Shall will in others seem right gracious, And in my will no fair acceptance shine? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store: So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will One will of mine, to make thy large Will more. Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one Will.” How preposterous to believe that a common-place play actor, with a wife and children, addressed such sentiments to the bride of his dearest friend! At no time do the sentiments or circumstances of the poem fit the person of the actor, of whom the dying and dissipated playwright, Greene, wrote in 1592: “There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that with his Tygers heart, wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his owne conceyt, the onely Shake-scene in a countne.” But, on the other hand, frequent evidence appears that Bacon, up to the time he was made Attorney-General in 1613, was constantly engaged in secret literary work. But not so secret as to be unknown [24] to a circle of friends and perchance a few enemies; for, in 1599, when he interceded with the Queen for his dear friend Essex, then under arrest on account of a treasonable pamphlet being dedicated to him, her Majesty flung at Bacon “a matter which grew from him, but went after about in others’ names,” being in fact the play of “Richard II,” which, in that and the preceding year, had a great run on the stage, and had gone through two editions, but, for prudential reasons, with the scene containing the deposition of the king left out. But even in the “Sonnets” the fact appears that the author has been writing for the stage: “Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offenses of affections new; Most true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely; but by all above, These blenches gave my heart another youth, And worse essays proved thee my best of love.” “O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand: Pity me then and wish I were renewed.” Here is not only a private confession of being compelled to produce plays for subsistence, but a sorrowful acknowledgment that thereby his “name receives a brand.” Yet it must not be supposed that Bacon was publicly known at any time as a play writer. His first [25]