From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 543-47. [Prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
Editors and commentators upon Shakspeare appear at every turn in all societies. In the club-house we meet three or four of a morning; in the park, see them meditating by the Serpentine, or under a tree in Kensington Gardens, no dinner table is without one or two; in the theatre you view them by dozens. Volume after volume is poured out in note, comment, conjecture, new reading, statement or mis-statement, contradiction, or variation of all kinds. Reviews, magazines, and newspapers, repeat these with so little mercy on the reader, as to give occasional emendations of their own. Some descant upon his sentiments, some upon his extravagancies, some upon his wonderful creations or flights of imagination, some upon his language or phraseology. Several suppose that he wrote more plays than he acknowledged, others, that he fathered more than he had written. While the last opinions are still more original and extraordinary -- that his name is akin to a myth, and that he wrote no plays at all! Every new aspirant in this struggle for distinction aims to push his predecessor from his stool. -- PRIOR, SIR JAMES, 1780-90, Life of Edmund Malone, Editor of Shakspeare, p. 47.
Alas, Shakespeare! Lethe is upon thee! But if it drown thee, it will give up and work the resurrection of better men and more worthy. Thou hast had thy century; they are about having theirs. He was not the mate of the literary characters of his day, and none knew it better than himself. It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us. He had none that was worthy of being transmitted. The enquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him? The plays themselves, or rather a small portion of them, will live as long as English literature is regarded as worth pursuit. The authorship of the plays is no otherwise material to us, than as a matter of curiosity, and to enable us to render exact justice; but they should not be assigned to Shakespeare alone, if at all. -- HART, JOSEPH C., 1848, The Ancient Lethe.
Shall this crowning literary product of that great epoch, wherein these new ages have their beginning, vividly arranged in its choicest refinements, flashing everywhere on the surface with its costliest wit, crowded everywhere with its subtlest scholasticisms, betraying, on every page, its broadest, freshest range of experience, its most varied culture, its profoundest insight, its boldest grasp of comprehension -- shall this crowning result of so many preceding ages of growth and culture, with its essential, and now palpable connection with the new scientific movement of the time from which it issues, be able to conceal from us, much longer, its history? -- Shall we be able to accept in explanation of it, much longer, the story of the Stratford poacher? -- BACON, DELIA, 1856, William Shakespeare and his Plays, Putnam's Magazine, vol. 7, p. 2.
I am sure that, if those who deny to Shakespeare the credit of writing his own dramas had thought of ascribing them to the judicious Hooker or the pious Bishop Andrews instead of Lord Bacon, they might have made a specious show of proof by carefully culled extracts from his writings. Nay, if Jeremy Taylor, whose prose is so full of poetry, had not been born a generation too late, I would engage, in the same way to put a plausible face on the theory that the plays of Shakespeare, except, perhaps some passages wickedly interpolated were composed by the eloquent and devout author of "Holy Living and Dead." -- BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 1872, Shakespeare, Occasional Addresses, vol. II. p. 302.
It is not possible for me to feel the slightest interest In the sort of literary feat which I consider writing upon "Who wrote Shakespeare?" to be. I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce Collier -- all Shakespearian editors, commentators, and scholars -- and this absurd theory about Bacon, which was first broached a good many years ago, never obtained credit for a moment with them nor did they ever entertain for an instant a doubt that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon were really written by him. Now I am intimately acquainted and in frequent communication with William Donne, Edward Fitzgerald, and James Spedding, all thorough Shakespeare scholars, and the latter a man who has just published a work upon Bacon, which has been really the labor of his life; none of these men, competent judges of the matter, ever mention the question of "Who wrote Shakespeare?" except as a ludicrous thing to be laughed at, and I think they may be trusted to decide whether it is or is not so. I have a slight feeling of disgust at the attack made thus on the personality of my greatest mental benefactor; and consider the whole thing a misapplication, not to say waste, of time and ingenuity that might be better employed. As I regard the memory of Shakespeare with love, veneration, and gratitude, and am proud and happy to be his countrywoman, considering it among the privileges of my English birth, I resent the endeavor to prove that he deserved none of these feelings, but was a mere literary impostor. I wonder the question had any interest for you, for I should not have supposed you imagined Shakespeare had not written his own plays, Irish though you be. Do you remember the servant's joke in the farce of "High Life Below Stairs" where the cook asks "Who wrote Shakespeare?" and one of the others answers, with, at any rate, partial plausibility, "Oh! why, Colley Cibber, to be sure !" -- KEMBLE, FRANCES ANNE, 1874, Farther Records, A Series of Letters, p. 53.
We may be told, at this stage, that such an extent of search and demonstration as I have devoted to these Baconian points is not necessary to dispose of a bubble which had never floated among the public with any amount of success, and we may be flippantly assured that the inexorable reasoning faculty of Time alone, would of itself, dispel the fallacy; but such contemptuous treatment is not adequate to the destruction of a theory which has received the support of such minds as that of Lord Palmerston, in England, and such scholars and critics as Judge Holmes and General Butler in America. Bubbles thus patronized must be entirely exploded, or they will be sure to reappear whenever the world has a sick or idle hour, and delusions find their opportunity to strike. Moreover, nothing is lost by our inquiries, after all, beyond a little time; and I doubt not that all true admirers of our poet will agree, that one new ray of light which may thus be thrown upon the character and history of Shakespeare, will justify octaves of discussion. -- WILKES, GEORGE, 1877, Shakespeare from an American Point of View, p. 457.
The critic has the same interest in the works of Miss Delia Bacon, Mr. W. H. Smith, and Judge Holmes, as the physician has in morbid anatomy. He reads them, not so much for the light which they throw on the question of authorship, as for their interest as examples of wrong-headedness. It is not at all a matter of moment whether Bacon, Raleigh, or another be the favorite on whom the works are fathered, but it is instructive to discover by what plausible process the positive evidences of Shakespeare's authorship (scanty as they are) are put out of court. -- INGLEBY, CLEMENT MANSFIELD, 1877, Shakespeare: The Man and the Book.
When we ask whether it would have been easier for the author of the philosophy to have composed the drama, or the dramatic poet to have written the philosophy, the answer will depend upon which is the greater of the two. The greater includes the less, but the less can not include the greater. . . . Great as are the thoughts of the "Novum Organum," they are far inferior to that world of thought which is in the drama. We can easily conceive that Shakespeare, having produced in his prime the wonders and glories of the plays, should in his after leisure have developed the leading ideas of the Baconian philosophy. But it is difficult to imagine that Bacon, while devoting his main strength to politics, to law, to philosophy, should have, as a mere pastime for his leisure, produced in his idle moments the greatest intellectual work ever done on earth. -- CLARKE, JAMES FREEMAN, 1881, Did Shakespeare Write Bacon's Works? North American Review, vol. 132, p. 171.
This work undertakes to demonstrate, not only that William Shakespeare did not, but that Francis Bacon did, write the plays and poems. It presents a critical view of the personal history of the two men, their education, learning, attainments, surroundings, and associates, the contemporaneousness of the writings in question in prose and verse, an account of the earlier plays and editions, the spurious plays, and "the true original copies." It gives some evidence that Bacon was known to be the author by some of his contemporaries. It shows in what manner William Shakespeare came to have the reputation of being the writer. It exhibits a variety of facts and circumstances, which are strongly suggestive of Bacon as the real author. A comparison of the writings of contemporary authors in prose and verse, proves that no other writer of that age, but Bacon, can come into any competition for the authorship. It is recognized that the evidence drawn from historical facts and biographical circumstances. are not in themselves alone entirely conclusive of the matter however suggestive or significant as clearing the way for more decisive proofs, or as raising a high degree of probability; and it is conceded, that, in the absence of more direct evidence, the most decisive proof attainable is to be found in a critical and thorough comparison of the writings themselves, and that such a comparison will clearly establish the identity of the author as no other than Francis Bacon. -- HOLMES, NATHANIEL, 1884, The Authorship of Shakespeare, Bibliography of the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, ed. Ivy- man, p. 28.
Bacon could no more have written the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the triumphs of natural philosophy. -- CHURCH RICHARD WILLIAM, 1884-88, Bacon, p. 218.
The ingenious critics who insist on merging the existence of Shakespeare in the philosophy of Bacon, are not entirely without excuse for their infatuation. -- FRASER, JOHN, 1887, Chaucer to Longfellow, p. 311.
As to the actuality of the Cipher there can be but one conclusion. A long, continuous narrative running through many pages, detailing historical events in a perfectly symmetrical, rhetorical, grammatical manner, and always growing out of the same numbers, employed it the same way, and counting from the same, or similar, starting-points, cannot be otherwise than a pre-arranged arithmetical cipher. Let those who would deny this proposition produce a single page of a connected story, eliminated, by an arithmetical rule, from any other work; in fact, let them find five words that will cohere, by accident, in due order, in any publication, where they were not first placed with intent and aforethought. I have never yet been able to find even three such. Regularity does not grow out of chaos. There can be no intellectual order without preexisting intellectual purpose. The fruits of mind can only be found where mind is or has been. -- DONNELLY, IGNATIUS, 1887, The Great Cryptogram, Introduction, p. v.
Some attempts have been recently made to extinguish Shakspeare's individuality in Bacon's. Any reader who intimately knows and sincerely loves both authors instinctively feels that the external evidence against Shakspeare's real existence is simply unworthy of critical consideration. Shakspeare's vast mind is in itself a sufficient puzzle for the critic and the metaphysician to explain, to blend it with Bacon's is to double the difficulties of the problem. Shakspeare and Bacon are both high above the ordinary range of even eminent intellects and souls; but to say that Bacon "wrote Shakspeare" is to introduce hopeless confusion into the philosophy of the human mind. Every critic who has the slightest discernment of spirits must know that the mental processes of Shakspeare and Bacon are fundamentally different, -- a difference which goes deep down into vital sources of individual genius. Shakspeare individualizes the results of his knowledge, Bacon generalizes the results of his. The mind of Shakspeare darts to conclusions; the mind of Bacon moves to them with a gravity worth of a lord chancellor. Both are men large reason, large understanding, large imagination, large individuality; but the are different not only in degree, but in kind. It would be impossible for any intelligent critic to reconcile a really characteristic work of Shakspeare with really characteristic work of Bacon. The mental processes of the two men are radically dissimilar. -- WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1888, Outlooks on Society, Literature and Politics, p. 300.
The portrait, after all, that forms the frontispiece to the plays does not look like a perfect fool. It is not a bad nor mean forehead, is it? If the person represents did not do something remarkable, one cannot help wondering why not with that great brain, and that speaking face. What did Ben Jonson mean by those verses of his, saying that this "was for the gentle Shakespeare cut"? Did he mean by gentle, silly? When he spoke of his wit, did he speak ironically? Or did Bacon buy up him too, and get him to write this lie? Joking apart, I think nothing more monstrous was ever conceived than this theory. It is too foolish even to be entitled to consideration. -- STORY, WILLIAM WETMORE, 1890, Conversations in a Studio, vol. I, p. 173.
It is well known that in recent days a troop of less than half-educated people have put forth the doctrine that Shakespeare lent his name to a body of poetry with which he had really nothing to do -- which he could not have understood, much less have written. Literary criticism is an instrument which, like all delicate tools, must be handled carefully, and only by those who have a vocation for it. Here it has fallen into the hands of raw Americans and fanatical women. Feminine criticism on the one hand, with its lack of artistic nerve, and Americanism on the other hand, with its lack of spiritual delicacy, have declared war to the knife against Shakespeare's personality, and have within the last few years found a considerable number of adherents. We have here another proof, if any weren't needed, that the judgment of the multitude, in questions of art, is a negligible quantity. Before the middle of this century, it had occurred to no human being to doubt that -- trifling exceptions apart -- the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by him. It has been reserved for the last forty years to see an ever-increasing stream of obloquy and contempt directed against what had hitherto been the most honoured name in modern literature. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898 William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, p. 104.
The abundance of the contemporary evidence attesting Shakespeare's responsibility for the works published under his name gives the Baconian theory no rational right to a hearing; while such authentic examples of Bacon's effort to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose-writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. Defective knowledge and illogical or casuistical argument alone render any other conclusion possible. -- LEE, SIDNEY, 1898, A Life of William Shakespeare, p. 373, Appendix.
It appears that the author of the plays took little care for their preservation while Bacon took the greatest pains to preserve his acknowledged writings, even when their publication must be postponed; that he was familiar with English poetry, songs and plays, both published and unpublished, some of the latter having no existence, probably, outside of the theatre, while there is nothing to show that Bacon had any knowledge of or taste for such writings, or that he could have had access to the unpublished plays, and in fact it seems probable that he despised them all; that Shakespeare was known and recognized as a poet from poems of conspicuous merit and undoubted authenticity, while Bacon produced no poem worthy of notice, and with a single exception was never spoken of by his contemporaries as a writer of poetry; that the author, moreover, shows an acquaintance with Warwickshire, the home of Shakespeare, and used names and language relating to habits, customs, sports, there prevalent, and to occupations with which Shakespeare was familiar, and also used provincialisms there current, while Bacon is not known ever to have visited that parts of England, that he was also steeped in knowledge of rural life, and of the customs and habitual modes of speech of the lower classes, which Bacon would naturally have less acquaintance with; that the plays abound in anachronisms, historical errors, and obscurities and other peculiarities in the text, which Bacon was less: likely than Shakespeare to fall into; and that the author was familiar with, and was full to repletion of allusions to, theatrical matters, and the habits and technical language of actors, which formed the daily life and speech of Shakespeare, while Bacon must have been less conversant if not entirely unacquainted with them. All of these circumstances tend in a greater or less degree to negative their theory of Baconian authorship; and the combined or cumulative force of so many, detailed facts, all pointing in the same direction, is certainly a consideration of great weight. -- ALLEN, CHARLES, 1900, Notes on the Bacon-Shakespeare Question, p. 237.
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