68 PART II.- SOME IMPORTANT METHODOLOGICAL TERMS. 



himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own 

 writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he 

 by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy 

 his friends the office of their care and pains, to have collected 

 and published them." 



Again, according to Ben Jonson's Commemorative Ode in 

 the first Folio, amply and conclusively confirmed by Richard 

 Farmer in the succeeding century, Shakespeare had "small 

 Latine, and less Greeke". Indeed, few, if rny, of his fellow 

 playwrights seemed so dependent on translations from the 

 classics or quoted so little Latin. Yet Bacon was a brilliant 

 Latin scholar, and his acknowledged works abound in referen- 

 ces to untranslated passages, and quote not a few in the original. 

 Moreover, the later seventeenth and the eighteenth century 

 were in emphatic accord with Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare 

 lacked "art", which would constitute ar ludicrous statement if 

 applied to Bacon. That is, the judgment of his own and that 

 of the succeeding century conforms precisely to what we should 

 expect of William Shakespeare, the son of John Shakespeare, 

 of Stratford-on-Avon, and is in violent conflict with the theory 

 that the super-learned Bacon was the author of the plays in 

 dispute. Shakespeare's helpless dependence on translations 

 completely disposes, of itself, of the Bacon theory. 



Much might have also been said of the different styles of 

 the two writers; of Bacon's absorbing and life-long interest in 

 scientific method, of which there is no sign in Shakespeare's 

 plays; of the absence of the romantic element in Bacon's 

 writings; of his wanting time to write over thirty plays when 

 his hours were already so full. 



When the principal facts, only obtainable through close 

 historic studies, are thus focused, we learn that there is every 

 reason for believing that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed 

 to him, and that Bacon did not. Yet bare surmises and dilet- 

 tante enquiries would have only led us into ever deeper 

 quagmires. Facts cannot be divined. 



Even more impressive from the viewpoint of scientific method, 

 is the solution of the problem of Shakespeare's real status as a 

 dramatist. According to the conception generally prevalent at 

 the present day, Shakespeare is the prince of the dramatists 

 of the modern era. Compared to him, every other dramatist 

 is a Liliputian at the side of a giant, or rather Shakespeare 

 is altogether unique and incomparable. His fellow dramatists 

 of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages are of a different, almost 

 infinitely lower, stamp; his contributions to dramatic literature 

 are quite individual; his genius cannot be explained by anything 

 but his innate greatness ; and, accordingly, in articles and works 

 on Shakespeare, his dramatic environment is almost uniformly 

 ignored. His predecessors are sometimes referred to, but mostly 

 in far from flattering terms. In fact, the theory that Francis 



