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n It was snobbery. Nothing more and nothing less.nThey’ll tell you otherwise and try to dress it up as something else but it wasnsnobbery. Pure and simple. You see, we don’t really have that much informationnabout him. We don’t know when he was born but we do know when he was baptised,nso we can make a bit of a guess about his birthday. We know his fathernwas a glove-maker made good, so good indeed that he became a local alderman. Wenknow his mother came from land-owning farming stock and was worth a shilling orntwo. We think we know where he may have gone to school and we know he gotnmarried young to an older wife and had three children but he left them and went to live innLondon for a while, before coming back home, where he died, leaving a widow andntwo daughters. His son had died young, one daughter married a doctor and thenother married a vintner, but neither had any surviving children so his directnline died with them.
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| His Last Will and Testament |
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nWe’ve got his will and we know the date on which he died,nand we know where he’s buried. We know a few other bits and bobs but that’snreally the lot, more or less, and it’s not really all that much for the man whonis generally thought to be the best in the world at what he did. And that’snwhere the snobbery begins. His old man made gloves, his old mum had a farm, hendidn’t go to university, he ran off and left the wife with three little ones,nso evidently he wasn’t much of a model for the World’s Greatest Writer, whichnis what most people would say he was, if you buttonholed them and demanded anname from them for that particular position. If you haven’t got it yet, I’mntalking about William Shakespeare.
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| William Shakespeare |
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nThat entire World’s Greatest Writer stuffnbegan to pick up speed in the nineteenth century and if you want to give it anname, Bardolatry is as good a name as any. But if you’re going to elevatensomeone to such lofty heights then it would be nice if they were, well, a bit special. Not a glover’s son from the Midlands. A Lord would be much better, orna Prince even. Not a farm girl’s brat from Stratford. A Classical scholar or anvarsity chap at the very least. Goodness me, neither of his parents could evennwrite their own names, what sort of a provenance of that for Poet Number One. Snobbery, you see. Chap’s not up to snuff, don’t you see, can’t havenbeen him, must have been somebody else. One of us, don’t you know, not one ofnthe great unwashed.
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| Joseph C Hart – The Romance of Yachting – 1848 |
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nThe strange thing is that this idea first saw the light ofnday in book called The Romance of Yachting by Joseph C Hart published inn1848, a book which, despite its title, is a gossipy ramble about a merchantnvessel’s voyage to Spain (It is in print, if hard to find, and worth seekingnout.).
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n“Alas, Shakespeare! Lethe is upon thee! But if it drown thee it willngive up and work the resurrection of better men and more worthy. Thou hast hadnthy century; they are about having theirs.”n
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nThen, four years later, annanonymous piece appeared in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal titled WhonWrote Shakespeare?, which speculated that an avaricious, opportunisticnShakespeare may have ‘kept a poet’ who did the actual writing for him.
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| Notes and Queries – November 5 1853 |
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nAn enquiry from ‘Theta’ in Notes and Queries, November 5thn1853, raised the point that whilst Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon werencotemporaries, neither mentions the other and wonders why this might be. Thisnletter is notable in that it marked the commencement of a series of articlesnthat ran in N & Q for many, many years.
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| Delia Salter Bacon |
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nThe ‘Was it Shakespearenor Bacon’ industry really got under way in 1856, when Delia Salter Baconnpublished an unsigned article in Putnam’s Monthly magazine ‘WilliamnShakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them.’
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| Delia Salter Bacon – William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry concerning them – Puttnam’s Monthly – 1856 |
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nMore about thisngifted woman will follow on another day, but pretty soon everyone and his dog,nit seems, was casting about with theories of their own regarding Bacon andnShakespeare. You may recall that I mentioned yesterday Bacon’s three ‘distempers’nto learning, one of which was ‘Fantastical Learning’, and this, as itnturns out, is just what Bacon had in mind when brought the subject up himself.
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| Francis Bacon ponders where all this will end |
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nFantastical Learning isn’t real learning; it just pretends to be. It’snself-referential, it’s circular and dresses itself up in arcane terminology, innan attempt to baffle to gormless and impress the educated, and it’s empty,nself-important twaddle beyond the normal realms of twaddle. Baconiana is allnthat and more; think astrology, reflexology, graphology, phrenology (in fact,nquite a lot of ologies, as it seems), anything that involves crystals andncandles being together in the same place at the same time, homeopathy andnmanagement consultancy, all bundled together, mixed up in a big pot with thencrazy stick and with an extra sprinkle of barmy thrown in just for goodnmeasure, and you just might be a quarter of the way there.
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nThere is crazinessnand woo, there’s daft and bonkers, and there is Baconiana. Seriously. I’venwalked about in this world and seen quite a bit of what’s going on out therenbut some of this gobshitery flabbers even my gast. And bear in mind, there’snalso the other stuff that even your average run-of-the-mill Baconian finds justna tad weird and maybe needs a bit of a rethink.
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