Thursday, 11 February 2010
The Industrious Francis Bacon...
Jonathan Bate, in The Genius of Shakespeare (an excellent book), devotes a chapter to demolishing, coolly but definitively, the various absurd theories about who - other than the man himself - wrote Shakespeare. Of course no rational argument will ever dent the conspiracy theorists' conviction - based on snobbery and ignorance - that someone other than the 'grammar school boy' Shakespeare must have written his plays. Bacon is generally the favourite (even the otherwise sane E. Nesbit was a convinced Baconian) - but what I hadn't realised, until I read Sarah Bakewell's How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and 20 Attempts at an Answer, was that the arch-Baconian Ignatius Donnelly, having proved to his own satisfaction that his man wrote Shakespeare, then goes on to establish beyond peradventure (hem hem) that Bacon also wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, all of Marlowe's works - and, er, the Essays of Montaigne. Stands to reason, doesn't it? The word Francis occurs several times in the Essays (referring to Francois I), and the word bacon more than once. And the clincher is that the plays supposedly written by Shakespeare frequently mention mountains, or 'Mountaines'. Why did Bacon write in French, under Montaigne's name? Why, he needed the cover in order to express sceptical, heterodox views. Case closed... Truly there is no bottom to human folly.
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I'm not sure 'snobbery and ignorance' tells the full story. Sigmund Freud, Henry James and Enoch Powell can hardly be described as ignorant (snobbish, yes). I suppose it can take a lot of cleverness to justify highly dubious beliefs.
ReplyDeleteWell of course, Bacon is a direct blood descendent of Mary Magdalene. He also wrote all of the Beatles songs (Have you seen the little piggies... clutching forks and knives, to eat their bacon) and predicted that Mary Beard would solve 9/11.
ReplyDeleteIn one regard, they are all right, though. So far as we know, Shakespeare did not write every word of every one of his plays: a few were collaborative efforts, a perfectly normal thing at the time. One of his collaborators, George Wilkins, was the Elizabathan equivalent of Arthur Daley with a charge sheet as long as your arm. Of course, none of this will stop some researchers from "investigating" the grave of Fulke Greville in the very near future, the latest man in the frame as the real WS. Seems the whole thing has become a nice little earner.
ReplyDeleteSurely everyone knows that Bacon also wrote the works of Ignatius Donnelly (not to mention those of E. Nesbit).
ReplyDeleteHe was truly a man out of his time! I salute him.
I hope Bakewell's book on Montaigne gets a US publisher soon. I don't know if I can afford the trans-Atlantic shipping rates.
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