In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays eBook

That dreary morass, that Serbonian bog, the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, has been lately lit up as by the flickering light of a will-o’-the-wisp, by the almost simultaneous publication of an imaginary charge delivered to an equally imaginary jury by a judge of no less eminence than the late Lord Penzance (that tough Erastian) and of the still bolder jeu d’esprit, A Report of the Trial of an Issue in Westminster Hall, June 20, 1627, which is the work of the unbridled fancy of His Honour Judge Willis, late Treasurer of the Inner Temple, and a man most intimately acquainted with the literature of the seventeenth century.

Neither production of these playful lawyers, clothed though they be in the garb of judicial procedure, is in the least likely to impress the lay mind with that sense of ‘impartiality’ or ‘indifference’ which is supposed to be an attribute of justice, or, indeed, with anything save the unfitness of the machinery of an action at law for the determination of any matter which invokes the canons of criticism and demands the arbitrament of a well-informed and lively taste.

Lord Penzance, who favours the Baconians, made no pretence of impartiality, and says outright in his preface that his readers ’must not expect to find in these pages an equal and impartial leaning of the judge alternately to the case of both parties, as would, I hope, be found in any judicial summing-up of the evidence in a real judicial inquiry.’  And, he adds, ’the form of a summing-up is only adopted for convenience, but it is in truth very little short of an argument for the plaintiffs, i.e., the Baconians.’

Why any man, judge or no judge, who wished to prepare an argument on one side of a question should think fit to cast that argument for convenience’ sake in the form of a judicial summing-up of both sides is, and must remain, a puzzle.

Judge Willis, who is a Shakespearean, bold and unabashed, is not content with a mere summing-up, but, with a gravity and wealth of detail worthy of De Foe, has presented us with what purports to be a verbatim report of so much of the proceedings in a suit of Hall v. Russell as were concerned with the trial before a jury of the simple issue—­whether William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, ’the testator in the cause of Hall v.  Russell,’ was the author of the plays in the Folio of 1623.  We are favoured with the names of counsel employed, who snarl at one another with such startling verisimilitude, whilst the remarks that fall from the bench do so with such naturalness, that it is perhaps not surprising, or any very severe reflection upon his literary esprit, that a member of the Bar, having heard Judge Willis deliver his lecture in the Inner Temple Hall, repaired next day to the library to study at his leisure the hitherto unnoted case of Hall v.  Russell.  Ten witnesses are put in the box to prove the affirmative—­that Shakespeare was the author of the plays.  Mr.