Nineteenth century questions

by James Freeman Clarke

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Subjects: American essays History / Civilization Literary Collections / Essays Literary Criticism / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS 1 The greatest of English poets is Shakespeare. The greatest prose writer in English literature is probably Bacon. Each of these writers, alone, is a marvel of intellectual grandeur. It is hard to understand how one man, in a few years, could have written all the masterpieces of Shakespeare, -- thirty-six dramas, each a work of genius such as the world will never let die. It is a marvel that from one mind could proceed the tender charm of such poems as " Romeo and Juliet," " As You Like It," or " The Winter's Tale;" the wild romance of " The Tempest," or of " A Midsummer Night's Dream; " the awful tragedies of " Lear," " Macbeth," and " OtheUo;" the profound philosophy of " Hamlet; " the perfect fun of " Twelfth Night," and " The Merry Wives of Windsor; " and the reproductions of I Ionian and English history. It is another marvel that a man like Bacon, immersed nearly all his life in business, a successful lawyer, an ambitious statesman, a courtier cultivating the society of the sovereign and the favorites of the sovereign, should also bethe founder of a new system of philosophy, which has been the source of many inventions and new sciences down to the present day; should have critically surveyed the whole domain of knowledge, and become a master of English literary style. Each of these phenomena is a marvel; but put them together, and assume that one man did it all, and you have, not a marvel, but a miracle. Yet, t...

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 2009

About the author

James Freeman Clarke was an American theologian and author.