Love's Labor's Lost - Authorship Evidence - Part 1

Love's Labor's Lost - Authorship Evidence - Part 1

There's a great deal of evidence on the authorship question regarding this play. And it's important enough to post most of the main points. So it will cover four separate posts to make it more digestible. Remember I'm leaving out much of the evidence and analysis for sake of space.

This is taken from Cockburn's Chapter 9 pgs 129-146

The play's plot has the King of Navarre (then an autonomous province in the South-West corner of France) and three of his young Lords vowing to devote three years to study, excluding woman and merriment. They set up an academy for this purpose. But a princess (daughter of the King of France) arrives with her three Ladies-in-waiting, whom the men find distracting.

The incidents of this plot match very well actual events in France in 1578. Then, Henri Bourbon was King of Navarre and another Henry, Henry III was King of France. Francis Bacon was in France from September 1576-March 1579, being attached to the British Ambassador there.

The play was first known to have been published in 1598, but this appears to be a revised version. It's also not known where it was first played. For many reasons, it's argued here that it was meant to part of the Gray's Inn Christmas Revels of 1594-95 along with The Comedy of Errors. The firm evidence we have is that it was played before two private audiences--once before Queen Elizabeth, and another time at either Southampton House or at the home of Robert Cecil before Queen Anne in 1605.

Following are the points relevant to the authorship question:

Point 1) Like with The Comedy of Errors, it wouldn't have been economical for a playwright to write a play meant for a private audience, either at Gray's Inn, or elsewhere. The 1631 Folio of Shake-Speare's Works says it was performed at the Globe and at the Blackfriars Theatres, but we don't have evidence that it actually was and this may have been added as another sales ploy long after the event.

Point 2) The clever bantering and in-jokes in the play favor an insider authorship and a peculiar audience, rather than the usual public theater attendees.

Example (a) the reference to the School of Night [act 4,scene 3] refers to the disagreements between the circle of friends of Walter Raleigh that favored a life of contemplation and study as opposed to having love interests, and Raleigh's enemy the Earl of Essex and his circle (including Bacon) that didn't exclude the study of love, along with their academic interests. The slight at Raleigh's school favors Bacon's authorship, as Essex was his close friend and someone he advised. The argument for Will Shakepere is that he had the Earl of Southampton as his patron and as Southampton was also friends with Essex that W. Shakspere too might have made the same slight at Raleigh. But there isn't clear evidence of Southampton's patronage of Will Shakspere. Nor is there any evidence of a friendship between him and Essex.

Example (b) The character in the play named Don Armado acts and speaks like a historical person that was a friend to Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony. Don Armado resembles Antonio Perez who was a Spanish Secretary of State who defected and came to England in April 1593 and joined somewhat to the Essex circle. Both Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony mention him in their letters, as does King Henry IV of France and Navarre in a letter to Anthony. In the play, Don Armado was a Spanish braggart who used flowery, affected language. Antonio Perez had a similar personality to this and used similar language, which annoyed the Bacon brothers so much they were glad to be rid of him later. More specifically, in the play, Holofernes says of Don Armado: "He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it". "Peregrinate" meaning "Having the air of one who has lived or travelled abroad". Antonio Perez had nicknamed himself "Peregrino" and signed letters and his book with this name. We also know that Francis Bacon well knew this word as he used a variation of it, writing "a full period [end] of all instability and peregrination". In addition, one of Anthony Bacon's contacts wrote of Perez that "Surely he is, as we say, an odd man".

Francis Bacon was far more likely to know of these peculiarities of Perez than would be Will Shakspere, and far more likely to have a motive to write them in a play since he close friends could appreciate the inside joke. The Stratfordian argument is that Don Armado (as well as other characters) is a stock character of the Italian Commedia del Arte and not unusual. Italian players had visited England, but this was in the 1570's and so would have been much too early for Will Shakspere to be very familiar with them, whereas Bacon had ample opportunity to learn about them while at the French court in the 1570s. Plus, Martin Hume, in his Spanish Influence in English Literature (1905) observed that "No one can read Perez's many published letters and Relacianoes [a book] without identifying numerous affected turns of speech with those put into the mouth of Don Adriano Armado".

So, the forgoing evidence again favors Bacon's authorship of Love's Labor's Lost over that of William Shakspere's. [end of Part 1 of 4]

Parallels - Tempest: 2 of 2 Granting/Denying suits; over-topping; ivy; oft-telling; screens

This parallel is the second of two parallels from The Tempest that Cockburn believes, by their remarkableness, reach the status of proof of common authorship by themselves.

They are both from The Tempest. The first parallel of this set was published earlier. It involved the phrase "The print of goodness". 

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This is a long post as Cockburn wrote 4 pages on it alone. I'm abridging it down to about three of his pages. The analysis you'll find gets into some challenging detail, but this is necessary to cover all angles of an argument. So some of the extra detail may only be of interest to those with more of a scholarly interest in the subject.
The following is from The Tempest 1.2. 77-110

  PROSPERO.      Thy false uncle-
    Dost thou attend me?
  MIRANDA.    Sir, most heedfully.
  PROSPERO.    Being once perfected how to grant suits,    {ACT1|SC2, line 80}
    How to deny them, who t'advance, and who
    To trash for over-topping, new created
    The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd 'em,
    Or else new form'd 'em; having both the key
    Of officer and office, set all hearts i' th' state
    To what tune pleas'd his ear; that now he was
    The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,                    {ACT1|SC2, line 87}
    And suck'd my verdure out on't. Thou attend'st not.
  MIRANDA.    O, good sir, I do!
  PROSPERO.   I pray thee, mark me.
    I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
    To closeness and the bettering of my mind
    With that which, but by being so retir'd,
    O'er-priz'd all popular rate, in my false brother
    Awak'd an evil nature; and my trust,
    Like a good parent, did beget of him
    A falsehood, in its contrary as great
    As my trust was; which had indeed no limit,
    A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded,
    Not only with what my revenue yielded,
    But what my power might else exact, like one       

    Who having into truth, by telling of it,                    {ACT1|SC2, line 100}
    Made such a sinner of his memory,
    To credit his own lie-he did believe
    He was indeed the Duke; out o' th' substitution,
    And executing th' outward face of royalty
    With all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing--Dost thou hear?
  MIRANDA.     Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
  PROSPERO.     To have no screen between this part he play'd
    And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
    Absolute Milan. Me, poor man, my library
    Was dukedom large enough,

Comments: Let us look first at lines 80-82, and compare them with a letter from Bacon to the King in 1620:

Bacon: "To grant all suits were to undo yourself or your people; to deny all suits were to see never a contented face; as your Majesty hath of late won hearts by depressing, you should in this lose no hearts by advancing".

And in his Essay on Ambition Bacon wrote:  "There is use also of ambitious men in pulling down the greatness of any subject that overtops". As in line 82 above.

These passages share with Shake-Speare's lines the contrast between granting and denying suits, and the collocation of "advance" / "advancing" and "overtopping" / "overtops".
   
Now look at line 87, and compare it with this from Bacon's History of Henry VII, speaking of Perkin Warbeck's plan to murder the Lieutenant of the Tower:

"It was ordained that this winding ivy of a Plantagenet should kill the tree itself".

Thus in both authors this ivy-round-a-tree metaphor is applied to a usurper.

Next, lines 100-4. The 18th century scholar Edmund Malone wrote of these lines: "There is a very singluar coincidence between this passage and one in Bacon's History of Henry VII". The Bacon passage reads:

"[Perking Warbeck] did in all things notably acquit himself; insomuch as it was generally believed, as well amongst great persons as amongst the vulgar, that he was indeed Duke Richard. Nay, himself with long and continual counterfeiting and oft telling a lie, he was turned by habit almost into the thing he seemed to be; and from a liar to a believer".

Warbeck was a boy who was schooled by Margaret, duchess dowager of Burgandy, to put himself forward as being young Duke Richard, heir to the throne, who was now in fact dead. Like Bacon, Shake-Speare evidently knew of the story that Warbeck had come to believe his own deception, and he decided to apply it to Antonio in the play. The story is related in John Speed's History of Great Britain (1611), as follows:

"Neither was he [Warbeck] in any point wanting to his part...and as it is so observed of some, that by long using to report an untruth, as last forgetting themselves to be the authors thereof, believe it is earnest; so these honours making our Peter [Perkins] to bury in utter oblivion his birth's obscurity, he seemed to be persuaded that he was indeed the self party whom he did so exactly personate".

However, Shake-Speare is unlikely to have taken the story from Speed since The Tempest was probably written in 1610, before Speed's huge work was published (though Bacon might well have seen it in manuscript if it was in preparation over a period of years). And, so far as I know, the story did not appear in any other published source. But it was probably well known among historians by reason of its human and dramatic interest. Bacon is far more likely to have known it than Shakspere - English history was not on the curriculum at Stratford Grammar School. Further, there are two similarities of wording between the Shake-Speare lines and the Bacon passage, which are not the inevitable consequence of both authors writing about the same thing, as is illustrated by their absence from Speed's account. First, "into" in line 100 must be a corruption of "minted", as some scholars have suggested. So Shake-Speare had a coin image in mind. So probably did Bacon in his "counterfeiting". This inference is strengthened by a comment on Warbeck which Bacon attributes only 6 lines later to a speech by Dr. Warham, our Ambassador to Flanders, namely that:

"To counterfeit the dead image of a King in his coin is an high offence by all laws. But to counterfeit the living image of a king in his person exceedeth all falsifications."

And in his The Advancement of Learning Bacon refers to "the mint of knowledge".

Secondly, Shake-Speare's "telling of it" must be a corruption of "telling oft", as again scholars have recognized - 'oft telling' was an essential prerequisite of the deception. So Shake-Speare's "telling oft" matches Bacon's "oft telling".

Shake-Speare cannot have borrowed from Bacon, whose Henry VII was not published till 1622; nor could Bacon from the published play which first appeared in 1623 and in any event does not mention Warbeck.

Then in line 107 Shake-Speare says: "To have no screen between his part..."  There are three places where Bacon describes ministers as "screens" for the rulers they serve.

a) "There is also great use of ambitious men in being screens to Princes in matters of danger and envy. For no man will take that part except he be like a sealed dove, that mounts and mounts, because he cannot see about him. There is also use of ambitious men in pulling down the greatness of any subject that overtops".
    Essay on Ambition

The last sentence, as we have seen, affords the parallel with line 79-81. By the first sentence Bacon meant that ministers are useful screens for Princes since, if anything goes wrong, the ministers, rather than the Princes themselves, will get the blame.

b) "And nothing doth extinguish envy more than for a great person to preserve all other inferior officers in their full rights and pre-eminences of their places. For by that means there be so many screens between him and envy".
    Essay on Envy

c)  "...make a good Lord Treasurer whose proper duty is...to stop suits, put back pensions, check allowances, question merits, translate the suit from the suitor to your Majesty in a proportion; and in short to be a screen to your Majesty in things of this nature".
    Letter to King James of 20 September 1620

This last quote was from the same letter that was quoted earlier in regard to "granting suits". So the same letter deals with both suits and screens, as do the Shake-Speare lines. Shake-Speare, like Bacon, associated ministers with "screens". So, though he does not quite liken Antonio to a screen, he still couches his statement in "screen" terminology. Did any other Elizabethan speak of ministers as "screens", or as having "screens" between themselves and their sovereign? Shake-Speare cannot have borrowed "screens" from Bacon since the play was written before any of the three Bacon texts had appeared; nor Bacon from the published play which first appeared in 1623.

Lastly, in the last two Shake-Speare lines above, where Prospero describes his library as "dukedom large enough". Compare a letter by Bacon to Lord Burleigh about 1592 in which Bacon says: "I have taken  all knowledge to be my province".

So, in the above Shake-Speare Tempest quote there are 4 striking parallels with Bacon passages. The first and fourth arise from three consecutive sentences in Bacon's Essay on Ambition. And the fourth explains Shake-Speare lines which have troubled editors. (I omitted some of that analysis to save space here). It is fair to say that the whole Tempest quote is saturated with Bacon thought and expression.

Parallel - The Tempest: Print of Goodness 1 of 2

This parallel is the first of two parallels from The Tempest that Cockburn believes, by their remarkableness, reach the status of proof of common authorship by themselves. It is also one of 4-5 sets of parallels that he believes can have such status. 

In The Tempest 1.2.353-5 we have:

"Abhorred slave
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill!"

On "any print of goodness" the Arden editor comments: "Tannenbaum would read point, but the metaphor seems to be from printing". They would hardly have had any doubt about it if they had known these Bacon parallels:

"Veritas [truth] and Bonitas [goodness] differ but as the seal and the print; for truth prints goodness."
  Bacon in The Advancement of Learning

"This Janus of imagination hath differing faces: for the face towards Reason hath the print of Truth, but the face towards Action hath the print of Goodness."
Bacon's The Advancement of Learning

"The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in human nature."
Bacon's Essay on Goodness

"Let it be . . . that, living or dying, the print of the goodness of King James may be in my heart."
Bacon's Letter to King James in 1624

Chronologically Shake-Speare could have borrowed from The Advancement texts, but Bacon could not have borrowed from the published play. Did any other Elizabethan speak of the "print" of goodness?

Parallels - Troilus and Cressida 4 of 4

Troilus and Cressida    (a subgroup of four parallels)

(Part 4 of 4)

First, Bacon:
In his De Augmentis Bacon wrote:

"The second [rule] is to keep a discreet temper and mediocrity both in liberty of speech and in secrecy. For liberty of speech invites and provokes a similar liberty in others; and so brings much to a man's knowledge; but secrecy induceth trust, so that men like to deposit their secrets there, as in their own bosom".

Comment: So liberty in speech and secrecy in speech can both be used to draw people out. Remarkably, we find both these axioms illustrated in the same scene in the play. Now we find Shake-Speare having Cressida saying to Troilus:

"Sweet, bid me hold my  tongue,
For in this rapture I shall surely speak
The think I shall repent. See, see, your silence,
Cunning in dumbness, from my weakness draws
My very soul of counsel. Stop my mouth."
  Troilus And Cressida,  3.2. 128-132

And then a little later in the same scene, Cressida, again addressing Troilus, refers to the other tactic for drawing out another's thoughts:

"Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love,
And fell so roundly to a large confession
To angle for your thoughts."
  Troilus And Cressida, 3.2. 151-3

Comment: Shake-Speare could not have borrowed from Bacon since the play was written (but not published) about 1602, which was before De Augmentis (1623) (or The Advancement of Learning, 1605, which voiced similar sentiments) was published. And Bacon could not have borrowed from the published play because the Advancement of Learning was written before the play was published in 1609.

Cockburn adds that the last three of the these four parallels for Troilus And Cressida are each quite remarkable in themselves. They cannot be accidental  So, the set of four by themselves he would grant the status of proof of common authorship.

There seem to be at least four subsets of parallels that Cockburn believes reach the level of proof of common authorship between Bacon and Shakespeare.  

Parallels - Troilus and Cressida 2 of 4

Troilus and Cressida (a subgroup of four parallels)   (2 of 4)

Shake-Speare:
(Hector favours the return of Helen to the Greeks to secure peace, and says:)

"Though no man lesser fears the Greeks than I
As far as toucheth my particular,
Yet, dread Priam,
There is no lady of more softer bowels,
More spongy to suck in the sense of fear,
More ready to cry out "Who knows what follows?"
Than Hector is. The wound of peace is surety,
Surety secure [over-confidence]; but modest doubt [fear] is called
The beacon of the wise."
  Troilus And Cressida 2.2.8-16

Bacon:
"A young man's bowels are soft and succulent" [from the Latin Juveni viscere mollier et succulenta]
   History of Life and Death (1623)

"Doubt [fears] are so many suckers or sponges to draw use of knowledge."
  The Advancement of Learning (1605)

"Distrust is the sinews of wisdom"
  De Augmentis (1623)

Comment: Hector was a young man. And Shake-Speare associates "softer" and "suck" and "spongy" with bowels and with fear, as Bacon associates "soft" and "succulent" with bowels and "spongy" with "doubts" [fears]. The folly of over-confidence and the wisdom of modest fear were commonplaces, but this parallel derives its force from their combination in both authors with the striking verbal similarities noted.

(Sidenote: I've read also that in Elizabethan times the word "beacon" could be pronounced like "Bacon" - for what it's worth)

Parallels - Troilus and Cressida 1 of 4

A special set of Shake-Speare and Bacon parallels

Troilus and Cressida (a subgroup of four parallels from this play)

(1 of 4)

Shake-Speare:
"As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,
Infects the sound pine and diverts his grain
Tortive and errant from his course of growth." 
   Troilus and Cressida 1.3.7-10

Bacon:
"There be divers herbs, but no trees, that may be said to have some kind of order in the putting forth of their leaves; for they have joints  or knuckles, as it were, stops in their germination. The cause whereof is for that the sap ascendeth unequally, and doth as it were tire and stop by the way. And it seemeth they have some closeness and hardness in their stalk which hindereth the sap from going up, until it hath gathered into a knot."
  A Natural History

Comment: Thus both authors attribute knots to a conflux of sap. Bacon is speaking of herbs, not trees, in so far as order in the putting forth of leaves is concerned. But he would presumably have given the same explanation for knots in trees since their hardness is even more likely to hinder the sap from going up. Does any other Elizabethan dramatist show the slightest interest in the cause of knots in trees or plants? Chronologically Bacon could have borrowed from the published play (1609).