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his recklessness in money matters, the way he indulged and spoilt his retainers, their leaving him at his fall, the fidelity of his steward, Sir Thomas Meautys, through good and evil report, his mental anguish at the first moment, and his selfesteem almost immediately recovered, all these things are reflected in the play.

Thus in the first days of his troubles, when he fell ill and probably expected his death, he drafted a will in which he wrote:

"My body to be buried obscurely.

My name to the next ages, and to foreign nations."1

But he soon recovered his serenity of mind, and on his release from the Tower, where he was only confined for a few days, we find him writing to Buckingham," wherein your Lordship, by the grace of God, shall find that my adversity hath neither spent nor pent my spirits "2; and in the following year (1622) to the same: "For I confess it is my fault, though it be some happiness to me withall, that I do most times forget my adversity"; and to the King about the same time: "This same Nova Creatura is the work of God's pardon and the King's." To some observers he seems, indeed, to have given the impression of entire insensibility and indifference (though this, as his correspondence shows, was not the case). Thus Chamberlain describes him as "having (as should seem) no manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing as vain and idle in all his humours as when he was at highest." Bacon was evidently aware of these sour criticisms, for he writes with a sharp jest: "I am said to have a feather in my head, I pray some have not

1 Spedding, Letters & Life, vii. 228. The first of these clauses was omitted from the final will, where he directs his burial at St. Alban's. The second becomes : "For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages."

Ibid. p. 281.

Ibid. p. 341.

▲ Ibid. p. 297.
Ibid. p. 302.

mills in their head that grind not well."

This occurs in some

notes for a memorial of access to the King, written in the year after Bacon's fall, and among these there is one which has a special significance in connection with the conclusion of the play of Timon: For envy it is an almanack of the old year, and as a friend of mine said, the Parliament died penitent towards me."

If the reader will look back at my summary he will see that Shakespeare appears to make amends for the violence of Timon's abuse of the "Senators " by a scene at the end showing them repentant and explaining that the men who had banished Alcibiades were dead, and that in the meantime they had tried to be reconciled to Timon. I think it very probable that this scene (and possibly also the earlier scene in which Alcibiades argues before the Senate, III. v.) was put in on a later revision of the play, when the author's mind, according to its habit, had recovered its serenity, and this may account for the delay which seems to have occurred in the printing of the play in the 1623 folio. There is evidence for a general revision of the plays before they were collected in one volume, notably in Hamlet, and I should like to draw attention to some curious passages, which seem to me to have all the appearance of having been inserted in the author's last years, in order to vindicate his memory in connection with the circumstances of his (that is Bacon's) fall. The peculiar feature of them is that they are entirely irrelevant to plot or character. Thus in Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen is suddenly made to say:

My desolation does begin to make

A better life.

(V. ii.).

and in the same scene, equally inconsequently:

Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought

For things that others do; and, when we fall,

We answer others' merits in our name,

Are therefore to be pitied.

1 Spedding, Letters & Life, vii. p. 351.

Ibid. p. 351.

In Cymbeline there is another passage, inserted at the close of a scene, in the same peculiar way:

Be cheerful; wipe thine eyes:

Some falls are means the happier to arise,

(IV. ii.)

It seems very possible that the beautiful dirge in that play was intended to be the last word on the subject, and that it may have been put in on a final revision. In that case the difficulty of adapting the text for the introduction of musicians, if the dirge was to be sung, has been got over by having it "said." It is difficult to believe that the two last lines especially had not some personal significance:

Quiet consummation have;

And renowned be thy grave!

With these passages may be compared the lines in Timon, quoted above:

My long sickness,

Of health and living now begins to mend,

And nothing brings me all things.

Of extreme interest in this connection is the account of Bacon's character and fall given by Wilson and to be found in Bennett's History of England. I have quoted from it

at the end of my last chapter.

This, then, I believe to be Shakespeare's last work, though I am quite prepared to believe that the Tempest was intended to be the last and that it was placed for that reason in the Folio in the forefront of the plays. Who, except the author, would have placed it in such a position? In parts, grand, sublime, and calm, it seems fitly to sum up the poet's life. But the terrible tragedy of Bacon's fall, in my belief, provoked for a time the morbid outburst which we encounter in Timon; only, however, for a time, for the writer, if he be Bacon, and Bacon's correspondence and literary remains are any index of the state of his mind, soon recovered his normal and wonderful equanimity. I think that he included the play in the Folio as a record, though amending it, at that time, in certain respects to take the edge off its bitterness.

It is very possible that when Bacon, as I believe, wrote the Tempest, he regarded his dramatic work as finished. The date is not certainly known, but it is supposed that it was composed about 1611, a period when Bacon was much engaged, so far as the business of the State allowed it, on philosophical work.

It is a significant fact that the drawing to a close of Shakespeare's dramatic work practically synchronises with Bacon's obtaining office, which occurred, for the first time, in 1607, when, at the age of 46, he was appointed Solicitor General. On the death of the Earl of Salisbury in 1612, Bacon, in addition to his heavy legal work, was engaged under Buckingham on a variety of political business, until he practically occupied the position of prime minister, and this lasted until his fall in 1621. From that time until his death in 1626, he occupied himself with literary work, mainly, it is thought, of a revisory character. About 1611, Shakespeare is supposed to have abandoned dramatic composition, and it is about the same time that affairs began to engross the best part of Bacon's time. To me it is one of the great difficulties of believing in the actor as the author of the plays, that it necessitates the belief that all the great tragedies were written in the bucolic surroundings of Stratford by a man who was living in retired prosperity and engaged in establishing himself as a man of local position.

King Richard II.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HISTORICAL PLAYS

(See List in Table of Contents.)

I have already alluded to the apprehension caused in the mind of Queen Elizabeth by this play, and to the fact that the deposition scene was not at first played publicly, though said to have been performed in streets and private houses; nor was it included in the first impressions of the play, which was published anonymously in 1597. In Hereford, Elizabeth saw indications pointing to Essex, and in Richard II. an attack on herself. The suggestion underlying the Essex analogy was favoured by the coincidence that "Hereford " was his second title. But, apart from this, there are clear indications in the play that the author had Essex in mind in drawing Hereford, otherwise Bolinbroke and subsequently Henry IV. Essex was the hero of the London populace, and his affability to them was one of the charges against him at his trial for treason. It had provoked much comment and excited the suspicions of the Queen. Thus, in the Declaration of the Earl's Treasons, the official account drawn up by Bacon for the Government, we find the following:

"So likewise those points of popularity which every man took notice and note of, as his affable gestures, open doors, making his table and his bed so popularly places of audience to suitors, denying nothing when he did nothing, feeding many men in their discontentments against the Queen and State, and the like."1

and further, in the same document :

"besides, his general conceit that himself was the darling and minion of the people and specially of the City."

1 Spedding, Letters and Life, ii. 248.

2 Ibid. 267.

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