To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add
the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare's company, and the
inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets. Even without this
considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but
with it--he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept him
and his plot--to write plays under the pseudonym of "William
Shakespeare."
Talk of miracles as things which do not happen! The activities of
Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man's mind and heart,--
especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his
passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to
me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold,
he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older. No
wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and saw
life en noir: man delighted him not, nor woman either.
The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of
Bacon, do not make his authorship of the plays a physical
impossibility. But they make it an intellectual miracle. Perhaps I
may be allowed to set off this marvel against that other portent,
Will Shakspere's knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. {282a}
I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip
of his pen. Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon and
no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and his
legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only Bacon
can have been capable of these mysterious productions.
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