable 
 
456 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 emplo37ments." Shakespeare on the contrary makes 
 Polonius say that "borrowing dulls the edge of hus- 
 bandry." Again a sharp divergence. Dr. Theobald 
 solves his problem by the pronouncement that " when 
 Hamlet was written, the poet does not seem to have 
 advanced quite so far " as he did when he wrote the essay 
 on Usury! Thus when Shakespeare and Bacon hold 
 contrary opinions, it is to count for nothing against the 
 Baconian theory, which in effect professes to rest upon 
 " echoes and correspondencies " ! 
 
 21. Shakespeare, in a passage on the possibility of 
 forecasting events from the past, speaks of the " seeds and 
 weak beginnings " of things (2 Henry IV, iii, i, 80 sq.). 
 Bacon in turn speaks of " a beginning and seed " (Works, 
 ed. Spedding and Ellis, vii, 4) ; again of " the seminary 
 and beginnings " of monarchies (Life, iii, 324) ; and yet 
 again of " fair seeds and beginnings " (Works, vii, 47). 
 Any critical reader noting such an extremely likely 
 coincidence of phrase would make some scrutiny before 
 deciding that it stood for identity of authorship. The 
 Baconian never makes such an inquiry. Yet the phrase 
 is obviously a natural one, likdy to be common. Com- 
 pare: 
 
 So that they have had their beginning of themselves in seede, 
 in flower, or in kemell. 
 
 Golding's trans, of De Momay, on The Trevonesse of 
 the Christian Religion, 1587, ed, 1604, p. 6. 
 
 22. Similarly Dr. Theobald founds on the fact that 
 Shakespeare makes the King in All's Well (I, ii, 15) 
 utter the million-times repeated platitude about a 
 foreign war being an " exercise " for a nation — a senti- 
 ment which Bacon gives out in his own person more than 
 once. Dr. Theobald appears to think that he strengthens 
 his case by first adducing the advice of Henry IV to his 
 son " to buoy giddy minds with foreign quarrels " 
 (2 Henry IV. IV, v, 210)— a totally different proposition 
 —and even goes the length of quoting the " somewhat 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 457 
 
 coarse" language of Parolles (All's Well; II, iii; 296). 
 The daim is beneath discussion. Shakespeare makes one 
 king employ a saying about war which had been uttered 
 by multitudes of men in all time about every foreign war^ 
 in history ; and Bacon does as much on his own account. 
 It is set forth by Daniel in his Civil Wars, B. v, st. 17. 
 The inference of identity is here outside discussion. 
 
 23. Bacon somewhere (Dr. Theobald gives no reference) 
 speaks of indulgence as causing weakness by " expense of 
 spirit " ; as does Shakespeare in Sonnet 129. In the lack 
 of a reference the point can hardly be discussed ; but 
 here again the phrase is in the common way of Elizabethan 
 diction : 
 
 Right sacred expense of his time. 
 
 Chapman; pref. to trans, of Iliad, 
 
 The serious expense of an exact gentleman's time. 
 
 Jd. Epist. ded. to Seven Boohs of the Iliads, 1598. 
 
 The worthy expense of my future life. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Spend their souls in sparks. 
 
 Id. Verses To M. Harriots, app. to trans, of Achilles' Shield. 
 
 Spent his vital spirit. 
 
 Spenser, Ruins of Time, 1. 382. 
 
 A scholar doth disdain to spend his spirits 
 Upon such base employment as hand labours. 
 
 Patient Grissil (1599) v. 1. 
 Foolish inamorates who spend their ages, their spirits, nay 
 themselves, in the servile and ridiculous imployments of their 
 mistresses. 
 
 T. Hejrwood, Apology for Actors, Sh. Soc. rep. p. 54, 
 
 And speak away my spirit into air. 
 
 Jonson, Inducticm to Every Man out of his Humour. 
 
 24. Bacon in his speech of Undertakers (Life; v; 43); 
 speaks of " the fort of affection and the fort of reason," 
 and uses " fort of reason " again in the Discourse on 
 Fortitude which is spoken at the Conference of Pleasure. 
 Shakespeare has " pales and forts of reason " (Hamlet, I; 
 iv, 27). Bacon again (last cit.) has " fortitude the marshal 
 of thought, the armour of the will " ; while Shakespeare 
 
458 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 writes of " the marshal to my will " (M. N. D., II, ii, 120) 
 and " armour of the mind." 
 
 It is quite possible that Bacon had heard performances 
 of the plays cited, and echoed them. But the metaphors 
 joid plurases in question were common. E.g. : 
 ■ Where virtue keepeth the fort, report and suspicion may assail 
 but never sack. 
 
 Greene; Pandosio (1588), Hazlitt's Sh. lib. iv, 42, 
 
 Yet first he cast, by treaty and by trains. 
 Her to persuade that stubborn fort to yield. 
 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, B. I, c. vi, st. 3. 
 
 What war so cruel, or what siege so sore 
 As that which strong affections do apply 
 Against the fort of reason evermore, 
 
 Id. II, xi, I. 
 
 That fort of chastity. 
 
 That impregnable fort of chastity and loyalty. 
 
 Chapman, The Widow's Tears, i, i ; iii, i. 
 
 Thou hast the goal, the fort [of chastity] is beaten. 
 
 Nero (1624), ii, i. 
 To summon resignation of life's fort. 
 
 Chapman, the Gentleman Usher, iv, i. 
 
 Most tender fortress of our woes. 
 
 Chapman, Hymnus in Noctem. 
 
 I must confess I yielded up my fort. 
 
 Heywood, i Edward IV, v, 4. 
 
 To win the Fort, how oft have I essayed, 
 Wherein the heart of my fair mistress lies. 
 
 W. Percy, Sonnets to Ccelia, 1594, Son. 10. 
 Under pretence of friendship, where he hath a fort, as it were; 
 commodiously seated. 
 
 Holland, trans, of Plutarch's Moraiia ("To discern 
 a Flatterer from a Friend ") Everyman Lib. 
 selection, p. 38. 
 
 " Marshal of the will " and " armour of the mind " are 
 
 equally common types of figure. The second was made 
 
 current for all Europe by Boethius, of which there were 
 
 three English translators. Chaucer has : 
 
 Certes I gave thee such armours that, if thou ths^self ne haddest 
 first cast them away, they shoulden han defended thee. 
 
 B. i, pr. 2. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 459 
 
 The idea is common in Tudor belles lettres : 
 
 Only to think that he was out of these meditations was sufficient 
 armour to defend him from all other torments. 
 
 Gascoigne, Adventures of Master F. J. Cunliffe's 
 ed. of Works, i, 422. 
 
 But the religious use of the metaphor, starting from such 
 texts as " the armour of righteousness," " the whole 
 armour of God " (2 Cor. vi, 7 ; Eph. vi, 11, 13), was 
 ahsolutely imiversal. E.g. Erasmus' Enchiridion, and 
 Latimer, passim. 
 
 25. Bacon says in a letter to Villiers (Life, v, 260) that 
 
 the times require a King's attorney " to wear a gauntlet 
 
 and not a glove " ; and Shakespeare has : 
 
 A scaly gauntlet now , . . must glove this hand. 
 
 2 Henry IV, i, i, 145. 
 
 The phrase is a typical Tudor commonplace. 
 
 26. Bacon " is fond of taper-light " ; speaks of events 
 as " lights or tapers " (Life, i, 132) ; and has in his 
 Promus (688) the proverbial phrase : " To help the sun 
 with lanterns" — as well as others (686, 687) about 
 digging a well by a river, and a gold ring on a swine's 
 snout. All these ideas are claimed to be " clearly repro- 
 duced in Shakespeare," in the passages (i) about smooth- 
 ing the ice and adding taper-light to that of the sun 
 (John, IV, ii, 9) ; (2) about adding water to the sea and 
 bringing a faggot to burning Troy (Titus, III, i, 68) ; 
 
 (3) about adding coals to Cancer (Troilus, II, iii, 205) ; 
 
 (4) about the raven chiding blackness {tb. 221), and 
 
 (5) about honey as a sauce to sugar (As You Like It, III, 
 iii, 29) ; and again in the line " She doth teach the torches 
 to bum bright." 
 
 An extremely common ty^ of metaphor and an 
 extremely common form of proverb are here foimded on 
 to prove identity of authorship. Upon that principle 
 Bacon wrote the plays of Jonson, who has 
 
 Witness thy youth's dear sweets here spent untasted. 
 
 Like a fair taper, with his own flame wasted. 
 
 Cynthia's Rtvels, i, i. 
 
46o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and of Dekker; who wrote : 
 
 'Twere impiety then to dim her light, 
 Because we see such tapers seldom burn- 
 
 The Honest Whore, Pt. II, iv, 2. 
 
 Whose star-like eyes have power ... to make night day. 
 
 Old Fortunatus, n, 2. 
 
 The tapers of the night \i.e. the stars] are already lighted. 
 
 lb. Prologue at Court. 
 
 To say nothing of : 
 When the taper of my heart is lighted. 
 
 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593). Son. 24. 
 
 It was a common trope long before Bacon. E.g. : 
 
 A light or torch to show man his filthy and stinking nature. 
 Hooper, Declaration of Christ's Office, 1547. Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. 89. 
 
 As to the phrase about bringing lanterns to the sun, 
 nobody but a Baconian would need to be told that it was 
 in everyday use among common folk. It emerges even 
 in theology : 
 
 Man's wisdom giveth as much light unto the word of God, as 
 a little candle giveth unto the bright sun in the mid-day. 
 
 Hooper, Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker 
 Soc. vol. p. 169. 
 They do shewe themselves worthie to be laughed at, as which 
 should take upon them to enlighten the Sunne with a Candle. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of De Momay Of the Trewnes 
 of the Christian Religion, 1587, ed. 1604, p. i. 
 
 Compare a poet : 
 
 To light 
 A candle to the Sun. 
 
 Daniel, pref. poem to The Queenes Arcadia, 1605. 
 
 27. Bacon in one letter speaks of the solitude " which is 
 
 the base-cotul of adversity," in which he has " often 
 
 remembered " the Spanish proverb, " Love without end 
 
 has no end ' ' (Life, vii, 335) . Shakespeare in Richard II 
 
 pirns on the " Base court, where kings grow base " ; and 
 
 in Cymbeline (IV, ii, go) says : 
 
 . / have heard you say 
 Love's reason's without reason. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 461 
 
 " This," says Dr. Theobald, " is evidently a variation on 
 the Spanish proverb." It is simply another proverb of 
 the same very common cast, and the twofold parallel is a 
 rope of sand. 
 
 28. Bacon has the phrases " no brewer of holy water in 
 Court," and " no dealer in holy water " (Life, i, 200 ; 
 iii, 297). " The same very curious phrase occurs in Lear,". 
 says Dr. Theobald : 
 
 O, uncle, court holy water in a dry house is better than rain out 
 0' door. (Ill, ii, lo.) 
 
 For Dr. Theobald, every obsolete idiom is very curious. 
 Yet he cites the " Clarendon note " on the passage to the 
 effect that " Court holy water " was a phrase from the 
 French. That is to say, it was a current tag. From the 
 variorum edition Dr. Theobald might have learned that it 
 is so given in Cotgrave's Dictionary, 1611, and in Florio's 
 Itahan Dictionary, 1598, under the word ManteUizare. 
 The " coincidence " thus stands for absolutely nothing. 
 
 29. Bacon in a speech in Parhament said : " Let not this 
 Parliament end like a Dutch feast, in salt meats, but like 
 an English feast in sweet meats " (Life, iii, 215). Shake- 
 speare in Richard II (I, iii, 67), has : 
 
 Lo, as at English feasts, so I regreet 
 
 The daintiest last to make the end most sweet. 
 
 On the face of it, Bacon's remark was likely to have been 
 
 made a million times a year in England ! Shakespeare 
 
 does not mention the Dutch usage ; but, as Dr. Theobald 
 
 observes, he might have added another line in Richard II : 
 
 (Not like Dutch feasts, that end with salted meat.) 
 
 And this is a " coincidence " ! 
 
 30. Bacon writes to Villiers that in regard to his friend 
 he is '.' covetous " only to take away care from him (Life, 
 vi, 115). Henry V says he is 
 
 not covetous for gold . • . 
 But if it be a sin to covet honour; 
 I am the most offending soul alive, 
 
 Henry V, IV, iii, 24. 
 
462 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 So Bacon evidently wrote Shakespeare ! By the same 
 token he wrote Ben Jonson : 
 
 We here protest it, and are covetous 
 Posterity should know it, we are mortaL 
 
 Sejanus, i, 2. 
 
 31. Inasmuch as Bacon writes that " Fame hath swift 
 wings; specially that which hath black feathers " (Life, 
 V, 248), and Shakespeare in Soimet 70 has : 
 
 The ornament of beauty is suspect; 
 
 A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air; 
 
 "Bacon is interpreted by Shakespeare." I spare 
 comment. 
 
 32. Dr. Theobald claims to find " the same pictm-e " in 
 Bacon's reference to men's holding of&ces after their 
 powers are decayed and Shakespeare's allusions to (i) a 
 disregarded old tale (Winter's Tale, V, ii, 67 ; John IV, 
 ii, 18 ; Venus and Adonis, 841). There is absolutely 
 no coincidence or parallel whatever. 
 
 33. For once Dr. Theobald does find a parallel. In 
 Hamlet we have the lines (I, ii, 11) : 
 
 As 'twere with a defeated joy. 
 With an auspicious and a dropping eye. 
 With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage ; 
 
 and in The Winter's Tale (V, ii, 80) : 
 
 She hath one eye declined for the loss of her husband ; another 
 elevated that the oracle was fulfilled ; 
 
 while Bacon speaks of Ferkin Warbeck (Works; vi, 192) 
 " beginning to squint one eye upon the crown and another 
 upon the sanctuary " ; and of Walpoole in the Squire 
 conspiracy, as " carrying a waking and a waiting eye." 
 As this common employment of a common trope is to 
 prove identity of authorship, let us once more note in 
 part the extent of Bacon's production : 
 
 Avert his [Apollo's] fervent eye. 
 And turn his temperate. 
 
 Chapman's trans, of Iliad (1398). i, 62-3. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 463 
 
 In which time came upon the Stage a woman clothed with a 
 white garment, on her head a pillar, double-faced, the foremost 
 face fair and smiling, the other behind black and lowring. 
 
 Gascoigne, Jocasta, Dumb Shew before Act V. 
 
 As if you stuck one eye into my breast. 
 
 And with the other took my whole dimensions. 
 
 Jonson, The Sad Shepherd, iii. 
 
 They have wont to give their hands and their hearts together ; 
 but we think it a finer grace to look asquint, our hands looking 
 one way and our hearts another. 
 
 ComwaUis, Essays; 1601. 
 
 Her face was changeable to every eye ; 
 One way look'd ill, another graciously. 
 
 Chapman, Third Sestiad of Hero and Leander, 1598. 
 
 As if she had two souls, one for the face. 
 
 One for the heart, and that they shifted place. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 His eyes were seats for mercy and for law. 
 Favour in one, and Justice in the other. 
 
 Greene, A Maiden's Dream, 1591, st. 9. 
 
 34. " Shakespeare's phrase ' out of jomt,' which has 
 passed into current speech, so that its singular and original 
 character is forgotten, is used more than once both in 
 Shakespeare and Bacon." So writes Dr. Theobald. I 
 invite the attention of rational readers to the frame of 
 mind of a writer who, knowing practically nothing of pre- 
 Shakespearean Uterature, affirms that such a phrase as 
 " out of joint " was " original " about the year 1600. 
 
 When such a thing can be written, and pass into a 
 second edition, it seems necessary to demonstrate the 
 folly of the assertion. Any one noting that Hamlet uses 
 not only the phrase " out of joint," but " disjoint and out 
 of frame " (i, 2) ; that Macbeth says " let the frame of 
 things disjoint " (iii, 2) ; and that " out of frame " occurs 
 also in Love's Labour's Lost (iii, i), would realise that 
 " out of joint " and " out of frame " were equivalent 
 phrases in ordinary use — ^unless indeed the Baconian 
 should decide that Bacon invented both. As Mr. Craw- 
 
464 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 ford has pointed out, both are pre-EHzabethan, even in 
 the moral sense : 
 
 To thy correccion now haaste and hie, 
 
 For thou hast been out of jo3ait al to longe. 
 
 Hoccleve's Works (1415) ; Fumivall's rep. p. 14. 
 The londe he brsmgeth out of frame, 
 Agaynst all goddis forbod. 
 
 Roye, Rede me and be nott Wrothe, 1528. 
 Add: 
 
 In this worlde that we do name 
 There is none so farre out of frame. 
 
 Idem. 
 The latter phrase, which Brandes surprisingly describes 
 as a "curiously poetic expression " in Hamlet,^ occurs 
 in Latimer : 
 
 That the King's majesty, when he cometh to age; will^see a 
 redress of these things so out of frame. 
 
 First Sermon before Edward VI ; Dent's rep. p. 86. 
 
 Brandes traces it from Shakespeare to Florio's Montaigne. 
 The idea is common in Daniel, who uses this and the 
 figure of " joint " with a frequency which indicates the 
 absolute normaUty of the metaphor. Compare : 
 
 How things at full do soon wex out of frame. 
 
 The Civil Wars, 1595, B. i, st. 8. 
 As if the frame of all disjoynted were. 
 
 Id. B. iv, St. 10. 
 The broken frame of this disjoynted State. 
 
 A Panegyricke Congratulatory to the King, 1603, St. 41. 
 An addition to the frame 
 Of this great work, squar'd fitly to the same. 
 
 Which out of judgment best accommodates 
 These jojmts of rule. 
 
 The model of this frame. 
 
 [Nothing] 
 
 Could once disjoint the couplements whereby 
 
 It [the frame] held together in just Sj^metry , 
 
 ^ William Shakespeare, 1898, ii, 17. 
 
 Id. St. 43. 
 
 Id. St. 44. 
 Id. St. 45. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 465 
 
 And be so clos'd as all the joynts may grow 
 Together firm in due proportion. 
 
 And lay the frame of Order and Content. 
 
 This frame of pow'r. 
 
 Id. St. 60. 
 Id. St. 61, 
 Id. St. 61. 
 
 And as for thee, thou huge and mighty frame, 
 That stcinds corrupted so with time's despight. 
 
 Id. Musophilus, 1602-3, U- 379-8o. 
 Shall, with a sound incountring shock, disjo3ait 
 The fore-contrived frame. 
 
 Id. ib. 11. 870-1. 
 
 Such phrases as " out of course," " out of order," " out of 
 form," " out of square," " out of rank," are of course 
 equally common. In the literal sense, " out of joint " 
 was in everyday-use : 
 
 When a member that was out of jojmt is set in again. 
 
 Sidney and Golding's trans, of Dc Mornay, 1587. 
 Ed. 1604, p. 7. 
 Doubtless, Apollo's axle-tree is cracked. 
 Or aged Atlas' shoulder out of joint. 
 
 Marlowe and Nashe's Dido (1594), iv, i . 
 
 Not that he had put out of jo3mt, or lamed 
 His arme, his legge, or any other part. 
 
 Harington, trans, of Orlando Furioso, 1591, i, 66. 
 
 But the metaphor too was in dramatic use : 
 
 This resolution, then, hath set his wits in joint again. 
 
 Chapman, The Widow's Tears, ii, 3. 
 
 Dr. Theobald believed that Bacon-Shakespeare invented 
 the very phrase " household words." Such faith, but no 
 other, can conceive either as inventing " out of joint." 
 The idea is in Chaucer before Hoccleve : 
 
 That the linage of mankinde ... be departed and unjoined 
 from his welle. 
 
 Boece, B. V. pr. iii, end. 
 What discordable cause hath to-rent and unjoined the binding 
 ... of things. 
 
 Id. B. V, Met. iii. beginning. 
 
 The phrase, in short, Ues at the roots of English " dis- 
 
 2G 
 
466 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 covirse." If it had been argued that the metaphor was 
 new in Bacon's day, one could have set down the claim as 
 one more instance of ordinary Baconian assumption. 
 But the idea that the phrase was then originated tells of a 
 degree of credulous folly that excludes the very faculty 
 of judgment. 
 
 35. After the last-noted item, the reader is not unpre- 
 pared to learn that Dr. Theobald finds significance in the 
 fact that Bacon sometimes uses the phrase " money in 
 his purse " ; that lago says " Put money in thy purse " ; 
 and that the expression repeatedly recurs in Shakespeare. 
 A child might realise that such phrases were likely to be 
 in habitual use ; and a reference to Mr. Hart's edition of 
 Othello will give the reader two coeval instances : 
 
 No arts and professions are now set-by and in request but such 
 as bring pence into our purses. 
 
 Holland's tr. of Pliny, proem, to Bk. xiv. 
 
 Get money ; still get money, boy, &c. 
 
 Jonson, Every Man In, ii, 3. 
 
 If we turn to a later play of Jonson's, we find three 
 instances of the phrase in one scene : 
 
 Has still money in his purse, and vrill pay all. 
 He has ever money in his purse. 
 Thou hast money in thy purse still. 
 
 Bartholomew Fair, ii, i. 
 
 Nashe (Works, ed. McKerrow, i, 163) has the occult 
 remark that " He that hath no money in his purse " must 
 dine on credit — a scientific truth which may be gathered 
 from Hoccleve in the previous century. 
 
 The Baconians will presumably argue that Jonson was 
 lending to the Bohemians of his Fair a coinage from the 
 " Baconian Mint." We can but speculate as to what 
 they make of the idea when it occurs a himdred and fifty 
 years earlier : 
 
 And loke ye ringewele in your piu:s. 
 
 For ellys your cawse may spede the wurs. 
 
 Coventry Mysteries, c. 1450. Sh. Soc, ed. p. 131 ; 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 467 
 
 and in the morality Mankind, dating circa 1475 : 
 
 What is in thy purse ? thou axt a stout fellow. 
 
 Farmer's rep. p. 22. 
 
 The simple sentiment in question was also put in rhyme 
 by Dame Juliana Bemers or another in the fifteenth 
 century, in the epilogue to her treatise on Hunting, with 
 its refrain : 
 
 Ever gramercy mine own purse. 
 
 It is only the plain necessity of disproving, by chapter 
 and verse, the most childish assumptions on the Baiconian 
 side that can keep one in countenance in thus demonstra- 
 ting that the most elementary notions existed in Enghsh 
 literature before the reign of James I. 
 
 36. Bacon has the phrase " If time give his Majesty 
 the advantage, what needeth precipitation to extreme 
 remedies ? " (Life, v, 379). " Surely," says Dr. Theobald, 
 " this is simply a variation of the more condensed 
 expression of the same maxim : 
 
 Advantage is a better soldier than rashness." 
 
 Henry V, III, vi, 128. 
 
 It is; and " surely " the same thing must have been said, 
 in similar words, by ten thousand men in every war ! 
 " This almost technical use of the word advantage," adds 
 Dr. Theobald, " as applied to time, is distinctly Baconian. 
 It is equally Shakespearean " — citing Richard III, IV, 
 i. 49 ; Cymbeline, IV, i, 12 ; Venus and Adonis, 129. 
 It is the normal force of the word in Tudor English in 
 Bacon's day : 
 
 Had you come one to one, or made assault 
 With reasonable advantage. 
 
 Hey wood. Fair Maid of the West, iv, i . 
 Conditions such as it liketh him to offer them which hath them 
 in the narrow straits of advantage. 
 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, pref. ch. ii, §4. 
 He should never take her at the like advantage. 
 
 Gascoigne, Adventure of Master F. J. Works, ed. 
 Cunlifie, i, 435. 
 
468 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Hold our enemies still at advantage. 
 
 Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, Arber's rep. p. 46 
 
 Upon a good and a military advantage. 
 
 Middleton, Blurt, Master-Constable (1602) i, i 
 
 Backward he beais for more advantage now. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B. iii, St. 77 
 
 Make imperfections their advantages. 
 
 Id. B. iii, St. Sh 
 In extremes advantage hath no time. 
 
 Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, iii, 13 
 Watch you 'vantages ? 
 
 Id. Soliman and Perseda, 1, 2 
 
 At his best advantage stole away. 
 
 Id. i. 3 
 For if the wife her at advantage take . . . 
 
 Higgins' add. to Mirrour for Magistrates, 1575 
 Rep. of 1810, p. 68. 
 
 38. " The curious expression flay prizes occurs once in 
 Shakespeare," says Dr. Theobald, citing Titus, I, i, 399. 
 And it occvirs thrice in Bacon ! I know nothing more 
 " curious " in the Elizabethan age than Dr. Theobald's 
 untiring acclamation of its household words when he 
 chances to find them in both Bacon and " Shakespeare," 
 never dreaming of looking furiiher. " Play his prize," 
 which is found only in Titus among the plays ascribed to 
 Shakespeare, occurs a score of times in the plays and 
 tales of Shakespeare's day : 
 
 Getting up and down like the usher of a fence school about to 
 play his prize. 
 
 Greene, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, Works, xi, 221. 
 
 Why should not we, ladies, play our prizes, I pray ? 
 
 Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, v, 2. 
 If I play not my prize. 
 
 Massinger, A New Way to pay Old Debts, iv, 2. 
 
 When I do play my prizes in print. 
 
 Nashe, Have with you to Saffron Walden ; Works, iii, 128. 
 Room, let my prize be played. 
 
 Dekker, The Honest Whore, Pt. II, v, 2. 
 Nay, let me alone to play my master's prize. 
 
 Id. Pt. I, iv, 3. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 469 
 
 To play at the wooden rapier and dagger at the end of a 
 maister's prize. 
 
 Id. Seven Deadly Sins, Arber's rep. p. 2, 
 
 Not so nimble at their prizes of wit. 
 
 The Witch of Edmonton, i, 2. 
 
 As may be learned from Steevens' note to the Merry 
 Wives, I, i, 295, the practice was as familiar in the London 
 of that day as cricket in ours. Thus illustrated, the 
 argument attains to " curious'st," as the Elizabethans 
 would say. As Titus is non-Shakespearean, it would 
 appear in this connection that Bacon wrote pretty well 
 all the Elizabethan plays but Shakespeare's. 
 
 39. " Starting holes is another curious phrase," con- 
 tinues Dr. Theobald. " Curiouser and curiouser." See 
 above, p. 277. 
 
 40. Bacon has the phrase " as we now say, putting 
 tricks upon them." Essay Of Cunning (1612). On this 
 passage Dr. Abbott remarked that " The word ' now ' 
 seems to apologize for the new-fashioned colloquial 
 phrase, put tricks on." It is used by Stephano in the 
 Tempest {II, ii, 62), and by the clown in All's Well, 
 rV, V, 63. " As neither of these plays were known till 
 1623," comments Dr. Theobald, " there is no reason for 
 giving the phrase an earlier date than the Essay." 
 
 We are thus asked to believe that Bacon invented in 
 1612 the trivial phrase " put tricks on," and introduced 
 it with the formtda " as we now say," — putting it at the 
 same time into a play, to bear out his remark ! The 
 literary fact is, as Mr. Crawford points out, that Jonson 
 uses the expression in both versions of his Every Man in 
 his Humour, so that it was already current in 1596. And 
 Jonson further uses it twice in Catiline; again in The 
 New Inn, and also in Bartholomew Fair. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 I have now followed Dr. Theobald seriatim through 
 forty of his eighty " Echoes and Correspondencies." The 
 remainder I shall merely sample. 
 
470 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 41. " Bacon more than once uses the curious verb 
 stage " {e.g. Letter to Buckingham, Life, vii, 151). So 
 Shakespeare, M. for M.. I, i, 68, Anthony, V, ii, 216. 
 
 The word is a perfectly normal formation of early 
 
 English and the Tudor period, like " horsed," " hotised," 
 
 " shipped." It is used by Stow in his Survey of 
 
 London, 1598 : 
 
 To stay and behold the disguisings and other disports . . 
 showed in the great hall, which was richly hanged with arras, and 
 staged about on both sides. 
 
 Morley's rep. p. 419. 
 
 and by Hall in his Chronicle (p. 596) : 
 
 The Kyng . . . caused his great chambre at Greenwiche to be 
 staged. 
 
 43.* In the light of the foregoing comparisons, there is 
 a special piquancy in Dr. Theobald's proclamation that 
 the phrase " gross and palpable " "is one of Bacon's 
 many contributions to verbal currency. It was a new 
 coin when it issued from his affluent mint." See above, 
 p. 276, as to its newness. 
 
 45. An instance is actually made of the title " Narcissus, 
 or Self-Love," in Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, 
 and the reference to Narcissus and self-love in Lucrece, 
 264. Narcissus was " Self-Love " for all who knew any- 
 thing of mythology. It never occurs to a Baconian to 
 wonder why the plays always make the ordinary use of 
 m5^hological names and tales, and never hint at those 
 interpretations or allegorisings of them which make up 
 the bulk of Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients. 
 
 48. Bacon notes the observation of " some of the 
 ancients" that "marigolds, tulippas, pimpernel, avd 
 indeed most flowers do open or spread their leaves abroad 
 when the stm shineth serene and fair ; and again (in some 
 part) close . . . when the sky is overcast " (Syl. Syl. 
 493). Shakespeare refers thrice to this property in the 
 
 * I follow Dr. Theobald's numbers. His instances grow more 
 and more futile as they proceed. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 471 
 
 marigolds only. And we are asked to infer identity of 
 authorship ! On this principle. Bacon wrote Greene's 
 Menaphon, where the relation of the marigold to the sun 
 is the theme of a whole paragraph (Arber's rep. p. 59). 
 
 50. Shakespeare has " out of tune and harsh " (Hamlet; 
 III, i, 166) ; and Bacon has " duras et absonas " (Novum 
 Organum, i, 28). Dr. Theobald does not say whether he 
 thinks Bacon invented this phrase. As Mr. Crawford 
 points out, " out of time," in the moral sense, occurs in 
 Roye's Rede Me and be not Wrothe (1528). It must 
 have been an extremely common trope. In Sidney and 
 Golding's translation of De Momay (1587) we have 
 
 Our minde [must] bee brought from . . . jarring into right 
 tune. Which is a token that our mind is out of tune even of its 
 own accord, seeing that it needeth so many precepts to set it in 
 tune agajme. 
 
 Ed. 1604, p. 282. 
 And in the drama : 
 
 Whose voice, if it should utter her thoughts, would make the 
 tune of a heart out of tune. 
 
 Lilly, Midas, iii, 3. 
 
 52. Bacon quotes Martial to the effect " that accident 
 is many times more subtle than foresight, and over- 
 reacheth expectation " (Life, v, 276), which corre- 
 sponds to Hamlet's " praised be rashness for it " speech 
 (Hamlet, V, ii, 6). 
 
 As I have elsewhere shown (Montaigne and Shake- 
 speare, 2nd ed. p, 42 sq.), Shakespeare found this and much 
 other matter lying to his hand in Florio's translation of 
 Montaigne. 
 
 54. Dr. Theobald seriously argues that these lines in 
 Antony and Cleopatra (V, ii, 172) : 
 
 Or I shall show the cinders of my spirit 
 Through the ashes of my chance, 
 
 were not written till the issue of the folio in 1623, because 
 Bacon wrote " the sparks of my affection . . . under the 
 ashes of my fortune " in a letter in 1621 ! The figure was 
 
472 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 in common use. In Sidney and Gelding's translation of 
 De Momay we have : 
 
 Drawen some small sparkes of truth and wisdome of them as 
 out of some little fire raked under a great heap of ashes. 
 
 Pref. To the Reader. 
 Greene has : 
 
 Having the sparks of honour fresh under the cinders of poverty. 
 
 Menaphon, Arber's rep. p. 82. 
 
 The figure is as old as Chaucer : 
 
 Looke how that fire of smalc gleedes, that been almoost deede 
 under ashen, woUen quike agasm when they been touched with 
 brymstoon. Right so ire wol evermo qnyken agayn when it is 
 touched by the pride that is covered in mannes herte. 
 
 Parson's Tale : Sequitur de Ira. 
 Yet in our asshen olde is fyr y-reke. 
 
 Prologue to the Reeve's Tale. 
 
 55. Bacon and Shakespeare both speak of money and 
 worldly goods as " trash." Ergo — ! Fifty preachers and 
 playwrights had done so before them. E.g. : 
 
 Therefore must I bid him provide trash, for my master is no 
 friend without money. 
 
 Greene, James IV, iii, i. 
 Kneel hinds to trash : me let bright Phoebus swell 
 With cups full flowing from the Muses' well. 
 
 Jonson, Poetaster, I. i. (Rendering of the Ovidian 
 motto of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis). 
 
 59. Bacon writes hyberbolically to the King that unless 
 his Majesty works a miracle " I shall still be a lame man 
 to do your service " if others are " put in before me." 
 And Shakespeare has : 
 
 So I. made lame by fortune's dearest spite, (Son. 37.) 
 and again : 
 
 Speak of my lameness and I straight will halt. (Son. 89.) 
 Therefore Bacon wrote the Sonnets ! 
 
 61. Bacon speaks of " the wrong of time " (Advance- 
 ment, I, viii, 6) ; and so does Shakespeare (Sonnet 19). 
 It was a ciurent trope : 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 473 
 
 Books, tractations, and monuments, which hitherto, by iniquity 
 of time, could not be contrived. 
 
 Foxe, Ep. Ded.to 2nd ed.oi Acts and Monuments, 
 1570. 
 
 Time's despight. 
 Wicked Tjnne. 
 Wicked Time. 
 
 Daniel, Musophilus, 1603, 1. 380. 
 Spenser, Faerie Queene, III, vi, 39. 
 
 Id. ib. IV, ii, 33. 
 
 63 and 64. Bacon speaks of Caesar as a stag at bay ; 
 Antony says, " How wast thou bay'd " ; and Bacon speaks 
 of the Revenge in the sea-fight as " like a stag among 
 hounds at the bay" (Life, vii, 491). Again, Bacon has 
 " Truth prints Goodness " ; and Prospero in the Tempest 
 calls Caliban a slave " which any print of goodness will 
 not take." I spare the reader conunent and confutation. 
 
 66. Bacon and Shakespeare both use the expression 
 " pray in aid." They well might ! As the commentator 
 Hanmer pointed out a himdred and fifty years ago; 
 " Praying in aid is a term used for a petition made in 
 a court of justice for the calling in of help from another 
 that hath no interest in the cause in question." 
 
 67. Bacon uses the expression " to be retrograde " 
 (Life, i, 357), as does Shakespeare (Hamlet, I, ii, 114; 
 All's Well, I, i, 210). An " unusual expression " Dr. 
 Theobald calls it, as usual. It was a common term in 
 astrology, current in general literature : 
 
 Ramp up thy genius ; be not retrograde. 
 
 Jonson, Poetaster, 1601 (parodying Marston, who 
 had used the word). 
 
 Let's be retrograde. 
 
 Id. Cynthia's Revels, i€oo, v. 2. 
 
 You must be retrograde. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 
 Till all religion become retrograde. 
 
 Daniel, Civil Wars, B. vi, st, 36. 
 
 Or in our birth the stars were retrograde. 
 
 The Play of Stucley, 1605, 1. 2098. 
 
474 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 70. Bacon and Shakespeare both use the expression 
 " stand in (or within) his danger ' ' (History of Henry VH ; 
 Works, vi, 36 ; Merchant of Venice, IV, i, 180) . Ergo— \ 
 
 This is one of the most futile of Dr. Theobald's many 
 futile citations. The phrase, to begin with, is as old as 
 Chaucer. 
 
 In daunger hadde he at his owne gys^ 
 
 The yonge girles of the diocyse. 
 
 Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 663-4 (665-6) . 
 
 The old French word meant " power, dominion " ; and 
 this is its sense in the lines : 
 
 Narcisns was a bachelere 
 
 That Love had caught in his daungere. 
 
 Romaunt of the Rose, 1469-70. 
 This world is all in his daangere. 
 
 Id. 1049. 
 We find it in the Morte Darthur : 
 
 Then said the knight unto Arthur, thou art in my danger 
 whether me list to save thee or slay thee. 
 
 B. I, ch. xxi; 
 
 in Fabyan's Chronicle, Hen. Ill, ann. 38 : 
 
 How they passed out of the K}mges dannger, I finde not ; 
 
 .in the Interlude of Calisto and Melebea {circa 1530) : 
 
 Out of his daunger will I be at lyberte. 
 
 Malone Soc. rep. 1. 33 ; 
 
 in Tyndale's Pathway unto the Holy Scripture 
 (Parker Soc. ed. p. 9) : 
 
 In sin, and in danger to death and hell ;^ 
 and in Bale's Interlude of John the Baptist (1538) : 
 
 If ye mynde therefor, of God to avoyde the daunger. 
 
 Rep. in Harl. Misc. ed. 1808, i, 208. 
 It continued to be common : 
 
 Betray his fame and safety 
 To the law's danger and your father's justice. 
 
 Chapman, Revenge for Honour, iii, i . 
 ^^ » The Parker Soc. editor notes that Bishop Fisher has :— 
 "What suppose ye that Luther would do. if he had the Pope's 
 holiness in his clanger ? " 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 475 
 
 Had brought herself in danger of lawe through ignorance. 
 
 Brief Discourse of the Murder of Saunders. 1573, in 
 Simpson's School of Shakespeare, ii, 225. 
 
 Against the pride of Tarquin, from whose danger 
 None great in love, in counsel, or opinion. 
 Can be kept safe. 
 
 He3nvood, Rape of Lucrece, ii, i . 
 Not to run 
 Within the danger of the Gods. 
 
 Chapman, trans, of Iliad, B. vi, 161. 
 
 71. " Bacon has a trick of using the word twenty to 
 express a large and indefinite number " ; and so has 
 Shakespeare. It is most true ! And the trick was in 
 universal use. It was ordinary in Chaucer's time : 
 In twenty manere coude he tripp and dauncei 
 
 The Miller's Tale, 1. 142. 
 And let me slepe, a twenty devel way. 
 
 Id. 1. 527, 
 It was normal on the stage : 
 
 Comparing it to twenty gracious things, 
 
 Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, i, 2. 
 
 I open Bishop Hooper at random and find : 
 
 It is a ceremony instituted by bishops more than twenty. 
 
 Answer to the Bishop of Wt«cA«stor (1546) Parker 
 Soc. rep. p. 176. 
 
 The expletive given in Chaucer was current in Tudor 
 times : 
 
 Come on, in twenty devils' way. 
 
 Gammer Gurton's Needle, i, 3, end. 
 
 Dr. Theobald would presumably assign to Bacon the 
 
 pseudo-Shakespearean play The Puritan, where (i, 2) 
 
 Mary says : 
 
 Where I spend one tear for a dead father, I could give twenty 
 kisses for a live husband ; 
 
 and likewise Chapman's continuation of Marlowe's Hero 
 
 AND Leander : 
 
 A tender twenty-coloured eye. 
 
 A light of twenty hues. 
 
 Third Sestiad. 
 
476 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Freckled with twenty colours. 
 
 Fourth Sestiad. 
 Wanton Air in twenty sweet forms. ' 
 
 Fifth Sestiad. 
 
 But there would still remain the problem of the Interlude 
 of The Trial of Treasure, printed in 1567 : 
 
 I holde twenty pounde it is Baalam's asse. 
 
 I holde twenty pounde the knave is lousy. 
 
 Percy Soc. rep. pp. 6, 23 ; 
 
 and of the older Interlude, Nature (c. 1490) : 
 
 It would have done me more good 
 Than twenty shillings of fee. 
 
 Farmer's Lost Tudor Plays, p. no ; 
 
 and of the Interiude Republica (1553) : 
 
 Each one, twenty and twenty score 
 Of that ye most long for. 
 
 Any time within these years twice twenty. 
 
 Id. p. 182 ; 
 lb. p. 214 ; 
 
 to say nothing of Ben Jonson's 
 
 Ere you can call twenty. 
 
 Bartholomew Fair, Indue. 2nd sentence. 
 
 76. Dr. Theobald turns directly to Baconian account 
 the fact that Shakespeare makes Ford (Merry Wives, 
 II, ii, 223) speak of " a fair house built on another man's 
 ground," with a legalist application, while Bacon writes 
 of " another man's ground " without that application. 
 {See above, p. 40.) Be it noted that here the lawyer 
 does not talk law. 
 
 78. Bacon tells the hackneyed story of the ancient 
 musician [often, an artist] who said to a meddling king, 
 " God forbid that your fortime should be so bad as to 
 know these things better than I " ; and Shakespeare 
 partially reproduces the idea in dialogue (L. L. L. V, ii, 
 493) . The story told by Bacon had been told ad nauseam 
 by previous sixteenth century writers. 
 
 Dr. Theobald actually alleges a "correspondency" 
 between Bacon's advice to a traveller to frequent good 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 477 
 
 company "of the nation where he travelleth " and 
 Rosalind's satirical advice to Jaques to " disable all the 
 benefits of your own country " ! 
 
 • • • ■• 
 
 In conclusion, after justly observing that " all these " 
 illustrations of his " might be almost indefinitely multi- 
 plied," Dr. Theobald imdertakes to show that such 
 every-day colloquialisms as " it is strange," " it is won- 
 derful," " it is certain," " I am very sure," " surely,'' 
 " out of question," " to say the truth," " questionless,'' 
 " out of doubt," are peculiar to Bacon and Shakespeare. 
 " So far as my reading of Elizabethan literature goes," 
 he declares, doubtless with perfect truth, "the same 
 phrases, habitually employed, are not to be f oimd in any 
 other writer." 
 
 This thesis is perhaps the uttermost mark of Dr. 
 Theobald's aberration. It stands for an amount of 
 inattention to pre-Shakespearean English hterature that 
 seems impossible of attainment by an educated man. 
 Even in reading Shakespeare, Dr. Theobald must have 
 seen Falstafl's phrase, " A rascally yea-forsooth knave " ; 
 and in reading the New Testament he must have noted 
 the expression ' ' Verily. ' ' Any excursion into Elizabethan 
 drama would have revealed to him that " forsooth " and 
 " verily " are types of a number of terms of asseveration 
 in constant use in common talk. If he had begim his 
 investigation with Chaucer, he might have noted the 
 perpetual use of " certes," " trewely," " soothly," " for- 
 sothe," " certeyn," " in good sothe," " verrayment," and 
 so on. In verse, such terms might conceivably be line- 
 padding ; but in Chaucer's prose translation of Boethius 
 they occur to the nxmiber of at least twenty in the first 
 book ; and in the prose Tale of Melibeus they are still 
 more frequent — eleven times in two paragraphs (§§ 14, 15). 
 The usage is continuous. In the old Revelation of the 
 Monk of Evesham, first printed about 1482, " sothly " 
 and " trewly " occur eight times in the three short 
 
478 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 opening chapters. Thus in Enghsh as in other tongues 
 the habit of emphasis, exclamation, and asseveration was 
 established in literature as in talk long before the age of 
 Bacon and Shakespeare. And in their day it remained 
 normal; one can hardly open a Tudor book without 
 seeing a multitude of such instances as these : 
 
 And Plato verily was of this opinion . . . 
 
 Holland's trans, of Plutarch's Moralia (Dent's 
 Selection, p. 4). 
 And verily Aristotle used these principles and grounds. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 And verily the poet Homer most excellently expresseth. 
 
 Id. p. 5. 
 And yet verily it is reported also of Zeno. 
 
 Id. p. 6. 
 (Four instances in three successive pages.) 
 This verily is the chief cause that hath encouraged me . . . 
 Ralph Robinson, Ep. Ded. to trans, of More's 
 Utopia, Dent's rep. p. 4. 
 
 Of a surety that thing could I [not] have performed. 
 
 Id. More's pref. epist. p. 7. 
 
 If you cannot remember the thing, then surely I will write. 
 
 Id. ib. p. 9. 
 And I think verily it shall be well done. 
 
 Id. ib. 
 Howbeit, to say the very truth, I am not yet fully determined . . . 
 
 Id. ib. p. 10. 
 Cuthbert Tunstall, a man doubtless out of comparison. 
 
 Id. Utopia, p. 13. 
 What by his natural wit, and what by daily exercise, surely he 
 held few fellows. 
 
 Id. pp. 12-13. 
 (Seven instances in seven successive pages.) 
 As I suppose. As God judge me. 
 
 Sir Thomas Elyot, " Proheme " to the Govemour. 
 Wherefore undoubtedly. ... Id. B. i, c. 2. 
 And I verily do suppose. Id. c. iv. 
 And yet no man will deny. Id. ib. 
 
 I dare affirm. ... As I might say. . . . But verily mine 
 intent. ... c, 8, 
 
 And surely. . . . e.g. And what doubt is there. . . . c. 10. 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 479 
 
 And surely. . . . c. 11. Surely if a nobleman do thus c. 11. 
 
 Surely, as I have diligently marked. . . . c.12. Verily. 0.12,0.13. 
 
 Verily. , . . Undoubtedly. . . . To say the truth. . . . Un- 
 doubtedly. ... As I might frankly say. , . . (The last 
 five instances in two pages.) 
 
 Dr. Theobald's argument on this head is of a piece with 
 Mrs. Pott's amazing attribution to Bacon of the invention 
 of the most ordinary forms of accost in Elizabethan 
 England. As to that see Mr. Crawford's essay on " The 
 Bacon-Shakespeare Question." 
 
 In other chapters, going about to connect Bacon with 
 Shakespeare by other " echoes and correspondencies," Dr. 
 Theob^d claims to find proofs of community of author- 
 ship by bringing together ideas which in his opinion are 
 complementary. For instance (ch. x, p. 179) he notes 
 how Bacon harps on the idea that "money is like muck, 
 not good except it be spread," and then cites from 
 Shakespeare (Cor. II, ii, 128) the phrase, " As they were 
 the common muck of the world." Whereon we have this 
 gloss : — " The only comment on this which I have been 
 able to find is a suggestion that muck is equivalent to 
 vilia rerutn. The poet certainly intended to suggest a 
 good deal more than this, but the rich suggestiveness of 
 the passage cannot be easily brought out if Bacon's use 
 of the word is not remembered." This is of course sheer 
 fiction : the phrase of Cominius simply means, " as if they 
 were dirt." But supposing Shakespeare had meant to 
 convey an implication about muck = manure, what 
 ground is there for bringing in Bacon ? As Mr. Crawford 
 has remarked, the rustic saw about muck being good only 
 when spread abroad was already current in ballad poetry 
 (Gernutus, in Percy's Reliques) and on the stage (Jonson, 
 Every Man Out, iii, 2) ; and " muck," for " money " or 
 " riches," was a univei^ figxire : 
 
 Worldly mack. 
 
 Wiclif, Against the Order oj Friars, c. 48. 
 
48o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 To get falsely muck to Antichrist's convent. Id. ib. c. 19. 
 
 Winning of stinking muck. 
 
 Id. ib. c. 26. 
 
 The people give them [the friars] more dirt than is needful or 
 profitable. 
 
 Id. ib. c. 29. 
 
 Worldly muck. 
 
 J. Redford, Interlude of Wit and. Science, Fanner's 
 Lost Tudor Plays, p. 138. 
 
 Our mucky money. 
 
 Editorial pref . to Latimer's Second Sermon before 
 King Edward, end. 
 The wicked muck and mammon of the world. 
 
 Hooper. Declaration of Christ and his Office, Works, 
 Parker Soc. ed. p. 43. 
 For glory vain, nor yet for muck. 
 
 Bauldwin, Treatise of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1600, 
 B. i, c. 19. 
 
 Shakespeare uses the Baconian simile neither in the case 
 of money nor in that of manure. Jonson uses the proverb 
 about manure ; the balladist partly applies it to things 
 moral. Surely Dr. Theobald's proper conclusion is that 
 Bacon wrote the ballad of Gernutus the Jew, and 
 Jonson's plays ! 
 
 As to Dr. Theobald's wonder over finding in Lucrece 
 and elsewhere the ancient sentiment about griefs being 
 Ughtened by the knowledge that they are shared, I refer 
 the reader to Mr. Crawford's comments. Dr. Theobald, 
 proceeding by the method of ignorance, annoimces that 
 the Latin proverb Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris 
 [or malorum], which is found in Marlowe's Faustus, 
 published in 1604, " was probably invented by the author 
 of Faustus "—that is, in Dr. Theobald's system of 
 mythology. Bacon. " How it came to appear in 
 Lucrece," he adds, "is an enigma which awaits its 
 solution." The enigma is of Dr. Theobald's own making. 
 As his previous extracts show, the sentiment occurs in a 
 whole series of the Shakespearean plays ; and if he had 
 but had a Uttle knowledge of previous literature, he would 
 
COINCIDENCES OF PHRASE 481 
 
 have known it to be an established moral commonplace. 
 Not only is the idea expressed in Kyd's Cornelia (ii, 
 226-7) in 1594, but, as Mr. Crawford notes, the Latin line 
 occurs in Greene's Menaphon, 1589, and in Lodge's 
 Rosalind, 1590 ; and the English equivalent is given in 
 EuPHUES, 1579 (Arber's rep. p. 96). It is apparently a 
 line of Renaissance poetry, in part contradiction of 
 Cicero's Levis est consolatio ex miseria aliorum (Ad. Fam., 
 VI, iii, 4) and Seneca's Mcdevoli solacii genus est turba 
 miserorum (De consol. ad Marc, xii, 5). But in the 
 Senecan tragedy we have Duke mcerenti populus dolentum 
 (Troades, 1014) ; and an old Synopsis Communium 
 LocORUM (1742, c. 70) gives under the head of the Solamen 
 miseris phrase a series of other approximations. The line 
 is given as a standing quotation by M. Neander, Ethice 
 vetus et sapiens veterum Latinorum, Lipsiae, 1590, 
 p. 411.^ Only a Baconian could for a moment suppose 
 that such a saying had been left for Bacon to invent. The 
 English form of the saying was already a current proverb in 
 the time of Chaucer, who reproduces it again and again : 
 
 For wel sit it, the sothe for to sesme 
 A woful night to han a drery fere. 
 
 Troilus and Criseyde, i, 2. 
 Men seyn, to wrecche is consolacioun 
 To have an-other felawe in his pejme. 
 
 Id. i, 102. 
 For unto shrewes loye it is and ese 
 To have hit felawes in peyne and disese. 
 
 Chanoun Yemannes Tale, 193-4- 
 
 Latimer in turn has : 
 
 It is consolatio miserorum :itis comfort of the wretched to have 
 company. 
 
 Third Sermon before Edward VI, Dent's rep. p. 116. 
 
 And Dr. Theobald finds it an " enigma " that the senti- 
 ment should occur in Lucrece ! 
 
 » See W. F. H. King's Classical and Foreign Quotations, 1904. 
 Mr. King gives a substantially equivalent passage from Thucy- 
 dides, vii, 75. 
 
 2H 
 
^82 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 I will not carry the " quest " further. It has its dis- 
 ressing as well as its ridiculous side. These divagations 
 >f men utterly possessed by a foregone conclusion, blind 
 o all countervailing evidence, h5rpnotised by a hallucina- 
 ion, tell of an " expense of spirit " in error that is not to 
 le contemplated without discomfort. It is the desire to 
 [linimise the amotmt of such aberration in future that has 
 ustained me, as I trust it may do some readers, through 
 he tedium of a detailed confutation. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 PROSE STYLE IN SHAKESPEARE AND BACON 
 
 [T is perhaps unnecessary to argue, even as against 
 Baconians, that every powerful or original writer, 
 in any long series of writings, must betray some 
 peculiarities of diction, phraseology, clause forma- 
 ion, and so on, which are as special to him as are the 
 echnical methods of any artist to his work, or the gait, 
 ccent, or intonation of each of us to himself. The 
 Baconians actually subsimie this, however vaguely, in 
 heir attempts, hereinbefore discussed, to detect Baconian 
 thraseology in the plays. But, of course, they have 
 ttempted no deeper investigation.* The idea of corn- 
 taring the general movement and rh}rthm of the abundant 
 irose in the plays with those of Bacon's signed writings 
 > not one which would naturally occur to critics conscious 
 f no initial difficulty in supposing that the Pla3rs and the 
 Lssays came from tiie same hand. 
 Let the open-minded reader, however, take the trouble 
 compare the way of the prose in the pla}rs with that 
 if the prose of Bacon, and he will realise one more vital 
 nd irreducible divergence between the two bodies of 
 rork. In the comse of the inquiry he may or may not 
 letect such differences in the verse movement of certain 
 •f the plays as will make clear to him why some critics 
 leny that those plays are wholly, or it may be. at all; 
 
 * Mr. Appleton Morgan, of New York, who had a " New Theory " 
 f his own about the authorship of the Plays (an adaptation of 
 >elia Bacon's, that of a group of young nobles collaborating), 
 vowed that " experts have proved that the styles of Bacon and 
 bakespeare are as far apart as the poles." (Cited by Mrs. Stopes, 
 ^he Bacon-Shakespeare Question Answered, 2nd ed. 1889, p. 187.) 
 
 483 
 
484 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the work of the author of Othello and Macbeth and 
 Lear and CoRiOLANUS. But this is another issue. What 
 is here proposed is a comparison of the prose of the unchal- 
 lenged plays with that of the undisputed work of Bacon. 
 
 The first general proposition to be put in this connection 
 is that Shakespeare's prose is neither so masterly nor so 
 variously rhythmical as his blank verse. To put the 
 matter bluntly I would say, pace certain panegyrists, 
 that Shakespeare is not a great writer of prose. Greatness 
 in any mode of art is imputable only to exceptional power 
 or exceptional variety of execution. Shakespeare's prose, 
 compared with that of great prose writers, cannot be 
 said to exhibit either. And if any reader, before scanning 
 the data, be hastily moved to dispute the thesis, let him 
 first bethink himself how rarely, in literary history, have 
 men acquired enduring fame in both orders of expression. 
 
 Diyden was in his day reputed a great poet and a good 
 writer of prose : in the latter regard he stands higher 
 to-day than in the former; but no one would to-day 
 put Idm in the highest rank of either art. Dante wrote 
 both prose and verse ; no one ever ranked him with the 
 great prosists. Milton has as high a twofold fame as 
 any ; but criticism to-day leans more and more to the 
 opinion that his finest English tractate, which is practi- 
 cally all that men read of his large prose output is rather 
 "a splendid example of mistaken prose," a rhetorical 
 tour de force, than a triumph of prose art comparable 
 with his poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge both wrote 
 some excellent prose and some perfect verse : both would 
 to-day be admitted by almost any good critic to have 
 produced much more of inferior verse than of good. 
 Shelley's prose never won much laud, though it has fine 
 qualities, and some warm admirers. Bjnron and Keats 
 wrote letters and notes which certainly exhibit plenty 
 of prose power; but neither ever attempted a prose 
 work. Tennyson and Browning— Tenn3^on in particular 
 — hardly attempted to write prose save by way of jottings. 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 485 
 
 In all literature we shall find but some half-dozen great 
 )r fine poets (apart from Milton, Wordsworth and 
 x>leridge, dealt with above) whose prose notably com- 
 )etes in fame with their verse. They are : Goethe, 
 Heine, Poe, Leopardi, Hugo, and Arnold ; and in not 
 >ne of these cases, I think, is the poet's prose style, as 
 ityle — ^matter apart — such as to win him rank as a great 
 )rose artist. Goethe's fame on that side is understood 
 o be latterly in occultation among his countrjonen. 
 lugo and Poe are (diversely) famous rather as writers 
 »f prose romances than as writers of prose ; Leopardi 
 lertainly lives less in his prose than in his poetry ; and 
 !ven Arnold and Heine, charming prosists both — if we 
 nay so speak of Arnold, who strove with success to be 
 omething more than charming — are less eminent as 
 )rose artists than as poets. 
 
 But all this is perhaps an unnecessary if not a useless 
 ireamble to the demonstration that the prose of Shake- 
 ipeare lacks the distinction, the artistic mastery, of his 
 ncomparable blank verse. His supremacy in that is 
 inchaUenged and unchallengeable. To read him beside 
 lis predecessors is to perceive a new departure in rhythmic 
 )rogression. They rarely exceed the chance adventure 
 >f a single run-on line ; and it is at that stage that we 
 ee him begin, if we can be sure of seeing his handiwork 
 Q the opening scene of the Comedy of Errors, a work 
 i^hich he almost certainly did but elaborate or coUaborate- 
 Q or re-fashion. Of verse as a continuous rhythm they 
 lad hardly a conception : they write verses rather than 
 ^erse, matching unrhymed lines as they had been wont 
 o match rhymed, and measuring lengths, at best, like 
 nen pacing a cage or a ship's deck. With Shakespeare 
 here begins a new species of motion, differing from 
 heirs almost as does that of the bird on the wing from 
 ts little runs of hops upon the sward. For an inorganic 
 eries of self-contained lines, we have a prolonged organic 
 ulsation in which sense-pauses and clause-pauses can 
 
486 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 occur anywhare, the rh5^hm or measure becoming but 
 as the bars in music, cognised only by the rhythmic sense. 
 There is nothing to compare with it in previous EngUsh 
 verse : only alongside of Shakespeare, in some of the 
 best verse of Jonson, do we see the perception of the new 
 possibilities beginning ; and what in Shakespeare seems 
 to have been an effortless evolution is for Jonson visibly 
 a matter of laborious construction. But there are com- 
 pensations. As Ben notes in his Discoveries : " Virgil's 
 felicity left him in prose, as Tully's forsook him in verse." 
 There is no such absolute cleavage in the case of either 
 Shakespeare or Jonson, but there is a certain approxima- 
 tion to it. 
 
 As in ancient, so in modem literature, the possibilities 
 of prose were discovered later than those of verse. As 
 a purposely artistic instrument, it discemibly begins to 
 act in English in the Boece of Chaucer, a solitary 
 performance no more improved upon, aesthetically speak- 
 ing, than his verse, down to the Tudor age. Chaucer 
 is in fact almost more noteworthy as a prose-writer, in 
 respect of that performance, than as a writer of verse. 
 As a poet ke belongs to the age of simple and marked 
 measures, which he handles with a skill that distinguishes 
 him from his EngUsh contemporaries, but with a facility 
 and fluency that as a rule exclude greatness of cadence. 
 With his measures, the grand style was practically in- 
 compatible. But in his rendering of Boethius, albeit 
 he draws on the French version to eke out his Latin, ^ he 
 is visibly awake to the aesthetic effects of classic prose, 
 and goes about, however experimentally, to produce in 
 EngUsh something independently beautiful. 
 
 This judgment ostensibly conflicts with that of Ten 
 Brink, who is quoted as saymg that in the Boece " we 
 
 * The inaccuracy of the translation, remarks a close student of 
 Boethius, " is not that of an inexperienced Latin scholar, but 
 rather of one who was no Latin scholar at all." H. F. Stewart, 
 Boethius : An Essay, 1891'. p. 226. 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 487 
 
 an see as clearly as in any work of the middle ages what 
 , high cultivation is requisite for the production of a 
 ood prose. ' ' ^ This is most true, as is Ten Brink's remark 
 hat the translation, " in the undeveloped state of prose 
 omposition so characteristic of that age," is " often 
 [uite imwieldy."* But when Ten Brink goes on to grant 
 hat " there is no lack of warmth, and even of a certain 
 olouring," and to quote a passage in illustration, he 
 eems to me to have partly missed sight of the aesthetic 
 uccess to which Chaucer does attain. The passage he 
 ites does not at all fully reveal it. Where Chaucer was 
 Lot clear as to the meaning of the original, and had to 
 leal with complicated constructions, he naturally produces 
 inwiddy sentences. But at times even in following the 
 )rose, and often when he is rendering or, rather, abimdantly 
 )araphrasing the " metres " — from his version of one of 
 vlach Ten Brink rightly quotes — ^he attains to a charm 
 >f cadence, of balanced movement, and of harmonious 
 liction, which is in itself a new and specific enjoyment 
 or those who read. Richard Rolle of Hampole, his 
 )redecessor, who writes with the eager sincerity that 
 loimts for so much in good prose, never aimed at such 
 esthetic ends as these. Let the lover of good prose — 
 lot necessarily identical with the lover of books and 
 iterary studies — compare with the following passages 
 my English prose before the age of Shakespeare, and say 
 whether they can be matched for beauty. I modernise 
 >ne or two words, and the spelling of some of the particles, 
 a. the interest of the slothful reader : 
 
 Blissful was the first age of men. They held them apayed ' 
 nth the meats that the true fields broughten forth. They ne 
 estioyed ne deceived not themselves with outrage.* They 
 irere wont lightly to slake their hunger at even with acorns 
 f oaks. They could not mingle » the gift of Bacchus with the 
 
 » Chaucer Studien. p. 141. cited by Stewart, pp. 226-7. 
 ' History of English Literature, Eng. trans, ii. 78-9. 
 » Contented. * Excess. 
 
 * Medle in orig. 
 
488 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 clear honey, nor could they mingle * the bright fleeces of the 
 country of Syria with the venom of Tyre. . . . They slepen 
 wholesome sleeps upon the grass, and dranken of the running 
 waters, and layen under the shadows of the high pine trees. No 
 guest or stranger carved yet the high sea with oars or ships ; 
 nor had th^y yet seen new strands to leden merchandise into 
 diverse countries. Then were the cruel clarions full hushed and 
 full stai.* 
 
 Here we have the successful use of the short sentence : 
 brief pausation without haste or jolting : a quality not 
 soon reached in prose, though it began in some such way, 
 Uke verse. In the next book comes a good sample of a 
 larger and more canorous movement : 
 
 It liketh me to show by subtle song, with slack * and delightable 
 sound of strings, how that Nature, mighty, inclineth and fiitteth * 
 the governments of things ; and by which laws she, purveyable, 
 keepeth the great world ; and how she, binding, restraineth all 
 thing^ by a bond that may not be unbound. . . . And the 
 jangling bird that singeth on the high branches, and after is 
 enclosed in a strait cage, although that the playing busy-ness 
 of men giveth them honeyed drinks and large meets with sweet 
 studies, yet natheless if thilke bird skipping out of her strait 
 cage seeth the agreeable shadow of the woods, she defouleth ^ 
 with her feet her shed meats, and seeketh mourning only the 
 wood, and twittereth desiring the wood with her sweet voice.' 
 
 This is prose written with a new perception of the possi- 
 bilities of cadence, of gracious movement without metre, 
 of long breathing and restful fall. In yet another passage 
 the quest for beauty is still more intent. It tells the tale 
 of Orpheus : 
 
 The poet of Thrace, that whilom had right great sorrow for 
 the death of his wife, after that he had maked by his weeply 
 songs the woods moveable to nin, and had maked the river to 
 standen still, and had maked the harts and the hinds to join 
 dreadless their sides to cruel lions, for to hearkenen his song, 
 and had maked that the bear was not aghast of the hound which 
 was pleased with his song, so when the most ardent love of his 
 wife burned the entrails of his breast, not even the songs which 
 
 » Medle in orig. a b. ii, met. 5. 
 
 ' Probably a copyist's error. * ? Fitteth. 
 
 * N.B. Not defileth. Defouleth = treadeth under foot. 
 
 * B. iii, met. 2. 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 489 
 
 liad overcomen all things might assuage his lord. He plained 
 liim of the heaven gods that were cruel to him. He went him to 
 the houses of hell, and there he tempered his blandishing songs 
 with resounding strings, and spake and sung in weeping all that 
 Ever he had received and laved out of the noble wells of his 
 mother Calliope, the goddess. . . . Cerberus, the porter of hell 
 with his three heads, was caught and all abashed for the new 
 song. And the three goddesses, furies and vengeresses of felony, 
 that tormenten and aghasten the souls by annoy, woxen sorrowful 
 and sorry, and wepen tears for pity. Then was not the head of 
 Ixion tormented by the overthrowing wheel. And Tantalus, 
 that was destroyed by the madness * of long thirst, despiseth 
 the floods to drinken.^ 
 
 The mere alternation of short sentences with long is 
 aesthetically calculated, with a sense of the repose it lends 
 to the whole movement. Chaucer had had vision of 
 what Whitman was later to call "the diviner heaven 
 of prose," in which freedom from rhymed metre could 
 mean a sweep and flow of speech that such verse could 
 not compass. Only an artist could have written so ; 
 and few were the artists who could so weave words even 
 in the sixteenth century. Bishop Hooper, in his Declara- 
 tion OF Christ and His Office, shows some of the in- 
 stinctive gift for balanced prose movement, being one 
 of the writers who prove that the controlled sentence 
 was not a discovery of the eighteenth century, but merely 
 a rediscovery, after an age of devotion to " voluble " 
 construction; but only in Nashe, perhaps, among the 
 bellettrists of Shakespeare's day — ^Nashe, so wooden in 
 liis verse — do we find a bom writer of prose as prose ; 
 and only in his Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, perhaps, 
 does he deliberately endeavour after a large and grave 
 liannony of artistic diction — ^in a not very sincere treatise. 
 In this endeavour, I repeat, Shakespeare did not share. 
 Master of the freest of verse-forms, he had not Chaucer's 
 motive to seek for beauty in prose ; but there is no reason 
 to suppose that his genius could there have attained 
 supremacy if he had sought it. Jonson's dramatic prose 
 1 Woodness in orig. * B. iii, met. 12. 
 
490 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 often, and his non-dramatic prose always, is more true 
 to the laws of prose-form, more easeful, more balanced, 
 larger-limbed, than that of Shakespeare, yet felicitous 
 and spontaneous.^ True, the very purpose of writing 
 prose for reading means a different technique : the prose 
 of dramatic speech would miss its purpose if it ran to 
 spacious or cadenced composition : even the crisp anti- 
 theses of Lilly defeat illusion. But Jonson's feehng for 
 prose frequently asserts itself even in his plays, and 
 Shakespeare in his dedications and in the " Argument " 
 to LucRECE shows no more concern for prose artistry, 
 as apart from mere pointed statement, than in the prose 
 of the plays. His faculty is first and last for verse. 
 
 And herein he differs radically from Bacon, whose 
 scanty verse, as verse, is without spontaneity, but whose 
 prose, though hardly ever written, so to speak, for prose's 
 sake, is always magistral, Jong-breathed even when most 
 expressly concise, easily spacious, effortless in its opulence. 
 As an Elizabethan would say, it is cothurnate, yet it is 
 always instinct with nervous strength. There is no 
 aesthetic kinship or community between any of Shake- 
 speare's prose and that of the Essays, early or late, the 
 Advancement of Learning, and the History of Henry 
 Seventh. Let us take first a representative selection 
 of prose passages from the plays, grave and gay, didactic 
 and impassioned, philosophic and narrative. We shall 
 find infinite verve and vivacity, fluency and fire ; an end- 
 less fecundity of phrase, image, and epithet ; but we shall 
 not find a great architectonic prose. 
 
 Falstaff. Not a penny. I have been content, sir, you should 
 lay my countenance to pawn : I have grated upon my good 
 friends for three reprieves for you and your coach-fellow, Nsrm ; 
 or else you had looked through the grate, like a geminy of 
 baboons. I am damned in hell for swearing to gentlemen njy 
 friends you were good soldiers and tall fellows: and when 
 
 * " For his prose I must confess a deep and reverent partiality." 
 J. A. Symonds, Ben Jonson, 1886, p. 6i« 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 491 
 
 nistress Bridget lost the handle of her fan, I took't upon mine 
 lonour thou hadst it not. 
 
 Pistol. Didst thou not share ? hadst thou not fifteen pence ? 
 
 Falstaff. Reason, you rogue, reason : think'st thou I'll 
 endanger my soul gratis ? At a word, hang no more about me, I 
 mi no gibbet for you : — go. — ^A short knife and a thong ; — ^to 
 l^our manor of Pickt-hatch, go. — ^You'll not bear a letter for me, 
 yovL logue ! — ^You stand upon your honour ! — ^Why, thou uncon- 
 Snable baseness, it is as much as I can do to keep the terms of 
 my honour precise. I, I, I xayseHi sometimes, leaving the fear 
 3f heaven on the left hand, and hiding mine honour in my necessity, 
 un fain to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch ; and yet you, rogue, 
 will ensconce your rags, your cat-a-mountain looks, your red- 
 lattice phrases, and your bold-beating oaths, under the shelter 
 of your honour ! You will not do it, you ? 
 
 Merry Wives, Act II, Scene 2. 
 
 Provost. A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but 
 as a drunken sleep ; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, 
 present, or to come ; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal. 
 
 Duke. He wants advice. 
 
 Provost. He will hear none ; he hath evermore had the 
 liberty of the prison ; give him leave to escape hence, he would 
 not : drunk many times a day. if not many days entirely drunk. 
 We have very oft awaked him. as if to carry him to execution, 
 and showed him a seeming warrant for it : it hath not moved 
 him at all. 
 
 Duke. More of >^im anon. There is written in your brow, 
 provost, honesty and constancy : if I read it not truly, my 
 ancient skill beguiles me ; but in the boldness of my cunning, 
 I will lay myself in hazard. Qaudio, whom here you have 
 warrant to execute, is no greater forfeit to the law than Angelo 
 who hath sentenced him. To make you understand this in a 
 manifested effect. I crave but four days' respite ; for the which 
 you are to do me both a present and a dangerous courtesy. 
 
 Measure for Measure, Act IV, Scene 2. 
 . • • • 
 
 Beatrice. What should I do with him ? dress him in my 
 apparel, and make him my waiting-gentlewoman ? He that 
 hath a beard is more than a youth ; and he that hath no beard 
 is less than a man : and he that is more than a youth is not for 
 me ; and he that is less than a man I am not for him. Therefore. 
 I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bearward, and lead 
 his apes into hell. 
 
 Much Ado, Act U, Scene i- 
 
492 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Beatrice. Not till God make men of some other metal than 
 earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be over-mastered 
 with a piece of valiant dust ? to make account of her life to a 
 clod of wajrward marl ? No, uncle, I'll none : Adam's sons are 
 my brethren ; and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kindred. 
 
 Beatrice. The fault will be in the music, cousin, if you be 
 not wooed in good time : if the prince be too important, tell 
 him there is measure in everything, and so dance out the answer. 
 For hear me. Hero j wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a 
 Scotch jig, a measiire, and a cinque-pace : the first suit is hot 
 and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical ; the wedding, 
 mannerly modest, as a measure full of state and ancientry ; 
 and then comes repentance, and, with his bad legs, falls into \he 
 cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave. 
 
 Id. Act. II, Scene i. 
 
 Orlando. Why, how now, Adam ! no greater heart in thee ? 
 Live a little ; comfort a little ; cheer thyself a little : if this 
 uncouth forest yield an)rthing savage, I will either be food for 
 it, or bring it for food to thee. Thy conceit is nearer death 
 than thy powers. For my sake, be comfortable ; hold death 
 awhile at the arm's end : I will here be with thee presently ; 
 and if I bring thee not something to eat I will give thee leave to 
 die : but if thou diest before I come thou art a mocker of my 
 labour. Well said ! thou look'st cheerly : I'll be with thee 
 quickly. — Yet thou liest in the bleak air : come, I will bear thee 
 to some shelter ; and thou shalt not die for lack of a dinner, 
 if there live anjrthing in this desert. Cheerly, good Adam ! 
 
 As You Like It, Act II, Scene 6. 
 
 Rosalind. No ; I will not cast away my phjrsic but on those 
 that are sick. There is a man haunts the forest that abuses 
 our young plants wth carving Rosalind on their barks ; hangs 
 odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles ; all, forsooth, 
 deifsring the name of Rosalind : if I could meet that fancjnnonger 
 I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the 
 quotidian of love upon him. 
 
 Id. Act III, Scene 2. 
 
 Rosalind. A lean cheek ; which you have not : a blue eye, 
 sunken ; which you have not j an unquestionable spirit ; 
 which you have not : a beard neglected ; which you have not : — 
 but I pardon you for that ; for, simply, your having in beard is 
 a younger brother's revenue. — Then your hope should be 
 ungartered, your bonnet unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, 
 your shoe untied, and everything about you demonbtrating a 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 493 
 
 :areless desolation. But you are no such man ; you are rather 
 point-device in your accoutrements, as loving yourself, than 
 seeming the lover of any other. 
 
 Id. Act III, Scene 2. 
 
 Rosalind. Yes, one ; and in this manner, He was to imagine 
 me his love, his mistress ; and I set him every day to woo me ; 
 it which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be 
 jffeminate. changeable, longing, and liking ; proud, fantastical, 
 ipish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles ; for every 
 passion sometiiing, and for no passion truly anything, as bo5rs 
 auid women are for the most part cattle of this colour : would 
 now like him, now loathe him ; then entertain him, then forswear 
 liim ; now weep for him, then spit at him ; that I dravc my 
 suitor from his mad humour of love, to a living humour of madness; 
 nrhich was, to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live 
 in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him ; and this 
 tray will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound 
 sheep's heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in't. 
 
 Id. Act III, Scene 2. 
 
 Jaques. I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is 
 nnulation ; nor the musician's, which is fantastical ; nor the 
 :ourtier's, which is proud ; nor the soldier's, which is ambitious ; 
 aor the lawyer's, which is politic ; nor the lady's, which is nice ; 
 aor the lover's, which is all these ; but it is a melancholy of 
 [nine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many 
 jbjects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels, 
 in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous 
 sadness. 
 
 Id. Act IV, Scene i. 
 
 « • • • 
 
 Fabian. She did show favour to the youth in your sight, 
 jnly to exasperate you, to awaken your dormouse valour, to put 
 5re in your heart, and brimstone in your liver. You should 
 then have accosted her ; and with some excellent jests, fire- 
 lew from the mint, you should have banged the youth into 
 lumbness. This was looked for at your hand, and this was 
 [>aulked ; the double gilt of this opportunity you let time wash 
 )ff, and you are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion ; 
 n'here you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless 
 |rou do redeem it 1^ some laudable attempt, either of valour or 
 E>olicy. 
 
 Twelfth Night, Act III. Scene 2. 
 
 Sir Toby. Now will I not deliver liis letter : for the behaviour 
 )f the young gentleman gives him out to be of good capacity 
 
494 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and breeding ; his employment between his lord and my niece 
 confirms no less ; therefore this letter, being so excellently igno- 
 rant, will breed no terror in the youth, — he will find it comes 
 from' a clodpole. But,' sir, I will deliver his challenge by word 
 of mouth ; set upon Aguecheek a notable report of valour ; 
 and drive the gentlemiin (as I know his youth will aptly receive 
 it) into a most hideous opinion of his rage, skill, fury, and 
 impetuosity. This will so fright them both, that they will kill 
 one another by the look, like cockatrices. 
 
 Id. Act III, Scene 4. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Enobarbus. Under a compelling occasion, let women die : it 
 were pity to cast them away for nothing ; though, between 
 them and a great cause, they should be esteemed nothing. 
 Qeopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly i 
 I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment : 
 I do think there is mettle in death which commits some loving 
 act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene 2. 
 
 Enobarbus. Why, sir, give the gods a thankful sacrifice. When 
 it pleases their deities to take the wife of a man from him, it 
 shows to man the tailors of the earth ; comforting therein, 
 that when old robes are worn out there are members to make 
 new. If there were no more women but Fulvia, then had you 
 indeed a cut, and the case to be lamented ; this grief is crowned 
 with consolation ; your old smock brings forth a new petticoat : — 
 and, indeed, the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow. 
 
 Id. Act I, Scene 2. 
 
 • • * • 
 
 Duke. The Turk with a most mighty preparation makes 
 for Cjrprus. — Othello, the fortitude of the place is best known 
 to you : and though we have had there a substitute of most 
 allowed sufficiency, yet opinion, a more sovereign mistress of 
 effects, throws a more safer voice on you : jrou must therefore 
 be content to slubber the gloss of your new fortunes with this 
 more stubborn and boisterous expedition. 
 
 Othello, Act I, Scene 3. 
 • • • • 
 
 Edmund. This is the excellent foppery of the world ! that, when 
 we are sick in fortune, (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), 
 we make guilty of our disasters the sun, moon, and stars : as 
 if we were villains on necessity ; fools by heavenly compulsion ; 
 knaves, thieves, and treachere, by spherical predominance ; 
 drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 495 
 
 anetary influence ; and all that we are evil in, by a divine 
 irnsting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to 
 y his goatish disposition on the charge of a star ! 
 
 • > • ■ 
 
 Gloster. These late eclipses in the snn and moon portend 
 J good to us : though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus 
 id thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects : 
 ve cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide : in cities, mutinies 1 
 1 countries, discord ; in palaces, treason ; and the bond cracked 
 wixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the 
 rediction ; there's son against father : the king falls from bias 
 [ nature ; there's father against child. We have seen the best 
 [ our time : machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all 
 linous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves ! — ^Find 
 it this villain, Edmund ; it shall lose thee nothing ; do it care- 
 illy. — ^And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished ! his 
 Sence honesty ! — 'Tis strange ! 
 
 King Lear. Act I, Scene 2. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Letter of Macbeth. They met me in the day of success ; and I 
 ave learned by the perfectest report, they have more in them 
 lan mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question 
 lem further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished. 
 iThiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came missives from the 
 mg, who all-hailed me. Thane of Cawdor ; by which title, before, 
 lese weird sisters saluted me, and referred me to the coming 
 a of time, with. Hail, king that shall be I This have I thought 
 Dod to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness ; that 
 lou mightest not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant 
 ( what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and 
 oewell. 
 
 Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5 . 
 
 • » • t 
 
 Camillo. Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia, 
 hey were trained together in their childhoods ; and there 
 xjted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose 
 ut branch now. Since their more mature dignities and rojral 
 ecessities made separation of their society, their encounters; 
 lOugh not personal, have been ro3rally attomejred, with inter- 
 liai^ge of gifts, letters, loving embassies ; that they have seemed 
 > be together, though absent ; shook hands, as over a vast ; 
 ad embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds. The 
 eavcna continue their loves ! 
 
 The Winter's Tale, Act I, Scene i. 
 
496 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Polixenes. As thou lovest me, Camillo, wipe not out the rest 
 of thy services, by leaving me now : the need I have of thee 
 thine own goodness hath made ; better not to have had thee 
 than thus to want thee. Thou, having made me businesses which 
 none without thee can sufficiently manage, must either stay 
 to execute them thj^elf, or take away with thee the very services 
 thou hast done : which if I have not enough considered, (as too 
 much I cannot,) to be more thankful to thee shall be my study ; 
 and my profit therein, the heaping friendships. Of that fatal 
 country, Sicilia, pr'ythee speak no more : whose very name 
 punishes me with the remembrance of that penitent, as thou 
 callest him, and reconciled king, my brother ; whose loss of his 
 most precious queen and children are even now to be afresh 
 lamented. Say to me, when sawest thou the prince Florizel, 
 my son ? Kings are no less unhappy, their issue not being 
 gracious, than they are in losing them when they have approved 
 their virtues. 
 
 Id. Act IV, Scene i. 
 
 I Gentleman. I make a broken delivery of the business. — 
 But the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very 
 notes of admiration : they seemed almost, with staring on one 
 another, to tear the cases of their eyes ; there was speech in their 
 dumbness, language in their very gesture ; they looked as 
 they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed : a notable 
 passion of wonder appeared in them : but the wisest beholder, 
 that knew no more but seeing, could not say if the importance 
 were joy or sorrow ; but in the extremity of the one it must 
 needs be. Here comes a gentleman, that happily, knows more. 
 The news, Rogero ? 
 
 Id. Act V, Scene 2. 
 
 Lafeu, They say, miracles are past ; and we have our philo- 
 sophical persons, to make modem and familiar, things spiritual 
 and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors ; 
 ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should 
 submit ourselves to an unknown fear. 
 
 All's Well. Act II, Scene 3. 
 
 I Lord. I, with a troop of Florentines, will suddenly surprise 
 him ; such I will have whom I am sure he knows not from 
 the enemy : we will bind and hoodwink him, so that he shall 
 suppose no other but that he is carried into the leaguer of the 
 adversaries, when we bring him to our own tents. Be but your 
 lordship present at his examination : if he do not, for the promise 
 of his life, and in the highest compulsion of base fear, offer to 
 betray you, and deliver all the intelligence in his power against 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 497 
 
 you, and that with the divine forfeit of his soul upon oath, never 
 trust my judgment in anything. 
 
 Id. Act III, Scene 6. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Falstaff. No. I'll be sworn : I make as good a use of it as 
 many a man doth of a death's head, or a memento mori : I never 
 see thy face but I think upon hell-fire, and Dives that lived in 
 purple ; for there he is in his robes, burning, burning. If thou 
 wert any way given to virtue, I would swear by thy face ; my 
 oath should be. By this fire : but thou art altogether given over ; 
 and wert indeed, but for the light in thy face, the son of utter 
 darkness. When thou rannest up Gadshill in the night to catch 
 my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus, or 
 a ball of wildfire, there's no purchase in money. O, thou art a 
 perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light ! Thou hast 
 saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with 
 thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern : but the sack that 
 thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap 
 at the dearest chandler's in Europe. I have maintained that 
 salamander of yours with fire, any time this two and thirty years ; 
 Heaven reward me for it ! 
 
 King Henry IV. Pt. I, Act III, Scene 3. 
 
 Falstaff. If I be not ashamed of my soldiers I am a soused 
 gurnet. I have misused the king's press damnably. I have 
 got. in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers, three hundred 
 and odd pounds . I press me none but good householders, yeomen 's 
 sons : inquire me out contracted bachelors, such as had been asked 
 twice on the banns ; such a commodity of warm slaves as had as 
 lief hear the devil as a drum ; such as fear the report of a caliver 
 worse than a struck fowl, or a hurt wild duck. I pressed me none 
 but such toasts and butter, with hearts in their beUies no bigger 
 than pins' heads, and they have bought out their services ; and 
 now my whole charge consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, 
 gentlemen of companies, slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the 
 painted cloth, where the glutton's dogs licked his sores : and such 
 as, indeed, were never soldiers ; but discarded unjust serving 
 men. younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters, and 
 ostlers trade-fallen ; the cankers of a calm world and a long peace ; 
 ten times more dishonourable ragged than an old -faced ancient : 
 and such have I, to fill up the rooms of them that have bought 
 out their services, that you would think that I had a hundred 
 and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, 
 from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way, 
 and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the 
 dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I'll not 
 
 21 
 
498 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 march through Coventry with them, that's flat, — ^Nay, and the 
 villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on ; 
 for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There's but a 
 shirt and a half in all my company ; and the half-shirt is two 
 napkins tacked together, and thrown over the shoulders like a 
 herald's coat without sleeves ; and the shirt, to say the truth, 
 stolen from my host of Saint Albans, or the red-nose innkeeper 
 of Daventry : but that's all one ; they'll find linen enough on 
 every hedge. 
 
 Id. Act IV, Scene 2. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 1 Citizen. We are accounted poor citizens ; the patricians 
 good . What authority surfeits on would reUeve us . If they would 
 yield us but the superfluity, while it were wholesome, we might 
 guess they relieved us humanely ; but they think we are too dear 
 the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is an inven- 
 tory to particularise their abundance ; our sufferance is a gain 
 to them. — ^Let us revenge this with oiu: pikes, ere we become 
 rakes : for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread, 
 not in thiist for revenge. 
 
 Coriolanus, Act I, Scene i. 
 
 Menenius. Our very priests must become mockers, if they 
 shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you are. When 
 you speak best unto purpose, it is not worth the wagging of you 
 beards ; and your beards deserve not so honourable a grave 
 as to stuff a botcher's cushion, or to be entombed in an ass's 
 pack-saddle. Yet you must be saying, Marcius is proud ; who, 
 in a cheap estimation, is worth all your predecessors since Deuca- 
 lion ; though, peradventure, some of the best of 'em were 
 hereditary hangmen. Good den to your worships ; more of your 
 conversation would infect my brain, being the herdsmen of the 
 beastly plebeians : I will be bold to take my leave of you. 
 
 Id. Act H, Scene i. 
 
 2 Officer. He hath deserved worthily of his country : and his 
 ascent is not by such easy degrees as those who, having been 
 supple and courteous to the people, bonneted, without any 
 further deed to have them all into their estimation and report : 
 but he hath so planted his honours in their eyes, and his actions 
 in their hearts, that for their tongues to be silent, and not confess 
 so much, were a kind of ingrateful injury ; to report otherwise 
 were a malice, that, giving itself the lie, would pluck reproof and 
 rebuke from every ear that heard it. 
 
 Id. Act II, Scene 2, 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 499 
 
 Hamlet. I will tell you why ; so shall my anticipation prevent 
 your discovery, and your secrecy to the king and queen moult 
 no feather. I have of late, (but, wherefore, I know not.) lost all 
 my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises : and, indeed, it goes 
 so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, 
 seems to me a sterile promontory ; this most excellent canopy, 
 the air, look you, — ^this brave o'erhanging firmament— this 
 majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other 
 thing to me, than a foul and i)estilent congregation of vapours. 
 What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! how 
 infinite in faculty I in form and moving how express and admir- 
 able ! in action how like an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! 
 the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! And yet, 
 to me, what is this quintessence of dust ? man delights not me, 
 nor woman neither ; though by your smiling you seem to say so. 
 
 Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2. 
 
 Hamlet. I heard thee speak me a speech once, — but it was never 
 acted : or, if it was. not above once ; for the play, I remember, 
 pleased not the million ; 'twas caviare to the general : but it 
 was (as I received it, and others, whose judgments, in such 
 matters, cried in the top of mine.) an excellent play : well digested 
 in the scenes ; set down with as much modesty as cunning. I 
 remember, one said, there were no sallets in the lines, to make the 
 matter savoury ; nor no matter in the phrase that might indite 
 the author of affectation ; but called it an honest method, as 
 wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than 
 fine. One chief speech in it I chiefly loved : 'twas Eneas' tale 
 to Dido ; and thereabout of it especially, where he speaks of 
 Priam's slaughter : if it live in your memory, begin at this line ; 
 let me see, let me see ; . . . 
 
 Hamlet. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it 
 to you, trippingly on the tongue : but if you mouth it, as many 
 of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines. 
 Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus : but use 
 all gently : for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) 
 the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temper- 
 ance, that oiiay give it smoothness. O, it ofiends me to the soul, 
 to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, 
 to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings ; who, for the 
 most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows 
 and soise : I could have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing 
 Termagant : it out-herods Herod : Pray you, avoid it. 
 
 Id. Act III. Scene 2. 
 
500 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Hamlet. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion 
 be your tutor : suit the action to the word, the word to the action ; 
 with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty 
 of nature ; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of plajdng, 
 whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 
 't were, the mirror up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature, 
 scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his 
 form and pressure. Now this, overdone, or come tardy off, 
 though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious 
 grieve ; the censure of the which one, must, in your allowance, 
 o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players, that 
 I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not 
 to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, 
 nor the gait of Christian, Pagan, nor man, have so strutted, and 
 bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen 
 had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity 
 so abominably. 
 
 Id. Act III, Scene 2. 
 
 In all these extracts, serious and humorous ahke, there 
 is a similarity of movement which cannot be overlooked. 
 All alike are vivaciotis, crisp, incomplex, proceeding by 
 clear sequences of short clatises, lacking in fugal breadth. 
 There is no indication of what prose may be made by 
 exfoliation, no large progression, no polyphony. It is 
 true, once more, that even if he would, the dramatist 
 cannot often put reading prose in the mouths of his cha- 
 racters ; and that the greatest prose must alwa}^ be 
 that penned for reading. But oratory is spoken prose ; 
 and there is no sign that Shakespeare could have made 
 a character deliver a prose speech comparable in sonority 
 and sweep with any of the blank-verse speeches in the 
 plays, addressed to audiences of more than one or two. 
 Let us take the only two pieces of non-dramatic prose 
 which Shakespeare has left us — the dedications to his 
 two long poems. I do not cite the "Argument" to 
 LucRECE, which follows usage in being bald and com- 
 pressed in diction : the dedications yield the better 
 test: 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 501 
 
 DEDICATION TO ' VENUS AND ADONIS ' 
 To The 
 Right Hon. Henry Wriothesly, 
 Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. 
 Right Honourable. 
 
 I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished 
 lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for 
 choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden : only, 
 if your Honour seem but pleased, I account mjreelf highly praised, 
 and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured 
 you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my inven- 
 tion prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, 
 and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so 
 bad a harvest. I leaye it to your honourable survey, and your 
 Honour to your heart's content ; which I wish may always 
 answer your own wish, and the world's hopeful expectation. 
 
 Your Honour's in all duty. 
 
 DEDICATION TO THE 'RAPE OF LUCRECE' 
 
 To The 
 
 Right Hon. Henry Wriothesly, 
 
 Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. 
 
 The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end ; whereof 
 
 this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. 
 
 The w arr a nt I have of your honourable disposition, not the 
 
 worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. 
 
 What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours ; being 
 
 part in aU I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my 
 
 duty would show greater : meantime, as it is, it is bound to your 
 
 Lordship : to whom 1 wish long life, still lengthened with all 
 
 happiness. 
 
 Your Lordship's in all duty. 
 
 There is finally no escape from the conclusion before 
 reached. He who in blank verse commands so many 
 styles, and in all is easily spacious and organically con- 
 tinuous — master of an ever-evolving roll of cadenced 
 utterance of every order, from the rippUng flow of Mercutio, 
 the large discourse of Ulysses, and the eager torrential 
 thought of Hamlet, to the noble andante of Macbeth and 
 the thunder of Coriolanus — the master poet is in his prose 
 style (wit and wisdom apart) an ordinary Elizabethan 
 dramatist, rather more staccato than most of the rest. 
 
502 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Compare any of those quick-stepping runs of prose 
 with the swing of the verse, going as a great bird wheeling 
 on mighty wings. See how the movement hfts and soars 
 when the poet touches his true instnunent : 
 
 Wouldst thou be window'd in great Rome and see 
 Thy master thus, with pleached arms, bending down 
 His corrigible neck ; his face subdued 
 To penetrative shame ; whilst the wheeled seat 
 Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, branded 
 His baseness that ensued ? 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
 Whether it be 
 Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
 Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
 A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom. 
 And ever three parts coward, I do not know. 
 Why yet I live to say, ' This thing's to do ' ; 
 Sith I have cause and will and strength and means 
 To do it. 
 
 Hamlet. 
 You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate 
 As reek o' the rotten fens ; whose loves I prize 
 As the dead carcases of unburied men 
 That do corrupt my air, / banish you, 
 And here remain with your uncertainty. 
 
 Coriolanus. 
 
 O Proserpina I 
 For the floweis now, that frighted thou let'st fall 
 From Dis's waggon I DafEodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim. 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or C3rtherea's breath. 
 
 Winter's Tale. 
 
 The remarkable thing is that the primary movement 
 or clause formation here is broadly the same as in the 
 prose : it is from the same mint, so to speak. The pro- 
 gression is as it were linear, by short clauses, the images 
 being added to each other without involution. There 
 is the same " bright speed," as of a vivacious talker, with 
 no more approach to long or large constructions than 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 503 
 
 in any of the prose we have just scrutinised. A subtle 
 physiologist might perhaps divine from either the poet's 
 rate of breathing. Let us turn Antony's speech into 
 prose, and, reading by the comma pauses, note its struc- 
 tural identity with the purposed prose of other speeches : 
 
 Wouldst thou be windowed in great Rome, and see thy master, 
 thus, with pleached arms, bending down his corrigible neck, 
 his face subdued to penetrative shame, whilst fortunate Caesar's 
 wheeled seat, drawn before him, branded his baseness following ? 
 
 What has effected the profound difference ? Obviously, 
 the magic of rhythm, which lays a transfiguring unity 
 upon the whole, at once creating a new aesthetic fact and 
 force. First and last, once more, this man is a master 
 of metrical rhythm, the very genius of blank verse, a 
 fundamentally different thing from prose, whereof the 
 rhythm goes by clause and sentence, not by metre, and 
 wherein the relation of clauses is one of balance rather 
 than of sequence. 
 
 Turn we now to the prose which was Bacon's instru- 
 ment, as verse was Shakespeare's. Like every good 
 prosist. Bacon can vary his tempo ; and we have from 
 him alternately cturt and stately, simple and ornate 
 diction. But in every kind there is a pulsation, a pro- 
 gression, a stride that is not Shakespeare's. Let us 
 first sample him from the Essays : 
 
 Examine thy customs of diet, sleep, exercise, and the like ; 
 and try, in anything thou shalt judge hurtful, to discontinue it 
 by little and little ; but so as if thou dost find any inconvenience 
 by the change thou come back to it again ; for it is hard to dis- 
 tinguish that which is generally held good and wholesome from 
 that which is good particularly, and fit for thine own body. . . • 
 As for the passions and studies of the mind : avoid envy ; 
 anxious fears, anger fretting inwards ; subtle and knotty inquisi- 
 tions ; joys and exhilarations in success ; sadness not commu- 
 nicated. Entertain hopes ; mirth rather than joy ; variety 
 of delights, rather than surfeit of them ; wonder and admiration, 
 and therefore novelties ; studies that fill the mind with splendid 
 and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of 
 nature.* ••fj! ; 
 
 » Essay^XXX, Of Regiment of Health. 
 
504 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Observe, first, the deliberation and balance of the 
 exposition, the fore-planned arrangement of the thoughts, 
 in contrast with the kindling process of the poet ; next 
 the instinctive balancing of the clauses in point of rhythm ; 
 and thirdly, the cHmaxing movement to a full and poly- 
 phonous closing phrase— the natural method of prose, 
 and the exact opposite of the practice of Shakespeare, 
 whose typical period-endings are sudden or vehement 
 arrests of speech in mid-line, as of a horse reined back 
 on his haimches : 
 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
 And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. 
 Signifying nothing. 
 
 Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, 
 Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, 
 Whiles, like a pufE'd and reckless libertine. 
 Himself the primrose path to dalliance treads. 
 And recks not his own rede. 
 
 Rather a ditch in Egypt 
 Be gentle grave unto me ! rather on Nilus' mud 
 Lay me stark nak'd, and let the water-flies 
 Blow me into abhorring ! rather make 
 My country's high pyramides, my gibbet 
 And hang me up in chains ! 
 
 There are hundreds of these speech-endings in the plays ; 
 and in the prose there is the same habit of the quick stop, 
 which is as alien to Bacon's way of writing as it would 
 have been to his way of walking, in court or garden. 
 In the essay before us, the very preoccupation about 
 health and diet is a mark of Bacon, absent from Shake- 
 speare, who did not smoke, but never discussed tobacco 
 even to gratify James ! And in that single extract of 
 three sentences there are seven words and phrases never 
 used by Shakespeare : " litUe by little," " fretting inwards," 
 "studies of the mind," "inquisitions," "exhilarations," 
 " contemplations " ; " noveltws." Observe the Baco- 
 nian plurals, much seldomer found in Shakespeare's 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 505 
 
 prose. The word " exhilaration " never occurs in the 
 plays at all, in any flexion : " splendid," a common 
 word with Bacon, is found only once, in the dubious 
 2 Henry VI ; " knotty " occurs only twice ; " dis- 
 continue " only once ; " inconvenience " only once in 
 a homogeneous play. 
 
 Another piece of Baconian prose, from the essay preced- 
 ing that just cited, will convey the same lessons : 
 
 'There may be now, for martial encouragement, some degrees 
 and orders of chivalry, which nevertheless are conferred promis- 
 cuously upon soldiers and no-soldiers ; and some remembrance 
 perhaps upon the scutcheon ; and some hospitals for maimed 
 soldiers ; and such-like things. But in ancient times, the 
 trophies erected upon the place of the victory ; the funeral 
 laudatives and monuments for those that died in the wars ; 
 the crowns and garlands personal ; the style of Emperor, which 
 the great kings of the world after borrowed ; the triumphs of 
 the generals upon their return ; the great donatives and largesses 
 upon the disbanding of the armies, were things able to inflame 
 all men's courages. But of all, that of the triumph amongst 
 the Romans, was not pageants or gaudery, but one of the wisest 
 and noblest institutions that ever was. 
 
 Again we have a handful of words and phrases never 
 found in the plays : " promiscuously," " soldiers and no- 
 soldiers," " orders of chivalry," " hospitals " (the word 
 " hospital " occurs only once in Shakespeare), the position 
 of the adjective in "crowns and garlands personal," 
 "laudatives," "donatives," "largesses," "disbanding," 
 " courages," " gaudery " — ^in the course of a dozen lines, 
 five words and three plurals never found in the plays. 
 This habitual use of the plural is a specialty of Bacon, 
 not of Shakespeare ; and by small peculiarities of that 
 kind the idiosyncrasy of a writer is much more truly to 
 be traced than by merely occasional use of current saws 
 and formulas. Even " institutions," common in Bacon, 
 occurs only once in Shakespeare. And always the style 
 of Bacon is radically different from that of the dramatist 
 —reflective rather than impassioned, deliberate rather 
 
5o6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 than eager ; calm, not quick, measured in quite another 
 sense than is the poet's verse. 
 
 Not a single essay, I believe, will fail to yield the same 
 order of proofs. We have dipped into Essays XXX and 
 XXIX : let us turn to XXXI, Of Suspicion. It opens 
 with a series of short " sententious " sentences : 
 
 Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, 
 they ever fly by twilight. Certainly they are to be repressed, or 
 at the least well guarded ; for they cloud the mind ; they lose 
 friends ; and they check with business, whereby business cannot 
 go on currently and constantly. They dispose kings to tjrranny, 
 husbands to jealousy ; wise men to irresolution and melancholy. 
 
 Here, in three sentences, we have three non-Shake- 
 spearean words : " repressed," " currently," " irresolu- 
 tion," and the form " check with," never found in the 
 plays ; to say nothing of the opening string of Baconian 
 plurals. " Suspicions " occurs only once in Shakespeare. 
 In the two short essays Of Regiment of Health and 
 Of Suspicion may be found several more words never 
 found in the plajrs : " excesses," the name Celsus, 
 " benign," which in Shakespeare occurs only in the non- 
 Shakespearean prologue of Gower in Pericles (ii), 
 " masteries," " buzzes," the phrase " of a middle temper," 
 "stoniest," the phrase "discern of," and the peculiar 
 form " owing to " in the sense of " accruing to " — 
 " strength of nature in youth passeth over many excesses, 
 which are owing to a man till Ms age." (" Owing " occurs 
 only once in Shakespeare.) 
 
 But the question of vocabulary calls for separate 
 treatment ; and our immediate business is with prose 
 style. If the reader be not convinced by our few selec- 
 tions from the Essays, let him turn to the Advancement 
 OF Learning. Here will be found a multitude of soporous 
 and long-breathed sentences in a style never to be found 
 in Shakespeare's prose. The second paragraph begins 
 with a sentence of nearly two hundred words — a para- 
 graph in itself. The third paragraph consists of one such 
 sentence : 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 507 
 
 Therefore did I conclude with myself that I could not make 
 unto your Majesty a better oblation than of some treatise tending 
 to that end ; whereof the sum will consist of these two parts : 
 the former consisting of the excellency of learning and knowledge, 
 and the excellency of the merit and true glory in the augmenta- 
 tion and propagation thereof ; the latter, what the particular 
 acts and works are which have been embraced and undertaken for 
 the advancement of learning, and again what defects and under- 
 values I find in such particular acts ; to the end that though 
 I cannot positively or affirmatively advise your Majesty, or 
 propound unto you framed particulars, yet I may excite your 
 princely cogitation to visit tiie excellent treasure of your own 
 mind, and thence to extract particulars for this purpose agreeable 
 to jrour magnanimity and wisdom. 
 
 There is no such interwoven, periodic writing as 
 this in the whole range of Shakespeare. One more 
 sentence will sufl5ce to illustrate the stately and archi- 
 tectonic style which is normal in Bacon, and of which 
 the plays afford no sample : 
 
 And as for those particular seducements or indispositions of 
 the mind for policy and government, which learning is pretended 
 to insinuate, if it be granted that any such thing be, it must be 
 remembered withal, that learning ministereth in every of them 
 greater strength of medicine or remedy than it ofiereth cause of 
 indisposition or infirmity. 
 
 If anywhere Bacon might be expected to approximate 
 to the prose style of the pla}^, it would be in the Con- 
 ference OF Pleasure or in the Henry VII. But there 
 we have the same measured utterance, the same enchain- 
 ing of clauses. In the former, " The Praise of Fortitude " 
 sets out with half a dozen short and crisp " sententious " 
 sentences ; then comes one of eighty words, marked by 
 the Baconian enchainment of clauses. The History 
 begins : 
 
 After that Richard, the third of that name, king in fact only, 
 but tjnant both in title and regiment, and so conmionly termed and 
 reputed in all times since, was by the Divine Revenge, favouring 
 the design of an exiled man, overthrown and slain at Bosworth 
 Field, there succeeded in the kingdom by the Earl of Richmond 
 thenceforth styled Henry the Seventh. 
 
5o8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 This is a type of the style of the book — ^interlocked and , 
 jointed, not merely sequent clauses, with a periodic 
 rise and fall. And in the second sentence occurs the 
 word " miHtar," always Bacon's form of the adjective 
 (though sometimes spelt militare "), and never found in 
 the plays, whether in prose or verse. There the word 
 is always " militarie " or " mihtary." Thus in the most 
 truly significant details of style, verbal and structural 
 alike, the prose writer is once for all marked off from the 
 poet, even as he is in a hundred points of doctrine, cer- 
 tainly not always to his advantage. But as a writer, 
 he is all the more clearly differentiated ; and as a teacher 
 turned man of letters to fulfil a mission, he belongs to 
 another world. Bacon, indeed, is not the supreme master 
 of prose that Shakespeare is of blank verse. He has not 
 the signally elastic movement of Nashe, the magical 
 cadence of Browne, or the endless flow of Jeremy Taylor. 
 With all his professed contempt for rhetorical artifice, 
 too, he was capable at times, by the avowal of Spedding, 
 of " a certain affectation and rhetorical cadence ... 
 agreeable to the taste of the time." ^ But this, as the 
 same critic goes on to claim, was " so alien to his own 
 individual taste and natural manner, that there is no 
 single feature by which his style is more specially distin- 
 guished, wherever he speaks in his own person, whether 
 formally or familiarly, whether in the way of narrative, 
 argument, or oration, than the total absence of it." In 
 short, he could fault, as Shakespeare faiilted ; but he 
 stands to the prose as Shakespeare stood to the verse of 
 his time, as a witness for the root truth in regard to all 
 writing, that to be great it must be sincere. And this, 
 with his large faculty for phrase, cadence, and dictioni 
 makes him one of the great writers, inasmuch as he 
 habitually makes style a vesture for thought, and not 
 a decoration of it. But he was an artist in spite of him- 
 self. To dislike and reject bad rhetoric is to crave for 
 * Letters and Life of Bacon, i, 119. 
 
PROSE STYLES COMPARED 509 
 
 aod ; to detect false ornament is to cherish the true ; 
 ad Bacon is spontaneously an artist in his handling of 
 rose. With a burden of thought such as was never 
 iven to Nashe or Browne or Taylor, and a range of 
 Mison far wider than that of Hooker, he far outweighs 
 11 three as a contributor to the store of human wisdom. 
 
 And with all this it is the more wildly incredible that 
 e should have been the greatest master of verse as well 
 s the chief master of philosophic prose in his age. Mon- 
 trous as is the thesis that he, taldng all knowledge as his 
 rovince, and tied by destiny to the vocations of law 
 nd politics, yet secretly supplied during twenty years 
 f his crowded life the main stock of the new plays of a 
 .ondon theatre, and penned Venus and Adonis and 
 .UCRECE and the Sonnets — ^monstrous in every respect 
 s is that fantasy, it is hardly more incredible at bottom 
 ban would be, for those who can realise the conditions 
 f artistic genius, the conception of the combination in 
 ne man of a faculty not far short of supreme for prose 
 nd for prose themes with a quite supreme faculty for 
 npassioned verse. The thesis has arisen and won vogue, 
 1 fact, among men as little wont to consider the psy- 
 hology of genius as to study the literary facts by which 
 ny theory of authorship is to be tested. And even that 
 > not the end of the purely literary demonstration of the 
 oily of the Baconian creed. 
 
 It is not to be expected that Baconians will be moved 
 ly the argument from prose style. All these years, they 
 ave gone on comparing Bacon and the Plays without 
 letecting any difference of style or manner of sentence, 
 ny more than they can discern the antipodal difference 
 f preoccupation and habit of mind. Being wholly 
 ccupied in looking for resemblances in the trees, they 
 lever get a view of the woods ; and having always stated 
 heir case mainly on illusory "correspondencies," 
 ' echoes," and " classical " and " legal " mares' nest; , 
 hey are not likely to consent to any other kind of test. 
 
510 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 For the hitherto perplexed but open-minded reader, 
 however, the argument from style form will doubtless 
 carry its due weight ; and it has here accordingly been 
 presented, after strict examination of the three orders 
 of Baconian argument specified. 
 
 The further argument from constant disparities in the 
 two writers, introduced in our incidejital citation of 
 Baconian words and phrases not found in the plays, may 
 possibly make some appeal even to some Baconians, 
 seeing that it turns their own method of particular com- 
 parison against their own thesis. To that, then, we shall 
 devote a separate chapter, before we deal in conclusion 
 with some of the fundamental considerations which ought 
 to have vetoed the Baconian theory from the first. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 THE VOCABULARIES OF SHAKESPEARE AND BA(X)N 
 
 THE range of Shakespeare's vocabulary is an 
 old theme among his admirers ; and on the 
 strength of some very loose statistical guessing 
 and plainly inadequate statistical comparison 
 le has been credited with supremacy in this as in other 
 iterary aspects. Even careful comparisons between the 
 >lays of Shakespeare and the verse, say, of Milton, the 
 >ulk of whose output is prose, could not carry the con- 
 lusions founded on the hand-to-mouth statistics in 
 [uestion. For a just estimate of a writer's verbal range 
 ve require, it would seem, comparison of his work with 
 in approximately equal quantity of matter by another 
 vriter ; and it might have been e:q)ected that the Baco- 
 lians would give some special attention to the respective 
 vocabularies of the two writers they identify. Signifi- 
 antly enough, however, there has been almost no attempt 
 mong them to compare the general use of words in the 
 wo writers, apart from such wholly nugatory under- 
 aldngs as that of Mr. Donnelly and Dr. Theobald, above 
 liscussed, to find special identities in the use of the 
 ommonest terms; phrases and figures of the period. 
 Vhen, seeking a rational test, we compare the vocabu- 
 iries in general, we find, instead of any noticeable 
 imilarity or uncommon measure of coincidence, a much 
 ader divergence than could well have been reckoned on. 
 o clear is this divergence that a little carefvd study of 
 bis one point might open the eyes of any reasonable 
 tudent to the niillity of the Baconian hypothesis. 
 Not only does Bacon, as we have seen, employ fre- 
 
 5" 
 
512 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 quently in particular works, as the Natural History, 
 a large number of special terms such as Shakespeare 
 very rarely uses, and many which he never uses at all : 
 the language of Bacon's philosophic and general works 
 diverges no less signally from that of the Plays in respect 
 of the use of a multitude of words which never occur 
 there. 
 
 Of Bacon, unfortunately, there is no concordance : 
 the Baconians have done nothing so useful as that. But 
 a sufficiently fair test may be set up by taking any un- 
 biased selection of pages from Bacon and noting the 
 words therein which do not occur in the Shakespeare 
 concordance. The result will perhaps be found surprising 
 by non-Baconians as well as by the Baconians who will 
 make the experiment. In dealing with the question of 
 prose style I have already shown that a few passages 
 from the Essays jdeld a handful of words, phrases, and 
 plurals, which are not to be found in the Plays — the three 
 opening sentences of one essay presenting three non- 
 Shakespearean words, though the words in question 
 are not at all out of the way (save as regards the crucial 
 case of " militar," which is worth a hundred) i and the 
 phrases are more or less idiomatic. But it may be sus- 
 pected by some that the essays and passages in question 
 are exceptional, and have been selected for that reason. 
 In order, therefore, to secure an indisputably fair coin- 
 parison, I have taken (i) the first two pages (in Rout- 
 ledge's edition) of the Advancement of Learning; 
 (2) the last page of Book First and the first of Book 
 Second ; (3) the last two pages of Book Second ; (4) a 
 sequence, taken at random, of four pages in the same 
 book ; (5) the first and the last of the Essays ; (6) the 
 first page of The New Atlantis ; and (7) the first two 
 and the last two pages of the History of Henry VII. 
 The result is the following set of lists of mostly common 
 Baconian words which either do not occur at all in the 
 Plays or occur there only in the rare instances specified. 
 
VOCABULARIES 513 
 
 First Page of " Advancement of Learning " 
 (Routledge's ed. of Works, p. 42) 
 
 branching ^ penetration (mental) propriety (= pro- 
 elocution proficience perty = quality) 
 oblation ' tabernacle 
 
 Second Page 
 
 affirmatively politiques tacit 
 
 amplification propagation ' triplicity 
 
 compendious propound * undervalues sb.) 
 
 extraction(s) propriety (= pro- universality 
 
 illumination perty = quality *) veneration 
 
 oblation signature 
 
 Last Page of -B. I. (Ed. cited, p. 74) (Short page) 
 
 barleycorn generate knowledges (twice) 
 
 benign illumination magnified 
 
 consociate immersed renovation 
 
 demolish (ed) incorruptible 
 
 First Page of B. II (Ed. cited, p. 75) (Short page) 
 amplitude overcomen transitory 
 
 benign proficience transmit 
 
 foresight renovation(s) 
 
 Second Last Full Page of B. II (Ed. cited, p. 174) 
 commonplace(s) edition (-= giving liturgy 
 concordance(s) out) privatively 
 
 conservation effectually prolix 
 
 dispersedly harmonies (lite- summary (adj.) ' 
 
 rary) • 
 
 1 " Branching itself." Shakespeare only once has " branch " 
 as a verb. 
 
 * Occurs in the Shakespeare plays only in a clearly non- 
 Shakespearean part of Pericles. 
 
 * Used by Shakespeare once only, and then in another and 
 peculiar sense, " propagation of a dower " (M . for M., I, ii, 1 54) . 
 
 * Shakespeare has only " propoundc(Z," and that only once, 
 in the doubtful 2 Henry VI. The word is very common in 
 Bacon. 
 
 * Often used by Bacon in this sense. Shakespeare has the.word 
 only twice, and both times in the modem sense. 
 
 * Shakespeare often has " harmony " in the ordinary sense ; 
 never in this. 
 
 ' " The works of God summary." Shakespeare has the noun 
 twice, in the ordinary sense, never the adjective. 
 
 2K 
 
514 
 
 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Last 
 
 Full Page of B. 
 
 II. 
 
 (P- 175) 
 
 atheism 
 
 elevation 
 
 
 proficience 
 
 compatible 
 
 libertine (adj.) 
 
 
 receded 
 
 confutation (twice) 
 
 liturgy 
 
 
 receding 
 
 declination (s) 
 
 occupate 
 
 
 retribution 
 
 deducing 
 
 preoccupate 
 
 
 tares 
 
 deficience 
 
 privative 
 
 
 unsown 
 
 Four Pages in Sequence taken at Random from B.II 
 (Ed. cited, p. i66) 
 
 animation 
 
 animosities 
 
 aphorisms 
 
 certificate * 
 
 contrariwise 
 
 deficience 
 
 peregrinations * 
 propriety (= pro- 
 perty — quality) 
 
 idiom 
 
 libertine (adj.) 
 mystical 
 
 emergent 
 
 futility 
 
 intelligence 
 
 (»= mind) 2 
 judicially 
 lawmaker (twice) 
 
 P. 167 (short) 
 
 reprehension 
 
 Sabaoth 
 
 vivacity 
 
 P. 168 (short) 
 
 participant 
 reluctation (twice) 
 righteousness 
 
 P. 169 
 
 enucleating 
 examinable 
 grift (= graft) 
 imposture 
 interdicteth * 
 latitude 
 (Mahomet) 
 mediocrity * 
 
 multiplicity 
 preamble (s) 
 propound 
 response (s) 
 rigorously 
 
 theology 
 
 medium 
 
 nonsignificants 
 
 relatively 
 
 surd 
 
 ward (of a lock) 
 
 analogy 
 chess 
 
 contradictories 
 deduce(th) 
 deficience 
 dialectic 
 
 draughts (= writ- 
 ten rules) 
 
 » Occurs in Shakespeare only in the doubtful 2 Henry VI. 
 a Shakespeare always uses this word in the sense of information. 
 • Shakespeare has only " peregrinate," and that only once, 
 « Shakespeare has only " interdiction," and that only once. 
 Bacon has " golden mediocrity." So has Jonson. Shake- 
 speare has not even " mediocrity." 
 
allay (— alloy) * 
 comparable 
 discoursing 
 embaseth 
 
 abstruse 
 
 accurate 
 
 arietations 
 
 astrologer 
 
 computing » 
 
 concurrence 
 
 conflagration 
 
 degenerating 
 
 desolated (vb.) 
 
 dispeople 
 
 enervate 
 
 VOCABULARIES 
 
 First Essay (whole) 
 
 illumination shrunken « 
 
 mummeries theological 
 
 poles (of truth — 
 metaph.) 
 
 Phrase " at a stand." 
 
 515 
 
 Last Essay (whole) 
 
 exhaust («- ex- 
 hausted) 
 
 generate 
 
 hemisphere 
 -luxuriant 
 
 magnitude 
 
 (Mahomet) 
 
 martytdom 
 
 mountainous 
 
 (= living in the 
 mountains) 
 
 over-power (sb.) • 
 philology 
 populate 
 sanguinary 
 schism 
 
 suit («= sequence) 
 sustentation 
 version (-« direc- 
 tion) 
 vicissitude (7 times) 
 voluptuous 
 
 These lists, it should be explained, mostly cover 
 flesdons of words, in the senses in which they are used 
 by Bacon. That is to say, Shakespeare never uses 
 " extraction " or " undervalue " (sb.) or " immerse " or 
 " magnify " or " commonplace " or " concordance " or 
 " decUnation " or " tare " or " draught " (.= writing) 
 or "recede," &c. Two of the Bacon words, "Maho- 
 met " ' and " confutation," do occur in i Henry VI, 
 and are here included on the confident assumption that 
 that is a non-Shakespearean play. Its presumed authors, 
 Marlowe; Greene, and Feele, all use the name Mahomet 
 frequently : " Shakespeare " uses it in no other play. 
 " Certificate " I have noted as occurring in the doubtful 
 a Henry VI. "Effectually," again, occurs in Titus 
 
 * Shakespeare often has the verb " allay " : the noun only 
 once, and then in the sense of alleviation. 
 
 * Shakespeare has " shrunk," never " shrunken." 
 
 * Shakespeare has only " computation." 
 
 * Shake^>eare has neither the noun nor the verb. 
 
 ' ' I note a proper name in this case, because its use hcis a moral 
 significance. 
 
5i6 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Andronicus, but in no other play ascribed to Shake- 
 speare ; and here again the word is included on the 
 confident assumption that the play in question is non- 
 Shakespearean. "Benign," again, as ahready noted, 
 occurs in the Plays only in (power's prologue to Act II 
 of Pericles — generally admitted to be non-Shakespearean 
 matter. In no other case in these lists does this question 
 arise, unless it be specified. " Inferring," used by Bacon 
 (p. 174), occurs in Shakespeare only in the doubtful 
 3 Henry VI, but is not here included. " Edition " 
 Shakespeare uses once, and once only, in the now normal 
 sense ; in the sense in which it is used by Bacon, as above 
 cited, he never uses it at all. " Shrunken " I include, 
 as the fact that Shakespeare always has " shrunk " is 
 in its degree significant. 
 
 It will be observed that the lists under notice include 
 both common and uncommon words, terms seldom used 
 even by Bacon, and terms often used by him and by many 
 other writers. " Benign," for instance; is a favourite 
 word of his. The remarkable thing is the number of 
 quite ordinary words used by Bacon that are never iound 
 in the Plays. This appears from the lists before us, and 
 can be further proved ad libitum. Thus Shakespeare 
 never uses words so common in Bacon and in Elizabethan 
 literature as : abstruse, accurate, animate, animation, 
 animosity, atheist, atheism, astrology, astrologer, analogy, 
 ampUtude, alloy, allegory, architecture, benign, common- 
 place, conflagration, compendious, comparable, com- 
 patible, compression, chess, concurrence, condense, con- 
 trariwise, contexture, collectively, compacted,^ delicacy, 
 deficience, or deficiency, deduce; or deducing, disbanding, 
 dialectic, elocution, extraction, elementary, elevation, 
 
 * Twice in one page in the Advancement, with "compaction." 
 Shakespeare has " compacted " once in Lucrece ; never in the 
 Plays. Of course, he often has compact — compacted. Both 
 forms \rere current : the dramatist takes one ; the prosist the 
 other 
 
VOCABULARIES 517 
 
 generate, geometrical, geometry, imposture, illumina- 
 tion, immerse, intelligence (=mind), knowledges, lati- 
 tude, liturgy, libertine (adj. — Shakespeare has the 
 noun), luxuriant, magnitude, martjnrdom, medium, 
 mediocrity, magnify, mystical, mtdtiplicity, oblation, 
 overpower, prolix, proficience or proficiency ,1 physics, 
 physical (general sense *), recede, renovation, relatively, 
 repress, resplendent, retribution, righteousness, signature, 
 sanguinary, subdivide, simiUtude, tacit, tabernacle, 
 theology, theological, transmit, transmission, transitory, 
 version (in any sense), voluptuous, veneration, vicissitude, 
 &c. &c. Hardly less remarkable is the number of common 
 words that occur only once. In the first few pages of 
 the Concordance I note :— abashed {abash does not occur 
 at all), abet, abetting, abjectly, abler, abominably, 
 abomination, abounding, abrogate, abrupt, abruptly, 
 abstains (abstain does not occur), abstemious, abundantly, 
 accessible, acclamation (pi.), accommodate, accompany- 
 ing, accomplice (pL), accomplishing, accomplishment; 
 accrue, accumulate, accumulated,accumulation — ^twenty- 
 five from " ab " to " ace." The full list, which would 
 run to thousands, includes such words as freewill, apostles, 
 apostle (both in doubtful plays),immortahty,indisposition, 
 magnificence (so common in Bacon), maxim, inference, 
 syllogism, reciprocal, navigation. 
 
 Such facts raise various questions as to the alleged 
 range of the Shakespearean vocabulary. For instance, 
 of the 15,000 words said to be found in the Plays,^ how 
 
 * Proficient occurs once in the Plays. 
 
 " Shakespeare has the word twice in the sense of " medicinal." 
 never in the general sense. 
 
 » Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, btb. ed. i, 
 309, citing — of all authorities — ^Renan's Histoire des Langues 
 Semitiques I I cannot find the passage in my copy (2nd ed.) of 
 Benan. Mr. G. C. Bonlpas (Problem of the Shakespeare Plays, 
 1902, p. iv) Characteristically asserts that the " estimate " is 
 Max Muller's own. Marsh (Student's English Language, 8th ed. 
 pp. 126, 180) makes the same statement as Muller cites from 
 Renan, giving no authority. Elze (William Shakespeare, Eng. 
 
5i8 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 many are mere plurals and verb-flexions ? how many 
 occur only in the doubtful or non-genuine plays ? and 
 how many are proper names ? And how does the Shake- 
 spearean vocabulary compare with, say, that of Ben 
 Jonson ? The question involved is, broadly, whether 
 the vocabulary of the Plays is or is not that of a scholarly 
 man, of very wide reading and far-gathered vocabulary, 
 or that of a poet with inmiense power of poetic expression 
 in the range of words of an ordinary cultured man. 
 
 Leaving the question of comparative range of vocabu- 
 lary to fuller statistical inquiry, we may -note the bearing 
 on the Bacon-Shakespeare theory of the evidence before 
 us. Putting aside for separate discussion the problem 
 of the intellectual interests involved or suggested, let us 
 ask how it could come about that the same man, repeatedly 
 using in his non-dramatic writings such familiar terms 
 as atheism, theology, theological, knowledges, illumina- 
 tion, renovation, magnify, magnitude, amplitude, defi- 
 cience, proficience, tacit, transitory, signature, chess, 
 analogy, medium, mjratical, imposture, commonplace, 
 recede; tares; deduce, mediocrity; inunersed, benign, 
 righteousness; alloy, generate, magnet, superlative — and 
 many hundreds more, equally common— could contrive 
 to write (as the Baconians hold) thirty-seven pla}^, 
 covering a productive period of some twenty years, 
 without once using any of them dramatically ? How 
 shovild he chance to avoid, in all his play-writing, the 
 use of two such common idioms as "at a stand " and 
 
 trans, p. 389) copies Muller verbatim, and cites him; Renan; and 
 Marsh ! Mr. Grant White (Studies in Shakespeare, p. 300) cites 
 the 15,000 estimate •with an " it is said," avowing that it seems 
 to him excessive. I know not who made the estimate, or whether 
 it has ever been checked. Mrs. Cowden Clarke and Mr. Baxtlett 
 offer no estimate in their Concordances. An allowance of 8000 
 words for Milton has the same loose currency. Mr. Morton Luce 
 (Handbook to Shakespeare's Works, 1906, p. 435) writes that 
 " Of course the range of his [Shakespeare's] vocabulary is far 
 greater than that of any other writer." No evidence is offered. 
 
VOCABULARIES 519 
 
 " at a stay," when these came to him quite naturally 
 in his other writings ? How should Bacon use the terms 
 " theory " and " theoretic " freely in his didactic works; 
 and only " theorick " (and that only thrice) in the thirty- 
 seven plays ? How, after writing often of " politiques " 
 in his avowed works, should he always write " politicians " 
 in his alleged plays, when other dramatists {e.g. Ben 
 Jonson) used " politiques " ? Using the metaphor of 
 " oblation " so frequently in his signed works, how could 
 he abstain from using it once in the plays ? Or will the 
 Baconians insist on giving him one of the worst-written 
 scenes in Pericles because it there occurs in the plural; 
 and in the literal sense ? Why should he write " over- 
 comen " and " holpen " in his prose and never in his 
 poetry ? Why should he always use the spelling 
 " drought " in his signed works, and " drouth " when 
 writing dramatically ? How should it be possible to 
 him to write of " vicissitude " seven times in one essay 
 and never once in thirty-seven plays ? How should he 
 chance frequently to use the word " voluptuous " in 
 didactic writings, and never once in so many plays in 
 which the notion is so often suggested ?* And, having 
 a habit of speaking of " knowledges " in his books, how 
 should he abstain from using that plural in twenty years 
 of play-writing ? 
 
 Once more, why should he always use the spelling and 
 scansion " militarie " or " military " in the Plays, and 
 invariably " miUtar " or " militare " in the books ? How, 
 yet again, should it come about that, while in his books 
 he often employs the word regiment = rule; which at 
 the time was in universal English use, in all the thirty- 
 seven plays he uses it only once, though it is there seven 
 times employed in the special sense which has latterly 
 become the sole one— that of a body of soldiers ? Naming 
 Solomon as he does, with seriousness; thirty or forty 
 
 1 Shakespeare has " voluptuously " once, and " voluptuous- 
 ness " twice ; but " voluptuous " never. 
 
520 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 times in his signed works, how came he to name him only 
 twice in the plays, and that with levity, in the Love's 
 Labour's Lost ? Why, using the word " temporary " 
 so constantly in his serious writing, did he use it only once 
 in the thirty-seven plays, and then frivolously, in the 
 phrase " a temporary meddler " ? How came he in all 
 the Plays to use only once each such words as " erudition," 
 " rigorously " [in a non-Shakespearean play], " totally," 
 which he uses so often in his didactic writings ? 
 
 To put these questions is to point to the answer. Of 
 all the coincidences of diction and phrase claimed by the 
 Baconians, there are not half a dozen worth serious dis- 
 cussion ; ninety-nine out of a hundred, as we have seen, 
 are normal uses of every-day language ; while the diver- 
 gences are innumerable and overwhelming in their eviden- 
 tial force. The vocabularies of Shakespeare and Bacon 
 are markedly and decisively distinct. Words frequent 
 in one are wholly absent from the other. Of two synonjmis, 
 the first habitually uses one ; the second the other. 
 Bacon uses a number of participles in " ate," as " occu- 
 pate," " preoccupate," which are not to be found in the 
 Plays. Whereas he uses " lawmaker " twice in one page; 
 the Plays not only have not " lawmaker," they have not 
 even " lawgiver." He uses such verbs as " to desolate," 
 which Shakespeare never employs. He has the locutions 
 " evading from," " chasing after," " conlude with my- 
 self," and many more, all unknown in the Plays. Here 
 we are considering not the special emplo3m[ient of sets 
 of terms proper to particular researches or topics, but 
 differences in the habitual use of a common language. 
 We are contemplating two different verbal outfits, so to 
 speak; two largely different selections from the store 
 of words common to all for all purposes j two diverging 
 sets of preferences— in a word, the output of two differ- 
 ently cultured men.* 
 
 1 Mr. G. C. Bompas (The Problem of the Shakespeare Plays, 
 1902, p. iv) alleges— here merely following an old statement by 
 
VOCABULARIES 521 
 
 Incidentally it appears that the man of special culture 
 has, as might be expected, the larger vocabulary in a 
 given space. None of the computators seems to have 
 sought to estimate quantitatively Bacon's vocabulary; 
 and I can only give my own impression. But it is founded 
 on the above-noted facts. In every thousand consecutive 
 words of Bacon's text as above sampled, roughly speaking, 
 there are from ten to thirty words not to be found in the 
 Plays. With due allowance made for repetitions, this 
 would soon, I think, give us over a thousand ordinary 
 words which occur in Bacon and not in Shakespeare ; 
 and a collation of the Sylva Sylvarum would greatly 
 swell the list. In no similar set of selections of sequent 
 words from Shakespeare, I think, will there be found any 
 such proportion of words not to be found in Bacon, though 
 in some single pages there may be. This, of course, is 
 not an issue that affects our conclusion as to the non 
 identity of the two writers. If it be found that the Plays 
 contain as large a number of terms not to be found in 
 Bacon as we have found vice versa, the inference as to 
 non-identity will in fact be pro tanto strengthened. I 
 mention my own view of the proportions by way of 
 suggesting that the playwright was really not a man of 
 
 Mrs. Pott — ^that " Bacon's vocabnlaty is practically the same 
 as that of the Shakespeare plasms." The assertion is repeated 
 at p. 25. I know no more flagrant instance of the levity of 
 assertion with which the Baconian case is put. Mr. Bompas 
 sticks at nothing. He alleges (p. 39) that " there seems scarcely 
 a sentiment or opinion expressed in the plays which has not 
 its connterpart in the acknowledged works of Bacon." 
 Without blenching, he adopts the monumental nonsense put 
 forth by Mrs. Pott as to there being only three instances before 
 1594 of the salutation " good morrow," " good day," etc. (Upon 
 this particular deliration, see Mr. Crawford's " Bacon-Shakespeare 
 Question " in his Collectanea.) As illustrative of Mr. Bompas's 
 first-hand knowledge may be noted his assertion (p. 51) that 
 Thomas Kyd " is not known to have translated from the Italian." 
 He cannot even have looked into Professor Boas's edition of 
 Kyd's Works. I am told, however, that he is an esteemed 
 exponent of Baconics. 
 
522 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 supremely large vocabulary for his time : the impression 
 set up by a long scrutiny of the concordance is rather one 
 of surprise at the large number of words familiar to 
 educated men which do not appear in it, and the large 
 number which appear only once. Multitudes of them, 
 of course, he must have known ; and it is fairly arguable 
 that for the purposes of a dramatist, the expression of 
 human passions and the narrative of common human 
 actions, there is needed a much narrower range of vocabu- 
 lary than is required for the ratiocinative purposes of 
 such a thinker as Bacon. This granted; the resulting 
 critical conclusion is that the kind of aesthetic effect 
 produced by Shakespeare is one of the inspired use of an 
 ordinarily fecund writer's vocabulary, and not, as the 
 idolaters have assumed, one of abnormal command of 
 variety of terms. True, he has always an abundant 
 diction ; and in some plays, as Troilus, he resorts so 
 much to literate terms as to convey an impression of 
 special largeness of vocabulary. But the literate diction 
 of Troilus, however it is to be accounted for, is not that 
 of his purest poetry or his intensest feeling. His most 
 thrilling effects are commonly produced by the exquisite 
 collocation and cadenced flow of familiar words. Such 
 lines as : 
 
 Finish, good lady, the bright day is done ; 
 And we are for the dark. 
 
 Unarm, Eros : the long day's work is done. 
 
 Revisit 'st thus the glimpses of the moon. 
 
 Nothing of him that doth fade 
 But doth suffer a sea change 
 Into something rich and strange. 
 
 The prophetic soul 
 Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. 
 
 And Beauty making beautiful old rhyme. 
 
 Daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty. 
 
VOCABULARIES 523 
 
 Give me my robe, put on my crown : I have 
 
 Immortal longings in me : now no more 
 
 The juice of Eg3^t's grape shall moist this lip. 
 
 As she would take another Antony 
 In her strong toil of grace. 
 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player. 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
 And then is heard no more. 
 
 Spirits are not finely touched 
 But to fine issues. 
 
 In thrilling region of thick-ribbdd ice. 
 
 We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep 
 
 these and a hundred more immortal touches of rhythmic 
 diction are not the yields of a great vocabulary : they 
 are the masterstrokes of a poet working in the eternal 
 and universal stuff of human feeling and passion, dis- 
 tilling their quintessences by his own alchemy. To 
 assume that they were possible only or specially to a 
 man of learning, a "courtier," a trained lawyer, a 
 methodically practised reasoner, is an exorbitance of 
 misconception that remains revolting alike to the literary 
 sense and to common sense after any amount of reflection. 
 Sidney the courtier. Da vies the lawyer and the dialectician 
 in verse, have no such jewels as these. And if there 
 were any general conclusion rightly to be drawn either 
 a friori or a posteriori it would be tluit those starry points 
 of song could not be the creation of the learned lawyer 
 and would-be renovator of the sciences, great as was his 
 literary gift in his own large province. Not in all litera- 
 ture is there a known instance of a literary prodigy that 
 could be remotely compared with such a miracle as the 
 production of the Novum Organum and Lear, the New 
 Atlantis and Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet 
 and the essay on Love, by the same man, even if we 
 consider them solely as forms of literary output, without 
 
524 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 reference to the intellectual predilections involved. 
 Lawyers have written on philosophy ; men of science 
 have penned verse ; and historians have produced poetic 
 dramas ; but where in the whole roll of human achieve- 
 ment is there such a confounding combination of such 
 utterly disparate forms of gift for mere utterance as 
 would be the writing of Hamlet and the De Augmentis, 
 Macbeth and the Natural History, Henry IV and 
 the History of King Henry the Seventh by the 
 same pen in the same period ? 
 
 Those who are not repelled by the " fierce impossi- 
 bility " of such a conjuncture have thus far had set 
 before them a number of the concrete proofs that it did 
 not take place. But the proofs are not even yet all 
 specified. After dealing with the claims founded on 
 false assumptions, we have considered the rebutting 
 evidence of style and vocabxilary. It remains to consider 
 that which is furnished by (i) a contrast of the intel- 
 lectual interests obtruded by Bacon's whole work with 
 the whole tone, aim, and content of the Plays, and (2) a 
 notation of the circumstantial facts of the history of the 
 Plays and the personal positions of the two men. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS OF 
 SHAKESPEARE AND BACON 
 
 IF we survey the written life's work of Bacon, we find 
 it broadly dividing into three main masses, of 
 which one intellectually if not quantitatively out- 
 bulks the others. As a lawyer, he did a certain 
 amount of purely professional writing, marked by the 
 customary composure and ease of his style. To a lay- 
 man's eye these papers indicate plenty of legal learning ; 
 and indeed, whatever Coke might say, Bacon's competence 
 as a lawyer and a judge was never doubted among his 
 unprejudiced contemporaries. But Bacon, be it observed, 
 does not lard with law his writings on other subjects,^ as 
 the Baconians make him out to have done in the Pla3rs — 
 a circumstance which alone might have served to guard 
 careful readers against the notion that the law tags in 
 the Plays come from his pen. 
 
 Much more keenly was he interested in the poUtical 
 problems which pressed upon the governments of Eliza- 
 beth and James ; and to these he devoted an amount of 
 eatnest and sagacious thought which makes his political 
 writings still the most interesting of their kind in his 
 period. Only in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, in 
 that age, is there any such union of thought and style, 
 insight and power of speech ; and Hooker, in the less 
 rational world of the church, is not more bent than Bacon 
 on the right guidance of contemporary life. But the 
 
 * The express claim of Mr. G. C. Bompas is that of 250 law 
 terms occurring in the Plays " 200 are treated with more or less 
 fuhiess in Bacon's law tracts." (The Problem of (he Shakespeare 
 Plays, 1902, p. 29.) 
 
526 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 greatest of all Bacon's preoccupations is that to which he 
 gave the bulk of his published matter — the comprehensive 
 revision and reconstruction of scientij&c lore of all kinds, 
 naturahst and humanist. 
 
 To this, his master-purpose, he directed the Advance- 
 ment OF Learning (expanding it from two books in 
 English into seven in Latin), the Novum Organum, and 
 the series of short treatises which lead up to and anticipate 
 that ; striving further to accumulate scientific material 
 in the Natural History, the Historia Ventorum, the 
 HiSTORiA ViT^ ET MoRTis, and the Historia Densi et 
 Rari. The Wisdom of the Ancients, written in Latin 
 like the Novum Organum, was penned to the same 
 general end of refonning men's habits of thought ; and 
 The New Atlantis heads in the like direction. All are 
 parts of a high-aiming and high-hoping propaganda, im- 
 pelled by a devouring aspiration, which overrode all the 
 engrossing preoccupations of professional and pohtical 
 life. His few excursions into pure beUes lettres, apart from 
 the Essays, are but passing diversions : the Conference 
 OF Pleasure, the version of a few of the Psalms, tell of 
 small predilection to pure literature for literature's sake. 
 Of the Essays and the History of Henry the Seventh 
 alone among his larger undertakings could it be said that 
 they are in any large measure outside the social and 
 philosophical purposes which mainly swayed their author ; 
 and even these, partly written as they were with an eye 
 to getting an audience for the other works, are so far 
 concurrents. Wide as it is, then, the mental outlook of 
 Bacon has one prevailing bent. Persistently he strove 
 and hoped to lead the mind of his time in matters of 
 natural science by better paths than those it appeared to 
 him to be treading. Of the merits and demerits of his 
 lead, we are not here concerned to speak : the matter in 
 hand is the nature of his intellectual ambition. The fact 
 stands out so clearly that no one has ever questioned it 
 save by way of those imputations of sheer self-seeking 
 
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS 527 
 
 which still to some extent darken critical counsel concern- 
 ing Bacon ; and for our purpose these are irrelevant. 
 Even if we should subscribe to the sophism that Bacon's 
 intellectual ambition was whoUy of a piece with that of a 
 Cecil or an Essex— a purely self-regarding impulse— the 
 fact would still emerge that his master passion was one 
 of edification, of propaganda, of persuasion. And the full 
 perversity of the theory which identifies him with the 
 author of the Shakespearean plays is to be realised only 
 when we reflect on the absolute obstacle to the over- 
 powering preoccupation of his avowed intellectual life 
 that would be involved in the devotion of an incalcvilable 
 amount of its space and energy to the production of the 
 dramas in question. 
 
 Unless they deny it; the Baconians must be presumed 
 to see that Bacon throughout the mass of his avowed 
 writings has an end in view ; that he is profoundly con- 
 cerned to influence opinion. Yet they impute to him the 
 deliberate assumption of the time-devouring task of 
 writing dozens of stage plays, in not one of which are his 
 intellectual purposes so much as hinted at.* They con- 
 ceive him writing Love's Labour's Lost and the Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream and the Comedy of Errors and 
 Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece at one end 
 of the task, and The Tempest and Cymbeline and 
 Henry VIII and the Winter's Tale at the other, with 
 all his life's ambition still unfulfilled ; with the sciences 
 all in his opinion still misdirected ; with the " idols " of 
 the tribe and the cave, the theatre and the market-place, 
 all along in command of the general allegiance. Possessed 
 as he was by the vision of a world to reform, both on the 
 intellectual and on the political side, we are to conceive 
 
 * Mr. Harold Bayley, in his Baconian mood {The Shakespeare 
 Symphony, 1906, p. 356). pictures Bacon as penning plays, not 
 only the Shakespearean but others, in order to forward " the New 
 Philosophy." Neither he nor any one else has pointed to one clear 
 enunciation in the Plays of one of Bacon's leading ideas. Dr. 
 Theobald's theses on that head are idle. 
 
528 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 him bending his powers year after year to the entertain- 
 ment of the audiences at the Globe Theatre. 
 
 As the Baconians cannot see the incredibihty of this in 
 the mass, it behoves us to indicate it in some detail. To 
 give the slightest primary plausibiHty to their thesis on 
 this side they must assume one of two contrary positions 
 which they may be defied to defend. Either they must 
 stand to the old German theorem of some profound 
 didactic purpose that inspires all the Plays, from Titus 
 Andronicus to Pericles, thus crediting the dramatist 
 with a morahsing aim in writing aUke the FalstafE scenes 
 and the First Part of Henry VI and All's Well that 
 Ends Well— an extravagance of fable which almost 
 competes with the Baconian theory itself — or they must 
 make the assumption that Bacon wrote the Plays in order 
 to get away mentally from aU his didactic ideals. As the 
 didactic ideals of his works are specific and reiterated, 
 while any implied in the plays are simply those of normal 
 and accepted ethics, they can have no refuge save in the 
 second alternative. They must imagine Bacon striving 
 to drown his scientific cares in drama as other men seek 
 to drown pecuniary cares in drink. Whatever they may 
 say about his doctrine of dramatic teaching in the 
 Advancement of Learning, they can find no trace in 
 the plays of any attempt to fxulher the aims of that 
 treatise. They must picture Bacon as a literary Jelyll- 
 and-Hyde, alternately absorbed in an immense pldlosophic 
 ambition and in a nerve-wearing career of theatrical 
 craftsmanship from which every thought of Baconian 
 propaganda was expelled. 
 
 At times, by way of proving that the same hand wrote 
 Hamlet and the Novum Organum, they dwell on such 
 coincidences as Hamlet's phrase about the stars being 
 fire and the handling of that very thesis in several of 
 Bacon's writings. There is here a real point of coincident 
 interest or contact ; as again in the speech of Polixenes 
 to Perdita about the art that adds to nature being an art 
 
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS 529 
 
 that nature makes.i Those two topics, and some others, 
 had undoubtedly occupied, in however different degrees, 
 the thought of both writers. But on the theory that the 
 two were one, why have we only these few coincidences 
 of subject-matter ? If it were worth Bacon's while to 
 raise cUdactically the issue of Art versus Nature in The 
 Winter's Tale, why should he restrict himself to a single 
 brief discussion of that and a bare mention of the problem 
 about the physics of the stars in Hamlet ? Were these 
 alike uncontrollable aberrations from the policy pursued 
 (on the Baconian theory) throughout all the other plays, 
 of saying nothing whatever about the main aims to which 
 Bacon devoted the naass of his signed writing ? And was 
 it by way of self-mortification that the pubUcist, who in 
 his publications quotes and discusses Aristotle over a 
 hundred times, makes but two jejune allusions to him in 
 the Plays ? If so, why even these two, seeing that Plato; 
 quoted or criticised over fifty times in Bacon's prose, is 
 never named in the Plays at all ? 
 
 Even to a Baconian there must surely be something 
 bafiSing in the contrariness which excludes from the Plays 
 all mention of Copernicus, about whose theory Bacon 
 was so much concerned, and whose doctrine was so 
 interesting a topic for so many Elizabethans. To a 
 student, the crudely conventional and ignorant references 
 to Machiavelli in .1 and 3 Henry VI are no matter for 
 surprise, the passages being so plainly non-Shakespearean ; 
 but to the Baconian, for whom £dl " Shakespeare " is 
 Bacon, it must at times, one thinks, seem odd that a 
 writer who in his prose makes so many intelligent allusions 
 to Machiavelli should write of him so obtusely in blank 
 verse. The playwright of the Baconians is a mere miracle 
 
 1 In Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. pp. 203-211, I have 
 traced the development and vacillation of Bacon's thought on this 
 problem, and noted its final divergence from Shakespeare's. It 
 may well be that both writers had talked on the theme with Ben 
 Jonson, the Mend of both. 
 
 2L 
 
530 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of self-renunciation. He will not allow himself a word 
 in promotion of his dearest scheme. In the Essays and 
 in his State Papers concerning Ireland he is deeply con- 
 cerned about " plantations " : in all the Plays the word 
 occurs but once, in the line : 
 
 Had I plantation of this isle, my lord. 
 
 Tempest. II, i, 143. 
 
 In his traceable literary life; Bacon stands confessed a 
 lover of Virgil, quoting him at least fifty times. In the 
 Plays, there are barely three palpable Virgilian echoes, 
 and these of the most hackneyed kind, made in EngUsh ; 
 while there are many, also in English, from Ovid, for 
 whom the prose-writing Bacon shows much less Uldng. 
 But passing strange above all this, on the Baconian 
 theory, is the fact that the essayist and propagandist who 
 was so concerned about atheism and theology never 
 mentions either word in the Plays i that he who in so 
 many philosophical writings speaks of "the light of 
 nature " should never use the phrase in his alleged work 
 in drama ; and that; after devoting so many critical 
 pages to philosophy, he there uses the term "philo- 
 sophical " only once, in pure levity ! 
 
 It is all too blankly unplausible for more detailed 
 discussion. The Plays are, in a word, the composition of 
 a man not at all preoccupied with problems of scientific 
 reform, though in one passage he disposes unanswerably, 
 once for all, of an old theoretic confusion over which 
 Bacon wavered, seeing now clearly and now cloudily. 
 The author of The Tempest and The Winter's Tale 
 had indeed brooded intensely over some of the great 
 riddles of existence, but he was not the schemer of a " New 
 Instauration " of the sciences ; and as little did he aspire 
 to reconstruct the life of Ireland. He was in no wise 
 zealous either to vindicate dogmatic orthodoxy or to 
 persuade dogmatists to change their hearts and study 
 Nature with open minds : it is with a smile that tp make§, 
 
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS 531 
 
 Perdita propound their Polynesian principles. Echoing 
 Montaigne, he will put in the mouth of a person in 
 a drama a proposition flouting naturalist speculation; 
 which Bacon would have repugned with emphzisis ; yet 
 he is pervadingly non-rehgious in his outlook. He was 
 no fulminator against atheism, no zealous flatterer of 
 King James, no striver against Aristotelian scholasticism. 
 Despite all that has been loosely said of his observation 
 of Nature, he was no watchful student of her processes : 
 hke Bacon, he loved flowers, but not with his botanical 
 bias.^ Of the Latin classics he knew little, else he must 
 have quoted Virgil as lovingly as Bacon does : his Ovid 
 he knew mainly from transla,tion, partly by reminiscence 
 from his school-days. To realise the futility of the pre- 
 tence that the playwright was a good classical scholar, 
 and therefore was Bacon, we have but to turn from the 
 few scraps of Latin which here and there dot the Plays, 
 — chiefly three or four which are not of his making — 
 to the pages of the Advancement and the Essays, where, 
 for many pages together, Latin enters into almost every 
 other sentence, and classical allusion is omnipresent. 
 
 One of the standing theses of the Baconians, not thus 
 far considered in our survey, is that Bacon's proclivity to 
 drama is manifested not oiUy by his share in the planning 
 of the masques at Gray's Irm, but by his allusions to 
 dramatic poetry and the theatre in the Latin version of 
 the Advancement of Learning," and at the close of the 
 sixth book of the expanded treatise.' It would be 
 dif&cult to cite a better proof of Bacon's aloofness from 
 the contemporary theatre. He expressly complains that 
 though " the stage is capable of no small influence both of 
 disciphne and corruption," " Now of corruptions of this 
 
 * Mr. Bayley notes (Shakespeare Symphony, p. 320) that " A 
 knowledge and love of flowers as great as that of Bacon and 
 Shakespeare is exhibited by the minor dramatists," 
 
 ' De Augmenits, ii, 13. 
 
 ' m. G. C. Bompas (Problem of the Shakespeare Plays, 1902, 
 p. 22) puts this passage (vi, 4, end) " in the second book." 
 
532 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 kind we have enough, but the discipline has in our times 
 been plainly neglected." The De Augmentis was 
 published in 1623, the very year of the pubUcation of the 
 Shakespeare Folio. What then is the Baconian position 
 here ? That Bacon meant his sweeping dispraise to apply 
 only to other people's plays, he having for his part been 
 carrying on for twenty years the discipline which he 
 declared to have been " in our times plainly neglected " ? 
 The procedure could be fitly described only in the verna- 
 cular— as " crying stinking fish." If Bacon had taken 
 the pains to write seven-and-thirty plays, he must be 
 supposed to have intended them to be witnessed. Here 
 he is warning all men off. The disparagement of the 
 whole EUzabethan drama can mean only one thing, that 
 it did not at all realise Bacon's ideal of moral propaganda. 
 In his blame he included perforce much if not all of the 
 work of his sworn admirer, Ben Jonson. Would the man 
 who blamed that for lack of moral purpose, and who saw 
 nothing but lack of discipline in Dekker and Webster and 
 Hejnvood, no less than in Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 eulogise in the mass the Plays of Shakespeare ? Bacon; 
 in a word, had not the playgoing temperament. He was 
 all for moral and intellectual improvement, not for spon- 
 taneous Ufe, the pell-mell of poetry and ribaldry, tragedy 
 and farce, that crowded the Elizabethan boards. It does 
 not follow that before his official advancement he had not 
 from time to time seen a play and carried away with him 
 a line or two ; but he was verily no haunter of theatres. 
 The passage at the end of the sixth book is equally a 
 confutation of the Baconian <:laim founded on it . Recom- 
 mending, in his admiration of the Jesuit methods of 
 pedagogy, the teaching of the art of acting in the schools; 
 he pronounces stage-playing {actio theatralis) "a thing 
 indeed, if practised professionally, of low repute ; but, if 
 it be made a part of discipline, ... of excellent use." 
 This is not a recommendation of the theatre : it is a 
 recommendation to avoid it, and to promote the acting 
 
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS 533 
 
 of didactic plays in the schools under pedagogic auspices. 
 And there is on record even a more pronounced expression 
 of Bacon's substantial antipathy to the theatre of his day. 
 When, in 1614, the Thames watermen, led by John 
 Taylor, the Water-Poet, presented their petition to the 
 King to put a stop to the removal of the playhouses from 
 the south to the north side of the river, a change which; 
 they said, took away half their livehhood, it was referred 
 by James to his " Commissioners for Suits," who then 
 included Sir Francis Bacon. The King's Players (Shake- 
 speare's company) put in a counter petition. But, says 
 Taylor, 
 
 our extremitie? and cause being judiciously pondered by the 
 Honourable and Woishipfull Conunissioners, Sir Francis Bacon 
 very worthily said that so farre forth as the Publike weale was to 
 be regarded before pastimes, or a serviceable decaying multitude 
 before a handful of particular men, or profit before pleasure, so 
 far was our suite to be preferred before theirs. 
 
 Before any decision was come to, the Commission was 
 dissolved, and the matter dropped, poor Taylor being in 
 due course accused by his fellow watermen of taking bribes 
 from the players to let the suit fall.^ 
 
 The Baconians, no doubt, are honestly ignorant of the 
 existence of this record ; and now that it is cited they 
 will probably seek to explain it away. Bacon had 
 declared against the cause of the very company of players 
 who, according to the Baconians, were acting his plays ; 
 disparaging their work as " pastime," even as he later 
 disparaged the theatre in general as devoid of the " dis- 
 cipline " he cared about. We shall be told, doubtless, 
 that he had to conceal his connection with the players — 
 that coimection which, according to the same theorists; 
 was actually known all the while to Ben Jonson and naany 
 others 1 Thus does the Baconian theory proceed from 
 inconsequence to inconsequence. 
 
 » The True Cause of the Watermen's Suit concerning Players, in 
 Taylor's Workes. 1630, Section Second, pp. 172-3- 
 
534 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 The rational reader, following all Bacon's pronounce- 
 ments on dramatic and theatrical matters, can see that 
 they consist with each other, and tell of a general dis- 
 satisfaction with what is being done. Dramatic Poesy he 
 commended as a vehicle for moral instruction ; and 
 perhaps Ferrex and Porrex might have satisfied him 
 as a duly didactic performance. The plays he wanted to 
 be performed in the schools could not conceivably be 
 those which the Baconians declare him to have written. 
 In the matter of the watermen's petition he took up his 
 usual protectionist attitude. The watermen were losing 
 much of the custom by which they lived, and he was 
 perfectly willing to meet their wishes; on the professed 
 principle of putting "profit before pastime," when in 
 point of fact the profit in question depended solely on the 
 continuance of the pastime in a particular place. If 
 Bacon disapproved of the change, his " tool " Shake- 
 speare and the rest of the company were flouting the 
 wishes of their own plajrwright ; and he in turn, by seek- 
 ing to thwart them, was, on the Baconian hypothesis, 
 provoking them to reveal his secret. The rational and 
 natural reading of the facts yields a perfectly intelligible 
 situation : the Baconian theory reduces it, as usual, to 
 nightmare. Yet I doubt not that some Baconians will 
 promptly accuse their idol of gross hypocrisy in order to 
 maintain their theory of his authorship. 
 
 But perhaps the wildest inconsequence of all in the 
 Baconian case is its utter disregard of the fact, witnessed- 
 to alike by the precept and the practice of Bacon, that he 
 was latterly either so convinced of the coming " bank- 
 ruptcy " of the modem languages as to be moved to put 
 forth all his serious didactic matter in Latin, or anxious 
 enough for foreign appreciation to forego much of the 
 audience he might have secured at home by writing in his 
 mother tongue. The Baconians would Iwive us believe 
 that the Bacon who composed even the Wisdom of the 
 Ancients in Latin; rather than spend less time in putting 
 
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS 535 
 
 it forth in English, determinedly gave himself to the 
 writing of thousands of pages of plays in English, mostly 
 in verse, with a great deal of " comic relief " in pilose, 
 much of it to be spoken by stage clowns. And, as if this 
 were not enough in mass, they would have him be author 
 of a play (Richard II) the reproduction of which ^ in 
 1601 at the request of the fellow conspirators of Essex, 
 on the day before his rising, brought upon the theatre the 
 sharp displeasure of the Government, and a veto on 
 further performance — this at a time when Bacon was 
 compelled by his official position to repudiate all share in 
 his former patron's proceedings (as he had long done), 
 and was on the eve of being called upon to prosecute the 
 rebels, as law officer of the crown. Do the Baconians, 
 one wonders, suppose that Bacon was playing fast and 
 loose, running with the hare and hunting with the 
 hounds ? If so, they outgo his enemies in imputation 
 against him. 
 
 It is all of a piece with the perversity that, without 
 blenching, ascribes to Bacon the authorship of the Sonnets, 
 wherein the poet avows his " rude ignorance," as in the 
 dedication of the Lucrece he bad spoken of his " un- 
 tutored lines " ; avows that he is one whose " name 
 receives a brand," so that 
 
 Almost thence my nature is subdued 
 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand ; • 
 
 making the actor's confession : 
 
 . It is most true, I have gone here and there. 
 And made myself a motley to the view. 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. 
 Made old oflEences of affections new ; » 
 
 1 Messrs. Clark and Wright in their Clarendon Press ed. of 
 Richard 1 1 say" it is certain that this was not Shakespeare's play." 
 I know not whence they derived their certainty. Few other 
 scholars share it. Had Shakespeare's company two plays on 
 Richard II ? 
 
 * Sonnet iii. • Sonnet no. 
 
536 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 and telling of an unhappy love-affair of which there is no 
 faintest trace or hint in Bacon's biography. 
 
 At every turn in the investigation, the monstrosity of 
 the whole theorem becomes more amazing, the incre- 
 dibiUty more mountainous. The form which it has 
 finally taken— the proposition that Bacon, writing the 
 Plays during a period of twenty years, chose as his literary 
 representative a " clown " who could not even sign his 
 name (for to this complexion the argument has come), 
 contriving that a secret thus alleged to be necessarily 
 known to a whole theatrical company, and inferrible by 
 all Shakespeare's fellow dramatists, should be absolutely 
 withheld from public or of&cial knowledge ; and yet all 
 the while plaiming endless crazy " ciphers " which would 
 reveal not only that " secret " but a hundred others to a 
 remote posterity in the event of that cipher being guessed 
 at — ^the total allegation is a critical chimera which 
 staggers judgment and beggars comment. 
 
 Yet it will go on being propounded, by men who make 
 no attempt to rebut confutations, heaping farce on 
 fallacy, facing no difficulty, ignoring mountains of dis- 
 proof. Again we can foresee the form of answer which 
 such partisans will make to the argument of this chapter. 
 They will revert for the nonce to one of the terms of Mr. 
 William Theobald's self-contradiction. After claiming 
 that Bacon " reveals " himself in the plays by duplica- 
 tions of phrase, idea, and word, they will now argue that 
 on the contrary he could not put his ideas in the plays 
 because he would thereby " reveal " his identity. Re- 
 turning to the " coincidences," they will again claim to 
 stand on these as revelations. Heads, the Baconian 
 wins ; tails, the Stratfordian loses. Two mutually 
 exclusive principles are alternately employed to defend 
 one proposition ; and a semblance of reasoning serves to 
 accredit two theses which contrarily flout reason. K 
 Bacon had reason to fear being known to be a plajrwright; 
 why in the name of common sense, should he have put 
 
INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS 537 
 
 himself in jeopardy by adapting or writing or collaborating 
 in thirty-seven plays in collusion with a fraudulent actor, 
 whose secret is alleged to have been actually divined by 
 his literary contemporaries, must, and in the terms of 
 the case, have been known to his colleagues ? If Bacon 
 desired to keep secret his authorship, why, in the name of 
 sanity, should he sow the bulk of the plays with law 
 phrases which, according to the Baconians, reveal the 
 deepest legal knowledge, when, all the while, he puts no 
 such legal seasoning in his signed works of a non-legal 
 character ? If Bacon dared not turn his plays to any of 
 the purposes of his life, why, in the name of Baconism, 
 did he write them ? And if, finally, he dared not reveal 
 himself, why did he supererogatorily reveal himself to 
 contemporaries as the Baconians, most of the time, allege 
 that he did ? To these questions there is no answer. 
 Stat i>ro ratione voluntas. 
 
 To convince such reasoners, be it plainly said, is not 
 even desirable. But to prevent the recruiting of the army 
 of the deluded by minds yet capable of rational enlighten- 
 ment may be possible ; and to that charitable end it may 
 be well to indicate one more set of facts, singly sufficient 
 to satisfy any reasonable reader, not only that the Plays 
 were the work of a man of the theatre, an " insider " and 
 not an outsider ; but that whatever may have been the 
 measure of occasional collaboration in the Plays from 
 outside, and whatever the amount of adaptation of other 
 men's work in them, the general authorship and the 
 source of adaptation can be vested in no other man than 
 the actor-partner, Shakespeare. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 EXTERNAL AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE : 
 LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 
 
 §1 
 
 THE Baconian hypothesis, it is obvious, arises in 
 a certain tendency to an a priori view of what 
 was likely to have been the preparation, and 
 what was likely to have been the way of Uf e, of 
 the supreme dramatist. All worship presupposes worship- 
 ful characteristics ; and in regard to Uterary genius, more 
 than to any other form of human facvdty, men are prone 
 to associate other forms of excellence with those put in 
 evidence by the writer's work. One result of this pro- 
 pensity, as I have elsewhere remarked, is that nearly 
 every full biography of a great man of letters sets up 
 disappointment. A Southey may gain from biography ; 
 a Shakespeare cannot, simply because hterary admiration 
 has given him every possible advance on credit. We 
 know that Bos well's Life of Johnson, deUghtful as it 
 was to be to later generations, for whom Dr. Johnson 
 was not a dictator in letters and morals, was a shock to 
 many of his admirers in that which received it ; and that 
 Lockhart's perfectly loyal Life of Scott, in respect of 
 its revelations of the great man's financial and other 
 weaknesses, actually set up speculation as to whether the 
 son-in-law wrote with a hostile animus. Milton and 
 Shelley and Keats and Coleridge are similarly disad- 
 vantaged for adoring readers of their verse by the publica- 
 tion of their lives and letters. And so it has been; for 
 men of our idealising age, with the short and simple 
 annals of the greatest of EngUsh dramatic poets. Men 
 
 538 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 539 
 
 not given to the study of the psychology of genius frame 
 [or themselves an unreal conception of its conditions and 
 bases. It is only after a cool comparative study of the 
 lives of the masters of speech and portraiture and song — 
 as Catullus and Poe, Tourgu^nief and Dostoyevsky; 
 Villon and Bums, Goethe and Heine, Carlyle and Ruskin — 
 that we are qualified to check our instinctive expectation 
 by a real knowledge of probabilities. 
 
 Emerson had not done so when he wrote concerning 
 Shakespeare that he " could not marry this man's Ufe to 
 his verse." He had formed an ideal of a supreme 
 intellect, identifying genius for utterance with genius for 
 universal judgment, a commanding power of speech with 
 command over all environment. And Emerson's lead 
 has been followed by those — ^university men and others — 
 unable to conceive how the greatest EngUsh poet can 
 have been a man of short schooling, who gathered what 
 knowledge he had outside of libraries and colleges. They 
 first grossly exaggerate his knowledge under the spell of 
 his art, ascribing to him scholarship and legal and other 
 acquirements which he did not possess : then they call 
 for a man who shall square with their ideal. And so we 
 have the "Baconian" theory and the "anti-Strat- 
 fordian" argument. I propose now to examine the 
 a friori side of these poations, testing it by the relevant 
 considerations; as we have tested all the attempts to 
 reinforce it by literary evidence, beginning with the more 
 concrete. 
 
 §2 
 One of the surprises of the controversy is the readiness 
 vwth which a number of men avowedly incline to accept 
 any hypothesis of the non-Shakespearean authorship of 
 the plays on the score of the strangeness of the actor's 
 apparent indifference to their preservation. The assump- 
 tion is that none of the quartos printed in Shakespeare's 
 lifetime was authorised ; and that the actor's abstention 
 
540 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 from issuing a collected edition implies an indifference 
 which in his case would be unintelligible. On the other 
 hand, the issue of the Folio in 1623 can by such reasoners 
 be without misgiving set down to Bacon, though the 
 actor-partners who caused it to be published ascribe the 
 plays to Shakespeare in the most unqualified terms, as 
 does Ben Jonson in his prefixed poem. This ascription, 
 declared to be dehberately false, is regarded as a trifle 
 that puts no difficulty in the way of the Baconian theory ; 
 while the actor's mere delay in publishing his plays, to 
 which he had been adding up to and even after the 
 time of his retirement (presumably in broken health), is 
 regarded as an inexpHcable phenomenon, on the assump- 
 tion of his authorship. 
 
 A hundred and fifty years ago. Farmer put the rational 
 explanation that the plays were not Shakespeare's to 
 publish ; that they belonged to the theatre-partnership ; 
 I and that it was not to its interest to print plays which 
 continued to draw audiences. This reasonable suggestion 
 might very well serve to allay any reasonable wonder. 
 But even in the eighteenth century it was urged that all 
 the quarto issues could not plausibly be held to have been 
 piratical ; and in the latest and most competent discussion 
 of the problem, Mr. A. W. Pollard's Shakespeare Folios 
 AND Quartos (1909), this contention is pressed to good 
 purpose. The common-sense view of the case is that, 
 seeing the piratical pubHcation of plays — whether from 
 stenographers' notes or from stolen manuscripts — ^was 
 clearly a source of profit, the actors who owned plays 
 would naturally pubUsh them when they ceased to 
 " draw," or when for any reason the theatres were closed. 
 This is the reasonable explanation of the uncommonly 
 abimdant pubhcation of plays in i593-94» when the 
 theatres were closed for a spell of eight months on account 
 of the plague ; and again in 1600; when the number of 
 the licensed theatres was reduced to two, and their 
 performances to two per week, with a close time for Lent. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 541 
 
 In each of the two short periods specified, the number of 
 plays entered in the Stationers' Register rises to twenty- 
 eight ; whereas in the eight years 1585-92 only nine 
 plays were entered, and in the years 1596-99 (after 
 January 1596) only nine more.^ 
 
 Further, we find that with the single exception of 
 Love's Labour's Lost, all the quartos which are found 
 to have " good " texts, or to have been used in preparing 
 the FoUo, were duly entered in the Register before being 
 printed ; whereas all the quartos with " bad " texts were 
 either not entered prior to pubUcation or entered in a 
 suspicious fashion, and printed by a dubious printer. 
 There thus arises the inference that the " good " quartos 
 had been printed by authority. To this exposition 
 Mr. Pollard adds a convincing demonstration that certain 
 of the " 1600 " and other quartos were really reprints of 
 1619, and may conceivably have formed part of an 
 intended complete issue of the plays in separate quartos. 
 With, this very interesting matter, however, we are not 
 here concerned. It suf&ces for us that — whether it was 
 he or the partnership that suggested the genuine issues of 
 the quartos — Shakespeare is shown not to have been so 
 indifferent to the preservation of his plays as has com- 
 monly been supposed, and was thus no such prodigy of 
 literary unconcern as to justify any resort to a desperate 
 search for another author, who, moreover, in the terms of 
 the case, showed no more anxiety than he did. 
 
 Still, there can be no pretence that Shakespeare did 
 show anxiety to have his plays properly printed. Some 
 of the authorised quartos seem to have been printed 
 either to suppress piracies or to prevent them. They 
 were not supervised by Shakespeare. It is clear that he 
 did not properly — ^if at all — read the proofs even of the 
 " good " quartos ; and if one might hazard a speculation 
 on that head, it would be that he, who so constantly 
 outran the clock in his plot construction, and wrote with 
 1 Polleird, as cited, pp. 9-10. 
 
542 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 an ease of composition which it annoyed Ben Jonson to 
 hear of, was not likely to be a good proof reader if he 
 tried. Further, it is well that we should make the effort 
 to conceive that the supreme master of dramatic objec- 
 tivity; whose highest gift lay precisely in his power of 
 projecting himself into other personaUties; may not have 
 been much exercised to see his plays in print. Signally 
 spontaneous in his first composition, he was as ready as 
 other men to see need for revision later ; better than any 
 one, he. knew the weakness of the ahen work he had taken 
 over ; and he may well have felt that a mere printing of 
 all the plays as they had left his hand would give him 
 more vexation than pleasxire. He could hardly have 
 foreseen that an adoring posterity would come to read 
 with reverence, as his, all the bombast and platitude and 
 bad versification by other men, which he had left in the 
 stage versions ; and if he could have foreseen it, he might 
 fitiy be credited with disreUsh for such uncritical worship. 
 On the other hand, it is surely not inconceivable that he 
 may have scrupled to claim, in the perpetuity of print, 
 over his name, the credit for a quantity of invention by 
 other men to which he may have been modest enough to 
 attach some importance. On the one hand, he had the 
 choice of the toil of rewriting all that inferior work at a 
 time of faiUng health ; on the other hand he had the 
 choice of pubUshing all that composite work, of so much 
 of which he of all men best knew the poverty, with 
 elaborate explanations of its literary history, teUing how 
 -this scene was mainly Greene's or Marlowe's ; and that 
 other mainly his own rewriting of their or Peele's verse : 
 how in this case he had elected to rewrite an entire play 
 (as Lear) and how in another (as Hamlet) he had 
 continuously recast, yet retained some littie of, the old 
 material. What should move him to either of these 
 burdensome courses ? We are here facing a problem 
 never gUmpsed by the Baconians ; but one which Mr. 
 Greenwood is both able and bound to face, though he has 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 543 
 
 not considered it in his book, which runs so much to the 
 uncritical and unprofitable endorsation of Lord Campbell 
 and the classicists. 
 
 And it is a problem constantly ignored by those who 
 dilate on the " strangeness " of Shakespeare's unconcern. 
 If any one accustomed to stand at that point of view will 
 reflect that certainly in much, and probably in most, of 
 Shakespeare's ostensible work there is old matter either 
 worked over or simply retained, or matter actually 
 supplied by collaborators, he will reaUse that for Shake- 
 speare to publish all his Plays as his works would have 
 been a very different thing from, the undertaking to that 
 effect by Ben Jonson. Shakespeare had in his youth 
 been railed at by Greene, the dying playwright, for 
 ^king out his and others' handiwork ; and a friend of 
 Greene's had later asserted openly that men who had 
 eclipsed Greene's fame in comedy had stolen his plumes, 
 challenging them to deny it. Supposing — as we so well 
 may — that several of Shakespeare's comedies were recasts 
 of Greene's originals, and recognising as we must that a 
 number of the history-plays and tragedies were un- 
 doubtedly either revisions or recasts of other men's work, 
 we must surely reaUse that for a man of moderately 
 sensitive literary conscience — such as the great master 
 presumably was — it was not possible to issue the plays 
 as his own work in the fashion in which the partners did 
 it after his death. To buy and adapt and revise and 
 recast for the theatre was both permissible and customary ; 
 and as a play had to have a responsible author for all 
 purposes, he had no need to scruple over being named as 
 the author of the acting plays in which his own work was 
 incomparably the best, where he had done any recasting. 
 Assiuredly he wrote " for gain, not glory," in the first 
 instance ; though genius irresistibly had the casting vote. 
 After the two " first-fruit " poems he prepared nothing 
 for the press, definitely electing to be a writer for the 
 stage. To leave his composite plays to the chances of the 
 
544 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 stage and the guardianship of his partners was really as 
 congruous a course on his part as some have thought it 
 incongruous. 
 
 And if we make a further effort in the way of compara- 
 tive criticism we may reaUse that, even apart from the 
 fact that the fathering of the plays in print would have 
 made him permanently responsible for a quantity of 
 matter which not only was not his but was in every way 
 inferior to his, there is a further consideration which 
 should at least appeal to those theorists whom I am now 
 answering. To publish one's own plays in that day was 
 in a manner to acknowledge that they had no very sure 
 future on the stage.^ A feeUng of this kind might fairly 
 have been credited, in the name of modesty, to Ben 
 Jonson, who in 1616 published his collected plays and 
 poems, in folio, as his " Works," and thereby incurred 
 much derision for his vanity. No plajrwright had ever 
 done it before, as indeed no other playwright well could. 
 Jonson had doubtless to receive many owners' permis- 
 sions, which he would get the more easily because so many 
 of his plays bad no abiding attraction on the boards. 
 After all, if Shakespeare in his latter years — when the 
 competition of new men hke Beaumont and Fletcher 
 moved him to compare with them in the matter of 
 elaborate plot-construction, as in Cymbeline and The 
 Winter's Tale* — were concerned rather to hope for 
 continued vogue in the theatre than to fall back on the 
 solace of sales among the reading public, it would really 
 have been a disposition on his part sufficiently human to 
 appeal to those who profess to find it incredible that such 
 an author should have "left his works to chance." 
 Pubhcation would have meant for him not so much 
 Success as withdrawal ; and we are really not entitled to 
 
 1 Or else to cheat the theatre, as Heywood implies that some 
 playwrights did. 
 
 * Compare on this, Mr. Barrett Wendell's William Shake- 
 speare, 1894. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 545 
 
 suppose that when he retired to Stratford he thought 
 himself played out as a dramatist. 
 
 But now, supposing this line of reasoning to be still 
 resisted by the " anti-Stratfordians," what is to be said 
 of the Baconian theory in the same connection? It 
 simply disappears. The proposition that Bacon did 
 cause the Plays to be published collectively in 1623, 
 without any supervision of the press, with all their 
 imperfections and their alloy on their heads, in order to 
 preserve his work for posterity, breaks down instantly on 
 confrontation with the typographical facts. The Folio 
 text, though printed from authorised quartos and from 
 theatre manuscripts, abounds in the most bafiling misprints 
 and confusions, which no author could have passed, 
 and which are not to be paralleled in any book of icon's. 
 And, having regard to the fortuitous late inclusion of 
 Troilus, and the omission of Pericles, it is inconceivable 
 that the responsible author had any hand in the business. 
 All the while, upon the very argument with which we are 
 dealing, Bacon must be held to have shown just such 
 disregard for his literary progeny as Shakespeare is said 
 to have done ; for Bacon, in the terms of the theory, 
 allowed his plays to Ue uncollected or unpubUshed till 
 1623, and set himself to issue them only after his fall had 
 given him new and utterly unexpected leisure. If it be 
 argued that up till then he had delayed the matter for 
 lack of leisure, it follows that but for his ruin he might 
 never have issued them at aU. Thus the argument from 
 " strange indifference '' recoils upon and destroys the 
 Baconian case. 
 
 §3 
 
 But this is only the beginning of the circumstantial 
 exposure of the insanity of the Baconian theory. 
 
 It has evidently never occurred to the Baconians to 
 wonder why the philosopher-playwright of their fantasy so 
 strictly bent himself, not to any philosophic plan or any 
 
 2M 
 
546 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 exposition of his own intellectual ainas, but to the simple 
 commercial needs of a going theatre, on lines dictated by 
 the theatrical circumstances. Even on the most conser- 
 vative view, the Plays are, as we have said, largely 
 adaptations or reconstructions of previous plays. King 
 John and Henry V and the Henry VI group and 
 Richard III are certainly based on previous plays ; as 
 are Hamlet, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for 
 Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, and probably 
 Othello and The Merchant of Venice. Macbeth, 
 Troilus, Pericles, Timon, and Henry VIII, are all 
 admittedly either reconstructions of previous plays or 
 works of collaboration ; ^ and a similar thesis might be 
 put as to the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, 
 The Two Gentlemen, and All's Well. Richard II 
 and Julius C^sar both raise problems of derivation. As 
 to Titus Andronicus, apart from the Germans and a 
 few Enghsh critics, even those who suppose Shakespeare 
 to have had some hand in the play limit his share narrowly, 
 recognising that there was certainly a previous play on 
 the subject. All these critical data, at which the 
 Baconians hardly ever glance, are part of the problem for 
 real students. 
 
 Now, the facts in question go as naturally with Shake- 
 speare's authorship as they are irreconcilable with Bacon's. 
 The actor-partner dealt with old plays as an actor- 
 partner would. He supphed his company on business- 
 like hnes, revising and recasting plays which had actually 
 been found to attract the public, and making new 
 experiments from time to time. But the Baconian theory 
 invites us to contemplate Bacon as habitually arranging 
 with the theatre people, during a period of twenty years, 
 for adaptations, adjustments, revisions, expansions, and 
 reconstructions of plays previously on the boards — ^nay, 
 as collaborating from time to time with other dramatists 
 
 * In Macbeth, the non-Shakespearean element is small, but it is 
 unmistakable. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 547 
 
 — and all the while counting on having his secret kept by all 
 concerned. I believe that any one who simply takes a 
 little pains to realise what a state of things is thus posited 
 will need no further persuasion to dismiss the Baconian 
 theory — though a sufficiency of confutation on other lines 
 has, I hope, been suppHed in the foregoing chapters. And 
 to the unknown lawyer of Mr* Greenwood's nugatory 
 hypothesis, the " busy man " writing plays and poems 
 during a Ufetime under the name of an actor, never dis- 
 closing his identity, the concrete recognition of the 
 situation involved is no less fatal. 
 
 Incongruities of detail as between the literary facts and 
 their theory are acknowledged by some Baconians. Even 
 Dr. Theobald admits that the contrast between the 
 handling of love in the Plays and that in the Essay Of 
 Love has staggered many of the faith. He proceeds to 
 resolve it by arguing that Bacon in the different cases had 
 different objects in view ; that the Essay is a dehberately 
 objective and as-it-were scientific study ; whereas in the 
 Plaj^ love is naturally handled as the great force it is in 
 human life ; though even there. Dr. Theobald contends, 
 love is always " subordinate." I leave it to the reader 
 to pronounce for himself on this precious philosopheme. 
 Thus far I have been careful to meet every concrete 
 Baconian argument with a concrete rebuttal ; but when 
 it comes to the aesthetic appraisement of the total Uterary 
 and psychic content of the P|ays and the Works, one 
 may, in passing, fitly meet Baconian asseveration with 
 flat counter-claim. Ajid I submit to the reader who has 
 an aesthetic sense, that the kind of feeling or temperament 
 and the kind of literary faculty underlying the Plays on 
 the one hand and the Works on the other, are about as 
 different as those of Burns and Hume, or those of Rabelais 
 and Descartes. I have lived, I suppose, as much in the 
 spiritual society of both Shakespeare and Bacon as the 
 majority of men of letters, and I have never for a moment 
 feh it to be otherwise than a ludicrous fantasy to conceive 
 
548 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of Bacon as writing either the FalstafiE scenes in Henry IV 
 or the love scenes in Romeo and Juliet. I would 
 suggest to any reader who claims to have an open mind; 
 a perusal of the scene in which Antony explodes at the 
 sight of Thyreus kissing Cleopatra's hand : 
 
 Approach there ! Ah, you kite ! Now. gods and devils. 
 
 Authority melts from me :' of late, when I cried " Ho ! " 
 
 Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth 
 
 And cry. " Your will ? " 
 
 Have you no ears ? I am Antony yet ! 
 
 Enter Attendants. 
 Take hence this Jack, and whip him. 
 
 Eno. (Aside.) 'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp 
 Than with an old one dying. 
 
 Ant. Moon and Stars ! 
 
 Whip him ! 
 
 and I would then invite him to say whether he can 
 conceive Bacon writing it. One can go vaguely through 
 some conceptual process of imagining Bacon composing 
 one of the " philosophical " passages in the plays, where 
 his thought — ^versification apart — could chime with the 
 author's ; but to associate him with the lightning flash of 
 fiuy which Shakespeare can lend to Antony or Coriolanus, 
 Othello or Cleopatra, is as impossible, to my thinking, 
 for any one who has really lived with Bacon, as to imagine 
 that stately personage drinking with FalstafE or breathing 
 out his soul to Juhet. 
 
 But all this is by the way. Baconians ostensibly either 
 can imagine these things or can make up their minds on 
 the critical problem without reahsing that any such things 
 are implied. Let purely aesthetic convictions then be 
 waived ; and let the theory be tested as it might be by 
 judges competently versed in the hterary subject-matter 
 and morally indifferent to the issue. Let what is a thesis 
 in hterary history be judged in the hght of all historical 
 facts available. Let us simply try to suppose Bacon, 
 gifted with any order of literary faculty we may care to 
 ascribe to him, writing the Shakespeare plays under the 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 549 
 
 known theatrical conditions in the given period; and the 
 hypothesis must be relegated to outer darkness. 
 
 §4 
 Considering it all comprehensively; one realises that 
 what plausibility it can ever have had for ordinarily 
 reasonable men must have arisen, as aforesaid, from some 
 spontaneous difficulty in conceiving that a Stratford lad; 
 who left school in his early or middle teens, married before 
 he was out of them, and soon thereafter fared to London 
 to make a living as an actor and actor-partner, cannot 
 well have been the author of what so many men of so 
 many nations pronounce to be the greatest total achieve- 
 ment in pure literature. Most of this difficulty, I think 
 we have seen, either proceeds upon or takes shape through 
 the common assumption or acceptance of the " orthodox " 
 form of the doctrine that the author of the plays was at 
 once a skilled lawyer and a deep classical scholar. We 
 have seen, I think, how baseless are both of those 
 positions, whether as put by Baconians or by idolatrous 
 Shakespeareans. Much of what is not thus accounted 
 for in the difficulty felt about the writing of the plays by 
 the " Stratford actor " is to be ascribed to the state of 
 mind set up by other idolatrous propositions to the effect 
 that Shakespeare was a profound naturalist, a master of 
 Italian literature, a deep student of medicine and biology, 
 a man of absolutely universal reading, and so forth. 
 Every one of these extravagances can be as decisively 
 disposed of as the " legal " and " classical " theories. 
 Mr. Greenwood, who is professedly not a Baconian, 
 unwittingly puts not merely a stumbUng-block in the 
 way of Baconians; but a weapon in the hands of the 
 " Stratfordians " when, proceeding upon the Quarterly 
 Review article of 1894, on " Shakespeare's Birds and 
 Beasts," he goes about to establish the view that the 
 author of the plays was no observant or studious 
 naturalist. Quite so, we answer. That was part of the 
 
550 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 idolatrous conception of the playwright as the Superman. 
 And the rejection of it, so far from putting any difficulty 
 in the way of the " Stratfordian " view, gives that a new 
 force of rationality. We are not in the least bound to 
 suppose that Shakespeare must have been an accurate 
 natiu"alist because he spent his youth at Stratford. It 
 was no scientific observer who went from Stratford to 
 London to start as play actor and play maker : it was a 
 youth with a genius for the perception and the rhythmic 
 utterance of human feeling. But, above all, it was not 
 the would-be naturalist Bacon who versified a description 
 of a horse from Du Bartas, and one of a bee-hive from 
 Lilly or Elyot or Bartholomew or another ! 
 
 But while thus unintentionally helping Shakespeareans 
 to rectify their conception of Shakespeare, Mr. Greenwood 
 is at pains to demonstrate that somehow the Plays are 
 at once incommensurable with the potentiaUties of the 
 " Stratford actor " and perfectly compatible with the 
 training of a thorough professional lawyer. He scouts 
 the idea that " genius " with scanty schooling could 
 capacitate any human being to write even Venus and 
 Adonis. Agreeing with me that it is absurd to suppose 
 that Shakespeare wrote the poem in his teens and kept 
 it by him unpubUshed till 1593, he proceeds to say 1 that 
 in his judgment " the real absurdity is in the belief that 
 the ' Stratford rustic ' could have written such a poem 
 at all. . . . In Shakespeare's time, and for a youth in 
 Shakespeare's environment, it would have been a miracle 
 of tenfold marvel. The truth is that we do not gather 
 figs from thistles, nor can we make a silk purse out of a 
 sow's ear. Even ' Genius ' cannot do this." 
 
 I confess to being somewhat mystified by these forcible 
 propositions. Mr. Greenwood cannot mean that the being 
 born and bred in a country town constituted a man an 
 irreclaimable " rustic," a moral " thistle." an inteUectual 
 " sow's-ear," even if the town were " squalid " and the 
 » Work cited, p. 64, note. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 551 
 
 man were a son of " illiterate parents," whether in the 
 
 Ehzabethan era or in ours. He must mean; I take it; 
 
 that to make such a youth capable of writing the Plays 
 
 and Poems there would have been required an elaborate 
 
 education ; and that this Shakespeare did not receive^ 
 
 But perplexity remains. What kind of education does 
 
 Mr. Greenwood suppose is required to quahfy a genius 
 
 for writing plays and poems ? What kind or degree of 
 
 culture; for instance, does he ascribe to Sappho; to 
 
 Terence, to Catullus, to Hans Sachs, to Bunyan, to Burns, 
 
 to Keats, to Jane Austen, to Balzac ? 
 
 Being myself responsible for a thesis on " The Economics 
 
 of Genius," to the effect that genius undoubtedly requires 
 
 culture-opportunities for its evocation — that, in short. 
 
 Hand facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obstat 
 Res angnsta domi — 
 
 I am not going to dispute the importance of culture to 
 poets. But I think Mr. Greenwood misconceives the 
 nature of the culture they reqmre. It is true that, on a 
 general survey of literary history, what we term university 
 culture counts for a great deal, the great majority of our 
 great poets having had that or its equivalent. But the 
 exceptions are sufficient to warn us to reject the notion 
 that it is essential. Keats will rank with any poet of his 
 age in respect of (i) "rh5rthmical creation of beauty," 
 and (2) sympathetic seiziure of the spirit of classical 
 antiquity. Yet Keats certainly had small Greek; his 
 sonnet On first reading Chapman's Homer tells as 
 much ; and though he learned Latin enough to do in his 
 teens (so, at least, we are told) a prose translation of the 
 ^NEID— with what accuracy or what crib help no one 
 now can say — ^he "was in childhood not attached to 
 books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight 
 any one — ^morning, noon, and night, his brother among 
 the rest. It was meat and drink to him." So testifies 
 an admiring schoolfellow.* It was only in his last few 
 * Colvin's Keats, p. 8. 
 
552 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 terms at school, in his foiirteenth and fifteenth years; that 
 he took earnestly to books and studies ; and at fifteen he 
 was bound apprentice to a surgeon. At nineteen he 
 became a medical student at Guy's ; and save for that 
 he had no "college" education. At twenty-one he 
 produced Endymion, and at twenty-three the Ode to 
 A Nightingale. His effective culture thus came sub- 
 stantially from the reading of EngUsh hterature. 
 
 Now, concerning the schooHng of Shakespeare we know 
 very httle ; but we do know that he was entitled to free 
 tuition at the Stratford Grammar School ; and it would 
 be as irrational to doubt that he had it as it would be to 
 reject Ben Jonson's testimony that, nevertheless, he had 
 " small Latin and less Greek," which, after all, is a very 
 different thing from saying that he had none. On the 
 other hand we have really no testimony that can justify 
 us in saying that he left school " very early." Sir Sidney 
 Lee, on the strength of Aubrey's late recital of the state- 
 ment of old neighbours that " when he [Shakespeare] was 
 a boy he exercised his father's trade," of a butcher — 
 which was one of his father's trades — ^writes (after 
 HalHwell-Philipps) that " probably in 1577, when he was 
 thirteen, he was enhsted by his father in an effort to 
 restore his decaying fortunes." For this " probably " 
 there is no clear basis. As we have seen, the " decaying 
 fortimes " have been inferred; not proved ; and there is 
 a strong contrary inference. But even if we knew that 
 at thirteen Shakespeare helped his father in the village- 
 butcher business, we should not be entitled to say that 
 he then left school. Boys may help their fathers and still 
 go to school. I did, for one. Having myself, neverthe- 
 less, left school at thirteen, with small Latin and no 
 Greek, I am not prepared to admit that such an experi- 
 ence excludes a boy from future culture ; but I am con- 
 cerned here simply to stipulate for strict adherence to the 
 evidence. Mr. Greenwood arguesi that inasmuch as he 
 accepts the " tradition " that Shakespeare went to the 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 553 
 
 Grammar School, he is entitled to press the " tradition " 
 that the boy left school at " an unusually early age " ; 
 but he has really no tradition to that effect to go upon. 
 Aubrey specifies no age ; and Shakespeare would be 
 "a boy "at fifteen. 
 
 That, however, is really not the vital point. Shake- 
 speare's special culture for his Hfe's work began when he 
 went to see the players, or, it may be, to the httle 
 customary court at Stratford ; ^ and his effective culture 
 would come to him after he had gone to London. If he 
 went thither, as is commonly reckoned, in 1586 or 1587; 
 he spent some six or seven years as an actor before he 
 published Venus and Adonis. Mr. Greenwood seems to 
 take it for granted that this actor's-Hfe meant the negation 
 or exclusion of " cidture." * I cannot imagine a more 
 thoughtless view of the case, unless it be taken in terms of 
 a conception of culture which seems to me wholly irrele- 
 vant. Discussing the Venus, Mr. Greenwood quotes 
 approvingly Mr. Appleton Morgan's hjrperboUcal account 
 of it as " the most elegant verses which the age produced, 
 and which for pohsh and care surpass his very latest 
 works " ; and adds : " Pohshed, indeed, and scholarly, is 
 this extraordinary poem, and, above all, it is impressed 
 throughout with that which we now call Cidture. It is, 
 in fact, imbued with the spirit of the highest culture of 
 the age in which it was written." ' 
 
 In support of this assertion, what data are offered ? 
 Simply these : a few borrowings from Ovid ; a borrowing 
 of the description of the horse from Sylvester's translation 
 —then in MS.— of Du Bartas ; and a possible imitation 
 
 1 It may be worth while here to recall Grote's luminous ex- 
 position of the relation of the Athenian drama to the Athenian 
 Dikasteries. 
 
 2 At the same time he notes that even the art of acting is not 
 to be learned in a day. Quite so. It is only the art of play- 
 making that, in the opinion of Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians 
 alike, requires no apprenticeship ! 
 
 ' Work cited, p. 59. 
 
554 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of the Ode de la Chasse of Etienne Jodelle, which also, 
 in the terms of the case, may have been current in an 
 English MS. translation. That is all ; unless we are 
 to understand Mr. Greenwood as implying that the 
 legal allusions in the poem belong to "the highest 
 culture of the age." It is hardly necessary to dwell 
 on the utter inadequacy of the evidence to the assertion. 
 The borrowings from Ovid are made through Golding's 
 translation;^ but even if they were not, it is merely 
 ridiculous to describe them as standing for " the highest 
 culture of the age." The poem shows no such range of 
 knowledge as does Sidney's Apology for Poetrie, to 
 say nothing of the earlier poems of Chapman. Considered 
 as a psychic distillation of knowledge of life, the Venus 
 nMght fairly be said to stand for want of " culture " in the 
 modern and larger sense of the term. But the kind of 
 culture it shows, the fluent and meUifluous use of English 
 verse, the multiplicity of image, the superfoetation of 
 verbal fancy, the unlimited play of description — all this 
 was just what Shakespeare; given genius to start with, 
 would acquire in his six or seven — or even five — ^years of 
 acting. 
 
 To deny it would be to refuse recognition of the obvious 
 fact that as an actor Shakespeare was habitually using 
 more or less academic as well as poetic diction, speaking 
 a language above the level of that of common talk; 
 inflated, doubtless, but copious, colorate, rhjrthmic, 
 eloquent . Even the acting of the more literary Interludes 
 must have meant considerable training in diction, a good 
 vocabulary, a fair range of hterary and classical associa- 
 tion ; and the young Shakespeare had a larger range open 
 to him than that. When not engaged in acting, he could 
 turn to the literature of the Tudor age — the prose and 
 verse of Elyot, More, Greene, Gascoigne, Lilly, Spenser, 
 Sidney, Peele, Lodge, Nashe, Sackville, Latimer, and the 
 divines ; much miscellaneous Enghsh poetry, down to 
 1 See Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. pp. 309-316. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 555 
 
 Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla, the model of the Venus ; 
 Chaucer ; the treatises of Puttenham and Webbe on 
 Enghsh Poetry ; the Chronicles ; a number of Voyages ; 
 many translations of Latin classics and of Italian prose 
 and poetry ; and, from the Greek, Herodotus and 
 Thucydides, Hall's Iliad, three orations of Demosthenes, 
 a good deal of Isocrates, some of Lucian, the Axiochus, 
 Diodorus, Appian, iElian, the Ethics of Aristotle, Epic- 
 tetus, Xenophon's Cyropaedia, North's Plutarch, some- 
 thing of Theocritus, something of Hippocrates and Galen, 
 and the ^Ethiopic History of HeUodorus. How much or 
 how little Shakespeare read in these translations no man 
 can say ; but there they were, in English — a great deal 
 more of culture material than any one can pretend to 
 find behind the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece. 
 And when we remember that Taylor the Water-Poet, a 
 Thames waterman, living by his boat, avowedly devoid 
 of all scholarship, had read in English in Ovid, Homer, 
 and Virgil, Plutarch's Morals and Lives, Marcus Aurehus, 
 Seneca, Suetonius, and Cornelius Agrippa, as well as in 
 Fairfax's Tasso, Du Bartas, Montaigne, Guevara, Jose- 
 phus ; and in Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Nashe, 
 Camden. Purchas, Speed, Fox, and Holinshed * — ^we are 
 really not entitled to doubt that the Stratford actor could 
 have read widely enough in English to give him all the 
 " culture " manifested in the Plays and Poems. Mr. 
 Greenwood will not deny that the Stratford actor could 
 read ; and as he cannot without a petitio principii deny 
 him genius, his primary case is thus quashed and done 
 with. For nothing more than genius and culture in 
 English, with some smattering of Latin, is needed to 
 account for the Plays and the Poems. 
 The " polish " of Venus and Adonis is just the kind of 
 
 * Last section of Taylor's Motto : Et Habeo, et Careo, et Curo : 
 Workes, 1630, section 11, p. 57. Taylor was then, by his own 
 account, in his later forties . It is here that he tells how he never 
 got beyond possum, posset. 
 
556 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 polish that an actor who was also a poet of genius could 
 acquire. In all ages some actors, without university 
 training, have spoken their own language hke men of 
 culture, acquiring facility in it from the nature of their 
 work ; and if genius be added, there is no special problem 
 to solve in the case of Shakespeare. The general problem 
 of genius hes outside the issue. A supreme gift for 
 rhj^hmic speech involves of necessity a spontaneous study 
 of language ; and Shakespeare, so conceived, must have 
 read much belles letires in his own tongue, as did Burns, 
 and as did Keats. If they with their culture could 
 produce masterpieces in song ; why in the name of reason 
 should not he have done so in drama ? His actorship, 
 which Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians so strangely 
 assume to have been a bar thereto, was part of the special 
 culture that made him supreme. Given poetic genius, the 
 practice of acting was the very discipline required to make 
 him transcend the declamation of his academic pre- 
 decessors, and reach the ring of living utterance where 
 they had mostly vended conventional rhetoric. 
 
 In failing to see the significance of Shakespeare ^s 
 experience as an actor, Mr. Greenwood seems to me to be 
 obsessed by what I would term the university fallacy. 
 He makes a strenuous attempt to rebut the argument of 
 Sir Theodore Martin to the effect that the early life of 
 Shakespeare was no more a bar to the development of 
 his genius than was that of Dickens to his. Dickens, 
 repUes Mr. Greenwood, actually found in his early life the 
 material upon which his adult genius worked ; but he 
 will have it that Shakespeare's " material " was the kind 
 of " culture " he claims to find in Venus and Adonis. 
 Denying that there is any noteworthy scholarly culture 
 in that poem, I deny that there is any force in Mr. 
 Greenwood's attempted rebuttal. It was not scholarly 
 culture that went to the writing of either the comedies or 
 the tragedies ; still less could such culture have prepared 
 the poet to create Falstaff. But as regards the writing of 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 537 
 
 living verse and the creation of living characters, his 
 training as an actor was relevant culture of the most 
 important kind. 
 
 Classical culture prepared Ben Jonson to write Sejanus 
 and Catiline and the Poetaster and Cynthia's Revels ; 
 but what part had it in Every Man in his Humour and 
 The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair ? And which 
 were his more successful plays ? Such culture was 
 possessed, in some degree, by Greene and Peele ; but was 
 it classical example or actual experience in play-writing 
 that — ^with quickly growing faculty — ^made Greene capable 
 of rising from Alphonsus King of Arragon to James 
 the Fourth ? and was it the scholarship indicated in 
 the Tale of Troy that went to the making of what 
 dramatic success was attained to by Peele ? If (a very 
 large if) it was university training, and not genius, that 
 made Marlowe capable of writing the blank verse of 
 Tamburlaine and Faustus, does it follow that it took 
 more scholarly training to make the poet of Macbeth and 
 CoRiOLANUS write blank verse far finer and greater ? 
 The broad culture-fact is that every one of the dramatists 
 above-named exhibits far more of mere classical scholar- 
 ship, in the way of quotation and allusion, than does 
 Shakespeare, who finally writes a verse incomparably 
 superior to theirs. If we are to frame an a priori h37po- 
 thesis at all, should it not be to the effect that the visibly 
 less learned poet vitahsed his Enghsh diction and rh3^hms 
 as he did in virtue of not having had a regular scholarly 
 training, and of having, besides genius, a practical training 
 in the actual handhng of the verse of the other men ? 
 
 I do not stand on such a proposition : I merely urge its 
 relative reasonableness. I note that whereas Spenser and 
 Peele and Chapman held to the vicious old usage of 
 falsifying final accents to make rhymes, Shakespeare, 
 perhaps encouraged by Greene, never once conformed to 
 it. He seems to have been as free of mere archaism as 
 he was of pedantry, though he had his own faults of 
 
558 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 diction. The Venus and Adonis is for its time an 
 essentially modern piece of work ; and I do not remember 
 that any of the contemporaries who praised its " sweet- 
 ness " ever said a word about its learning. So far as we 
 know, no one in that day ever asked. How came the 
 Stratford actor to produce this distillation of culture ? 
 I do not ask Mr. Greenwood to accept the " tradition " ; 
 but I do ask him how, on his view of the impossibility of 
 the actor's having, with his culture, written such a poem 
 at his age, not one of the actor's contemporaries, so far as 
 we know, ever so much as remarked that any notable 
 culture was required to write it.* 
 
 Much has been made, further, of the " difl&culty " of 
 supposing a mere actor to be permitted to dedicate 
 poems to the Earl of Southampton. There is really not 
 a grain of good ground for suggesting any difl&culty in 
 the matter ; and the very reason assigned — the difference 
 of status between poet and patron — destroys itself the 
 moment it is understood. If it be held unlikely that a 
 literature-loving nobleman in Shakespeare's day should 
 allow a mere actor to dedicate to him, as to a friendly 
 patron, two poems, how in the name qf common sense 
 
 1 Mr. G. C. Bompas (Problem of the Shakespeare Plays, 1902, 
 p. 70) is responsible for the statement that " One of Shakespeare's 
 contemporaries, the author of Politnanteia (1595) . . . wrote 
 that Shakespeare was both a ' schollar ' and also a member of one 
 or more of the ' three English universities, Cambridge, Oxford, 
 and the Inns of Court.' " No such passage is knovm to the 
 commentators. Dr. Ingleby (Centurie of Prayse, i, 12) cites the 
 marginal note from Politnanteia which runs " All praise worthy 
 [Lucrecia] Sweet Shakespeare," and classes the poet with " well- 
 graced authors." In a footnote. Dr. Ingleby mentions that 
 probably it was on the strength of this side-note that the late 
 Rev. N. J. Halpin arrived at the rather hazardous conclusion that 
 Shakespeare was a member of "one (or perhaps more) of the 
 English Universities." See his Dramatic Unities qf Shakespeare, 
 1849, p. 12, note. This appears to be the source of the hallu- 
 cmation of Mr. Bompas. He has been guilty of more " howlere " 
 than any other Baconian, except perhaps Mr. Donnelly. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 559 
 
 are we to suppose that the nobleman would let all the 
 world go on beheving that the poems were so dedicated 
 if they really were not ? The cavil is sheer absurdity. 
 
 §5 
 And, once more, if, ignoring that absurdity, we are to 
 suppose that the publication of the Venus and Lucrece 
 as his own by Shakespeare the actor was a pure fraud, 
 what kind of solution have we offered us of the mystifica- 
 tion ? Mr. Greenwood must have a lawyer who was a 
 " courtier," but will not say it was Bacon, herein taking 
 up a singvilarly weak position. He naturally resents 
 being called a Baconian when he is not ; but he will not 
 say No to the Baconians, and leaves the question open, 
 with a mere " anti-Stratfordian " negative. When he 
 comes to the positive Stratfordian evidence, he can offer 
 nothing but confessedly inconclusive cavils. The testi- 
 mony of Ben Jonson, a solid rock of first-hand proof, he 
 vainly seeks to get round, as we have seen, by suggesting 
 that Ben's prose is inconsistent with his poem prefaced 
 to the FoHo ; and that the players' preface, presumably 
 written by Jonson, is inconsistent with the facts as to the 
 sources of the Foho. The inconsequence of the whole 
 argument is staggering. To what exorbitance of self- 
 contradiction this hne of reasoning leads, we have partly 
 noted in dealing with the positions of Mark Twain ; but 
 there are further enormities of fallacy involved. If 
 Jonson had spoken of the player Shakespeare to Drum- 
 mond as a mere actor, or had so described him in the 
 Discoveries, there would indeed have been a rift in the 
 lute of his evidence. But the very criticisms to which 
 Mr. Greenwood so strangely points as somehow in vaUdat- 
 ing or countervaiHng the poetic tribute prefaced to the 
 Folio are explicit avowals of the artistic proddctivity of 
 the man named. Ben, in talk with Drummond, said of 
 Shakespeare that he " wanted art, and sometimes sense," 
 even as he said of Donne that " for not keeping of accent 
 
56o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 he deserved hanging." To the same Donne he wrote, 
 sending liis Epigrams : 
 
 If I find but one 
 
 Marked by thy hand, and with the better stone. 
 
 My title's seal'd.^ 
 
 Does Mr. Greenwood infer from this either that Jonson 
 thought Donne a good critic but a bad poet, or that he 
 believed some one else had written Donne's verses ? Or is 
 he restrained merely by the fact that Drummond cites also 
 the praise : "He esteemed him [Donne] the first poet in 
 the world for some things " ? Without that praise, the 
 testimony to Donne's authorship of poems would be just 
 as vaUd ; and the very criticism passed to Drummond 
 upon " Shakespeare " is a testimony that in Jonson's 
 belief " Shakespeare " wrote The Winter's Tale. It is a 
 criticism of the author, whosoever he was : Mr. Greenwood 
 unintelligibly cites it ' as somehow hinting a knowledge 
 that the putative was not the real author. In what police 
 court would Mr. Greenwood venture to advance such an 
 argument ? 
 
 The mystification set up over Ben Jonson's testimony 
 is the most gratuitous thing in the whole debate. Jonson 
 was notoriously a man both jealous and generous, given 
 to caviUing and quarrelling, with a high sense of his own 
 value; and a very critical eye for other men's work. 
 Ready to flout and contemn, to strive and blame, he was 
 also ready to forgive and praise. After his quarrels with 
 Marston and Dekker, he became reconciled to both. It 
 is reasonably to be inferred that in the " Apologetical 
 Dialogue " appended to The Poetaster he alludes to 
 Shakespeare among others of his censors in the lines : 
 
 Only, amongst them, I am sorry for 
 Some better natures by the rest so drawn. 
 To run in that vile line ; 
 
 seeing that in The Return from Parnassus the players 
 
 tell how their fellow Shakespeare had administered to 
 
 * Epigram g6. 2 Shakespeare Problem, p. 482. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 561 
 
 Jonson " a purge." Ben for his part had in his Every 
 Man Out of his Humour jeered at Shakespeare's coat of 
 arms, parodying the Non sans Droit by the motto Not 
 without Mustard ; and had well deserved his " purge " in 
 other ways. But he was one who could give and take, 
 forgive and forget. In his lines to Donne he praises him 
 expressly for his freedom in criticism : 
 
 Who shall doubt, Donne, whe'r I a poet be. 
 When I dare send my Epigrams to thee ? 
 That so alone canst judge, so alone dost make; 
 And. in thy censures, evenly, dost take 
 As free simplicity to disavow 
 As thou hast best authority t' allow. 
 
 These are the very qualities that he would have claimed 
 for himself. That such a man, alive to the greatness, 
 and, by his own avowal, to the lovableness of Shakespeare, 
 should pen a splendid paneg5nic for the Folio, touching 
 even that with critical quatification, and should at other 
 times, in critical talk with Drummond and in his Dis- 
 coveries, comment on what he held to be flaws in 
 Shakespeare's work, is so perfectly compatible not only 
 with literary but with ordinary human nature that it is 
 astonishing that either a layman or a lawyer should 
 profess to find in it anything strange. 
 
 By Mr. Greenwood's tests, we should be led to beUeve 
 that in Jonson 's opinion Daniel wrote none of his signed 
 verses save the Civil Wars, inasmuch as Jonson (i) told 
 Drummond that Daniel, who wrote that work, was no 
 poet, and (2) wrote of Daniel that he was a " verser," and 
 again of Du Bartas that " He was no poet but a verser, 
 because he xarote not fiction." Again, Mr. Greenwood 
 seems bound to deny to Marston the authorship of Us 
 plays, because Jonson told Drummond that " Marston 
 wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his father-in- 
 law his comedies." Gifford in fact offers the Baconians 
 an opening in advance, by his footnote with the query : 
 "But who was this father-in-law? Nay, who was 
 
 2N 
 
562 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Marston ? " Unfortunately, Gifford supplies particulars 
 in respect of which, he tells us, " I flatter myself that I 
 have here recovered both father and son " — as well as 
 father-in-law. 
 
 Jonson's gibe at Marston, obviously, is a mere jest : 
 his comments on Shakespeare are one and all criticisms 
 of a recognised author. And if Mr. Greenwood here 
 raises afresh his nugatory protest that the contemporary 
 encomiasts of Shakespeare do not tell us " who " he was, 
 it suffices to answer that neither did Jonson tell Drum- 
 mond " who " Donne or Daniel or Spenser or Dra3rton 
 was. It was really not customary to say " who " a 
 man was when you praised him by his name, for his 
 known works. As for the astonishing argument (i) that 
 the famous reference to the original form of the " Know, 
 Caesar doth not wrong " passage may have meant that 
 " Shakespeare the player misquoted the passage on the 
 stage," and (2) that " surely it is of the player, not the 
 poet, that Jonson speaks when he says that his volubility 
 was such that, like Aterius, he had to be (or ought to have 
 been) shut up," * I find myself at a loss to discuss it with 
 gravity. >^ere will Mr. Greenwood stop ? The sentence 
 he cites is from the paragraph in the Discoveries in 
 which Jonson tells how " the players have often mentioned 
 it as an honour to Shakespeare [' their friend '], that in 
 his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a 
 line. My answer hath been. Would he had blotted a 
 thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech." 
 And the very sentence ending with the allusion to 
 Haterius tells that Shakespeare "had an excellent 
 phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein 
 he flowed with that facility that . . ." Has Mr. Green- 
 wood found any Apella who can credit his theory 
 here ? 
 
 Such a fantasy is of a piece with the desperate 
 suggestion of " a learned German, Dr. Konrad Meier," a 
 * Work cited, p. 481. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 563 
 
 little hesitatingly welcomed by Mr. Greenwood in a 
 footnote,^ that Jonson's hne : 
 
 Aad though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
 
 is to be read in the sense " And if," or " even if," = 
 " even had it been true that." Need it really be pointed 
 out that while " and if " could have meant " and though," 
 " and though " could not mean " and if " in the sense 
 suggested? "Though" can stand for "if" when put 
 before a hyperbole : as in " though I speak with the 
 tongues of men and angels " ; not before a carefully 
 quantified proposition such as " small Latin and less 
 Greek" — a specification if ever there were one. Mr. 
 Greenwood, for the rest, really should have spared 
 English readers Dr. Meier's theorem that the " would " in 
 the following line : 
 
 From hence to honour thee I would not seek, 
 
 "is conditional," and that "as in every conditional 
 sentence, the conditional word would points to the unreal 
 alternative, which is to be taken as the opposite of the 
 actual fact." It is from a translation in Baconiana for 
 October 1907 (" into which, by the way, an error seems 
 to have crept ") that Mr. Greenwood derives this precious 
 philological sophism. It " would " seem, then, that we 
 must explain to Mr. Greenwood as well as to Dr. Meier 
 and the Baconians, that " I woidd " is perfectly normal 
 English for " I will " in predication. Has Mr. Greenwood 
 never said to an audience, " I would now direct your 
 attention . . ." ? or " Before sitting down, I would 
 like . . ." ? Anti-Stratfordianism has made him ac- 
 quainted with strange aUies. Jonson's hues simply 
 mean : " Though you had small Latin and less Greek, I 
 would not on that account seek merely to pit you against 
 other unlearned men, but would back you against all the 
 classic dramatists, from .ffischylus to Seneca." Mr, 
 Greenwood is as hard pressed for pleas when he seeks to 
 
 » Work cited; p. 475. 
 
564 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 get behind that testimony as when admitting that the 
 " sweet swan of Avon " line " undoubtedly . . . to all 
 outward appearance " identifies the dead dramatist " with 
 Shakspere of Stratford." Mr. Greenwood can find no 
 better shift than to echo Dr. Ingleby's wish " that Ben 
 had said aU this in Shakespeare's lifetime." O lame and 
 impotent conclusion ! 
 
 The cavilling about the players' statement that they 
 had " scarce received from him [Shakespeare] a blot in 
 his papers " is no better. The assertion that " we now 
 know that this statement is ridiculous,"* is utterly 
 unwarranted. We do know that Shakespeare revised 
 plays after they had been for some time played : we do 
 not know that he sweated over his anvil in first composi- 
 tion as Jonson did ; and Jonson's claim, in the panegjnic, 
 that every writer of living hues must so sweat is an 
 impeachment of Jonson's consistency, not of the players' 
 veracity, or of their common sense. Elsewhere, he 
 accepted their statement as true. The suggestion of 
 Stevenson, confidently repeated by Mr. Greenwood, that 
 the unblotted manuscripts, if such there were, must have 
 been merely fair copies, is idle. Unless Shakespeare 
 deliberately tricked his partners — a hjj^thesis which 
 Jonson did not advance, and which Mr. Greenwood had 
 better not raise — they must have known that whereof 
 they spoke. Neither Ben Jonson nor Stevenson was 
 quaUfied to say, nor is Mr. Greenwood entitled to reafl&rm, 
 that the abnormal genius who wrote the plays could not 
 compose in verse otherwise than did Jonson and Steven- 
 son. Jonson did later accept the statement of the players 
 as true ; and the fact that he nevertheless made his 
 general assertion about the indispensableness of " sweat " 
 proves simply that he could contradict himself on a 
 question of that kind as he and most men could and 
 can on others. But to suggest that such inconsistency 
 discredits his evidence as to his personal knowledge that 
 * Workcited, p. 480. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 565 
 
 Shakespeare was a man of genius, is really as unworthy 
 of a practical lawyer as it is of a man of letters. Either 
 Jonson was a deliberate and unscrupulous har or he was 
 not. If he was, neither Mr. Greenwood nor the Baconians 
 can make anything of his testimony, one way or the other. 
 If he was not, his evidence overthrows and overwhelms 
 all their cavils. He did not think that the plays and 
 poems could have been written only by a professional 
 lawyer. He held that Shakespeare had small Latin and 
 less Greek, yet had no hesitation in beheving that his 
 unlearned friend wrote the plays which he declared to be 
 " for all time." And his opinion on that head surely has 
 as much weight as any. 
 
 §6 
 In dealing with the Baconian argument from Jonson 's 
 Scriptorum Catalogus in the Discoveries, in which Bacon 
 is extolled and Shakespeare is not mentioned. Mr. 
 Greenwood candidly warns his Baconian allies that the 
 matter will not bear their inference ; that Jonson is 
 thinking of " wits " or orators as such, and not framing 
 a comprehensive list. In point of fact, the list names no 
 playwright whatever ; only one or two poets, and those 
 of a bygone generation ; and indeed only a few writers in 
 all.* Yet Mr. Greenwood goes on to argue that " stiU " 
 it is " remarkable " that Shakespeare is not named. If 
 the paragraph were meant as a " bead-roll " it wovdd be 
 no less strange that Spenser and Marlowe are also 
 unnamed : the only really remarkable thing is that 
 Jonson or any one else should ever have headed such a 
 jotting as a " Catalogus." But Mr. Greenwood, with 
 sorrow be it said, proceeds from this trifling cavil to 
 endorse the truly " Baconian " argument that there is a 
 deep significance in Jonson's use of the phrase about 
 " insolent Greece and haughty Rome " in his eulogy of 
 Bacon; after using it in his poem on Shakespeare. 
 
 * The critic cited by Mr. Greenwood, who called the Catalogus 
 "a bead-roll of English writers," has something to answer for. 
 
566 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 This particular divagation, I may note, really gives 
 a good excuse to those critics who describe Mr. Greenwood 
 as a Baconian, though he apparently does not perceive 
 that he has supplied them with any pretext. He insists 
 upon his specific denials ; but to what purpose has he 
 dwelt upon the fact that Jonson applies one phrase of 
 panegyric to both Bacon and Shakespeare? Through 
 seven pages he dwells on the " remarkable," " more 
 remarkable," and " most remarkable " aspects of that 
 item. He finds it " extraordinary " that Jonson, after 
 Bacon's fall, wrote of the ruined great man's character 
 in the highest terms, and yet has not " left us any noble 
 eulogy of this sort consecrated to the memory of Shake- 
 speare." Is not the panegyric prefixed to the FoUo a 
 noble eulogy in its sort ? After thus making a mystery 
 out of nothhig, he proceeds to dilate on the line : 
 
 Thou stand'st as if some mystery thou didst, 
 
 in Jonson's Ode on Bacon's Birthday. The phrase 
 simply means that on Bacon's birthday the '•' Genius 
 of the pile " stands among the guests as might a priest 
 celebrating a rite ; but Mr. Greenwood will have it t^iat 
 " the Stratfordians ... are unable to give any plausible 
 explanation of Jonson's meaning," as against the 
 Baconian thesis that Jonson knew " the secret Shake- 
 spearean authorship."^ After this, how can he complain 
 of being reputed a Baconian ? The poem itself, after 
 speaking of " some mystery," goes on : '* Pardon, I 
 read it in thy face." None are so blind as those who 
 will not see aught but their own theory.* 
 All the while, the argument from Jonson's double use 
 
 * Is it suggested, I wonder, that Bacon was telling his guests 
 that he had written the plays ? The phrase " as if some mystery 
 thou didst " plainly points to a quasi-rite or sacramentum, not to 
 a " mystery " in the modem sense. 
 
 ? The point was made clear by Mrs. Stopes four-and-twenty 
 years ago. Yet Mr. Lang oddly acquiesced in Mr. Greenwood's 
 cry of " mystery." 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 567 
 
 of the phrase " insolent Greece and haughty Rome " is 
 simply the crowning instance of the futiUty of non- 
 comparative study over the whole field of our problem. 
 Jonson did but repeat himself in that case as he did in 
 many others. I put to Mr. Greenwood this simple and 
 sufficient challenge. Jonson in his Ode on Bacon's 
 Birthday speaks of the Lord Chancellor as one 
 
 Whose even thread the fates spin round and full. 
 Out of their choicest and their whitest wool — 
 
 — alas for the forecast ! In The Hue and Cry after 
 Cupid the same Ben Jonson writes of 
 
 A prince that draws 
 By example more than others do by laws . . . 
 That was reserved until the Parcae spun 
 Their whitest wool ; and then his thread begun. 
 
 Does this passage suggest any misgivings to Mr. Green- 
 wood ? Does he find it " most remarkable of all " that 
 Jonson should have used the same figure in benison of 
 Bacon and of King James ? And does he see fit to 
 suggest that Jonson had cause to think that King James 
 wrote Bacon ? Will he not rather grant me that Jonson, 
 who uses this same figure yet another time in his Apolo- 
 GETiCAL Dialogue appended to The Poetaster — 
 
 The Fates have not spun him the coarsest thread — 
 
 appl3dng it to himself, and who in the same Dialogue as 
 well as in his Ode to Himself wrote of " the wolf's 
 black jaw and the dull ass's hoof," was simply prone to 
 repeat a sounding phrase upon which he " fancied 
 himself " ? 
 
 If not ; if Mr. Greenwood still elects to minister 
 platonically to the Baconians, he will do well to frame 
 either for them or for himself some presentable rebuttal 
 to the bayonet-line of challenge which faces him and 
 them. The hero of the Baconians, presumably, stopped 
 writing plays when Shakespeare died because, even in 
 view of his miraculous luck in having his literary secret 
 
568 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 thus far kept for him, he could not find another " mask." 
 Mr. Greenwood's occult lawyer, perhaps, was similarly 
 swayed. For both sets of theorists, then, Shakespeare 
 at least had the somewhat weighty merit of supplying 
 the learned and legal author with a means of vent for 
 his plays and poems which would otherwise have been 
 unattained. There is no more new " Shakespeare " 
 after Shakespeare's death, under any signature. And 
 Mr. Greenwood's lawyer is as hardly pressed as Bacon 
 by the demand of those who insist that an author shall 
 prove his reality by having his manuscripts regularly 
 printed. Mr. Greenwood's Man in the Paper Mask, 
 affirmed to be lawyer enough to make Venus talk like 
 one, secretly produces poems, plays, and sonnets. Bacon- 
 wise, over a period of twenty years ; then lays down his 
 pen or dies ; and either in his own despite or with no 
 touch of supervision from him, has his work perpetuated 
 in an inextricable blend with that of other men, and 
 flawed by a multitude of printers' blunders, at the hands 
 of the player-partners, who, in the view of Mr. Greenwood 
 and the Baconians, either lied venaJly or were strangely 
 deluded for twenty years by an impostor, their partner. 
 
 I am not going to play the panegyrist for the actor- 
 partners, who have it standing to their account that, 
 with the literary heedlessness of their age, they published 
 what they must have known to be a mass of largely 
 composite work without a hint to help posterity to dis- 
 criminate. But if we deal with evidence in the common- 
 sense spirit in which the sane lawyer is supposed to deal 
 with it, we are boimd to say that, under the reservation 
 mentioned, their general testimony far outweighs all 
 the cavils of the various schools of critics. They have 
 been harshly and heedlessly accused, even by " orthodox " 
 scholars, of falsely professing to print solely from true 
 original copies when they were suppljong the printer 
 with printed quartos for "copy." That attack, im- 
 important at best, is disposed of by the argument which 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 569 
 
 proves certain quartos to have been authorised, and 
 therefore to stand reasonably enough for the " true 
 original copies." The alleged " difficulties " of the 
 " Stratf ordian " case are thus as dust in the balance 
 against the insanities of the other ; which posits a night- 
 mare of protracted conspiracy and fraud imexampled 
 out of Bedlam. 
 
 §7 
 A number of other items in Mr, Greenwood's negative 
 case seem to me hardly to deserve discussion. All the 
 problems he raises as to the young Shakespeare's hfe at 
 Stratford, apart from the schooling, are practically outside 
 our problem : it matters not to the question of the author- 
 ship what were young Will's relations with Sir Thomas 
 Lucy, or what were the precise circumstances of his 
 marriage. Equally irrelevant to our inquiry is the pother 
 over the portraits.* As to Mr. Greenwood's urJiappy 
 chapter on " The Silence of PhiUp Henslowe," I confess 
 to being somewhat at a loss for comment. The chapter 
 seems to have been written without any examination of 
 Henslowe's Diary,* upon some vague inferences from 
 remarks by Collier and Judge Stotsenburg. Mr. Green- 
 wood argues that whereas the unknown lawyer of his 
 fantasy would naturally not take any payments from 
 such an enirepreneur as Henslowe, the actor, on the 
 contrary, readily would ; and that accordingly the absence 
 of the name of Shakespeare (or Shakspere or Shaksper, 
 &c.) from Henslowe's Diary " is certainly a very remark- 
 able phenomenon, and one . . . very difficult to reconcile 
 with the supposition that Player Shakspere wrote plays."^ 
 In the niame of mysteiy, why ? Mr. Greenwood claims 
 
 • Long ago Dr. Ingleby pointed out : " As to portraits, 
 Edmund Spenser stands in precisely the same position as Shake- 
 speare. The portraits claimed for him are hopelessly dis- 
 crepant " {Shakespeare : The Man and the Book, Pt. I, 1877, p. 78)- 
 
 • Mr. Lang, who has an amusing chapter in reply to Mr. Green- 
 wood's, seems also not to have studied the Diary. 
 
 • Work cited, p. 360. 
 
570 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 to solve his own enigma by the simple pronouncement 
 that " Neither Shakspere [i.e. the actor] nor ' Shake- 
 speare ' [i.e. Mr. Greenwood's unknown lawyer] ever 
 wrote for Henslowe." In other words, the actor (in Mr. 
 Greenwood's opinion) could not ; and the mysterious 
 lawyer, who provided the plays for the actor and his 
 partners, would not write for Henslowe. Q.E.D. 
 
 I collect myself to ask. How on earth can Mr. Green- 
 wood know this ? That Shakespeare ever " wrote for 
 Henslowe" I do not affirm: there are no means of 
 determining what were the business relations between 
 Henslowe and the Chamberlain's (Shakespeare's) company 
 when they played in either of Henslowe's theatres. I 
 am disposed to surmise that whatever refurbishing of old 
 or writing of new plays Shakespeare did while his com- 
 pany was playing at either the Rose or the Newington 
 Theatre, in the years 1592-96, was done " for " his com- 
 pany and not " f or " Henslowe. But seeing that the 
 Diary does not contain any entry of pa5anerit to any 
 writer for playwriting before 1597,* when Shakespeare's 
 company were successively at the Theater and the Curtain, 
 and had no longer any dealings with Henslowe, the non- 
 existence of any note of any payment to him is obviously 
 neither here nor there. The payments beginning in 1597 
 are noted as made " for my Lord Admirall's men," for 
 whom Shakespeare never wrote. It is simply impossible 
 to imderstand the use of such an argument as Mr. Green- 
 wood's save on the inference that he never examined the 
 Diary at all. He notes Collier's remark that in the 
 years 1594-96 the Admiral's men and the Chamberlain's 
 men were jointly or alternately using one of Henslowe's 
 theatres; and he exclaims accordingly. But had he 
 
 * These entries begin on Folio -43V., p. 82 of Mr. Greg's edition. 
 Earlier in the book, which is not continuous in order of time, 
 occur similar entries for 1599— Folio 29, p. 57. Even Collier's 
 forgeries, it should be noted, begin only in 1597. See ed, cited, 
 introd. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 571 
 
 gone to the Diary he would have found that in those 
 years there is no note of a payment to a playwright for 
 either company. 
 
 As to the period from 1596 onwards, there is simply no 
 rational groimd for expecting to find any note of a pay- 
 ment from Henslowe to Shakespeare, seeing that Shake- 
 speare and his company had no more dealings with that 
 personage. In 1599 they settled at the Globe, for good. 
 Henslowe paid the playwrights who worked for him or 
 for the Admiral's company ; and his Diary is simply a 
 day-book of his many receipts, loans, and payments; 
 theatrical and other, with a few " receipts " of the other 
 sort and some notes of agreements, &c. Obviously, 
 Mr. Greenwood's theory disposes of itself. If an outside 
 friend could solely supply Shakespeare, who catered solely 
 for his company, then Shsikespeare, a partner, might so 
 supply his own company, if he had the required literary 
 capacity. Mr. Greenwood, I trust, will not insist on 
 begging the question throughout the discussion ! Now, 
 that Shakespeare shoidd go on steadily supplying his 
 own company with plays instead of writing for Henslowe 
 was not only natural : it was the way of advantage as 
 against the way of disadvantage. Mr. Greenwood, pre- 
 sumably, does not deny that Shakespeare the actor was 
 from about 1594 a partner in the Lord Chamberlain's 
 (first known as Lord Strange's*) company of actors, who 
 successively played at the Rose and at Newington and 
 ran " the Theater " and the Globe Theatre. There is, 
 says Mr. Fleay, " no vestige of evidence that Shakespeare 
 ever wrote for any company but one."* This holds 
 whether we think of Shakespeare the actor or of Bacon- 
 Shakespeare or of Mr, Greenwood's unknown literary 
 lawyer. And what could be more a matter of course 
 
 * Originally, in aU likelihood. Lord Leicester's, but this is 
 matter of inference. See Fleay's Life of Shakespeare, pp. 91-6- 
 As to the changes in the company's name, see Fleay, pp. Ii4~5» 
 128. 2 Lifg of Shakespeare, p. 115, 
 
572 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 than that Shakespeare the actor should supply with plays 
 the company in which he was a profit-sharing partner, 
 instead of selling plays outright to Henslowe for a few 
 poiinds ? By the former course he enriched himself ; 
 by the latter, he would insanely have condemned himself 
 to the Ufe of chronic beggary led by all the other play- 
 wrights of the day, including even Jonson. That Mr. 
 Greenwood should see something "very remarkable" 
 in such a choice is quite the most remarkable thing in 
 his remarkable tissue of error and paralogism. All his 
 attacks upon " the Stratfordian editors " and others in 
 this connection are a mere fiasco. They and Sir Sidney 
 Lee, as it happens, did not say, as Mr. Greenwood alleged, ^ 
 that Shakespeare began his dramatic career " by writing 
 plays for Henslowe": they said that Shakespeare's 
 work " doubtless " began^ at the Rose theatre, about 
 1592. As Mr. Greenwood does not himself believe that 
 the plays there and then played by Shakespeare's com- 
 pany were Shakespearean, it is hard to see why he took 
 to this line of argument at all. But when he exults in 
 this connection over " a delightful specimen of Strat- 
 fordian reasoning," and proclaims it " the more extra- 
 ordinary — indeed incredible — that the old manager should 
 have made no mention " of Shakespeare in his Diary, 
 his Stratfordian foes are truly avenged. It wotUd have 
 been extraordinary, " indeed incredible," if Henslowe 
 had been found entering payments to Shakespeare for 
 plays he did not write, in a period of years in which the 
 Diary records no payments to any other plajrwrights for 
 the plays they did write, whether "for Henslowe" or 
 for any of the companies who used his theatres. 
 
 When Mr. Greenwood goes on to quote Judge Stotsen- 
 burg as to Henslowe's pa5mients for a " King Leare " 
 and "The Tamynge of a Shrowe," he strangely abets 
 
 ^ Work cited, pp. 353, 354. 
 
 * Sir Sidney Lee's words are : " The earliest scene of Shake- 
 speare's pronounced successes " {Life, 2nd ed. p. 37). 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 573 
 
 another gratuitous confusion. Judge Stotsenburg is 
 quoted^ as saying, concerning those two plays, and Titus; 
 and Henry the Sixth, that " since these plays have 
 the same names as those included in the Folio of 1623 
 the presumption is that they are the same plays until 
 the contrary is shown." Mr. Greenwood is well aware 
 that the old " Leare " was King Leir and his Three 
 Daughters ; that the old Taming of a Shrew is not 
 the Taming of the Shrew ; and that both of the old 
 plays named are extant. As he expressly admits that 
 Titus and the Henry VI plays are non-Shakespearean 
 (save for adaptations in the latter), his entire use of Judge 
 Stotsenburg's argument is a mere confounding of con- 
 fusion. Of the same order is his use of Judge Stotsen- 
 burg's contention in regard to Troilus and Cressida. 
 The production of a non-Shakespearean Troilus by 
 Dekker and Chettle in 1599 was perfectly well known to all 
 of us, like the rest of Henslowe's record ; and the existence 
 of plainly non-Shakespearean matter in the Shakespearean 
 Troilus is an old story among the critics. But if Mr. 
 Greenwood means to suggest — as, apparently, does Judge 
 Stotsenburg — that what is generally accepted as Shake- 
 spearean matter in Troilus was really written by Dekker 
 and Chettle, I am content to leave the question to Shake- 
 spearean readers, undebated. That Dekker could have 
 written the great speeches in Troilus is a proposition 
 which I caimot conceive to be advanced by any critic 
 who has read Dekker, and who can discern the qualities 
 of a style. As to the non-Shakespearean matter in 
 Julius C^sar, careful anal3^ical research is highly 
 desirable ; but it does not seem likely to be supplied by 
 the school of Judge Stotsenburg. It seems to me a 
 rather lamentable thing that a critic like Mr. Greenwood; 
 who might be doing real service to the study of 
 Shakespeare by furthering the scientific dissection of 
 the composite plays, should join hands with con- 
 » By Mr. Greenwood, p. 355. 
 
574 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 fusion-mongers who merely darken counsel by ignorant 
 
 inference. 
 
 It all comes of parti pris ; and, as Johnson said of 
 Capell, of " acquiescence in his first thoughts." In 
 his resolve to disparage the Stratford actor, he will not 
 even attach rational weight to Heywood's testimony 
 that when Jaggard in 1612 published an edition of The 
 Passionate Pilgrim with two poems of Heywood's 
 unwarrantably included, " the author, I know, was much 
 offended with Mr. Jaggard that (altogether unknown 
 to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." 
 " Here," says Mr. Greenwood,^ " we observe that Hey- 
 wood does nothing to identify ' the author ' with the 
 player. He is somebody of whom Heywood speaks in very 
 deferential terms." And Mr. Greenwood adds that " ' the 
 author ' does not seem to have raised any protest as Hey- 
 wood did." What possible justification can Mr. Green- 
 wood have for this assertion ? He appears to be bent 
 at once on disparaging the actor and affirming the author- 
 ship of the literary lawyer ; for he argues on the one hand 
 that had not Heywood interfered, the publisher's fraud 
 would have been acquiesced in, and, on the other hand, 
 that the hypothetical real author — " a courtier, for 
 instance, holding or aspiring to high office in the state " — 
 might have thought it expedient to hold his tongue. 
 Yet he implies that Heywood knew who this real author 
 was, and that it was somebody in high station. So the 
 secret was known to Heywood — and to how many beside ! 
 What concern, then, had the " courtier " shown for 
 expediency when he had already let his secret be thus 
 known ? The whole argument is an irreparable mess. 
 The plain answer to all Mr. Greenwood's cavils on these 
 heads is that he knows and can know nothing whatever 
 as to what Shakespeare the actor spontaneously did or 
 said when his works were pirated or other men's works 
 were ascribed to him. These were not occasions for 
 * Work cited, p. 349. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 575 
 
 public announcements, and no one has any right to allege 
 that " the author," whoever he were, did not do whatever 
 little was in his power to stop the printers.^ 
 
 It is hardly necessary, finally, to debate Mr, Green- 
 wood's claim to support his case from subsidiary conflicts 
 of opinion among those whom he lumps together as 
 " Stratfordians." He actually challenges us all, under 
 that name, to deal with the " difficulty " of the author- 
 ship of Arden of Feversham, which some Shakespeareans 
 have assigned to Shakespeare. The historical fact is 
 that two " Stratfordians," Mr. Fleay and Mr. Crawford, 
 have in turn claimed, and the second demonstrated, that 
 Arden is a work of Kyd. The problem is exactly the 
 same for Mr. Greenwood as for the Stratfordians ; and 
 to suggest that any conflict on such issues discredits the 
 common conviction that the Stratford actor wrote the 
 plays, is to "suborn" a sophism. As well might it be 
 said that a conflict of views among students of Bacon as 
 to his character and capacity is a reason for doubting 
 his authorship of any of his signed works. There will 
 long continue to be dispute among students of Shake- 
 speare as to his share in some of the works assigned to 
 him, whether canonical or apocr^hal : it is the business 
 of Shakespearean scholars to go on with those quests 
 as do other scholars with theirs. A desire to further this 
 legitimate mission has helped in the penning of these 
 pages. But it is hard to see how it can be otherwise 
 than very indirectly furthered by contributions to the 
 great " anti-Stratfordian " enterprise of straining at 
 gnats and swallowing camels. 
 
 §8 
 
 Something must be said, finally, concerning the so- 
 called arguments founded on the facts that Shakespeare 
 in his will left only his second-best bed to his wife, and 
 
 * If he had sued them, would not Mr. Greenwood have accused 
 the Stratford actor of oppressing poor tradesmen ? 
 
576 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 that the signature to the xvill is tremulous— or, as some 
 say, " illiterate." To me personally it has always been 
 so astonishing that reasoning men should treat such 
 items as having a real bearing on the question of author- 
 ship, that I have some little difficulty in discussing it 
 without raising the question of their good faith. Their 
 positions appear to be (i) that the bequest of the second- 
 best bed proved Shakespeare to have been on bad terms 
 with his wife ; (2) that a man capable of being on bad 
 terms with his wife could not be a man of genius ; and 
 (3) that bad handwriting is incompatible with great 
 Uterary production. It seems necessary to meet these 
 propositions seriously. 
 
 ^Vhether Shakespeare was or was not on bad terms 
 with his wife I do not pretend to say. No one has any 
 clear right to an opinion on the subject. It seems unlikely 
 that the " m5nriad-minded " dramatist should put as ia 
 general proposition, on the strength of his own experience, 
 the passage in the Tempest in which Prospero warns 
 Ferdinand against anticipating the marriage rite : he 
 must have known some strictly conventional households 
 in which the conjugal relation was inharmonious. My 
 own youthful surmise, on first reading the will, was that 
 the second-best bed had been the marriage bed ; and 
 that Anne desired to have it secured to her, dwelling on 
 her past as elderly women — and men — ^so often do. The 
 most probable solution seems to be that she was either 
 physically or mentally in a condition which made it 
 desirable that she should not be left a control of property. 
 But, on any conceivable view of the case, what has the 
 bequest to do with the question of the authorship ? I 
 will not go into the cases of Jonson, Moli^re, Byron, 
 Shelley, Milton, Victor Hugo, Hazlitt, Goethe, and 
 Dickens, who were so variously infelicitous in their 
 married lives : I will take simply that of Bacon. He 
 made a will in which he devised a great deal of money 
 that he did not possess, so that it had to be administered 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 577 
 
 by creditors, who got about seven shillings in the pound — 
 a circumstance that does not seem ever to have troubled 
 the Bacon-Shakespeareans. To that will, in which he 
 had made an abundant nominal provision for his " loving 
 wife," Bacon added a codicil, curtly declaring : " What- 
 soever I have given, granted, or appointed to my wife, 
 in the former part of this my will, I do now, for just and 
 great causes, utterly revoke and make void, and leave 
 her to her right only." Does that codicil, one asks, in 
 any way affect the question of Bacon's authorship of 
 anjrthing he did or did not claim to have written ? If 
 not, what is the difference in the case of the will of 
 Shakespeare ? 
 
 As the Baconian argument on this topic remains purely 
 ridiculous for me, while appearing to have for some people 
 a mysterious force, I will cite one more case of a literary 
 man's will, which raises the question about books, much 
 discussed by the Baconians. The will of the poet Samuel 
 Daniel is extant. It begins with the customary " com- 
 mitting " of body and soul to their respective destinations. 
 It then allots " to my sister, Susan Bowre,^ one feather 
 bed, and with the furniture thereto belonging, and such 
 linen as I shall leave at my house at Ridge." There 
 follow four bequests of ten pounds each to members of 
 the Bowre family, and " for the disposing of all other 
 things" the testator's brother is left a free hand, as 
 executor. There is not a word about books or wife, 
 though Daniel is supposed to have had a wife. " When 
 he was married, and to whom, still remain unknown."* 
 Does all this set up any doubt as to the existence of 
 Samuel Daniel, his authorship of the books to which 
 
 *The Rev. Mr. Grosart, who prints the will, mentions that 
 Daniel "had no sister, so far as appears "—another "msretery," 
 which I do not attempt to solve. 5««Grosart's ed. of Daniel's 
 Works, 1885, i, pp. xxv-xxvi. [In his Index, I find, Grosart 
 admits his oversight, and says he cannot account for it.] 
 
 2 Grosart, as cited, p. xxiv, Jonson told Drummond that 
 Daniel "had no children." 
 
 3 
 
578 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 he put his name, and his reading of many other 
 books ? ^ 
 
 The question of the handwriting calls for no more 
 elaborate treatment. The allegation that the signatures 
 to the will, written near the death of the testator, are 
 those of an " ilUterate " person, is a sample of the way 
 in which Baconians persuade. Mr. Greenwood does not 
 scruple to write of " the hopeless scrawls that do duty 
 for his signatures."^ I know not what the palaeographers 
 say on the subject : to me, on a comparison of the Shake- 
 speare signatures with others of the period, the assertion 
 seems simply false. The recently discovered half-signa- 
 ture to the deposition of 1612 ' is indeed very hastily and 
 badly written — apparently with the kind of impossible 
 pen still so commonly supplied for pubUc use in banks 
 and other offices. But such a signature was on any view 
 a matter of no formal importance ; and Shakespeare 
 could conceivably have been much bored by the Mount- 
 joye case, and impatient to get away from it. And the 
 Baconian attack, as it happens, had been made on the 
 signatures already known. Now, the signatures to the 
 deeds of 1612-13, in particular the second, seem to me 
 those of a good and firm penman : those to the will, 
 written within a month of death, are surely not out-of- 
 the-way.* Mr. Greenwood is able to cite Sir Sidney Lee 
 
 * The book query arises in regard to Reginald Scot, author 
 of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). He must have read 
 many books, and surely owned some, but no book is alluded to 
 in his will. (See it in Nicholson's rep. p. xxvii.) 
 
 * Shakespeare Problem, p. 14. 
 
 ' Art. New Shakespeare Discoveries, by Dr. C. W. Wallace, in 
 Harper's Magazine, March 1910. This half-signature goes far to 
 validate the similar one on the Bodleian Ovid. The abbreviated 
 form will probably be exclaimed over by Baconians. I may note 
 that I have seen just such a half-signature by a distinguished living 
 statesman. 
 
 * I once had the idea, put by Mr. Nesbit, that the tremulousness 
 of the signatures to the will might stand for a nervous malady, 
 the likely cause of Shakespeare's retirement. But within a 
 month of death, any cause might so operate. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 579 
 
 as having pronounced, on the strength of the five signa- 
 tures, that Shakespeare's handwriting was of an " illegi- 
 ble" type. It is rarely that Mr. Greenwood and Sir 
 Sidney are at one : in this case I take leave to deny the 
 assertion of both. But the whole of Mr. Greenwood's 
 argument on the subject is obscure. He seems to 
 imply that either to write or to sign in the old " Gothic " 
 script as late as 1600 was to give evidence of lack of 
 cultmre ; but the suggestion that men who then wrote 
 usually in the Italic script might sign law deeds in the 
 old script he meets by citing Sir Sidney Lee to the effect 
 that educated Englishmen in those days wrote their 
 letters usually in the old character and signed their names 
 in the new Italian hand. How such a question is to be 
 settled ; how we can know whether or not Shakespeare 
 usually wrote in modem script, I am tmable to under- 
 stand. Sir Sidney Lee and Mr. Greenwood seem for 
 once to have united in a dogmatic and unprovable asser- 
 tion of the kind that Sir Sidney usually eschews and 
 Mr. Greenwood professes to reprobate. 
 
 The common sense of the matter is that either hand 
 could be written with facility ; that probably the actors 
 had been taught, as Shakespeare probably was, the old 
 English script at school ; and that he was therefore not 
 unlikely to have written his plays for them in the said 
 script.* That wills and deeds, written in old script, 
 should be signed in old script, seems natural ; * but I am 
 content to leave that an open question, knowing of no 
 adequate research on the subject. In any case, there 
 
 * The MS. of The Birth of Hercules (written after 1600), of 
 which some facsimiles are given in the Malone Society's edition, 
 is in old script, with names in italic. 
 
 *Mr. Greenwood jeers vigorously (p. 14) at Dr. Gamett and 
 Dr. Philip Gosse for this suggestion. They had used the phrase, 
 "appropriate for business matters " ; and he asks why the old 
 should be more appropriate for business matters than the new 
 script. He knows that by " business matters " they meant 
 legal matters. Will he explain why an old script is still partly 
 retained in engrossing ? 
 
58o THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 would have been nothing out-of-the-way in Shakespeare's 
 adherence to the old script all his life, if he did adhere 
 to it. Spedding notes that Bacon wrote the old script 
 in his early youth, and later adopted the new. I have 
 seen a number of books of Shakespeare's age, in which 
 marginal annotations are made in the old English script. 
 The writing is often firmer, doubtless, than that of the 
 signatures to Shakespeare's will ; to say nothing of the 
 hasty half-signature to the deposition of 1612 ; but, as 
 already remarked, the other signatures seem firm enough. 
 But what if they were otherwise ? Supposing they 
 had been all alike tremulous, or penned with apparent 
 difi&culty, what would follow ? Anti-Stratf ordians either 
 are or are not aware (i) that many Uterary men 
 and scholars have written very illegibly all their lives ; 
 (2) that men who could once write clearly and neatly have 
 through some nervous afEection or cramp ceased to be 
 able to do so. The whole argument from the signatures 
 is for me so nugatory that, not knowing what its sup- 
 porters have in their minds, I think it well to mention 
 (i) that the late Mr. Andrew Lang, one of the most cul- 
 tured and one of the most productive men of letters of 
 his time, wrote (latterly, at least) one of the very worst 
 hands ever seen ; (2) that several financial magnates of 
 our day, in the case of whose signatures legibiUty would 
 seem to be important, notoriously sign in scrawls which 
 defy decipherment, and are recognised at the banks as 
 a species of mark ; (3) that cramp or other nerve affec- 
 tions will render stiff or tremulous the hand even of a 
 man of genius ; and (4) that when we are near death, 
 infirmity of body is likdy to occur in the case of any one 
 of us. 
 
 Having thus put briefly all the argrraients that seem 
 to me necessary^ to meet the Baconian case concerning 
 
 * See, however, Mr. Lang's posthumous work, and the smaller 
 book of Canon Beoching, for other and weighty confutations of 
 Baconian inferences of this order. 
 
LIVES AND PERSONALITIES 581 
 
 the will and the signatures, as I understand it, I will not 
 seek finally to disguise my conviction that those who 
 have advanced or been impressed by it have suffered 
 either intellectually or morally from the contagion of a 
 malady of opinion. When before was a literary man's 
 faculty or authorship challenged on the score of the 
 badness of his handwriting, or, for that matter, of his 
 spelling ? 1 And when before were a man's relations with 
 his wife considered to have a bearing on the question of 
 his possession of Uterary genius ? The Baconians tell 
 us that Shakespeare did not properly educate his daugh- 
 ters. Did Milton, who caused his to learn the mere 
 alphabets of dead languages so that they might read aloud 
 to him without understanding?* In an age in which 
 most women, especially in the provinces, did not learn 
 to write, is there anything astonishing in Shakespeare's 
 following of the general usage ? And even if there were, 
 has the matter any more evidential bearing on the ques- 
 tion of the authorship of the plays than has the fact of 
 Milton's display of repellent characteristics upon the 
 question whether he wrote Paradise Lost as it stands; 
 or whether the poem was " edited " as Bentley main- 
 tained? 
 
 * In the two letters of Bacon first printed by Dr. Grosart in 
 the intiodaction to his ed. of Sir John Davies, six separate 
 words are given up as " illegible," and the spelling is lax. 
 
 * Mr. Greenwood (p. 204) has a note on this subject, in which he 
 strives to show that Milton did more for his daughters than 
 Shakespeare for his. Denouncing the " pitiful " pleas of " Strat- 
 ford apologists," he strives to evade the fact that Milton forced 
 his daughters to read to him in languages which they did not 
 understand. All the while, he has never faced the real issue — 
 the probable difierence between the culture-standards of Stratford 
 in Shakespeare's day and those of London in Milton's. Milton 
 had his daughters taught to read, but not to know any language 
 save their own, because " one tongue was enough for a woman." 
 In the end he was fain to teach the youngest Latin. The others, 
 forced to read in languages they knew not, came to hate their 
 father. Mark Pattison was more severe on Milton in this connec- 
 tion than is Mr. Greenwood on Shakespeare. {Milton, pp. 147-8.) 
 
582 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 Postscript 
 
 Even Mr. Lang, in the act of confuting the "anti- 
 Stratfordian " case, seems to me to make one unwarranted 
 concession to it. On the strength of Shakespeare's four 
 law suits to recover small debts, he pronounces him a " hard 
 creditor." Now, it is not inconceivable that the author of 
 the Plays may have been a hard creditor ; but it seems to me 
 unlikely ; and the four small law suits are very inadequate 
 proof of such a chat;ge. It ignores (i) the far greater common- 
 ness of such litigation in that day than in ours ; and (2) the 
 obvious possibility that Shakespeare was dealing \vith slippery 
 debtors. Shakespeare, described by Jonson as of " an open 
 and free nature," might well have to leave such matters to his 
 attorney. John Shakespeare, as we have seen, ran many more 
 law suits than his son ever did, some of them with his personal 
 friends. Mot qui farle, I once sued a rascally debtor for a 
 small debt, because he was brazenly bilking me ; and he 
 succeeded, despite the court's order against him ! I cannot 
 on that score reckon myself a hard creditor — I never sued 
 anybody else — and I can conceive that Shakespeare, in a 
 day of lower standards than ours, found more than one of 
 his debtors dishonest, or otherwise exasperating. Still, the 
 point is quite irrelevant to the question of authorship or 
 genius — ^as irrelevant as is that of Bacon's laxness and in- 
 debtedness, or Scott's indefensible and unprofessional specu- 
 lations, or Bums's or Musset's drinking, or Defoe's trickeries, 
 or Heine's malice, or Tourgu^nief 's timidity, or the aberrations 
 of Poe, or the fanaticism of Dante, or the lying of Pope, or 
 the scurrility of Milton, or the brutal quarrelling of Jonson, 
 to the question of the faculty of any of these writers. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 ON a broad retrospect, the Baconian theory con- 
 stitutes a singular example of what men call 
 " the irony of fate." If there was one task 
 upon which Bacon was more bent than on any 
 other; it was that of goading or leading men to sound 
 methods of induction. The " idola " of his antipathy 
 were the heedless presuppositions and prejudices, the 
 arbitrary persistences in " fore-deeming " which with 
 most men did duty then, as they do now, for the spirit 
 of inquiry and truth-seeking. He miscarried often enough 
 in his own inductions, constructive and negative ; but 
 his great service to thought and science consisted precisely 
 in the force and instancy of his warnings against the 
 snares of intellectual " will-worship." And it has been 
 left to the professed " Baconians " of to-day to supply 
 the most flagrant instance in modem history, theology 
 apart, of the intellectual sin which he so forcefully 
 denounced. They have trodden his. law underfoot. 
 They have gone about their task with a more complete 
 disregard of the first principles of inductive research than 
 was shown by any alchemist or physicist in Bacon's age. 
 Catching at a conventional f alsism as to the legal know- 
 ledge in the Shakespeare plays, they have made it an 
 article in their creed without an attempt to check it by a 
 collation of other men's plays. Starting with the other con- 
 ventional falsism as to the classical knowledge exhibited 
 in the plays, they have but angrily flouted all contrary 
 contentions in a spirit of sheer fanaticism, and, instead 
 of checking their first data by inductive comparison, 
 
 583 
 
584 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 have heaped a PeUon of nonsense upon an Ossa of 
 error. 
 
 If, agam, there was one thing that a true Baconian 
 ought to have done before drawing an inference from 
 random coincidences in the Plays and the Works, it was 
 to turn to the plays and works of coeval writers, to 
 ascertain whether the coincidences were special or general. 
 Not one in a himdred of the professed " Baconians " has 
 ever made the attempt ; a few read one other dramatist 
 and decide straightway that Bacon wrote his works also ; 
 a few read a Uttle more widely and decide that Bacon 
 wrote everjrthing. We are witnessing, not a process of 
 induction, but a process of absurdity, not easily distin- 
 guishable from monomania. But the monomaniac who 
 affirms that Bacon wrote all the Elizabethan drama and 
 Spenser and Montaigne and Puttenham and Burton and 
 Nashe, and in addition did the Authorised Version of 
 the Bible, is only persisting in extending the primary 
 fallacy of the inference that Bacon wrote Shakespeare 
 because similar expressions occur in the Plays and the 
 Works. His wildest extravagance is what men quaintly 
 call a " logical " extension of the first absurdity, said to 
 have been embraced by John Bright. 
 
 True ; but, once more, he and they have thus merely 
 extended that play of uncritical belief and heedless 
 advocacy which, as Bacon saw, pervades more or less 
 the thinkiug and the propaganda of most men. We have 
 had gross nonsense from Lord Caihpbell ; and only rather 
 grosser nonsense from the Baconians ; he doing his special 
 pleading with half-professional imconcem for pure truth ; 
 they doing theirs with all the zest of self-pleasing fanatics, 
 as little awake as he to the laws of intellectual righteous- 
 ness. And other forms of " orthodox " dogmatism have 
 siimed about as heedlessly against the true Baconian 
 statute. A generation ago the general body of Shake- 
 spearean scholars either violently affirmed or tacitly 
 accepted as final the " expert " dictum that poor Peter 
 
CONCLUSION 585 
 
 Cunningham's discoveries in the " Revels " papers, 
 assigning to " Shaxberd " certain plays performed at 
 court on certain dates, were impudent, wicked, and sense- 
 less forgeries. And now Mr. Ernest Law convincingly 
 affirms,^ with the highest backing from expert authority; 
 that they are not forgeries at all. In a worid in which 
 such things happen, we cannot dismiss the Baconian 
 heresy as a mere negUgible freak of human nature. 
 
 Not that I suppose it possible to lead zealous Baconians 
 back to common sense. A preliminary passage in Dr. 
 Theobald's Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light 
 (p. 2) tells how, after reading Bacon and Shakespeare 
 " in perpetual juxtaposition for years " — that is to say; 
 mth no corrective resort to the writings of other Elizabethans 
 — " the persuasion which came by a flash of perception,* 
 ripened into a strong and well-groimded conviction; 
 resting on facts and arguments, sohd and secure as mathe- 
 matical demonstration." Quite so. All the vital counter- 
 vailing facts and argtmients had been ignored, and the 
 resulting conviction, obtained like that derived from a 
 mathematical demonstration of the squaring of the 
 circle, is held like an article of reUgious faith. Such a 
 psychosis is not corrigible. I should as soon expect to 
 convert a bishop to rationahsm as one of Dr. Theobald's 
 way of reasoning to the comparative method. 
 
 But something may be done to prevent the spread of 
 such hallucination among the normally uncritical. The 
 Baconian chimera will persist, and may even be outgone. 
 There has recently been produced, by Professor Gelestin 
 Demblon of Brussels, a new " demonstration " that the 
 Plays were written by Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland 
 (1576-1613), who married the daughter of Sir Philip 
 Sidney, and shared in the insurrection of Essex. It will 
 be interesting to follow the relations of M. Demblon with 
 the Baconians : no one else need intervene. Transcend- 
 
 1 Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 191 1 . 
 
 ' Word so corrected by hapid in my copy of the reissue of 1904 
 
586 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 ing their method as they have done that of common 
 sense, M. Demblon in his opening Vuc d'ensemble tells 
 us the circmnstances under which Lord Rutland wrote 
 the plays, and why he wrote them, sparing us the trouble 
 of digesting any evidence to show that he did write them. 
 So far as I can gather, the whole proof is contained in 
 the plea that he might have written them, chronologically 
 speaking, if we do not date any of the plays too early. 
 Of either external or internal evidence to show that 
 Rutland had anything to do with the plays, or wrote any- 
 thing else, M. Demblon produces not a scrap. ^ He pre- 
 sents us with the hero's portrait, that of a sweetly pretty 
 young man. For the rest, we learn that this youth 
 
 has successively depicted himself in Biron of Love's Labour's 
 Lost, in Bassanio of The Merchant of Venice, in Romeo, in Benedict 
 in Much Ado About Nothing, in Jaques of ^s you Like It, in 
 Hamlet, in Brutus of Julius Ceesar, in Prospero of The Tempest — 
 as did Goethe in Werther, Hermann, Faust, and Tasso ; as did 
 Honore de Balzac in Raphael, in Balthasar Claes, in Albert 
 Savarus, &c.* 
 
 ^M. Demblon appeals to have built his entire h3rpothesis on 
 the discovery that at Rutland's death his brother, acting as his 
 executor, paid "To Mr. Shakspeare in gold, about my Lordes 
 impreso, xlivs. ; To Richard Burbage for painting and making 
 it, xlivs." An "impreso," more correctly "impresa," was a 
 personal " device " or badge, often worn in toumsiments and 
 masques. M. Demblon asserts that the payment, as noted in 
 the family accounts, was to " William Shakspeare." It was not : 
 there is no prenomen. M. Demblon is evidently unaware that it 
 has been shown (by Mrs. Stopes, in the Atherusutn, May i6, 1908) 
 that " Mr. Shakspeare " was probably one John Shakspeare; 
 a fashionable bit -maker of the time, concerning whom there are 
 many entries in the Wardrobe Accounts of Charles I, as prince 
 and as king. Among other things he made " guilt bosses charged 
 with the arms of England." Such an artist was very likely 
 to be employed to do the metal work of an impresa. Mr. John 
 Shakspeare would seem to have been a cousin of the poet, which 
 would explain the connection with Burbage. Et voild tout— 
 for the theory of M. Demblon . 
 
 * Lord Rutland est Shakespeare. Par Celestin Demblon. Paris; 
 Ferdinando, 1912. P. 16. 
 
CONCLUSION 587 
 
 The details are filled in with the same masterly sim- 
 plicity. Rutland was incarcerated for his rebellion from 
 1601 till 1603, and " exhala sa douleur dans le premier 
 Hamlet, ecrit en 1602." Why he chose for this purpose 
 the old Hamlet of Kyd, and how he managed to arrange 
 the matter with the players while he remained in custody, 
 are questions that M. Demblon neither asks nor answers. 
 In his second chapter, the Professor informs us that 
 "notre 6tude d'ensemble," published in the Grande 
 Revue, " a fait beaucoup de bruit, dans la presse euro- 
 pdenne, notamment a Paris, k Rome, a Milan, k Madrid, 
 a Cologne, k Berlin, a Moscou, et quelque pen a Londrcs 
 et k New- York. Ce n'est qu'un commencement."* So 
 one would suppose. But when, citing some of the com- 
 ments, for the most part skilfully non-committal, of his 
 continental critics, M. Demblon deals with that of M. 
 Henri Roujon, of the Academic Fran9aise, he dashes the 
 cup of promise from our lips. In the best French manner, 
 M. Roujon had written : — " As for the proofs, in the sense 
 in which the word would be understood by a magistrate, 
 it appears that M. C^lestin Demblon reserves them for 
 a book which he is going to publish. He will pardon our 
 waiting till then to adhere to his theory." To which 
 M. Demblon replies : " While thanking M. Roujon for 
 his kindness, we permit ourselves not to be of his opinion : 
 with the French ex-Minister of whom we have spoken, 
 with M. de Pawlowski, with the scholars of England, of 
 Germany, and of New York who have written to us, we 
 believe our first chapter to he absolutely decisive." * And 
 there the matter rests ! " That does not signify," adds 
 M. Demblon, " that we have not a quantity of new proofs 
 to give J Our whole book so testifies, and some more 
 will be fotmd already in this chapter." The further 
 " proofs " are of like kind with those which M. Roujon 
 was unable to detect in the first chapter : that is to say; 
 there is not a grain of evidence in the book. Running to 
 * Work cited, p. 27. * Work cited, p. 29. 
 
588 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 559 Paiges, it is occupied chiefly with the thesis " Shaxper 
 de Stratford hors cause." Incidentally M. Demblon 
 discusses at great length many biographical and Hterary 
 points, sometimes quite inteUigently ; but as to his 
 grounds for asserting the authorship of Lord Rutland 
 he is resolutely unconmiunicative. 
 
 It is rather hard on the Baconians. He has cahnly 
 annexed all their case against " Shaxper " ; and for the 
 rest he simply tells them that they are mistaken about 
 Bacon, who did not and could not write the plays. It 
 is quite conceivable that he may convert some of them : 
 confidence of assertion seems to be the way to get at the 
 Baconian mind ; and as he spares them all worry over 
 parallel passages he offers them some spiritual compensa- 
 tion for the loss of Bacon. They are not required by 
 him to ascribe to Rutland the whole of the Elizabethan 
 drama, and the rest of the Baconian load. It should 
 be noted that he provides Mr. Greenwood with his lawyer ; 
 for Rutland had done some legal study at Gray's Inn. 
 Whether Mr. Greenwood finds this sufficient to dispose 
 of his difiiculties, I leave to him to say. 
 
 At one or two points, M. Demblon and Mr. Greenwood 
 are partly in agreement. They concur — or incline to do 
 so — in maMng Jonson's line. 
 
 And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
 
 and the sequel, mean : " and if you had small Latin and 
 less Greek I would none the less," &c. The other obstacles 
 presented by Jonson's testimony M. Demblon gets round 
 very much as Mr. Greenwood does. On his own accoimt 
 he has, as might be expected from his Vue d'ensemble, 
 the courage to allege that the reminiscences of Ovid in 
 the Venus and the Lucrece " recall always the original 
 text, never the text ofGolding."^ " La verity a ses droits," 
 is nevertheless one of M. Demblon's propositions, " Like 
 Mr. Greenwood, he has assumed that those who deny 
 
 * Work cited, p, 49. » P. 68. 
 
CONCLUSION 589 
 
 Shakespeare's possession of classical scholarship represent 
 him as being " presque inculte " — almost devoid of 
 education. This nobody but a Baconian ever did. 
 " Comme s'il avait jamais exists un grand poete inculte ! " 
 continues M. Demblon. " Comme si Ton pouvait mfime 
 en concevoir un ! " It may be worth while to say a 
 final word on that head. 
 
 If by inculte M. Demblon means a modem who had 
 not read the Greek and Latin classics, he in efEect destroys 
 his own case later, for he is wiUing to accept Plautus as 
 knowing no tongue but Latin, and Robert Bums, "ce 
 charmant poete," as having " fait de bonnes 6tudes 
 primaires et lu des livres dont il nous cite lui-m6me les 
 titres."^ This is just a trifle too puerile. No one with 
 whom M. Demblon has to debate ever suggested that 
 Shakespeare had not read as many books as did Bums. 
 The whole question, once more, is as to whether the 
 Shakespeare of the Plays needed much classical cultvure 
 to write them. If M. Demblon means to assert this, we 
 need not argue with him as to whether Plautus had read 
 any Greek. On his principles a Homer could not have been 
 a great poet, whether or not he could read or write. M. 
 Demblon is at pains to remind us that Musset made 
 " bonnes 6tudes dont il ne fait jamais ^talage," and to 
 argue that Balzac was not an ignoramus because he 
 assigned to a depute a fictitious department. Quite so : 
 the question about the " sea-coast of Bohemia " — copied 
 from Greene's tale — ^has really nothing to do with the 
 case ; though that was certainly not a lapse possible to 
 Bacon. But when we are discussing Balzac, is nothing 
 to be said on the question whether his " Com6die humaine' ' 
 was or cotdd have been constructed without classical 
 cultiure ? Balzac (concerning whom posterity may be 
 presented with a new Baconian myth, on the score that 
 the family name was really "Balssa"), was certainly 
 no scholar. He left school at seventeen. Is it alleged 
 
 » Pp. 42-43- 
 
590 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 that the smattering of classics he had at a college made 
 possible for him a work of imaginative creation such as 
 the schooling and actor-training of Shakespeare made 
 for him impossible ? I am content to leave the issue at 
 that — and M. Demblon to the Baconians. 
 
 In one attitude of mind they are truly akin. Deter- 
 mined to deny that the " Stratford actor " can have 
 produced the Plays, they never once balk at the notion 
 of their being produced as a kind of recreation by any 
 university man, however othervsdse engaged. Uncon- 
 cerned as they are to inquire how their exalted hero 
 contrived to be man-of-all-work to a theatre-company^ 
 they are if possible still less moved to wonder how that 
 manifold mass of dramaturgy was created secretly by 
 a man of affairs, ostensibly occupied throughout his life 
 in wholly different ways. Even Mr. Greenwood has no 
 misgiving in suggesting that his unknown lawyer-author 
 was a " busy man, whose aim it was to use the stage as 
 a means to convey instruction to the people, and to 
 teach them a certain measure of philosophy " ! * All 
 that mighty mass of poetic creation was a by-product 
 of a busy lawyer ; and its aim— from Falstaff to Corio- 
 lanus, from Juliet to Perdita — ^was " to convey instruction 
 to the people " 1 For the Baconians, it is not even a 
 proWem that the full-handed Bacon should have added 
 the seven-and-thirty Plays to a performance which, apart 
 from these; ranked him with the great thinkers and 
 workers of his time. For M. Demblon, it is not even a 
 matter for surprise that his young Earl threw off the 
 Plays in the intervals of travel, study, rebellion, and 
 court life. The work of the greatest of all dramatists, 
 it appears, could be written "standing on one foot," 
 provided one had only been at a university ! 
 
 There need, then, be no limit to the list of claimants. 
 From Mr. Greenwood's book, as above noted, and from 
 an Appendix to Mr. Harold Bayley's entitled The Shake- 
 * Shakespeare Problem, p. 514. 
 
CONCLUSION 591 
 
 SPEARE Symphony (1906). I learn that an "able work" 
 has been written by Judge Stotsenburg, under the head- 
 ing An Impartial Study of the Shakespeare Title, 
 to show, says Mr. Bayley, " that the Shakespeare Plays 
 are not the work of one single author, but of a poetic 
 syndicate, including among others Drajrton, Dekker, 
 Heywood, Webster, Middleton, and Porter. To this 
 group Bacon was merely a polisher and reconstructor." 
 This last idea is, in Judge Stotsenburg's own words, " a 
 conclusion that forces itself upon my mind because, 
 first, I beheve that Bacon if he originated the pla37s 
 would have observed the unities, and secondly, because 
 his philosophical views and peculiarities are interwoven 
 in some of them." I confess to having abstained from 
 taking the trouble to read Judge Stotsenburg's book. 
 One must draw the line somewhere. The judges have 
 an awful record in this business : only Judge Willis has 
 stood for critical investigation and common sense,* as 
 against Lord Campbell, Lord Penzance, Judge Webb, 
 Judge Holmes, and Judge Stotsenburg. Ne sutor ultra 
 crepidam : a judge is no judge in a literary problem when 
 he lacks either due knowledge or literary judgment. The 
 last seems to be Judge Stotsenburg's weak point. 
 
 His " S3mdicate " theory appears to be a modification 
 of that of Delia Bacon. How he can assign the great 
 tragedies to any combination of the writers above-named, 
 and why he does not assign all their works to other men, 
 I am not concerned to inquire. If he had been able to 
 recognise in the really alien or composite plays the hands 
 of Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and Kyd, he would have 
 creditably marked himself off from the Baconians ; and 
 if he could indicate in Troilus or Timon or Julius CiESAR 
 the hand of any of the writers he has named (Dekker, I 
 have suggested, wrote the Prologue to Troilus), he would 
 be doing some critical service. That there is something 
 
 *Even Judge Willis did strange things in his mock-trial 
 of the Bacon-Shakespeare question ! 
 
592 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 of Middleton in Macbeth was argued by others^before 
 Judge Stotsenburg. But to assign the whole of the 
 Shakespeare plays to a syndicate of which not one (at 
 least of those named by Mr. Bayley) was capable of 
 writing the finest Shakespearean poetry; is merely to 
 out-Bacon DeUa and the Baconians. Mr. Greenwood 
 notes that the learned judge assigns the Shakespeare 
 Sonnets to Sir PhiUp Sidney ; and Mr. Greenwood does 
 not wince ! The learned judge, says Mr. Bayley, " has 
 collected a large number of parallel passages from the 
 writers I have dealt with; but, curiously enough, he 
 notes none of those which happen to have struck me." 
 That would seem to mean that the learned Judge, reading 
 the Elizabethan dramatists, has failed to notice (as Mr. 
 Bayley has noticed) the multitude of tags and echoes and 
 coincidences which might have revealed to him how 
 those playwrights could have tags and sentiments in 
 common without community of genius. 
 
 Probably the whirUgig of Time will cast up yet other 
 fantasies in far greater numbers than rational contribu- 
 tions to Shakespeare study. I do not despair of seeing 
 seriously advanced the theory that the Plays were written 
 by Queen Elizabeth, who was a good classical scholar, 
 and must have heard, from her law officers, a good deal 
 about law. Sir John Davies pronounced her the " richest 
 mind " of all time.^ And if any man tell |US— as we are 
 at times tempted to tell ourselves — ^that in^ world in 
 which folly is thus forever heading this way and that, 
 like an uncontrollable epidemic, it is a waste of time to 
 reason with or against it even when it afiects thousands, 
 we can but rest on the analogies of civic life. If we are 
 well employed when we strive to minimise disease iu 
 the body politic and the body corporal, we are surely nol 
 much less rationally employed when we seek to minimise 
 delusion in the life intellectual. 
 
 Perhaps we may overrate the importance of thai 
 * Dedication to Nosce Teipsum. 
 
CONCLUSION 593 
 
 on the aesthetic side. But here again we can plead the 
 common human interest. If we be asked, Who and what 
 was this Shakespeare, that you should spend so much 
 time and trouble in settling esactly wlwit he wrote ? 
 we answer that it is all part of the eternal tribute men 
 pay to genius, as to beauty, were it only because each 
 is so rare. The very vogue of the Baconian delusion 
 is to be traced to that "witchcraft of the wit," that 
 dominion of masterly speech, which has won Shakespeare 
 his sovereignty. In seeking to dethrone one potentate 
 of the aesthetic life, the Baconians have not chosen a 
 commonplace substitute. It needed a great power over 
 men's spirits to move such a multitude even of unscientific 
 reasoners to acclaim in Bacon a possible claimant to 
 Shakespeare's realm. And if they have loved not wisely 
 but too well, they have therein shown themselves 
 members of the human family. 
 
 The trouble is that, set agoing as they were by the 
 rebound of the idolatrous habit in regard to Shakespeare; 
 they have developed a more extravagant idolatry in 
 regard to Bacon. As the old Shakespeare-worshipper 
 saw in his idol the sum of all intellectual excellence, the 
 Baconian, carrying credulity to new extremes, procleiims 
 a double miracle, and, giving two kingdoms to one man, 
 quadruples every folly of his predecessor. There has 
 never been a truly critical procedure in his whole develop- 
 ment. Instead of correcting the faults of omission and 
 commission in the idolatrous criticism of Shakespeare, 
 he has wholly abandoned Shakespearean anal}^is, taking 
 the entire mass of the plays without question as wholly 
 one man's work, and fathering on Bacon a quantity of 
 matter of tehich the considerate Shakespearean was long 
 ago glad to relieve Shakespeare's credit.^ At that level 
 of delusion, no corrective thinking is possible. Even 
 
 * From such blame Mr. Greenwood is honourably exempt. His 
 discussions of the composite and spurious plays are the soundest 
 parts of his book. 
 
 2P 
 
594 THE BACONIAN HERESY 
 
 the conceivably possible gain from a reaction against 
 idolatry of Shakespeare has been turned to naught by 
 the Baconian resort to mere vilification of the rejected 
 divinity. Uncontrolled in animosity as in adoration; 
 the heretic will see no kind of merit in the renounced 
 God, seeing all things in the new. Worshipping a man 
 who was fain to leave his reputation to " men's charitable 
 speeches," they catch at every pretext for defaming the 
 man of Stratford. Refusing to accept any tradition to 
 his credit, as they are entitled to do, they gloat over the 
 tradition, caught from a village vicar of a much later 
 time, that the worshipped poet had died of a drinking- 
 bout with old friends who visited him from London. 
 Mr. Greenwood, standing partly outside the Baconian 
 fold, has the fairness to admit that this is in all hkeli- 
 hood a myth ; but the Baconians are not that way 
 inclined. 
 
 The argument appears to be that if once Shakespeare 
 can be proved to have misconducted himself, the case 
 against his authorship is strengthened. Such a method 
 would make short work of the claims of Marlowe and 
 Greene and Peele and Jonson to their plays ; and it is 
 to be hoped that saner critical methods will in future 
 reign even among the " anti-Stratfordians." In so far 
 as they are sincerely perplexed, with Emerson, to " marry 
 this man's life to his verse," and are exercised by all the 
 " difficulties " they find in it, they may usefully ask 
 themselves how they can hope to solve these by a hjrpo- 
 thesis which, whether they insert Bacon or merely Mr. 
 Greenwood's unknown lawyer, involves on the bare issue 
 of the fact the most mountainous improbability in literary 
 history. And perhaps they may no less usefully ask 
 themselves how, on their principles, we are to solve the 
 difficulty of the strange incongruity between Bacon's 
 precepts for the right management of personal finance 
 and the laxity of practice which wrought his ruin. A 
 Mttle extension of this field of inquiry may lead them to 
 
CONCLUSION 595 
 
 perceive that there are " difficulties " in reducing to 
 strict congruity the life of any man. 
 
 Whatever may be the developments on that side of 
 the dispute, it is to be hoped that something has been 
 done in the foregoing pages to force it out of the field of 
 literary and philological m5^h-mongering upon which 
 the " anti-Stratfordian " case has been so largdy founded 
 by all its advocates. That at least seems worth doing. 
 On any view, in the house of science there are many 
 mansions, and the method of science is as reasonably to 
 be applied to any one problem as to any other. After 
 all, it may be as humanly useful to settle " aesthetic " 
 questions of this sort as to develop the law of projectiles, 
 to the end of more easily and surely destroying life in 
 war, or even as it may be to perfect the theory of " the 
 grip " in golf. 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 Ablative absolute, the, 226 
 Actors, status of in Tudor times, 
 
 27, 28 
 Adams, Thomas, legal phraseology 
 
 in sermons of, 170 
 Adonis, " gardens "of, 183 sg. 
 ^Esthetic taste, as arbitrator, 8, 14 
 Against Dicing, Dancing, &c., 
 
 classical matter in, 182 
 All's Well that Ends Well, law and 
 
 legal phraseology in, 65 sq., 85 
 Anacreon, Shakespeare's alleged 
 
 knowledge of, 215 
 Anthon, Prof., cited, 188 
 Anti-Stratfordians, the, i, Si 594 
 Antony tmi Cleopatra, legal 
 
 phraseology in, 84 
 Appius and Virginia, Webster's, 
 
 mal scene in, 162 sq. 
 Arden of Feversham, legal allusions 
 in, 61, 68 
 written by Kyd, 575 
 Ariosto. 249 
 
 Aristotle, Bacon and, 529 
 Arnold, prose and verse of, 485 
 Artist and King, story of, 476 
 Ascham, on English vocabulary, 
 2S9 
 on poetic imitation, 392 
 Asseveration, terms of, 477 
 Astrophel, Spenser's, 17 n. 
 Astropkel and Stella, 91-2 
 A s You Like It, legal phraseology 
 
 in, 47 sq. 
 " Atheistic academy," the, 25 
 Augustine, St., Shakespeare'^ 
 
 ^eged knowledge of, 203 
 
 Bacon, Delia, Theory of, 1 1 n. 
 Bacon, Francis, i, 2 
 
 our knowledge of, through 
 
 Eawley, 23 
 Baconus or Baco ?, 3 
 personality of , contrasted with 
 
 Shakespeare's, 7, 547 sq. 
 claims for, by Baconians, 5 
 and Montaigne, 5 
 on the bankruptcy of modem 
 
 languages, 534 
 handwriting of , 580, 581 «. 
 essays of, 6, 526 
 
 S96 
 
 Bacon, Francis, character of, 527 
 does not talk law in non- 
 legal works, 17, 525 
 and Essex, 32 
 occupations of, 32, 384 
 didactic ideals of, 528, 534, 
 
 S83 
 imitates Montaigne, 386 
 prose style of, 490, 503 sq., 
 
 507 sg. 
 vocabulary of , 504 sq., 511 sq. 
 intellectual intereists of, 384, 
 
 525 sj- 
 attitude of, to the theatre, 
 
 S3 1 sg. 
 will of, 576 sg. 
 Bacon and Shakespeare, 8 n., 
 
 II n. 
 Bacon is Shakespeare, 3 
 Bacon-Shakespeare Qttestion, The, 
 
 vii 
 Bacon-Shakespeare Question An- 
 swered, The, $66n.; S86»t 
 Baconian Mint, The, 272, 276 
 Baconian Theory, the, i sg., 6, 7, 
 
 9. 10 
 advocated by Mr. Donnelly, 
 
 Ssg. 
 Dr. Theobald, v, 5. 94i 
 
 201 sg., 253 sg., 376 
 Wm. Theobald, 218 sg. 
 Sir E. Dnming-Lawrence, 
 
 3-5 
 Mr. Castle, with qualifica- 
 tions, 127 sg. 
 Delia Bacon, 1 1 m. 
 W. H. Smith, II «. 
 Mark Twain, 12-14 
 not accepted by Mr. Green- 
 wood, 38 
 extension of, beyond Shake- 
 speare, 5 
 motived by " orthodox " 
 
 doctrine, 6 
 never accepted by a trained 
 
 English scholar, 8 
 insanities of, 221, 382 sq., 509, 
 
 528. 536, 545, 584 
 its defiance of Bacon's pre^ 
 
 cepts, 583 
 doubly idolatrous, 593 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 597 
 
 Baconians, attitude of, 9, 221. 
 S34. 536. 594 
 Bacon's precepts trodden 
 under foot by, 583 sq. 
 Bale, citea, 85 m.; vocabulary of, 
 
 262 
 Baluffe. A., cited, 30 n. 
 Balzac, culture and performance 
 
 of, 589 «£; 
 Bancroft, T., eulogy of Shakes- 
 peare by, 21 
 Banquet of Jests, A, 20 
 Barnes, Bamabe, " legal " sonnets 
 
 by. 88 sq. 
 Bartholomew, 206 
 Bayley, Harold, on word-creation, 
 265 N. 
 on Judge Stotsenburg, 592 
 Baynes, Prof., 182 
 Beaumont, 97 
 
 and Fletcher, use of "pur- 
 chase " by, 99 sq. 
 legal phraseology of, ch. 
 
 m., passim 
 echo Shakespeare, 396 
 rivalled Shakespeare in 
 plot-making, 544 
 Beeching, Canon, xii, 580 n. 
 Bees, described by Shakespeare, 
 Elyot, Lilly, and others, 204 sq. 
 Bentley, on the "gardens of 
 
 Adonis," 18459. 
 Bemi, 249 
 
 Bible, tnmslation of, ascribed to 
 Bacon, 5 
 Shakespeare's alleged know- 
 ledge of, 68, 145 
 Biography, lack of, in Shake- 
 
 q>eare's age, 24 sq. 
 Blackstone, 208 
 Blind Beggar of Alexandria, The, 
 
 legal matter in, 168 
 
 Bompas, G. C, on Shakespeare's 
 
 vocabulary, 517 n., 520-1 n. 
 
 miscarriages, of, 521 n., 558 n. 
 
 on Bacon's use of law terms, 
 
 525 «. 
 Brandes, G., 249 sq., 251 
 Bums, culture of, 556 
 Breton, N., 104 
 Browne, Sir T., prose of, 508 
 Browning, prose^and verse of, 484 
 Burbage, Richard, 586 n. 
 Burton's Anatomy, ascribed to 
 
 Bacon, 401 
 Butler, J. D„ 184 
 Byron, prose and verse of, 484 
 
 Casar. on vocabulary, 259 
 Camden, on Spenser's funeral, 1 5 
 Campbell, Lord Chief Justice, on 
 Shakespeare's legal ac- 
 quirements, 35 sq. 
 inconsistencies of, 37, 156, 
 157 sq. 
 Carlyle, on Emerson, etc., 17 
 Carter, Rev. T., cited, 145 sq. 
 Castle, E. J., on Shakespeare's 
 legal knowledge. 36-37. 
 127 sq. 
 on law in Macbeth, 39 ; in 
 
 Titus, 173 
 theory of, as to " legal " and 
 
 " non-legal " pia.ys, 127 
 on Lord Campbell, 127-8 
 uninformed as to Eliza- 
 bethan literature, 128 
 blunder of, as to use of 
 
 " colour," 128 sq. 
 blimder of, as to name 
 
 "Escalus," 134 
 follows Mr. Donnelly, 138 sq. 
 Catullus, Shakespeare's alleged 
 
 knowledge of, 208, 214 
 Centurie of Prayse, 22 
 Cervantes, 30 
 Chaucer, 19, 26. 102, 260 
 
 prose and verse of, 486 sq. 
 scholarship of, 486 
 Cheke, Sir John, on neologism. 
 258 
 influence of, 262 
 Chambers' Journal, art. in, on the 
 
 authorship of the plays, 1 1 fi. 
 Chapman, 20 
 
 legal allusions by,^40. 76, 78 
 
 (ch. iii. passim),' i€i 
 use of " purchase " by, 1 1 1 
 use of legal maxims by, 40, 119 
 on legal delays, 141 
 on law courts, 145 
 use of forms of trial by, 153 
 inoitates Shakespeare, 394 
 imitations by, 389 
 word formations by, 266 n. 
 Chloris, 91 
 Cicero, 203 
 
 Ciphers, Baconian, 2, 3, 536 
 Clarke, Mr. and Abs. Cowden, 201 
 Ccelia, 91 
 
 Coincidences of phrase, alleged, 
 between Bacon and Shakes- 
 peare, 376 sq., 433 sq. 
 Cokaine. Sir Aston, on Shake- 
 speare, 21 
 
598 
 
 GENERAL INDEX 
 
 Coleridge, echoes Davies, 392 
 prose and verse of, 484 
 effect of biography of, S38 
 Corner, J. P., 36 s?- , . , 
 
 Collins, J. Churton, on classical 
 knowledge in the p\a.ys, 
 ixsq., 34, I79«2-. 182. 190 
 on Fanner, 194 
 on MS. translations of classics, 
 
 on law terms m Tttus, 39, 171 
 Colman, 223 
 
 Comedy of Errors, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 46 
 composite authorship of, 197 
 sq., 48 s 
 Contention of . . . York and Lan- 
 caster, 73 , . J. , 
 Copernicus, doctnne of, rejected 
 
 by Bacon, S «., 5*9 
 Coriolanus. legal phraseology in, 
 84, 122 
 sources of, 191 n. 
 alleged classical learning in, 
 192 
 Cornelius Agrippa, 208 
 Cornish, 181 fi. 
 Cowley, allusion to Shakespeare 
 
 by, 20 
 Craik, Prof., on Julius Casar, 
 
 191 w. 
 Crawford, C, on the Bacon- 
 Shakespeare Question, vii, 
 7, 276, 380, 433 
 on authorship of Arden of 
 Feversham, 575 
 Creighton, Dr., on Shakespeare 
 
 and Barnes, 89 n. 
 Cryptogram, Mr. Donnelly's, 2 
 Cunningham, Peter, vindicated, 
 S84-S 
 
 Daniel, echoed by Shakespeare. 
 280, 389 
 Johnson on, 561 
 will of, 577 
 Dante, prose and verse of, 484 
 Davenant, Sir W., his Ode to 
 
 Shakespeare, 21 
 Davies, Sir John, "gulling 
 sonnets " by, 93 
 echoed by Shakespeare, 189 
 poetry of, 523 
 on Queen Elizabeth, 592 
 Davis, Senator Cushman, on law 
 in Shakespeare, 12 1 sq., 174 
 on Jonson's law, 123 
 
 DeCivilate Dei.The, Shakespeare's 
 
 alleged use of, 203 sq. 
 De Proprietatibus Rerum, 206 
 Dekker, scanty details as to life 
 of, 23-4 
 imprisonment of, 64 
 legal phraseology in, ch. iii 
 
 passim 
 use of " purchase " by, 109 
 use of forms of trial by, 1 S4 
 echoes Shakespeare, 395, 398 
 wrote prologue to Troilus?, 
 
 400 
 share in pre -Shakespearean 
 Troilus. 573 
 Delia, 91 
 
 Demblon, Prof. C, his thesis of 
 Lord Rutland's authorship 
 of the Plays, 585 sq. 
 his treatment of facts, 588 
 on the possibility of a great 
 uncultured poet, 589 
 Devecmon, on law in Shakespeare, 
 60, IS7. 162, 174 
 on law in Webster, 1 57, 171 
 Devil's Law Case, The, 50, 61-2, 
 
 iS7 sq.. 173 
 Diana, 91 
 Dickens, 17, SS6 
 Digges, Leonard, his eulogy of 
 
 Shakespeare, 20-22 
 Dogberry and Verges, 52 
 Donne and Ben Jonson, 560, 561 
 Donnelly, I., theories of, 2, 16, 
 183 s?, 
 on Bacon-Shakespeare paral- 
 lels, 376, 401 sq. 
 scholarship of, 183 
 on Bacon and Montaigne, 388 
 ascribes Burton's Anatomy 
 to Bacon, 401 
 Double-«ndings in Shakespeare's 
 
 plays, 198 
 Drake, scanty details as to life of, 
 
 26 
 Dra3rton, his lines to Shakespeare, 
 20, 22 
 his knowledge of Shakes- 
 peare, 22 
 legal phraseology in sonnets 
 
 of, 92 
 influence of, on Shakespeare's 
 
 sonnets, 92 
 description of a trial by, 145 
 echoes Spenser, 392 
 Drummond and Ben Jonson, 17, 
 20. 559 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 599 
 
 Dryden, prose and verse of, 484 
 Dugdale, Shakespeare monument 
 
 shown by. ix 
 Duming-Lawrence, Sir Edwin, 
 
 Baconian arguments of, v, 3, 4, 
 
 s. 14 
 
 Economics of Genius, the, 551 
 Edward III. echoed by Shake- 
 speare, 390 
 Edward IV. Pt. II. legal phrase- 
 ology in, 144 
 " Eitberside, Serjeant," 38, 115 
 Elegies, Elizabethan, 17 n. 
 Elizabeth, Queen, Sir John Davies 
 
 on, 592 
 Elyot, Sir T., on country sessions, 
 149 
 on civil polity and that of the 
 
 bees, 204 sq. 
 on study of languages, 262 
 Elze, on Shakespeare's vocabulary, 
 
 S17-8 «. 
 Emerson, on Shakespeare's life,539 
 Enchiridion militis Christiani, 181 
 Epitaph, Shakespeare's, by Basse, 
 20 
 Mrs. Hall's, 29 
 Erasmus, classical matter in En- 
 chiridion of, 1 8 1-2 
 Errors common to Bacon and 
 
 Shakespeare, 244 
 <' Escalu3,".Mr. Castle's theory as 
 
 to, 134 
 Essex, trial of, 32 
 Euphuism, 41, 91 
 
 Faerie Queene, legal matter in, 1 52 
 Farmer, Dr.. on the learning of 
 Shakespeare, 182, 192, 194, 
 222 
 high qualifications of, viii 
 on Sl^espeare's abstention 
 from publication, 540 
 Favorinus, on vocabulary, 260 
 Fees payable by prisoners, 64 sq. 
 Feltbam, Owen, praise of Shake- 
 speare by, 21 
 Fidessa, 91, 93 
 Fiske, Prof., 182 
 
 Fleay, F. G., on Julius Ctesar, 
 191 n. 
 on Shakespeare's company, 
 
 on authorship of Arden of 
 Feversham, S75 
 Florio, 5, i6n. 
 
 Flowers, allusion to, in the minor 
 
 dramatists, 531 n. 
 Folio (1633), references to, 20, 
 
 220. 540, S4S, SS9 
 Fortescue, Sir John, cited, 56 
 Four Elements, The, 181 
 Foumier, E., cited, 29 «., 30 n. 
 Foxe. 48 
 Fumivall, Dr., 220 
 
 Gascoigne, George, " legal " 
 sonnet by, 88 m. 
 comedy of Supposes trans- 
 lated by, 323 
 Genius, literary, assimiptions and 
 misconceptions as to, 53859. 
 and culture, 550 sq. 
 George-a-Greene, 125 
 Gifiord,onMarston's family, 561-2 
 Gloster, story of Duke of, 138 
 Goethe, prose and verse of, 485 
 " Golden Hind, The," 26 
 Gosson, 61 
 
 Greene, scanty details as to life 
 of, 23 
 development of, 557 
 share of in Titus. 35, 399 
 resort of to legal phraseology, 
 41. ch. iii. passim, 150 sq., 
 
 use of " purchase " by, 105 
 anecdote of, 125 
 plagiarised from Thynne, 151 
 hostile to Shakespeare, 219, 
 
 543 
 on neologism, 258 
 imitations by, 389 
 Greenwood, G. G„ positions of, 
 
 ». 9, 14, issq.. 18, 157s?. 
 his imagmary plajrwiight, 547, 
 
 553 «•, 559. 568 
 on Shakespeare's death, 16, 17 
 on allusions to Shakespeare, 
 
 19. 39 
 on Shakespeare's knowledge 
 
 of law, 34, 35 
 use of Lord Campbell's thesis 
 
 by. 35. 38. 60, 161, 171 sq.. 
 
 176 
 his position negative, 34, 559 
 on legal allusions in Titus, 
 
 39. 65, 171, 173 
 follows Grant White as to 
 
 " purchase," 99 
 argument of, as to law in 
 
 Webster, 157 sq., 161 sq., 
 
 171 sq. 
 
6oo 
 
 GENERAL INDEX 
 
 Greenwood, G. G., on the law in 
 Adams' sermons, 170 
 
 argument of, as to proofs of 
 Shakespeare's legal know- 
 ledge. 171 sq., 176 
 
 follows Lord Penzance, 173 
 
 blames Mr. Devecmon in 
 error, 174 
 
 recognises alien elements in 
 the Pla3^, 183 
 
 his theory of Shakespeare's 
 "culture," 1925^., 5505^. 
 
 its exiguous bcisis, 193 
 
 misconceptions of the author 
 by, 19S-6. 199 sq. 
 
 faced by problem of com- 
 positeness of plays, 542-3 
 
 on genius and culture, 550 sq., 
 SS6sq. 
 
 obtrudes the " university 
 fallacy," 556 
 
 on the testimony of Jonson, 
 SS9 sq., 564 sq. 
 
 misinterprets it, 562 
 
 rejects Baconian theory, 38 
 
 but gives excuse for calling 
 him a Baconian, 566 
 
 on "The Silence of Philip 
 Henslowe," 569 
 
 use of Judge Stotsenburg's 
 argument by, 573 
 
 treatment of Heywood's tes- 
 timony by, 574 
 
 on authorship of At den 0/ 
 Fever sham, 575 
 
 on Shakespeare's signatures, 
 577 sq. 
 
 on the education of Mil- 
 ton's and Shakespeare's 
 daughters, 581 
 
 holds that the Pla3rs were 
 written to convey instruc- 
 tion to the people, 590 
 
 recognises their composite 
 character, 593 
 GriflSn, B., sonnets by, 93 
 Grosart, Rev. Dr., on Daniel, 
 
 577 «. 
 Grote, on Athenian drama and 
 Dikasteiies, 553 n. 
 
 Habington, W., alludes to Shake- 
 speare, 21 
 Hales, of Eton, praises Shake- 
 speare, 21 
 Prof., on Spenser's life, 26 
 Sir James, 78 
 
 Hales V. Petit, 78, 176 
 Hall, H., on EUzabethan litigious- 
 ness, 44, 143 
 Mrs. Susanna, 28 ; epitaph 
 of, 28-29 
 Hallam, on neologism in Shake- 
 speare, 253 sq. 
 HaUiwell-Phillipps, on Stratford- 
 on-Avon, 28 
 on the learning of Shake- 
 speare, 183 
 Halpin, Rev. N. J., 558 «. 
 Hamlet, authorship of, 32, 399 
 legal allusions in, 63, jj sq., 
 121 
 Handwriting, literary men's, 580 
 Hannibal, Missouri, 23 
 Hannibal, name used for Cannibal, 
 
 336 
 Hawthorne, on Delia Bacon's 
 
 theory, 1 1 «. 
 Heine, prose and verse of, 485 
 Henry IV (i), legal allusions in, 
 69 sq. 
 wholly Shakespearean, 200 
 Henry V. alleged classical learning 
 in, 203 sq. 
 prologues to, non-Shake- 
 spearean, 400 
 Henry VI (1), authorship of, 135, 
 183, 201 
 (2) legal phraseology in, 7359., 
 122, 136 
 Henry VIII, 48 
 
 legal plu-aseology in, 48 
 authorship of, 118 m. 
 Henslowe, 25, 569 sq. 
 
 Shakespeare's relations with, 
 . 570 s?. 
 Heresy, the word, i 
 Herring, The Praise of the, 4, 5 
 Hes^wood, John, vocabulary of, 
 263 
 Thomas, his allusions to 
 
 Shakespeare, 21, 22 
 le^l phrases in his plays, ch. 
 
 iii. passim. 
 use of " purchase " by, 107 sq. 
 use of legal maxims by, 119 
 scanty details of life of, 23, 
 
 24, 40 
 echoes Shakespeare. 395 
 his relations with Shake- 
 speare. 574 
 Historie of Error, The, 197 
 Holland, Hugh, his eulogy of 
 Shakespeare, 20 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 6oi 
 
 Holmes, Judge N. and the 
 
 " American School," 1 1 «. 
 
 positions of, 377 
 
 cited, 12 n. 
 Hooker, 263, 509, 525 
 Hooper, Bishop, leg^sms of, 70, 
 
 169-70 
 prose of, 489 
 Hopkins, version of Psalms by, 
 
 III H. 
 
 Horace, Shakespeare's alleged 
 kno-wledge of, 193, 207 
 Tudor translations of, 208 
 Hughes, C. £., 22 
 Hugo, prose and verse of, 485 
 Hunt, Leigh, on Shakespeare's 
 
 scholarship, 201-2 
 Hutchinson, Roger, 103 
 on lawsuits, 141 
 
 Idea, 91. 92 
 
 Idola^ of Shakespeare, i, 32, 
 
 538 sy.. 549 s?-. 593 
 // You Know not Me, &c., scenes 
 
 in. 142-4 
 Imitation, poetic, 388 sq. 
 Impresa, the Rutland, 586 
 In re Shakespeare's Legal Acquire- 
 ments, 157 
 Indictments, legal, in stage 
 
 trials, 65 sq. 
 Ingleby, Dr., his Centurie of 
 Prayse, 22 
 cited, 558 n. 
 
 on portraits of Shakespeare 
 and Spenser, 569 
 Is Shakespeare Dead ? 12 
 
 JAGGARD, W., cited. 36 n. 
 aggard, the Elizabethan pub- 
 lisher, 574 
 James, IQng. 81 
 Jeronymo, 25 
 Johnson, Dr., effect of biography 
 
 oi. 538 
 Jonson, Ben, and Bacon's 
 '' secret," 2, 566 
 scanty details as to life of, 
 
 23.25 
 on Shakespeare, 20. 22, 27-28. 
 
 34, 559. 562 ^ 
 on Spenser's death, 1 5 
 conversations of. with Drum- 
 
 mond. 17. 20, 559 
 temperament of, 18, 560 
 Mark Twain on, 19 
 
 Jonson, Ben, his knowledge of 
 Shakespeare. 22, 27-28, 219, 
 
 560. 561 . . ^ ^ 
 critical inconsistenaes of, 564 
 on Shakespeare's classical 
 
 knowledge, 34. 563, 565 
 on the "glardens of Adonis." 
 
 188 
 use of legal phraseology by, 
 
 ch. iii. passim, 115 <9-< 
 
 123 sq., 152 sq. 
 use of " purchase " by, 106 
 legal maxims by, 119 
 forms of trial by, 1 52 sq., 
 165 sq. 
 imprisonment of. 64 
 parallels between Bacon and. 
 
 381.434, 437 sy. 
 imitates Shakespeare, 377t8 
 prose and verse of, 486, 489 
 culture of : its effect on his 
 
 art, 557 
 and Donne. 560, 561 
 on Daniel and Marston, 561 
 Catalogus Scriptorum of, 565 
 His Ode on Bacon's Birth- 
 day, 56659. 
 Repetition of phrases by, 
 
 565-7 
 Jonsonus Virbtus, 21 
 Judges, choleric, in Tudor times. 
 
 84-5 
 wicked, in Tudor and Stuart 
 
 drama, 135 
 record of. on the Baconian 
 question, 591 
 Julius Casar, originals and sources 
 of. i90sg., 392n., 573 
 
 Keats, prose and verse of. 484 
 effect of biography of. 538 
 culture of, 551 sq., 556 
 Kenyon.Lord."legal" verses by.87 
 King John, legal phraseology in. 
 
 67 M. 
 Ling, £dv 
 
 King, £dward, on English vocabu- 
 lary, 259 
 Knight, Charles, on learning of 
 
 Shakespeare. 190. 203 
 Kyd, scanty details as to life of, 
 23,25 
 author of the first Ham/ef, 399 
 possible share of in Titus, 35 
 alluded to by Nashe, 38 
 use of " purchase " by, 105 
 author of A rden of Fever sham, 
 57S 
 
602 
 
 GENERAL INDEX 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 7 
 Lang, A., viii sq., 569 n. 
 handwriting of, 580 
 Langland, 56, 103 
 Latimer, 103, 263 
 on lawsuits, 142 
 on kinds of sessions, 148 
 Latinisms in, 261 
 Latin elements in English, 255 sj. 
 Laughton, Prof., on Drake, 26 
 Laura, 91 
 
 Law, Ernest, on Peter Cunning- 
 ham, 585 
 Law, Shakespeare's alleged know- 
 ledge of. X. 13, 31 sq.96sq., 
 117 sq. 
 general proclivity to, in 
 
 Shakespeare's age, 44 
 conrts much resorted to, 145 
 Lawsuits, duration of, yi sq. 
 Lawyers, and clients, 44-45, 62-63 
 incompetent pronouncements 
 by, on law in Shakespeare. 
 
 94 
 Lear, legal phraseology in. 75 sq. 
 Lee, Sir Sidaey, 88, 572 «., 579 
 Leir, pre-Shakespearean play on, 
 
 573 
 
 Leopardi. prose and verse of, 485 
 
 Liaa, 91 
 
 Lilly, scanty details as to life of, 24 
 legal phraseology of. ch. iii, 
 
 passim, 114 sq. 
 use of " purchase " by, 105 
 
 Litigation and Legalism in Eliza- 
 bethan England, 140 sq. 
 
 Looking-Glass for London, A, trial 
 scene in. 155 
 
 Love-philtres. 246 
 
 Lover's Complaint, A, 16 n. 
 
 Love's Labour's Lost, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 52 
 
 Love's Labour's Won, 200 
 
 Lowell, 179 
 
 Luce, Morton, on Shakespeare's 
 vocabulsuy, 518 «. 
 
 Lumley, Lady, version of Euri- 
 pides by. 196 
 
 Macaulay. G. C, cited, vii 
 Macbeth, " law " in, 39, 80 
 alien elements in. 546 
 MacCallum. Prof., on Shake- 
 speare's Roman plays. 1-91. 391 
 Machiavelli, Bacon and, 529 
 McKerrow, 388 
 Maginn, Dr., 182 
 
 Magnetic Lady, The, legal matter 
 
 in, 165 sq. 
 Malone, on Shakespeare's law, 34 
 on authorship of i Henry VI. 
 
 13s 
 cited. 208 
 Mark Twain, attitude of. to the 
 problem, v, 10. 12 sq. 
 followed Mr. Greenwood, 14, 
 
 19. 34 
 
 ill-informed as to details, 18, 
 
 20. 22, 23 
 
 ignorant as to Elizabethan 
 
 life. 23 
 his case summarised, 1 3 
 his adoption of the legalist 
 
 case, 31 sq., 176 
 Marlowe, plays of. ascribed to 
 
 Bacon, 5. 377 
 use of " purchase " by. 105 
 probable author of i Henry 
 
 VI. 189 
 scholarship of. 189 
 echoed by Shakespeare, 208. 
 
 389 ^ 
 echoes Spenser, 389 
 Marsh on Shakespeare's vocabu- 
 lary. 517 «. 
 Marston. impiisonment of, 64 
 family connections of, 561 
 Jonson and. 560 
 vies with Shakespeare, 391 
 Martin, Sir T., on the culture of 
 
 Dickens. 556 
 Massinger. legal phraseology in. 
 54. ch. iii. />as5tfn. 112 sq. 
 use of " purchase" by, no 
 use of legal maxims by. 1 19 sq., 
 
 121 
 trial scenes in, 155 
 Maxims, legal.in Shakespeare and 
 
 Bacon. 40. 119 sq., 144 
 Measure for Measure, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 44 sj., 133 
 plot of. 134 
 Meier. Dr. K., 562 sq. 
 Merchant of Venice, The, legal 
 ' forms and phraseology in, 
 
 SS-61, 123. 161. 173 
 wholly Shakespearean. 200 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, legal 
 
 phraseology in. 40 sq. 
 Middleton. legal procedure in. 1 56 
 Milton on Shakespeare. 20, 22, 
 202 
 on the " gardens of Adonis," 
 185 sq. 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 603 
 
 Milton, imitates Sylvester, 392 
 prose and verse of, 484 
 vocabulary of, 518 n. 
 effect of biography of, 538 
 education of daughters of, 
 S81 
 Molidre, prejudice of pietists 
 against, 29 n. 
 scanty biographical details of. 
 30 
 Montaigne, Flono's translation, 
 Shakespeare's use of, 190, 
 207. 396 
 imitated by Bacon, 388 
 More, Sir T., vocabulary of, 261 . 
 Morgan, Appleton, on styles of 
 Shakespeare and Bacon, 
 483 «. 
 on Venus and Adonis, 553 
 Much Ado About Nothing, legal 
 
 phraseology in, 52 sq. 
 Muller, Max, on Shakespeare's 
 vocabulary, 517 m. 
 
 Nashe, dted, 4, 5 
 
 doctrine of Copernicus re- 
 jected by, 5 «. 
 scanty details of life of, 23 
 Epistle to Greene's Mena- 
 
 phon, 38 
 legal phraseology in, ch. iii, 
 
 passim 
 use of " purchase " by, 109 
 knowledge of law courts 
 
 shown by, 135 
 on lawyers and statutes, 1 37 
 on English litigiousness, 140 
 use of forms of trial by, 1 50 
 plagiarisms by, 388 
 prose of, 487 
 Neologisms. Elizabethan, 91. 258 
 alleged, in Shakespeare, 2 53 s^. 
 Nero, 396 
 New English Dictionary, The, 265, 
 
 438-9 
 North's Plutarch, 191-2 
 Northbrooke, 182 
 Nosce Teipsum, 189 
 
 "Orthodox "errors. 9, 10, S^Ssq., 
 
 549 sq., 584 
 0/Ae//o, legal phraseology in. 81 sq. 
 Ovid. Bacon's and Shakespeare's 
 
 use of, S30, 531 
 Oxford Dictionary , the, 265, 438-9 
 
 Palladis Tamia : Wit's Treasury, 5 
 
 Pattison, Mark, on Milton's con- 
 duct as a father, 481 
 
 Pecock, 257 
 
 Peele, our lack of knowledge of, 23 
 share of in Titus, 35, 216, 399 
 use of " purchase " by, 105 
 use of forms of trial by, 1 52 
 translation from Euripides 
 
 by, 196 
 imitations by, 389 
 culture and dramatic work 
 
 of. 557 
 Penzance, Lord, 35, 95, 173, 381 
 on classical knowledge in the 
 
 plays, 183 sq., 190 sq. 
 on coincidences between 
 Bacon and Shakespeare, 
 380 sq. 
 Persius, 207 
 Phillis, 91 
 Plagiarism in Elizabethan period. 
 
 388. 436 
 Plato, supposed knowledge of by 
 Shakespeare, x sq., 18457., 189 
 sq., 202, 203 sq. 529 
 Plajrmaking, supposed by "anti- 
 Stratfordians " to require no 
 training, 553 n.. 590 
 Plays, sale of, by theatrical com- 
 
 I>ames, 540 
 Plmy, on "gardens of Adonis," 
 
 187 
 Plowden, 78 sq. 
 
 Bacon and, 529 
 Poe, echoes Mrs. Browning, 392 
 
 prose and verse of, 485 
 Politnanteia, 558 m. 
 Pollard, A. W., on authorised and 
 
 unauthorised quartos, 540 sq. 
 Pott, Mrs., 381, 521 «. 
 Promus of Formularies and Ele- 
 gances, 381, 436 
 Prose, Shakespeare's and Bacon's, 
 
 483 sq. 
 Proverbs, currency of, 179 
 
 Raleigh, 25, 171 
 
 Ramsay, H., his praise of Shake- 
 speare, 21] 
 
 Ramus, 5 n. 
 
 Rape ofLucrece, The, legal phrase- 
 ology in, %7 
 
 Rawley, Dr., his account of 
 Bacon, 23 
 
 Renan, on Shakespeare's vocabu- 
 lary. 517 n 
 
6o4 
 
 GENERAL INDEX 
 
 Rhsrthm, magic of, 503 
 
 Richard II, played for the Essex 
 
 conspirators, 535 
 Richard III, composite author- 
 ship of. 198 n. 
 Rhymes, vicious, used by Spenser, 
 
 Peele, and Chapman, SS7 
 RoUe, Richard, 487 
 Romeo and Juliet, legal phrase- 
 ology in. 85 5ff. 
 Rowley and Dekker, 121 
 Rutland, Lord, Shakespeare's 
 
 plays ascribed to, 585 sq. 
 Rushton, W. L., on law in Shake- 
 speare, 40, 117 sq. 
 copied by Lord Campbell, 
 
 36 ». 
 on Lord Campbell's mistakes, 
 
 117 
 on Shakespeare's Euphuism, 
 117 
 " Rustic, the Stratford," 550 sq. 
 
 Scot, Reginald, will of, 578 n. 
 Scott, effect of biography of, 538 
 Shakespeare, Anne, 575 f 9. 
 Shakespeare, John, litigiousness 
 of, 145 sq. 
 a Puritan recusant ?, 145-8 
 supposed impecuniosity of, 
 146-7 
 Shakespeare, John, of London. 
 
 586 M. 
 Shakespeare a Lawyer, 36 n. 
 Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and 
 
 Greene, 36 
 Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 
 
 540 
 Shakespeare Forgeries, Some Sup- 
 posed, $85 
 Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements 
 
 Considered, 36 sq. 
 Shakespeare Problem Re-Stated, 
 
 The, 3^ 
 Shakespeare, Puritan and Recu- 
 sant, J 46 
 Shakespeare Studies in Baconian 
 Light, 201 sq., 253 sq., 377, 
 ^ 433 sq., 585 
 Shakespeare Symphony, The, 265 n., 
 
 S90-I 
 Shakespeare, boyhood of. 147, 552 
 bust of. ix. 10 
 portraits of. 569 
 allusions to, contemporary 
 
 and later, 20-21 
 schooling of, 552 sq. 
 
 Shakespeare, corrupt passages in 
 
 3.4 
 
 alleged knowledge of law in, 
 ix, 13, 31 sq.,i^7sq.,l7Ssq. 
 
 (See Campbell, Castle, Devec- 
 mon, Rushton, and Green- 
 wood) 
 
 alleged classical learning 
 shown by, ix, 20-21, 22. 34, 
 178 sq., 192 sq., 216, 253 sq. 
 
 death and funeral of, 16, 17 
 
 epitaph of. 18 
 
 alleged knowledgeof the Bible, 
 68, 14s 
 of Italian, 249 £9. 
 
 biography of, 26 
 
 and Lord Southampton. 558 
 
 Roman plays of, 190 
 
 general culture of, 192 sq., 554 
 
 early work of. 199 
 
 doubtful plays of, 210 n. 
 
 alleged large vocabulary of, 
 26s «., Siisq., S17 
 
 actual vocabulary of, 266 n.. 
 504 sg.. SI I sq. 
 
 imitations of and by, 389 sq. 
 
 prose and verse of. 483 sq. 
 
 the genius of blank verse, 503, 
 
 SS7 
 inspired phiasmg of, 522 
 moral attitude of. 530 
 non-religions outlook of. 521 
 avowals of. in the Sonnets, 
 
 S3S 
 could not gain from bio- 
 
 graphy, 538 
 inaction of, as to pubhshmg 
 
 his plays, 539 sq. 
 not given to proof-reading. 
 
 541 
 
 composite character of many 
 plays of, 542 sq., 546 sy. 
 
 produced plays on business 
 lines, 543 
 
 temperament of. contrasted 
 with Bacon's. 547-8 
 
 not a studious naturalist. 549 
 
 special culture of. 553 
 
 knew Ovid chiefly in transla- 
 tion, 554 
 
 culture opportunities open to, 
 
 SS4. 556 
 avoided viaous rhymes, 557 
 and Jonson, 560 
 unblotted manuscripts of, 
 
 562-4 
 actor-partners of, 568 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 605 
 
 Shakespeare, relations of, with 
 Henslowe, 570 sq. 
 will of, 575 sq. 
 signatures and script of, 
 
 578 sq. 
 and his daughters' education, 
 
 581 
 was he a hard creditor ?, 582 
 sonnets of. ascribed to Sid- 
 ney. 592 
 Shelley, effect of biography of.538 
 Stuck, Prof., 25 n. 
 Sidney, elegies on, 17 «. 
 sonnets of, 91 
 echoed by Shakespeare ?, 390, 
 
 396 
 poetry of. 523 
 culture of, 554 
 Sir John Oldcastle, " law " in, 
 
 125 sy. 
 Smith, Mr. Fearsall. on Shake- 
 speare's vocabulary, 266 n. 
 Society in the Elizabetltan Age, 44 
 Sonnets. Shakespeare's, 29, 535 
 legal phraseology in, 87 
 written by an actor, 535 
 Elizabethan, legal phrase- 
 ology in. 88 sq. 
 imitativeness of, 91 
 Souli£. cited, 30 w. 
 Southampton, Lord, 89. 558 
 Spanish Tragedy, The, 25 n. 
 Spencer. H., 7 " 
 
 Spenser. Baconian claim as to, $ 
 death and funeral of. 15. 16. 
 
 17 
 scanty detaik as to life of. 23. 
 
 25. 26 
 eleg^ of, on Sidney {Astro- 
 
 phel). 17 n. 
 use of " purchase " by, 104 
 use of form of trial by, 1 52 
 on the " gardens of Adonis," 
 
 184 w., 188 
 vocabulary of, 260 
 imitates Qiaucer. 392 
 repeats his tropes. 392 
 portraits of, 569 
 need for annotated edition of, 
 viii 
 Stapfer, 202 n. 
 Steevens. 34, 53 
 Stevenson, on Shakespeare's un- 
 
 blotted manuscript, 564 
 Stonyhnrst's Virgil, 194 
 Stopes, Mrs. C. C, $66 «., 586 n. 
 Stotsenburg, Judge, 572 sq., 591 
 
 Stratford-on-Avon, 20, 28 
 Shakespeare's life at, 23 
 lack of Shakespeare cult at, 27 
 Puritanism in, 28 
 illiteracy in, 23 
 law-courts at, 145 
 
 Stubbes, Philip, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 48, and ch. iii, passim 
 
 Suckling, praise of Shakespeare 
 by, 21 
 
 Supposes, 223 
 
 Sylva Sylvarum, vocabulary of, 
 520. 521 
 matter of, 3 84 
 
 Symonds, J. A., cited, 24, 25 «. 
 
 Taming of the Shrew, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 61 5^. 
 authorship of, 201, 399 
 Taming of a Shrew, $73 
 Tartuffe, 29 n. 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, prose of, 508 
 Taylor, the " Water Poet" cited, 
 20, 387 
 Farmer on classical matter in, 
 
 194 
 evidence of, as to Bacon's 
 
 view of the theatre, 533 
 culture of, 555 
 Ten Brink on Qiaucer, 486 
 Tennyson, 17 
 
 prose and verse of, 484 
 Terms (seasons), legal, 72 
 Terrent, J., praise of Shakespeare 
 
 by, 21 
 Theatre in Tudor times, 29 
 Theobald, Lewis, 182, 192, 202 n., 
 
 204 
 Theobald. Dr. R. M., v. 5, 94 
 
 on " law " in Shsikespeare's 
 
 Sonnets. 94 
 on the classical scholarship of 
 
 the plays. 201 sq., 253 sq. 
 follows Ilu. Donnelly, 202, 376 
 his list of " coined " words, 
 
 253 sq. 
 attempted reply to Judge 
 
 Willis by, 272, 274 
 argument of. on " cumula- 
 tive " force of instances, 
 377 sq. 
 on Bacon's treatment of love, 
 . S47 
 
 intellectual processes of. 585 
 Theobald. W.. on Classical Ele- 
 ment in Shakespeare's Plays, 
 218 sq. 
 
6o6 
 
 GENERAL INDEX 
 
 Theobald, W., on Sir Sidney Lee, 
 220 
 on Furnivall, 220 
 on Fanner, 222 
 suicidal thesis of, 221, 536 
 confusions of, 222 sq. 
 Theology, Tudor, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 70, 169 
 rt<MS Andronicus, authorship of, 
 vii, 35. 13s. 183. 201. 216. 399. 
 546 
 Tobacco, Shakespeare and, 504 
 Translations, MS., modem and 
 
 Tudor, 196 
 Trial of Treasure, The, classical 
 
 matter in, 180-1 
 Trial by combat, 63, 137, 160 sq. 
 Trials, dramatic, 57, I23sq.. I4gsq. 
 Troilus and Cressida, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 75 
 authorship of, 573 
 prologue to, plainly non- 
 Shakespearean, 400 
 pre -Shakespearean play of 
 same title, 573 
 Troublesome Raigne of King John, 
 
 67 
 
 Twelfth Night, date of, 200 
 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona, author- 
 ship of, 200 
 
 Two Noble Kinsmen, The. author- 
 ship of, 126 
 
 Tyndale, 260, 262 
 
 University culture, fallacies as 
 
 to, 556 sq. 
 Upton, 182, 192 
 
 Velasquez, i 
 Velvet-Breeches and Ooth- 
 
 Breeches, 150 
 Venus, the Rokeby, i 
 Venus and Adonis. legal phrase- 
 ology in, 86 sq. 
 Shakespeare's first complete 
 
 work, 199 
 kind of culture revealed in, 
 SSOsq., SS3sq.. SS8 
 VirgiI,Shakespeare'saIleged know- 
 ledge of, 193, S31 
 Bacon's love of, 530 
 Vitu, A., cited, 30 n. 
 Vocabulary, the Ehzabethan, 257 
 sq. 
 
 Vocabulary, Bacon's and Shake- 
 speare's, 50455., 511 sq. 
 
 Wallace, Dr. C. W.. on Tudor 
 
 interludes, 181 m. 
 Warner, version of the Meneechmi 
 
 by, 197 
 Warning for Faire Women, A , trial 
 scene in, 1 54 
 echoed by Shakespeare, 390, 
 391 «. 
 Warren, John, his lines to Shake- 
 speare, 21 
 Warton, 187 «. 
 
 Webster, his praise of Shake- 
 speare, 22 
 legal phraseology in, ch. iii, 
 
 passim, 1 57 sq. 
 use of "purchase " by, 106 sq. 
 trial by combat in, 63, 160 sq. 
 use of forms of trial by, iS7,sq., 
 
 162 sq. 
 much more given to 
 " legalisms " than Shake- 
 speare, 162 
 imitates Shakespeare, 393 
 Wendell, Barrett, cited, 544 
 West, Richard, his praise of 
 
 Shakespeare, 21 
 White. R. Grant. 54, 84, 249, 252 
 argument by, on legal phrase- 
 ology in Shakespeare, 96 sq.. 
 172 
 follows Lord Campbell, 96 
 theory of, on Shakespeare's 
 
 legal training, 96 sq. 
 mistakes of. on the legal issue, 
 
 98 
 blunders of, on the classical 
 issue, 184 sq., 189 sq., 202, 
 203 sq. 
 on Shakespeare's vocabu- 
 lary. 518 w. 
 Whitman on prose. 487 
 Willis, Judge, confutation of Dr. 
 Theobald by, 272 sq., 276 sq. 
 Winter's Tale, The, legal phrase- 
 ology in, 64 sq. 
 Woodward, Parker, v, 5 n. 
 Words used by Bacon and not by 
 
 Shakespeare, 511 «., 512 s^. 
 
 Wordsworth, echoes Spenser, 392 
 
 prose and verse of. 484 
 
 Zepheria, 90 sq. 
 
INDEX OF WORDS DISCUSSED 
 
 A large number of words not here included, used by Bacon and 
 not by Shakespeare, will be found in chap. xii. 
 
 Abruption, 264-5, 267, 353 
 
 Academe, 264, 278 
 
 Accite, 264, 279 
 
 Acknown, 264, 273, 279 
 
 Act, 366 
 
 Admire, 256 
 
 Admiration, 353 
 
 Advantage, 467 
 
 Affy, 171 
 
 Aggravate, 273, 280 
 
 Alloy. 515 «. 
 
 Antic, 267, 270 
 
 Antres, 281 
 
 Ape, 139,406 
 
 Argentine, 354 
 
 Arrest, 86 
 
 Artificial, 281 
 
 Aspersion, 282 
 
 Assubjugate, 242, 267 
 
 Attainted, 87 
 
 Axle-tree, 407 
 
 Bail, 87-9 
 Basilisks, 445 
 Bay'd, 473 
 Benign, 516 
 Boweb, 408 
 
 Cacodjehon, 282 
 Cadent, 362 
 
 Candidatus, 192, 242, 362 
 Capable, 76 
 Capricioas, 283 
 Captions, 224 
 Cast. 283 
 Casual, 283 
 Caveat, 157, i/S 
 Cerements, 267, 271 
 Certificate, 514 n. 
 Charter, 89 
 Circummure, 363 
 Circumscribed, 284 
 Civil, 284 
 Cloud, 409 
 Collect, 28s 
 Collection, 286 
 Colon, 266 M. 
 Colossus, 393, 394. 398 
 Colour, 128 sq., 174 
 
 Comforting, 77. 286 
 Compact, 253-4, 516 «. 
 Complement, 286 
 Composition, 287 
 Composure, 287 
 CompKJund, 287 
 Concents, 204, 205, 213, 288 
 Conduce, 288 
 Conflux, 267, 268 
 Congreeing, 290 
 Congruent, 290 
 Constancy, 253-4 
 Constringcd, 291 
 Continents, 253-4, 293 
 Contraction, 293 
 Contrive, 293 
 Conveniences, 293 
 Convent, 294 
 Corpse, 256 
 Courage, 256 
 Covetous, 461 
 Craven, 63, 161 
 Credent, 267 
 Crescive, 298 
 Crisp, 298 
 
 Computation, 515 n. 
 Conduct, 288 
 Confine, 289 
 Confixed, 363 
 Consequence. 367 
 Consign, 291 
 Consist, 291 
 Contain, 292 
 Conversation, 298 
 Convict, 297 
 Convince, 297 
 
 Danger, 474 
 Decimation, 299 
 Deformed, 233 
 Defused, 299 
 Degenerate, 299 
 Deject, 299 
 Delated, 300 
 Delation, 300 
 Demerits, 301 
 Demise, 301 
 Depend, 301 
 Deprave, 301 
 607 
 
6o8 
 
 INDEX OF WORDS 
 
 Deracinate, 267 
 Derogate, 267, 270, 303 
 Desert, 260 n. 
 Desolate, 520 
 Determine, &c., 355 
 Dilated, 303 
 Discoloured, 303 
 Distract, 305 
 Document, 305 
 Dolours, 267-8 
 Double, 306 
 Dregs, 410 
 Drouth, S19 
 
 Eager, 229, 3S2 sq. 
 Edition, 516 
 Effectually, 515 
 Election, 398 
 Enfeo£E'd, 70 sq. 
 Epitheton, 307 
 Err, errant, erring, 30S 
 Erudition, 257, 520 
 Eternize, 386 
 Evacuate, 257 
 Evitate, 237. 267, 273, 308 
 Exempt, 309 
 Exhaust, 309 
 Exhibition, 309 
 Exigent, 225, 310 
 Exorcist, 310 
 Expedient, 310 
 Expostulate, 310 
 Expnised, 311 
 ExsuMcate, 363 
 Extent, 48-9 
 Extenuate, 254, 312 
 Extern, 267, 271 
 Extirp, 312 
 Extracting, 313 
 Extravagancy, 355 
 Extravagant, 313 
 
 Facinorous, 313 
 Fact, 313 
 Factious, 361, 364 
 Fantastical, 411 
 Fatigate, 314 
 Fee, 77, 86, 171 
 Feoffee, &c., 115 
 Festinate, 267, 314 
 Fine, 314 
 Fluxive, 267 
 Forfeit, 82, 113 
 Forfeiture, 98, 112, 113 
 Fortitude, 367 
 Fracted, 363 
 
 Fraction, 367 
 Frustrate, 314 
 
 Galathe, 243 
 Garment, 385 
 Generosity, &c., 355 
 Gentle, gentility, &c., 367 
 Girdle, 393 
 Gratulate, 314 
 Gravelled, 386-8 
 
 Harmony, 513 k. 
 Holpen, 519 
 Honorificabilitudinitatibus, 3, 234 
 
 Illustrate, 314 
 Illustrous, 228 
 Immanity, 273, 315 
 Imminent, 315 
 Immure, 273, 315 
 Impertinency, 316 
 Implorators, 230, 316 
 Imponed, 316 
 Imposed. 316 
 Imposthnme, 450 
 Incarnadine, 235, 361 
 Incense, 316 
 Incertain, 317 
 Incony, 267-8 
 Include, 317 
 Inclusive, 318 
 Indenture, 67 sq., 98 
 Indigest, 318 
 Indigii, 318 
 Indubitate. 318 
 Inequality, 319 
 Infection, 239 
 Infest, 319 
 Infestion, 239, 319 
 Infinite. 385, 413 
 Influence, 368 
 Inform. 319 
 Infortnnate, 356 
 Ingenious, 356 
 Ii^abitable, 320 
 Inherit. 320 
 Insinuation, 320 
 Insistnre. 321 
 Instant, 321 
 Insult, 321 
 Intelligence, 514 n 
 Intend, 322 
 Intentively, 322 
 Interdict, 514 «. 
 Interrogatories, 61 
 Intrinse, 323 
 Ire, 257 
 
INDEX OF WORDS 
 
 609 
 
 Knowledges. 519 
 
 Lawmaker, 520 
 Lease, 87-88 
 Leets, 61, 81-83 
 Lethe. 356 
 Lethe'd, 224 
 Liberal. 238 
 Lurched. 245 
 
 Maculate. 363 
 Maculation, 363 
 Mahomet, 515 n. 
 Mediocrity, 514 «. 
 Mere. 217, 323 
 Merit, 324 
 Metaphysical, 244 
 Microcosm, 227 
 Military, 508. 519 
 Mirable, 370 
 Modesty. 325 
 Mortal, 41 5 
 
 Mortgage, 87-88, 112. 113 
 Mountain, 417 
 Much, 479 
 
 Multitudinous, 235, 266 n 
 Mure, &c., 370 
 
 Name, 361, 365 
 Narcissus. 470 
 Naso, 370 
 Nonsuits, 81-83 
 Notary, 86 
 
 Oblation. 513 «., 519 
 Obligation, 326 
 Obliged, 326 
 Occident, 326 
 Occupate, 520 
 Ocean, 417 
 Office, 357 
 Officious, 357 
 Oppugn, 327 
 Oppugnancy, 327 
 (Mient, 327 
 Ostentation, 327 
 Overcomen, 519 
 Overpower, 514 n. 
 
 Paint,'328, 418 
 Palliament, 242, 328 
 Pantheon, 242 
 Part, 328 
 Perceive, 118 
 Percussion. 226 
 Perdition, 328 
 Perdurable, 266. 329 
 
 Peregrinate, 329, 514 «. 
 
 Perge, 233 
 
 Periapts, 358 
 
 Permission, 329 
 
 Pernicious, 329, 361 
 
 Perpend, 330 
 
 Persian, 331 
 
 Person, 331 
 
 Pervert, 332 
 
 Ph3^ical, 517 
 
 Piece. 240 
 
 Plague, 365 
 
 Plant, 332 
 
 Plantations, 530 
 
 Plausibly, 371 
 
 Plea, 87 
 
 Pleading, 86 
 
 Politique, 519 
 
 Port (= gate), 333 
 
 Port (= bearing), 334 
 
 Portable, 334 
 
 Posset, 229 
 
 Praemunire, 48-50 
 
 Prefer, 335 
 
 Premised, 335 
 
 Preoccupate, 520 
 
 Preposterous, 335 
 
 Prevent, 336 
 
 Print, 473 
 
 Probation, 337 
 
 Proditor, 232, 337 
 
 Proficience, 517 
 
 Progeny, 226 
 
 Propagation, 513 n 
 
 Propend, 338 
 
 Propension, 338 
 
 Propound, 513 «. 
 
 Propriety, 513 w. 
 
 Propngnation, 338 
 
 Prosecution, 225 
 
 Pudency, 338 
 
 Purchase. 84, 96 sq., 99 sq„ 171 
 
 Quantity, 253 
 Questant, 339 
 Questrists, 339 
 Quicksilver, 448 
 Quintessence, 386-8 
 
 Receipt, 234 
 Recordation, 339 
 Reduce, 256, 339 
 Refelled, 340 
 Regiment, 519 
 Register, 86 
 Religions, 341 
 Remainder, 98 
 
 20 
 
6io 
 
 INDEX OF WORDS 
 
 Remonstrance, 342 
 Remotion, 242, 372 
 Renege, 342 
 Replete. 359 
 Repugn, &c., 343 
 Repute, 344 
 Retentive, 344 
 Retrograde, 473 
 Reverb, 273, 344 
 Reversion, 98 
 Rigorously, 520 
 Rivage, 345 
 Roscius, 372 
 Ruinate, 273, 345 
 
 Sacred, 243, 345 
 
 Sagittary, 243 
 
 Salve, 373 
 
 Scarcity, 341 
 
 Scope, 345 
 
 Scour, 420 
 
 Sea, 385, 422 
 
 Seal, 67 sq., y$ sq., 86 
 
 Sect, 346 
 
 Secure, &c., 347 
 
 Seen, 360 
 
 Segregation, 347 
 
 Semblable, 347 
 
 Sensible, 348 
 
 Septentrion, 348 
 
 Sequent, 364 
 
 Several, 176-7 
 
 Sessions, 81-83, 86 
 
 Shadow, 432 
 
 Shrunken, 514 m. 
 
 Sibylla, 211 
 
 Simular, 232, 273, 348 
 
 Sinews, 424 
 
 Solemn. 349 
 
 Solomon, 519 
 
 Sort. 349 
 
 Sovereign, 425 
 
 Speculation, 349 
 
 Spice, 427 
 
 Spirits, 384 
 
 Stage, 470 
 
 Statutes, 112, 113. lis, 168, 17s «. 
 
 Stelled, 350 
 
 Stuprum, 373 
 Substituted, 350 
 Success, 256, 350 
 Sugared, 278 
 Summary, 513 «. 
 Supersedeas, 83, 152 
 Suppliance, 364 
 Suspire, 351 
 Swelling, 385, 427, 448 
 
 Tapers, 459 
 Temporary, 520 
 Tenable, 351 
 Tenants, 88-89, 171 
 Tenure, 98 
 Terms, 351 
 Theory, 519 
 Thicken, 382 
 Thrice, 237 
 Tide, 429 
 Top, 278, 38s, 445 
 Torches, 459 
 Totally, 520 
 Translate, 253-4, 33' 
 Trash, 249, 472 
 Troubler, 430 
 Twenty, 475 
 
 Umber'd, 353 
 Umbrage, 353 
 Unseminar'ed, 364 
 Unsisting, 373 
 
 Vassalage, 87 
 Very. 217 
 Vicissitude, 519 
 Virtue, 232 
 Voluptuous, 519 
 
 Warrant, 41-43, 171 
 Wax, 86, 89, 113 
 Weeds, 385, 431 
 Wilderness, 432 
 Witness, 41 
 
 Yes, &c., 261 
 Your, 217 
 
INDEX OF PHRASES DISCUSSED 
 
 Absque hoc, 72, 231 
 Accident subtler than f oresight,47 1 
 Action of battery, 45, 72, 82, 84 
 Ad melius inquirendum, 17 1-2 
 Adonis' gardens, 183 sq. 
 Aedificatum solo solo cedit, 40 n. 
 Aedificium cedit solo, 40 
 Amorath an Amurath succeeds, 443 
 Aristotle's checks, 239 
 Armour of the mind, 458 
 Art adding to nature, 528 
 As heart can wish, &c., 74, 136 
 As tongue can speak, &c., 74 
 At a stand, 518 
 At a stay, 519 
 Attorney, tiie heart's, 86 
 Auspicious and dropping eye, 
 462 sq. 
 
 Bathe in blood, 244 
 
 Barren money, 455 f^. 
 
 Beat the breast, 239 
 
 Be it known unto all men, &c., 47 
 
 Before the judgment, 46 
 
 Biting out the tongue, 444 
 
 Bleed inwardly, 450 
 
 " Borne boon for boon," 3-4 
 
 Branching itself, 513 w. 
 
 Break his day, 55-56, 143 
 
 Brother justice, 45 
 
 Built on another man's ground, 40 
 
 By attorney, 50-51 
 
 By that sin fell the angels, 404 
 
 CiESAR and his Fortune, 231 
 Casar doth not wrong, 562 
 Chasing after, 520 
 Candle to the Sun, 460 
 Cinders under ashes, 471 
 Common and several, 1 76-7 
 Conflux of meeting sap, 453 
 Continente ripa, 253 
 Counsellors and Clients, 44-45 
 Court holy water, 461 
 Crow like a craven, 63, 172 
 
 Delighted spirit, 236 
 Desperate diseases . . . remedies, 
 397 
 
 611 
 
 Devour the way, 208-9 
 Discourse of reason, 215 
 Divinity hedging a king, 396, 399 
 Docet tolerate labores, 179 
 Double voucher, 98 
 Dutch feasts, 461 
 
 Elm and vine, 209 
 Enamelling of a danger, 444 
 Entail the crown, 122 
 Evading from, 520 
 Expense of spirit, 457 
 Extinctus amabitur idem, 214 
 Eye, the, " sees not itself," 189, 
 203, 247 
 
 Fame with black feathers, 462 
 Fat paunches have lean pates, 179 
 Fee farm, 44, 82, 85, 98 
 Fee simple, 41-44, 85-86, 98, 114, 
 
 122 
 Feoffee, &c., 70, 115 
 Fine and recovery, 41, 46, 98 
 Fires of heaven, 446 
 Flies in the ointment, 441 
 Fort of reason, 457 
 Fretted roofs, 403 
 Fretting inwards, 504 
 
 Gallop apace, 239 
 
 Gardens of Adonis, 1^4 sq. 
 
 Gauntlet and glove, 459 
 
 Giving the bastinado, 444 
 
 Greater drawing the less, 435 
 
 Green wounds, 230 
 
 Gross and palpable. 276, 438, 470 
 
 Heart's attorney, 86, 91 
 Heart's solicitor, 91 
 House built on another man's 
 ground, 40, 476 
 
 Immediately provided, 53 
 Indentures tripartite, 69 
 Injandum, regina, jubes. &c., 209 
 Insolent Greece and luiughty 
 
 Rome, 565 sq. 
 In time the savage bull, &c., 246 
 Keep his day, 55-56 
 Keep your fellows' counsel, &c., 5? 
 
6l2 
 
 INDEX OF PHRASES 
 
 Laus Deo, bene tntelUgo, 3, 233 
 
 Lawful prize, 81-83 
 
 Lease of Nature, 80 
 
 Leets and law days, 81-83 
 
 Liar towards God, 436 
 
 Lilies that fester, &c., 390 
 
 Lion spares a 3nelding foe, 44 1£? 
 
 Little by little, 504 
 
 Livery and seisin, 46, 70 sq., 115, 
 
 IS7 
 Livery, sne his, 71 
 Loss of question, 236 
 Love changing to bate, 452 
 Love must creep, &c., 403 
 Lovers' perjuries, Jove laughs at, 
 
 212 
 Love's reason's without reason,46o 
 Lurched all swords of the garland, 
 
 24s 
 Make extent, 48 
 Man and wife one flesh, 121 
 Many-headed multitude, 211, 246 
 Marigolds following the sun. 470 
 Medicine for the mind, 397 
 Mercy iu this case is cruelty, 453 
 Method in madness, 207 
 Mind diseased. 396-7 
 Mirror to nature, 397 
 Money in thy puise, 466 
 Most sure, the Goddess I. 193 
 Mouse-hunt, 244 
 Multitudinous seas, 391 
 
 NoisB of winds, 452 
 Non est inventus, 73. 171 
 Nul tort, nul disseisin, 150-1 
 
 On the case, 46 
 Out of frame, 463 sq 
 Out of joint, 463 sq. 
 Out of tune, 471 
 
 Play prizes, 468 
 Pole-clipt vineyard, 241 
 Possession nine points of the law, 
 
 121 
 Praying in aid, 473 
 Prophetic fury, 249 
 Put tricks on, 469 
 
 RsAOiNG malceth a full man, 437 
 
 Sandy plains, 438 
 Sanguinolent stain, 391 
 Scarlet ornaments, 390 
 Sea-coast of Bohemia, 589 
 Seal-manual, 86 
 Sea of troubles. 247 
 Sea of wax, 241 
 
 Seeds and beginnings, 456 
 Serjeant Death, 52, 78 
 Shake affiction oft, 402 
 Sleeping between termandtenn,5o 
 Small Latin andlessGreek, 563, 588 
 Smooth runs the water, &c.. 244 
 Solamen miseris, &c., 480 
 Spirits of sense, 190 
 Stand in his danger, 474 
 Stars and fire, 446 sq., 528 
 Starting-hoJes, 277. 438. 469 
 Statute staple, 147. 151 
 Statutes marchant, 98, 114, 116, 
 
 147. 151 
 Studies of the mind, 504 
 Success evoking envy, 439 
 Suffrages numlxred, not weighed, 
 
 437 
 Suum cuique, 171 
 Sweet and sour, 451 
 Sweet for speech in the morning, 
 
 4S2 
 Sweet south, 390 
 Swimming on bladders, 405 
 
 Take a bond of fate, 80, 118 
 Tears of joy. 243 
 Thrice armed, 209 
 Thrice blessed, &c., 237 
 Time . . . the common arbitra- 
 tor, 51-52 
 the old Justice, 51 
 tries all, 51, 2^ 
 Time's iniquity, 473 
 To thine own self bie true, 402 
 Tossing thoughts, 295 
 Troublers of the world, 384, 430, 
 
 444 
 Turn upon your right hand, &c 
 
 212 
 Two may keep counsel, &c., 248 
 
 Undiscovered country, the, 208 
 Unhouseled, disappointed, un- 
 aneled, 179 
 
 Virtues (must " go forth of us "), 
 213 
 
 War exercise for a nation, 456 
 
 Waters swelling before a storm,404 
 
 Way of life, 235 
 
 What with, 217 
 
 Who steals my purse, &c., 24$ 
 
 Wicked Hannibal, 236 
 
 Wool spun by the Fates, 567 
 
 Writ of ejectione ftrma, 46 
 
 Written in ice, 405 
 
 Wrong of time, 472