Who was the author of this most sinister literature? (Redux)
No one knows, but here is the most interesting possibility
Anyone who tells you they know who Shakespeare was is either lying, an idiot, or most likely a lying idiot. While we know the minutest of details about the lives of the most insignificant of many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, we know next to nothing about the Bard himself. That this situation has persisted for centuries makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that this anonymity was intentionally sought and protected. In other words, there was a conspiracy to conceal the identity of the world’s greatest author and this conspiracy has been fantastically successful. Nevertheless, it is pleasurable to entertain the possibilities. So while no one knows, the most interesting possibility is proposed by Nietzsche:
When I cast about me for my highest formula of Shakespeare, I find invariably but this one: that he conceived the type of Caesar. Such things a man cannot guess—he either is the thing, or he is not. The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. This is so to such an extent, that often after a lapse of time he can no longer endure his own work.... After casting a glance between the pages of my Zarathustra, I pace my room to and fro for half an hour at a time, unable to overcome an insufferable fit of tears. I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: how a man must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt, but certitude that drives one mad.... But in order to feel this, one must be profound, one must be an abyss, a philosopher.... We all fear the truth.... And, to make a confession; I feel instinctively certain and convinced that Lord Bacon is the originator, the self-torturer, of this most sinister kind of literature: what do I care about the miserable gabble of American muddlers and blockheads? But the power for the greatest realism in vision is not only compatible with the greatest realism in deeds, with the monstrous in deeds, with crime—it actually presupposes the latter. ... We do not know half enough about Lord Bacon—the first realist in all the highest acceptation of this word—to be sure of everything he did, everything he willed, and everything he experienced in his inmost soul.... Let the critics go to hell! Suppose I had christened my Zarathustra with a name not my own,—let us say with Richard Wagner's name,—the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess that the author of Human, all-too-Human was the visionary of Zarathustra.(Nietzsche, EH: WIASC, 4)
Nietzsche here offers two kinds of arguments, one positive and one negative.
The positive argument is based upon his insight into the character of world historical individuals. These rarest of rare men almost always bestride the earth alone. Rarely if ever are two of them alive at once. Given this fact of history, Nietzsche asks us to consider the likelihood that two such men not only lived and wrote at the same time, but also did so on the same wind blasted island. It can't but strike us that the more plausible explanation is that these two men were really one and the same. Julius Caesar is offered as evidence of that fact—the author of this most sinister literature had to be capable of being a Caesar himself, and we know that Lord Bacon was so capable as he rose to the highest office that one not nobly born could attain and served as acting king while James was in Scotland (and arguably as the first philosopher-king, whose wisdom is manifest in that he did nothing).
The negative argument is more personal and intended to address the discordance in Bacon and Shakespeare’s respective styles. To those who would say that the style of The New Organon is too far afield from that of Julius Caesar, Nietzsche offers his own works, Human, all-too-Human and Zarathustra as counter points. Had Nietzsche given credit for Zarathustra to Richard Wagner, who would have guessed or discerned that it was really Nietzsche? No one.
Not quite QED, but interesting nonetheless.