John Ford (1586-1642?) and James Shirley (1596-1666) have left us little of permanent literary value, and their works are read only by those who wish to understand the whole rise and fall of the drama.  An occasional scene in Ford’s plays is as strong as anything that the Elizabethan Age produced; but as a whole the plays are unnatural and tiresome.  Probably his best play is The Broken Heart (1633).  Shirley was given to imitation of his predecessors, and his very imitation is characteristic of an age which had lost its inspiration.  A single play, Hyde Park, with its frivolous, realistic dialogue, is sometimes read for its reflection of the fashionable gossipy talk of the day.  Long before Shirley’s death the actors said, “Farewell!  Othello’s occupation’s gone.”  Parliament voted to close the theaters, thereby saving the drama from a more inglorious death by dissipation.[157]

VI.  THE PROSE WRITERS

FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

In Bacon we see one of those complex and contradictory natures which are the despair of the biographer.  If the writer be an admirer of Bacon, he finds too much that he must excuse or pass over in silence; and if he takes his stand on the law to condemn the avarice and dishonesty of his subject, he finds enough moral courage and nobility to make him question the justice of his own judgment.  On the one hand is rugged Ben Jonson’s tribute to his power and ability, and on the other Hallam’s summary that he was “a man who, being intrusted with the highest gifts of Heaven, habitually abused them for the poorest purposes of earth—­hired them out for guineas, places, and titles in the service of injustice, covetousness, and oppression.”

Laying aside the opinions of others, and relying only upon the facts of Bacon’s life, we find on the one side the politician, cold, calculating, selfish, and on the other the literary and scientific man with an impressive devotion to truth for its own great sake; here a man using questionable means to advance his own interests, and there a man seeking with zeal and endless labor to penetrate the secret ways of Nature, with no other object than to advance the interests of his fellow-men.  So, in our ignorance of the secret motives and springs of the man’s life, judgment is necessarily suspended.  Bacon was apparently one of those double natures that only God is competent to judge, because of the strange mixture of intellectual strength and moral weakness that is in them.

LIFE.  Bacon was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seal, and of the learned Ann Cook, sister-in-law to Lord Burleigh, greatest of the queen’s statesmen.  From these connections, as well as from native gifts, he was attracted to the court, and as a child was called by Elizabeth her “Little Lord Keeper.”  At twelve he went to Cambridge, but left the university after two years, declaring the whole plan of education to be radically wrong,