Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

A local habitation and a name.”

The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth forms, and the poet’s pen turns them to shapes. But to suppose that Shakespeare here borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.

These are samples of Mr. Collins’s methods throughout.

Of Terence there were translations – first in part; later, in 1598, of the whole. Of Seneca there was an English version (1581). Mr. Collins labours to show that one passage “almost certainly” implies Shakespeare’s use of the Latin; but it was used “by an inexact scholar,” – a terribly inexact scholar, if he thought that “alienus” (“what belongs to another”) meant “slippery”!

Most of the passages are from plays (Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually) to his author, the Great Unknown. Throughout these early plays Mr. Collins takes Shakespeare’s to resemble Seneca’s Latin style: Shakespeare, then, took up Greek tragedy in later life; after the early period when he dealt with Seneca. Here is a sample of borrowing from Horace, “Persicos odi puer apparatus” (Odes. I, xxxviii. I). Mr. Collins quotes Lear (III, vi. 85) thus, “You will say they are Persian attire.” Really, Lear in his wild way says to Edgar, “I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say they are Persian; but let them be changed.” Mr. Collins changes this into “you will say they are Persian attire,” a phrase “which could only have occurred to a classical scholar.” The phrase is not in Shakespeare, and Lear’s wandering mind might as easily select “Persian” as any other absurdity.

So it is throughout. Two great poets write on the fear of death, on the cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination in nature, on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas, glorified by poetry, – and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study the Latin passages which he does not quote. So arbitrary is taste in these matters 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 Cressida, 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.

Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by the Achæans!

There were Latin translations of Plato; the Alcibiades I was published apart, from Ficinus’ version, in 1560, with the sub-title, Concerning the Nature of Man. Who had read it? – Shakespeare, or one of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another Troilus and Cressida (now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown? Which of these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long before Homer? Which of them followed the Ionic and mediæval anti-Achæan view of Homer’s heroes, as given in the Troy Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors? Troilus and Cressida is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus’ version of the Alcibiades; [60 - Alcibiades, I, pp. 132, 133; Troilus, III, scene 3.] and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war. “That was his fun,” as Charles Lamb said in another connection.

Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the “small Latin” with which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare. He could read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads French – that is, as easily as he reads English. Still further, Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with the Greek drama “that the characteristics which differentiate his work from the work of his contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of the Greek dramatists are actually attributable to these dramatists.”

Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as far as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much acquaintance with Euripides, Æschylus, Sophocles, and do not often remind us of these masters. Shakespeare does remind us of them – the only question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession of a genius akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with all the treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling up through the wells of Avon?

But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, cannot be demonstrated) that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians? He begins by saying that he will not bottom his case “on the ground of parallels in sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely to be” (fortuitous) “coincidences.” Three pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow. “Curiously close similarities of expression” are also barred. Four pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and Æschylus, plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!). Again, “identities of sentiment under similar circumstances” are not to be cited; two pages are cited; and “similarities, however striking they may be in metaphorical expression,” cannot safely be used; several pages of them follow.

Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the Aias of Sophocles, and tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from Titus Andronicus, which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non-Shakespearean, or not by his unknown great author. Troilus and Cressida, whatever part Shakespeare may have had in it, does suggest to me that the author or authors knew of Homer no more than the few books of the Iliad, first translated by Chapman and published in 1598. But he or they did know the Aias of Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did the author of Romeo and Juliet.

Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks are, Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians. “We have obviously to be on our guard” [61 - Studies in Shakespeare, p. 46.] against three kinds of such parallels, which “may be mere coincidences,” [62 - Iliad, p. 63.] fortuitous coincidences. But these coincidences against which “we must be on our guard” fill sixteen pages (pp. 46–63). These pages must necessarily produce a considerable effect in the way of persuading the reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately as Mr. Collins did. Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these parallels to readers of Mr. Collins’s essay. Indeed, what more can we do? Who would read through a criticism of each instance? Two or three may be given. The Queen in Hamlet reminds that prince, grieving for his father’s death, that “all that live must die”:

“That loss is common to the race,
And common is the common-place.”

The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra, – and here is a parallel! Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof. Greece agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that it is not lucky to be “a corby messenger” of bad news; or that all goes ill when a man acts against his better nature; or that we suffer most from the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is strength in a righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea common to Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or that, having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like again, – and so on as long as you please. Of such wisdom are proverbs made, and savages and Europeans have many parallel proverbs. Vestigia nulla retrorsum is as well known to Bushmen as to Latinists. Manifestly nothing in this kind proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare was saturated in Greek tragedy. But page on page of such facts as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of “the belly-pinched wolf,” the other of “the empty-bellied wolf,” are apt to impress the reader – and verily both Shakespeare and Æschylus talk of “the heart dancing for joy.” Mr. Collins repeats that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling them up. It was a theory of Shakespeare’s time that the apparent ghost of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil. Hamlet knows this —

“The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.”

Orestes (Electra, Euripides) asks whether it may not be an avenging dæmon (alastor) in the shape of a god, that bids him avenge his father. Is Shakespeare borrowing from Euripides, or from a sermon, or any contemporary work on ghosts, such as that of Lavater?

A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in Romeo and Juliet, and in Euripides, both say that Death is her bridegroom. Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the Greek Anthology —

“For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.”

One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels. But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.

To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names.

The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephoræ and Electra, are so close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.

Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and Beowulf and the Njal’s saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar. But no student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels knew Greek. The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick’s The Heroic Age (1912), especially Chapter XV, “The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.

But, to be short, Mr. Collins’s case can only be judged by readers of his most interesting Studies in Shakespeare. To me, Hamlet’s soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the Phœnix of Euripides no more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the text that “of death we know nothing” are bound to do, – though Shakespeare’s are infinitely the richer. For Shakespeare’s reflections on death, save where Christians die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-Æschylean Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves, Shakespeare’s highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone. But of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way, a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet’s lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr. Collins states the hypothesis – not his own – “that by a certain natural affinity Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek tragedy.”

Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins’s long array of Greek parallels, I do hold that by “natural affinity,” by congruity of genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians.

One thing seems certain to me. If Shakspere read and borrowed from Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins’s extraordinary tenacity of memory.

Now if “Shakespeare” did all that, he was not the actor. The author, on Mr. Collins’s showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its fragments. The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon’s works, that he was such a student.

Mr. Collins, “a violent Stratfordian,” overproved his case. If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as well as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were so learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion – he was, in the opinion of Mr. Collins.

If Shakespeare’s spirit and those of Sophocles and Æschylus meet, it is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with “the poet’s sad lucidity” the same “pageant of men’s miseries.” But how dissimilar in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins’s parallels.

Polynices, in the Phœnissæ of Euripides (504–506), exclaims:

“To the stars’ risings, and the sun’s I’d go,
And dive ’neath earth, – if I could do this thing, —
Possess Heaven’s highest boon of sovereignty.”

Then compare Hotspur:

“By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drownèd honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.”

What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur’s mind! Is Shakespeare thinking of the Phœnissæ, or is he speaking only on the promptings of his genius?

V

SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY

A phrase has been used to explain the Greek element in Shakespeare’s work, namely, “congruity of genius,” which is apt to be resented by Baconians. Perhaps they have a right to resent it, for “genius” is hard to define, and genius is invoked by some wild wits to explain feats of Shakespeare’s which (to Baconians) appear “miracles.” A “miracle” also is notoriously hard to define; but we may take it (“under all reserves”) to stand for the occurrence of an event, or the performance of an action which, to the speaker who applies the word “miracle,” seems “impossible.” The speaker therefore says, “The event is impossible; miracles do not happen: therefore the reported event never occurred. The alleged performance, the writing of the plays by the actor, was impossible, was a miracle, therefore was done by some person or persons other than the actor.” This idea of the impossibility of the player’s authorship is the foundation of the Baconian edifice.

I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr. Greenwood’s view of the young provincial from Warwickshire, Will Shakspere. If Will were what Mr. Greenwood thinks he was, then Will’s authorship of the plays seems to me, “humanly speaking,” impossible. But then Mr. Greenwood appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance that Will may have been, not merely “a sharp boy” but a boy of great parts; and not without a love of stories and poetry: a passion which, in a bookless region, could only be gratified through folk-song, folk-tale, and such easy Latin as he might take the trouble to read. If we add to these very unusual but not wholly impossible tastes and abilities, that Will may have been a lad of genius, there is no more “miracle” in his case than in other supreme examples of genius. “But genius cannot work miracles, cannot do what is impossible.” Do what is impossible to whom? To the critics, the men of common sense.

Alas, all this way of talking about “miracles,” and “the impossible,” and “genius” is quite vague and popular. What do we mean by “genius”? The Latin term originally designates, not a man’s everyday intellect, but a spirit from without which inspires him, like the “Dæmon,” or, in Latin, “Genius” of Socrates, or the lutin which rode the pen of Molière. “Genius” is claimed for Shakespeare in an inscription on his Stratford monument, erected at latest some six years after his death. Following this path of thought we come to “inspiration”: the notion of it, as familiar to Australian savages as to any modern minds, is that, to the poet, what he produces is given by some power greater than himself, by the Boilyas (spirits) or Pundjel, the Father of all. This palæolithic psychology, of course, is now quite discredited, yet the term “genius” is still (perhaps superstitiously) applied to the rare persons whose intellectual faculties lightly outrun those of ordinary mortals, and who do marvels with means apparently inadequate.

In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put – in place of the Muses or the Boilyas, or the Genius – what they call the “Subliminal Self,” something “far more deeply interfused than the everyday intellect.” This subconscious self, capable of far more than the conscious intelligence, is genius.

On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only higher in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday intellect which, for example, pens this page.

Thus as soon as we begin to speak of “genius,” we are involved in speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical; in difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by physiological science or experimental psychology, or by psychical research, or by the study of heredity. When I speak of “the genius of Shakespeare,” of Jeanne d’Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I possibly have a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood, when he uses the term “genius”; so we are apt to misunderstand each other. Yet we all glibly use the term “genius,” without definition and without discussion.

At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against “that fool of a word,” as Napoleon said, “impossible.” At once, on either side, we assume that we know what is possible and what is impossible, – and so pretend to omniscience.

Thus some “Stratfordians,” or defenders of the actor’s authorship, profess to know – from all the signed work of Bacon, and from all that has reached us about Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, from 1590 to 1605 – that the theory of Bacon’s authorship of the plays is “impossible.” I, however, do not profess this omniscience.

On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that he knows, or thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor’s education, conditions of life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of the actor is “impossible.”

Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much more about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in his life, than we know about the actor; while about “the potentialities of genius,” we know – very little.