Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown by Andrew Lang
page 98 of 246 (39%)

The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and
court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in
literature than at Court, decide that the poet of Love's Labour's
Lost was not Will, but the courtly "concealed poet." No doubt
Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald {121b} that "Bacon wrote
Marlowe," and, by parity of reasoning many urge, though Mr. Theobald
does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring into Lyly's comedies the
grace and wit, the quips and conceits of his own courtly youth.
"What for no?" The hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses,
"Bacon wrote Marlowe," "Bacon wrote Shakespeare."

The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore
the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and
are noted even in short educational histories of English literature.
Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls,
to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly's plays, and read the
poems of the time. I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet.
It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius, not only to
catch the manner of Lyly's Court comedies, and "Marlowe's mighty
line" (Marlowe was not "brought up on the knees of Marchionesses"!),
but to improve on them. People did not commonly talk in the poetical
way, heaven knows; people did not write in the poetic convention.
Certainly Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth talked and wrote, as a rule
(we have abundance of their letters), like women of this world.
There is a curious exception in Letter VIII of the Casket Letters
from Mary to Bothwell. In this (we have a copy of the original
French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured style already
practised by Les Precieuses of her day; and expands into symbolisms
in a fantastic jargon. If courtiers of both sexes conversed in the
DigitalOcean Referral Badge