Francis Bacon's Contribution to Shakespeare

A New Attribution Method

Barry R. Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Francis Bacon's Contribution to Shakespeare advocates a paradigm shift away from a single-author theory of the Shakespeare work towards a many-hands theory. Here, the middle ground is adopted between competing so-called Stratfordian and alternative single-author conspiracy theories. In the process, arguments are advanced as to why Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) presents as an unreliable document for attribution, and why contemporary opinion characterised Shakspere [his baptised name] as an opportunist businessman who acquired the work of others. Current methods of authorship attribution are critiqued, and an entirely new Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP) method is introduced which, unlike current stylometric methods, is capable of detecting multiple contributors to a text. Using the Early English Books Online database, rare phrases and collocations in a target text are identified together with the authors who used them. This allows a DNA-type profile to be constructed for the possible contributors to a text that also takes into account direction of influence. The method brings powerful new evidence to bear on crucial questions such as the author of the Groats-worth of Witte (1592) letter, the identifiable hands in 3 Henry VI, the extent of Francis Bacon's contribution to Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and the scheduling of Love's Labour's Lost at the 1594–5 Gray's Inn Christmas revels for which Bacon wrote entertainments. The treatise also provides detailed analyses of the nature of the complaint against Shakspere in the Groats-worth letter, the identity of the players who performed The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn in 1594, and the reasons why Shakspere could not have had access to Virginia colony information that appears in The Tempest. With a Foreword by Sir Mark Rylance, this meticulously researched and penetrating study is a thought-provoking read for the inquisitive student in Shakespeare Studies.

1 Introduction

For the wit and minde of man, if it worke vpon matter […] is limited thereby […] but if it work vpon it selfe, as the Spider worketh his webbe, then it is endlesse, and brings forth indeed Copwebs of learning, admirable for the finesse of thread and worke, but of no substance or profite.

—Francis Bacon (1605, 29)¹

1.1 A New Method of Attribution

To the best of our current knowledge, William Shakspere of Stratford was not the sole author of the collection of plays Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623). One need not be a conspiracy theorist to reach this conclusion. It is accepted by most academic practitioners of stylometric and phrase-matching tests. In fact, All’s Well That Ends Well, 1 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Henry VIII, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, and Titus Andronicus are just a few of the works in which other hands have been strongly indicated (see Chapter 4). However, the only man to receive credit in the First Folio eulogies is the actor William Shakspere of Stratford, who played in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. So, the First Folio collection of 36 plays cannot possibly be an accurate record of attribution of the Shakespeare work. Once one is aware of this fact one is entitled to ask just how much Mr Shakspere wrote. The best method of identifying the contributors to a text is through a stylistic test, but Shakspere has no independent prose works or extant letters to make a comparison with. So, his style is unknowable.² Nevertheless, if the several contributors to a play detected by stylistic tests take up most of the text then this can only restrict his contribution to it. This eliminative method appears to be the only way that the extent of Shakspere’s exclusion can be placed within approximate limits. His inclusion is untestable.³

In the absence of documentary evidence, it is not possible to assert who originated any of the plays in the First Folio. For example, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a manuscript draft by some unknown dramatist was acquired by some author—later detectable—who inserted topical allusions and revised it into a complete play. For this reason, no play can ever be dated with certainty. What can be detected in a play are the rare locutions of writers that already exist in a database of contemporary texts, for example, Chadwyck–Healey’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, and what can be dated are topical allusions and themes.

If other hands have been revealed, then they are usually regarded as grateful collaborators, playwrights who conspired with Shakspere to work on separate scenes. Practitioners of stylometric tests are careful not to consider these other hands as later revisers—writers who alter the work of others—for then the assumption necessary for their method to work, that their text segments are uniform in a single hand, would be violated. In July 2017, in a lecture delivered at the Oxford Festival of the Arts, Professor Jonathan Bate provided his own interpretation of the presence of other pens, characterizing William Shakspere as a superior script doctor who improved the work of lesser wits. Unfortunately, Professor Bate neglected to provide any evidence for his conjecture, and without presenting evidence from a test that might delineate Shakspere’s contribution to the canon it remains an uncorroborated one.

In reaction to the untenable assumption of Shakspere as single-originator, a number of conspiracy theories have arisen, mainly out of the fact that the work relies on a knowledge of classical literature that the non-university-educated Shakspere cannot be shown to have had. So, instead, an enlightened courtier must have composed the work under the pseudonym Shake-speare (hyphenated).⁴ Such theories differ only in the identity of this courtier—although some have proposed a collaborating group of concealed writers.⁵ Now, the same arguments apply here as for Shakspere. There are many hands in the Shakespeare canon, so there cannot be a single author. One need only use EEBO to analyze 3 Henry VI, with Greene, Marlowe, and Munday implicated as contributors, to realize this (see Appendix A).⁶

The main method employed in establishing the identity of this concealed courtier usually consists of extracting assumed biographical allusions to the supposed candidate from the Shakespeare text. A case made in this way can only gain force if the equally ingenious constructions for other supposed candidates are dismissed. Then, with all other possibilities rejected, the argument for the favoured candidate is confidently exhibited as the only alternative. Unfortunately, it is not a practice that submits any writer to the possibility of failing a critical test. In other words, hoarders of biographical allusions can take comfort in the knowledge that their candidate can never be ruled out. This single-minded gathering of connections is pseudoscience, and, in this regard, we cannot ignore Karl Popper’s caution:

I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that it is not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system that is to be taken as the criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical system to be refuted by experience.

(2002, 18)

This gathering of autobiographical allusions in the Shakespeare canon has been carried out for Shakspere too, although more to expand his biography than to reinforce his claim for single authorship, which his proponents already assume to be beyond question. William Leahy has noted that “biographers who together produce the works that make up the sub-genre of Shakespearean biography look to the plays and poems for biographical detail. In short, they build a life of Shakespeare from his surviving literary works” (2016, 40).

Some of this detail clearly misses the mark. For example, Ros Barber has shown that “Not a single claim that Shakespeare used Warwickshire, Midlands or Cotswold dialect can be upheld” (2016, 116). Nevertheless, new biographies regularly crave for space on store bookshelves, claiming to possess an accurate account of Shakspere’s life from cradle to grave. On closer inspection, they are nothing but a recycled mythology, a patchwork of invention stitched together by mercenary blotters who find factual evidence hanging on every syllable of the Shakespeare canon. Negligent thinkers swallow it whole for without sufficient independence to interrogate the facts, all they are digesting is a work of baseless fantasy. In response, Kevin Gilvary (2017) has provided a detailed study of modern Shakspere biographies, pointing out how they create a ‘biografiction’ through their unjustifiable interpolation of conjectural material.

The Renaissance philosopher-statesman Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) of Gray’s Inn is one candidate who has been proposed as the secret single author of the Shakespeare canon. However, the only claim set out in these pages is that he is one of several contributors. With 27 works in Chadwyck–Healey’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, it is possible for a stylistic test to either suggest or—and the following is what makes his test scientific—contraindicate him as a contributor to a Shakespeare play. If Bacon seems an unlikely candidate for dramatic contribution, it is only because most academic treatises neglect his role as producer for the Inns of Court players and have passed over the several examples of fictional devices he wrote for contemporary entertainments. Here our English polymath, who served as Solicitor General (1607), Attorney General (1613), and Lord Chancellor (1618), shall be revealed as a man active in the production of plays and masques at the Inns of Court law schools. There is documentary evidence that he assisted in writing dumb shows for The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play performed by the Gray’s Inn players before the queen at Greenwich in February 1587–8. He wrote speeches for the mock Privy Councellors at the 1594–5 Gray’s Inn Christmas revels, where The Comedy of Errors received its first known performance, and there is also strong evidence that Love’s Labour’s Lost was planned for enactment there but was cancelled. The play almost certainly contains allusions to Bacon’s speeches at the revels proceedings (see Tables D.1 and D.7, Appendix D). There are also the Queen’s Day celebrations in 1592 and 1595, for which he again wrote entertainments. So, as Bacon had a clear interest in drama it seems appropriate to run stylistic tests on the Shakespeare plays with Bacon included as one of the possibilities for contribution. Unfortunately, stylometric tests restrict the possible contributors to a small group of well-known dramatists.

To bring more evidence to the argument, the present author has developed the new technique of Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP), which adopts a more forensic approach than stylometry. Here, individual phrases and collocations in a target text are systematically and exhaustively checked to identify which ones are rare in relation to a contemporary database of texts. The search engine for the EEBO database (which contains thousands of searchable pre-1700 texts) is well suited for this task. A locution that appears in less than, say, 0.2% of the texts dated before that of the assumed target text date is defined as rare, and the authors that are returned for these locutions in the EEBO search, both before and after the target date, are recorded. In this way, a DNA-type profile for rare locutions can be constructed for those authors who appear frequently in the significant returns.⁷ For those alternative single-originator candidates who have insufficient works in EEBO to participate in such a test, the conclusion must be similar to that for Shakspere: if they made a contribution, the extent of it cannot be known. However, this need not be final. Should sufficient textual data for a candidate be obtained in the future their access would become feasible.

The RCP method has several major advantages over stylometry:

1. RCP’s forensic focus on individual phrases and collocations rather than a word count reduces dependence on the requirement that a text must be uncorrupted by later revision. It is assumed here that scribes and compositors would alter an individual word with greater abandon than a complex phrase or collocation, which carries a greater meaning and authorial preference.
2. The phrases and collocations used are ‘rare’ so that there can be no charge of ‘commonplace’, that is, many possible sources.
3. In using the EEBO database, any of the thousands of authors are afforded the possibility of being a source or contributor, not just the few well-known dramatists which stylometric methods are restricted to.
4. Attention is paid to the direction of influence of a rare return, that is, whether or not the target text sourced or was a source for a returned author in EEBO. If both directions of influence occur for this author from other searches (mutual borrowing) then this is an argument for contribution to the target text.
5. No vital evidence is rejected. There is no forced reduction of an author’s corpus (to equalize genre, time period, corpus size) in order to give all candidates an equal chance. There is no equal chance. The confidence that is to be placed in a claim for contribution is proportional to the number of rare matches obtained. If an author has insufficient textual data to run a test then the conclusion is that nothing can be decided for that candidate until further data is presented.

An example of the data logging of rare returns from Act 1 of Pericles is given in Appendix G. Examples of profiles for authors with frequent returns constructed from such a log for other plays are shown in Appendices A–F. So far, five Shakespeare plays and three pamphlets have been subjected to the new RCP method. Supported by the availability of this new evidence, the connections between Francis Bacon and some of the Shakespeare canon are now set out in detail.

1.2 Overview of the Work

In Chapter 2, a document-based biography of Shakspere is given. Although the extent of his education is unknown, it seems that there is insufficient justification for concluding he could perhaps read but not write as some have suggested. As well as acting in productions around London, he is known to have engaged in business deals involving malt, property, and moneylending. However, there is no evidence that he was acquainted with the nobility, and there is not the slightest hint that he owned or had access to even a small percentage of the books that the Shakespeare canon used as sources (Muir 2009).

Contemporary opinion of Shakspere is explored in Chapter 3. The ‘War of the Theatres’ was punctuated by attacks on various dramatists, delivered through the lines of characters on the stage. On the one side was Ben Jonson, while John Marston was one of several protagonists on the other. Since the victim was usually confronted with his own defects, we can expect to obtain an insight into contemporary opinion of his real character. These were serious attacks on real theatre personalities that usually elicited a response in kind. In the second Parnassus play acted at Cambridge University (c.1600), Shakspere comes under scrutiny in the character of Gullio. Here he is characterized by Ingenioso as an employer of scholars who wrote plays that Gullio put his own name to. Ben Jonson’s testimony in his Epigrams lends weight to this view.

There are several quartos bearing Shakspere’s name that were not his. Chapter 4 surveys a selection of these before examining the integrity of the First Folio (1623) as a record of attribution. It soon becomes clear that those who supplied eulogies to Shakspere for the collection, praising his authorship, were misinformed; concealing the reality; or, when their conscience gave them pause, ambiguous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Shakspere and Bacon
• PART II Bacon’s Influence on Selected Plays
• PART III Attribution Methods
• BONUS ESSAYS Response to Country Life Magazine
• Index