Call for Research 3 - Table of "Associations 3
Here is the third and last Table of Associations. This time with the emphasis on Bacon's strengths. I hope you all find it interesting. And if you can help in completing the unfilled cells that would be very much appreciated.
Here is the second Table of Associations. I hope you all find it interesting. And if you can help in completing the unfilled cells that would be very much appreciated.
I was working on this table many years ago and stopped. Now I don't have much time to keep working on it. So I'm making it public and asking if anyone can provide some help to complete it. Where there are asterisks for Oxford it means that I think this is true but do not have the express evidence at hand to prove or support it. If you want to provide that evidence I would be most appreciative. I got this idea from Sabrina Feldman who used this type of comparison to promote her candidacy of Thomas Sackville as the true author of the Shakespeare works. So I started working on this similar chart that incuded Bacon and Oxford. A Yes or No in a cell means there is evidence to support the answer.
Unfortunately it appears that the last column will post with the overlap of the Blog Archive dates.
"…The volunteer counsel [for the Stratfordian view], who have put more passion than reason in their arguments, and seem more satisfied that the crowd is with them than they are with the strength of their case, might as well abandon their line of defence, which has been to accuse you of being half-educated, cranky and insane . . . The personage to whom you assign the just fame of these marvelous productions seems to have been in every way born, educated and equipped for such a work. he had the requisite learning, the speculative aptitude and habit, the rhetorical skill and poetic feeling that the most cursory reading discloses as the everwhere dominant tone in this grandest diapason of human speech."
--George Talbot, author and retired lawyer, 1904
"In wit . . . He [Bacon] never had an equal"
- Mcaulay
"Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced."
-- Alexander Pope , 1741
"We are all Baconians here."
--Rev. H. R. Haweis, adding that he had never met anyone who, having thoroughly investigated the matter, came to a different conclusion.
Can anyone provide any similar evidence to anywhre near the same extent showing another candidate with as much recognized close language and knowledge likenesses between their candidate with the Shakespeare works? I haven't seen any.
"Wilde (Lord Penzance) argued, following Lord Campbell and others, that the works of Shakespeare are extremely accurate in matters of law. In The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy (1890) he wrote of "Shakespeare's perfect familiarity with... English law... so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault", arguing that this was evidence that the plays were the work of a legal expert such as Bacon.[8] Several other authors followed Wilde's arguments about the legal expertise used in Shakespeare, including Sir George Greenwood."
-- Wikipedia
"The Baconian thesis has up to this day been asserted in presence of three successive generations by able and most sincere writers . . . Such a controversy is therefore not disdainfully to be set aside, nor a priori declared unworthy of consideration."
.-- Journal Des Debats, Paris, 1903
"I cannot accord it to him who, though rich, did not educate his children, and who, though he sought fame through a coat-of-arms claimed to have been earned by the valor of his great-grandfather, nowhere, not even in his last will and testament, claimed the fame of authorship,--such authorship,--and whose sole posthumous anxiety centred on his dust and bones remaining undisturbed in the chancel of Stratford church."
-- J. Warren Keifer, Former Speaker of the National House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., 1904
"You ask my opinion, in a few words, upon the Bacon-Shakspere controversy, which has been a study of immense interest to me for nearly twenty years. In examining a problem of such importance to English literature as the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakspere one can hardly use too great deliberation. I felt this so strongly that it was only after about ten years' reading and reflection that I became a convinced Baconian. I have been brought to this conclusion mainly by the impossibility of reconciling the facts we know concerning the life of the man of Stratford with the technical and universal knowledge inherent in the plays."
-- Hon. William Waldorf Astor, attorney, politican, businessman, newspaper publisher, 1904
"The mere theory that Bacon was the real author of the plays, though the mass of Shakespeare's readers still set it down as a delusion, does not, indeed, contain anything essentially shocking to common sense. On the contrary, it is generally recognized that on purely a priori grounds there is less to shock common sense in the idea that those wonderful compositions were the work of a scholar, a philosopher, a statesman, and a profound man of the world than there is in the idea that they were the work of a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems to have found some difficulty in signing his own name."
--W. H. Mallock, 1901
"The difficulty hitherto of getting a fair hearing for the mere literary argument has chiefly arisen from the illogical resentment shown by many people at the bare idea of dethroning a national idol. Shakespeare has so long been thought of as a genius of the very foremost order that any suggestion, tending to prove that he was a very commonplace person in reality, is treated as though it involved an attempt to detract from the sublimity of the works bearing his name. But in reason it must be conceded that we worship the memory of Shakespeare because we admire Hamlet, king Lear, and the rest. We do not admire the plays because any particular man wrote them . . . The question is still one which most English newspapers and periodicals are afraid to discuss freely for fear of offending the blind prejudice above referred to. Orthodox Shaksperean biographers simply ignore the all important question as though it were a craze in notorious antagonism to well-known facts, like the idea that the earth is flat, and in this way the minds of people who might be capable of independent judgment, if they had the evidence before them, are left in complete ignorance of the prodigious force residing in the Baconian argument -- unless, indeed, they have gone out of their way to make a special study of the Baconian books."
--A.P. Sinnet, 1901
"It is desperately hard, nay, impossible to believe that this uninstructed, untutored youth, as he came from Stratford, should have written these plays; and almost as hard, as it seems to me, to believe that he should have rendered himself capable of writing them by elaborate study afterwards . . . The difficulty of imagining this your man to have converted himself in a few years from a state bordering on ignorance into a deeply read student, 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, is almost insuperable . . . His name once removed from the controversy, there will not, i think, be much question as to the lawyer to whose pen the Shakespeare plays are to be attributed."
--Lord Penzance, 1903
"I am not a Baconian, but I have a perfectly open mind on the matter. I have no objection at all to being convinced that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the splended dramas attributed to Shakespeare; it is so much easier to suppose from our unquestionable knowledge of his life and genius that he MIGHT have written them, than to accept from the unquestioned little that we know of Shakspere and his life that he COULD have done so. It is unnecessary to refer at length to the extraordinary similarity in the knowledge of law, science, art, politics, history, literature, and every other branch of human understanding, exhibited by Shakespeare and Bacon."
--R. B. Marston, 1902
"I can't help anticipating that, some of these days, Bacon letters or other papers will turn up, interpretive of his, at present, dark phrase to Sir John Davies, of 'your concealed poet.' We have noble contemporary poetry, unhappily anonymous, and I shall not be surprised to find Bacon the concealed singer of some of it. May I live to have my expectation verified."
-- Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, author of 'The Complete Poems of Joseph Hall'.
"To believe Shakspere to have written these wondrous works, saturated through and through with the reforming spirit of Francis Bacon, containing his philosophic theories and discoveries, advocating his new philosophy over that of Aristotle, containing the favorite, forceful phrases of his mother, the Lady Anne, his brother Anthony, and the Earl of Essex;--to believe that William Shakspere wrote these is to violate every principle of common sense, and be blind to truths plain as beacon lights for our guidance."
-- George James, 1896
"Only once grant that Bacon lacked imagination (he had infinite imagination), that he was devoid of humor (his humor was unbounded and inextinguishable), that he had no leisure to write the plays (he had years of waiting for place and work and years of struggle with debt), that he had no poetic faculty (his noblest prose is the highest poetry in all but metre), that he was cold and unsympathetic and selfish (Sir Tobie Matthew, and Rawleigh and other contemporaries did not think so)--only grant these postulates (all false) and a few others, and it will be certain that he did not write the plays"
-- Rev. L. C. Manchester, 1896
"The day has come when, rejecting fictitious lives of an imaginary Shakespeare, and scrutinizing the insignificant circumstances which are all that is known of him, the discrepancy becomes more and more apparent between the intellectual genius of the author of the plays and the sordid and squalid characteristics of the man of Stratford."
-- Pall Mall Gazette (London), 1900
"When one comes to study the literature of the subject in an honest quest of truth, it will occur to him, as a strange feature of the controversy, that the literary world has confided for three hundred years in tradition alone, and thus accepted the belief that the jolly lessee of the Globe and Blackfriars wrote the celebrated plays, collected after his death in the folio of 1623; and yet, upon thorough investigation, it is manifest that he never wrote a line of them."
--John L. T. Sneed, Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Tennessee, 1891.
"I am convinced that Bacon left the MSS. Either with Percy (the Earl of Northumberland) or Sir Toby Matthew, with authority to publish after his death. But the civil war broke out, and the trustees may have thought that under the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans the memory of Bacon, as a philosopher, would have been ruined, if it were published that he was the author of these dramas. In the interest of their deceased friend, they may have destroyed the MSS., together with the key."
---Count Vitzthum D'Eckstadt, Privy Councillor to the Emperor of Austria, 1888
"Firmly convinced that Shakspere of Stratford could not have been the author."
--Walt Whitman, 1888
"I see by your aid, better than before, the strength of Bacon's claim."
--W.T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education
"There is nothing very outrageous in the supposition that the same mind might have given birth to the Essayas and 'Hamlet.'"
--The Daily News (London), 1902
"That Shakespeare possessed an altogether extraordinary knowledge of law, of medicine, of science, of philosophy, of language, of everything, in short, which would be impossible for an uneducated man, whatever his genius as a poet might be, has long seemed to me an insoluble mystery."
--Sir Lewis Morris, 1888.
"The philosophical writings of Bacon are suffused and saturated with Shakespeare's thought . . . These likenesses in thought and expression are mainly limited to those two contemporaries:.
--Gerald Massey, 1888
"Experience disposes me to think that most of the finer Shakespearean Plays may be illustrated from the works of Bacon in the same way. If this be so, it certainly suggests the exceeding probability that the universal genius, enthroned by Ben Jonson on the summit of Parnassus, and the author of the Plays were one and the same person."
--Prof. Samuel Edmund Bengough, 1890
"On the general question of the authorship of the Shakespeare Plays, I may say that I have no more doubt that Lord Bacon was the author of all of them, and of the poetry attributed to Shakspere, than I have of the fact that Pope wrote the Essay on Man."
--Sir Joseph N. McKenna, M.P., 1891
"This presents one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of the human mind. It makes necessary the conclusion that two men, living contemporaneously in the same town, then a comparatively small city, --one a philosopher, endowed with the most brilliant imagination, the other a most imaginative poet, possessing the profoundest philosophical genius, and both reckoned among the greatest thinkers the world ever saw--did, possibly in the same year, at the same time, and certainly at the same period of their lives, write, without any interchange of views or opinions, upon the same identical subjects, follow the same train of thought, arrive at the same conclusions, and digest the results of their study, reading and meditation into the same system or body of philosophy, the which one stated to the world in abstract scientific propositions, while the other embodied it in poetic forms and framatic creations. No coincidence of mental action so remarkable as this can be found, it is believed, in any other age of the world."
--Henry J. Ruggles, 1870.
"Identification will come in due time. Meanwhile the admissions show how able men perceive in the works of Bacon indications of a mind gifted with the highest poetic power."
--William Thomson, 1880.
"Bacon desired nothing less than a natural history of the passions, the very thing that Shakespeare produced."
--Kuno Fischer, Prof. of Philosophy at Heidelberg, and a foremost literary critic. Also not a Baconian.
"It has often been said of Shakespeare that he was even more of a philosopher than a poet. Bacon's ambition was to grasp the universe, making all knowledge his province. Lessing has profoundly remarked of Shakespeare that his drama is the mirror of nature. And M. de Remussat has said that in Bacon's ordinary way of reflecting and representing the characters and affairs of men we cannot but notice something which brings Shakespeare to mind.' The analogy between the two is certainly very strong."
--Louis De Raynal, 1888
Two observations on these quotes. One is the impressive number of well read intellectuals, a century or more ago, that saw the close similarities in the writings by Shakespeare and Bacon. Second is that one needs to be a deep reader of Bacon's works to see the similar styles or language usage between them. Nowadays it seems few intellectuals read Bacon any more so fewer are aware of these similarities.
"Thus it is easier to prove that if Shakspere wrote the literature we have an instance of a stupendous miracle than it is to prove that, although Bacon possessed all the qualifications , he might still have refrained from writing it. In the one case we should have to exercise that form of faith described as "believing what you know to be untrue," on the other there is no tax whatever upon one's faculty of credence."
-- H. Crouch Batchelor from Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare, 1910
"Bacon's similes, for their aptness and their vividness, are of a kind of which Shakespeare or Goethe or Richter might have been proud".
-- Prof. J.S. Blackie (1886)
"He [Bacon] seems to have written his Essays with the pen of Shakespeare"
--Alexander Smith
"The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare is equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum."
-- Hazlitt, English Biographer, not a Baconian
"It has always struck me as extraordinary, and almost as a problem to be explained, how the two greatest Englishmen belonged to one era, nearly the same interval of years, how they lived, as it were, side by side, face to face, yet, so far as we could learn, were strangers to each other, the one a poetical philosopher, the other a philosophical poet".
-- W. Carew Hazlitt, English biographer, and a Stratfordian
"Thus we see that Bacon and Shakspere both flourished at the same time, and might, either of them, have written these works, as far as dates are concerned, and that Bacon not only had the requisite learning and experience, but also that his wit and poetic faculty were exactly of that peculiar kind which we find exhibited in these plays." . also "For upwards of twenty years I have held the opinion that Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare Plays." so from about 1837, preceeding Delia Bacon's publication of 1857.
-- Wiliam Henry Smith, 1857
"I am one of the many who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within planetary space of each other. Are there any two things in the world more incongruous? Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon after generations, I think we could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now on his head by almost common consent".
- Dr. W. H. Furness, the eminent American scholar in a letter to Nathaniel Holmes, Oct. 29, 1866
"Nobody believes any longer that immediate inspiration is possible in modern times; . . . And yet everybody seems to take it for granted of this one man Shakspere."
--James Russell Lowell, 1870.
"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. The inquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas inputed to him?"
-- Joseph C. Hart, 1848.
"We repeat, that there is nothing recorded in his everyday life that connects the two, except the simple fact of his selling poems and realising the proceeds, and their being afterwards published with his name attached; and the statements of Ben Jonson, which however are quite compatible with his being in the secret."
-- Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, 1852
"I would rather know that be known".
-Bacon's Promus (Notebook)
"Shakespeare is as astonishing for the exuberance of his genius in abstract notions, and for the depth of his analytical and philosophic insight, as for the scope and minuteness of his poetic imagination. It is as if into a mind poetical in form there had been poured all the matter that existed in the mind of his contemporary Bacon. In Shakespeare's plays we have thought, history, exposition, philosophy, all within the round of the poets. The only difference between him and Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay and calls it his own, while Shakespeare writes a similar essay and puts in into the mouth of a Ulysses or a Polonius."
- David Masson in Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and other Essays (1874)
" 'And who is Shakspeare' said Cadurcis. 'We know of him as much as we do of Homer. Did he write half the plays attributed to him?"
- Benjamin Disraeli
"All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakspere serves rather to disappoint and perplex us, than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek. No letter of his handwriting, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary has been produced."
- Henry Hallam, 1837
Othello 3.3.212: "…could give out such seeming to seel her father's eyes up, close as oak, He thought twas' witchcraft .."
Shakespeare read Plato:
Shakspeare "Thy promises are like Adonis' gardens, That one day bloomed and fruitful were the next". This couplet must have been suggested by Plato (Jowett's translation): Would a husbandman, said Socrates, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to be fruitful, and in sober earnest plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden of Adonis....?
Personal friend appraisal
"It will go near to pose any other nation of Europe, to muster out in any age, four men, who in so many respects should excel four such as we are able to show them: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. The fourth was a creature of incomparable abilities of mind, of a sharp and catching apprehension, large and faithful memory, plentiful and sprouting, deep and solid judgment, for as such as might concern the understanding part. A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all in so eloquent, significant, so abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing, a way of words, of metaphors and allusions as, perhaps, the world hath not seen, since it was a world. I know this may seem a great hyperbole, and strange kind of excess of speech, but the best means of putting me to shame will be, for you to place any other man of yours by this of mine."
- Tobie Mathew, close friend of F. Bacon
- F. Bacon
Expert appraisal
“…the acknowledgement that he was intellectually one of the most colossal of the sons of men has been nearly unanimous. They who have not seen his greatness under one form have discovered it in another; there is a discordance among men’s ways of looking at him, or their theories respecting him; but the mighty shadow which he projects athwart the two bygone centuries lies there immovable, and still extending as time extends, . . . .He belongs not to mathematical or natural science, but to literature and to moral science in its most extensive acceptation,--to the realm of imagination, of wit, of eloquence, of aesthetics, of history, of jurisprudence, of political philosophy, of logic, of metaphysics and the investigation of the powers and operations of the human mind. . . . All his works, his essays, his philosophical writings, commonly so called, and what he has done in history, are of one and the same character; reflective and, so to speak, poetical, not simply demonstrative, or elucidatory of mere matters of fact. What, then, is his glory?—in what did his greatness consist? In this, we should say;--that an intellect at once one of the most capacious and one of the most profound ever granted to a mortal—in its powers of vision at the same time one of the most penetrating and one of the most far-reaching—was in him united and reconciled with an almost equal endowment of the imaginative faculty; and that he is, therefore, of all philosophical writers, the one in whom are found together, in the largest proportions, depth of thought and splendor of eloquence. His intellectual ambition, also,--a quality of the imagination,--was of the most towering character; . . . . His Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum have more in them of the spirit of poetry than of science; and we should almost as soon think of fathering modern physical science upon Paradise Lost as upon them.”
- George L. Craik, LL.D., Professor and Chair of History and of English Literature in Queen’s College, Belfast
"..regarding the resemblance between the Eumenides of Eschylus and the Hamlet of Shakespeare: The plot is so similar that we should certainly have credited the English poet with copying it, if he could have read Greek…The common elements are indeed remarkable. Orestes and Hamlet have both......"
- pg. 3 in Ignatius Donnelly
F Bacon: "Though I profess not to be a poet...", yet also "... he should appear to have least opinion of himself in those things wherein he is really the best: just as we see it is the practice of poets."
In Archbishop Tenison's Baconiana or Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (1679), on p. 79, we read: "And those who have true skill in the works of the Lord Verulam, like great Masters in painting, can tell by the design, the Strength, the way of Coloring, whether he was the Author of this or the other Piece, though his Name be not to it."
"In both a similar combination of different mental powers was at work, and as Shakespeare was often involuntarily philosophical in his profoundness, Bacon was not seldom surprised into the imagination of the poet . . . In Bacon's works we find a multitude of moral sayings and maxims of experience from which the most striking mottoes might be drawn for every Shakespearean play, aye, for every one of his principle characters, testifying to a remarkable harmony in their mutual comprehension of human nature. In these maxims lie at once, as it were, the whole theory of Shakespeare's dramatic forms and of his moral philosophy."
- Georg Gottfried Gervinus, 1850.
"The marvelous accuracy, the real, 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."
- Knight
To King James: "The good [of my works], if any be, is due Tanquam, adeps sacrificii" [as the fat of the sacrifice" to be incensed to the honour, first of the divine Majesty, and next of your Majesty."
- in Bacon's De Augmentis 1623. Previously said in Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605)."
"Part of thy works truly lie buried." - - Robert Ashley
"The jewel most precious of letters concealed". --R.C. of Trinity
"So did Philosophy, involved in scholars riddles, call Bacon to her rescue; so by his touch entranced, she reard her crest: and as she crept along the ground in comic sock, he did not succor her with some device that gossips would approve, but made her wholly new. The with more polished art, he rose in higher buskin, and the Stagerite, another Virbius, lives again in a new Organon.
"Where, even in Plutarch's pages, are the aristocratic republican tone and the tough muscularity of mind, which characterized the Romans, so embodied as in Shakespeare's Roman plays? Where, even in Homer's song, the subtle wisdom of the crafty Ulysses, the sullen selfishness and conscious martial might of broad Achilles; the blundering courage of thick-headed Ajax; or the mingled gallantry and foppery of Paris, so vividly portrayed as in Troilus and Cressida?"
- Richard Grant White
"As for my Essays, and some other particulars of that nature, I count them but as the recreations of my other studies; though I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains and embracement, perhaps, yield more lustre and reputation to my name than those other which I have in hand."
-Bacon - An Advertisement Touching an Holy War
His [Shajkespeare's] very frequent use of Latin derivatives in their radical sense shows a somewhat thoughtful and observant study of that language.
- Richard Grant White
"My end was merit of the state of learning and not glory.", "I wish you to take heed of popularity. A popular judge is a deformed thing, and plaudites are fitter for players than for magistrtes."
- Francis Bacon, Life and Letters, 6 p. 211
“Therefore set it down, that an habit of secrecy, is both politic and moral.”
- Bacon
The writer was a classical scholar. Rowe found traces in him of the Electra of Sophocles; Colman, of Ovid; Pope, of Dares Phrygius, and other Greek authors; Farmer, of Horace and Virgil; Malone, of Lucretius, Statius, Catullus, Seneca, Sophocles, and Euripides; Steves, of Plautus; Knight of the Antigone of Sophocles; and White, of the Alcestis of Euripedes.
- Nathaniel Holmes
It may be asked why he should conceal his authorship of such writings. There is considerable proof from contemporary sources that to be known as a poet obstructed a man’s prospects as lawyer, statesman or other public servant. In the MS. play of Sir Thomas More (circa 1600), the Earl of Surrey says: “Poets were ever thought unfit for state.”
“The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum, to call up all that are against them.”
- Francis Bacon
I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all.
- Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, 1663
William Shakespeaer was born at Stratford, in Warwickshire; his learning was very little, and therefore it is more a matter for wonder that he should be a very excellent poet.
- Bentham--State of the English Schools and Churches, about 1686
In a letter from Francis Bacon to courtier Sir John Davies :So, desiring you to be good to concealed poets.,,,"
“Let him do his private business under a mask.” Bacon - De moribus interpretis
“In choice of instruments, it is better to choose men of a plainer sort,. . .” Bacon - Essay of Negotiating
“Writings should be such as should make men in love with the lesson, and not with the teacher. - Francis Bacon
