Extracts from Clarke’s The Shake-speare Puzzle continued:
The last two Shake-speare plays, King Henry VIII and the Two
Noble Kinsmen, have been dated to 1613, and in October of that year, Bacon
became Attorney General, a position that subsequently absorbed all his free
time. Around the period, Shake-speare’s output ceased. When in May 1621, as
Lord Chancellor, Bacon was stripped of his office by proceeding for corruption,
his leisure time returned and by October he had finished his book History of the Reign of Henry VII.
Leonard Dean states that Bacon seasoned his narrative with the aid of
documented counsels and speeches from Sir Robert Cotton’s depository, and
relied on well-known literary chronicles for the main structure such as
Polydore Vergil’s Anglicae Historiae
(1570), Edward Hall’s Chronicle
(1550), Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles
(1587), and John Stow’s Annals
(1580). He also informs us that:
“Henry VII …
was the last reign for which documentary evidence was readily available, all
later reigns depending on State Papers which were closely guarded.”
While the life of Henry VIII could be found in the
above chronicles (particularly Stow’s), one wonders how far Shake-speare’s
play went beyond them and made use of these secret State Papers. Shakspere
[the man from Stratford] would certainly have been in difficulty here but Sir
Francis Bacon in his position of Solicitor General and with his contacts in
court would have found far easier entry.
According to Leonard Dean, Bacon’s method of
writing histories shares certain features with the craft of a dramatist:
“ … he is like his Italian counterparts. For
Machiavelli whatever is instructive is contemporary, and Patrizzi is concerned
only with such details as how to narrate two or more groups of actions that
take place at the same time. … Bacon
explains events almost wholly by an interpretation of personal motives, and
neglects social and economic causes.”
This emphasis on character is the essence
of drama and appears to liberate Bacon from the charge that
his sensibility was too limited to have penned the Shake-speare work.
Meanwhile, Prince Charles, later to become Charles I,
had been pressing Sir Francis Bacon for a history of Henry VIII. [note the
earlier quotes on this from the first post]. On 10 February 1622, the King
authorized the Paper Office Keeper, Sir Thomas Wilson, to provide Sir Francis
Bacon, who had been denied access to library resources by his sentence for
corruption, with any papers he might require to research the project. [evidence
of his still active historical research].
Then once Prince Charles had returned from Spain,
Bacon sent a copy of his De Augmentis
Scientiarum with a different excuse for not beginning the requested history
[of King Henry VIII]:
“For Henry the Eighth, to deal truly with your
Highness, I did so despair of my health this summer as I was glad to choose
some such work as I might compass within days; so far was I from entering into
a work of length.”
In the end, Prince Charles was sent a mere two pages
of an outline of the history which Dr. Rawley published in 1629. Evidently,
Bacon was avoiding the project.
As we have seen in 1610-, in his The Beginning of the History of Great Britain, Sir Francis Bacon
was still interested in writing about Henry VIII. From 1622 onwards, despite
the Prince’s repeated requests and King James making available the necessary
research materials, he attempted to avoid doing so. Was it because the
history had already been completed in the Shake-speare play in 1613 nine years
earlier? In 1621, why did Bacon choose to compose a book on Henry VII?
Was it because he was the only monarch Shake-speare had omitted in the period
1377-1547? If Bacon and Shake-speare were different men then it is
remarkable how each managed to avoid duplicating the other’s projects. However,
if Bacon was writing under the pseudonym of Shake-speare it suddenly makes
sense.
Leonard Dean observes that:
“Bacon believed that the chief functions of history
are to provide the materials for a realistic treatment of psychology and
ethics, and to give instruction by means of example and analysis in practical
politics.”
He further summarizes Bacon’s scheme as an:
“...approach to the good life through the realistic
analysis of human nature by historians.”
[now a couple more quotes from Clarke’s book, again,
of which I’ve only supplied a portion of extracts]
[Hadfield in Shakespeare
and Rennaissance Politics, writes of Shake-speare] “No other contemporary
dramatist explored the meaning and significance of such a wide variety of
political and social systems, or established such a carefully nuanced
relationship between examining alternative constitutions in their own right, and
reading them in terms of English or British politics.”
Also “His [Shake-speare’s] works appear to be indebted
to the numerous attempts made in that decade [1590s] to study history, politics
and society in the relatively detached and relatively objective manner pioneered by thinkers such as Lispius,
Montaigne, Livy and Tacitus, as well as their English disciples such as Francis
Bacon and Sir John Haywood.”
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