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The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship holds that Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher, essayist and scientist, wrote the plays which were publicly attributed to William Shakespeare. Various explanations are offered for this alleged subterfuge, most commonly that Bacon's rise to high office might have been hindered were it to become known that he wrote plays for the public stage. Thus the plays were credited to Shakespeare, who was merely a front to shield the identity of Bacon.
Contents
- Terminology
- History of Baconian theory
- Baconian cryptology
- Credentials for authorship
- Grays Inn revels 159495
- Gesta Grayorum
- Promus
- Published work
- Arguments against Baconian theory
- References
Bacon was the first alternative candidate suggested as the author of Shakespeare's plays. The theory was first put forth in the mid-nineteenth century, based on perceived correspondences between the philosophical ideas found in Bacon’s writings and the works of Shakespeare. Later, proponents claimed to have found legal and autobiographical allusions and cryptographic ciphers and codes in the plays and poems to buttress the theory. All academic Shakespeare scholars but a few reject the arguments for Bacon authorship, as well as those for all other alternative authors.
The Baconian theory gained great popularity and attention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, although since the mid-twentieth century the primacy of his candidacy as author of the Shakespeare canon has been supplanted by that of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Despite the academic consensus that Shakespeare wrote the works bearing his name and the decline of the theory, supporters of Bacon continue to argue for his candidacy through organizations, books, newsletters, and websites.
Terminology
Sir Francis Bacon was a scientist, philosopher, courtier, diplomat, essayist, historian and successful politician, who served as Solicitor General (1607), Attorney General (1613) and Lord Chancellor (1618). Those who subscribe to the theory that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespeare work generally refer to themselves as "Baconians", while dubbing those who maintain the orthodox view that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote them "Stratfordians".
Baptised as "Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere" (William son of John Shakspere), the traditionally accepted author's surname is spelled in several variants during his lifetime, but his signature is most commonly spelled "Shakspere". Baconians often use "Shakspere" or "Shakespeare" for the glover's son and actor from Stratford, and "Shake-speare" for the author to avoid the assumption that the Stratford man wrote the work.
History of Baconian theory
A pamphlet entitled The Story of the Learned Pig (circa 1786) and alleged research by James Wilmot have been claimed to be the earliest instances of the claim that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's work, but the Wilmot research has been exposed as a forgery and the pamphlet makes no reference to Bacon.
The idea was first proposed by Delia Bacon in lectures and conversations with intellectuals in America and Britain. William Henry Smith was the first to publish the theory in a letter to Lord Ellesmere published in the form of a sixteen-page pamphlet entitled Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays? Smith suggested that several letters to and from Francis Bacon hinted at his authorship. A year later, both Smith and Delia Bacon published books expounding the Baconian theory. In Delia Bacon's work, "Shakespeare" was represented as a group of writers, including Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, whose agenda was to propagate an anti-monarchial system of philosophy by secreting it in the text.
In 1867, in the library of Northumberland House, one John Bruce happened upon a bundle of bound documents, some of whose sheets had been ripped away. It had comprised numerous of Bacon's oratories and disquisitions, had also apparently held copies of the plays Richard II and Richard III, The Isle of Dogs and Leicester's Commonwealth, but these had been removed. On the outer sheet was scrawled repeatedly the names of Bacon and Shakespeare along with the name of Thomas Nashe. There were several quotations from Shakespeare and a reference to the word Honorificabilitudinitatibus, which appears in both Love's Labour's Lost and Nashe's Lenten Stuff. The Earl of Northumberland sent the bundle to James Spedding, who subsequently penned a thesis on the subject, with which was published a facsimile of the aforementioned cover. Spedding hazarded a 1592 date, making it possibly the earliest extant mention of Shakespeare.
After a diligent deciphering of the Elizabethan handwriting in Francis Bacon's notebook, known as the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, Constance Mary Fearon Pott (1833–1915) argued that many of the ideas and figures of speech in Bacon's book could also be found in the Shakespeare plays. Pott founded the Francis Bacon Society in 1885 and published her Bacon-centered theory in 1891. In this, Pott developed the view of W.F.C. Wigston, that Francis Bacon was the founding member of the Rosicrucians, a secret society of occult philosophers, and claimed that they secretly created art, literature and drama, including the entire Shakespeare canon, before adding the symbols of the rose and cross to their work. William Comyns Beaumont also popularized the notion of Bacon's authorship.
Other Baconians ignored the esoteric following that the theory was attracting. Bacon's reason for publishing under a pseudonym was said to be his need to secure his high office, possibly in order to complete his "Great Instauration" project to reform the moral and intellectual culture of the nation. The argument runs that, he intended to set up new institutes of experimentation to gather the data to which his inductive method could be applied. He needed high office to gain the requisite influence, and being known as a dramatist, allegedly low-class profession, would have impeded his prospects (see Stigma of print). Realising that play-acting was used by the ancients "as a means of educating men's minds to virtue", and being "strongly addicted to the theatre" himself, he is claimed to have set out the otherwise-unpublished moral philosophical component of his Great Instauration project in the Shakespearean work. In this way, he could influence the nobility through dramatic performance with his observations on what constitutes "good" government.
By the end of the 19th century, Baconian theory had received support from a number of high-profile individuals. Mark Twain showed an inclination for it in his essay Is Shakespeare Dead?. Friedrich Nietzsche expressed interest in and gave credence to the Baconian theory in his writings. The German mathematician Georg Cantor believed that Shakespeare was Bacon. He eventually published two pamphlets supporting the theory in 1896 and 1897. By 1900 leading Baconians were asserting that their cause would soon be won. In 1916 a judge in Chicago ruled in a civil trial that Bacon was the true author of the Shakespeare canon. However, this proved to be the heyday of the theory. A number of new candidates were proposed in the early 20th century, notably Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, dethroning Bacon as the sole alternative to Shakespeare. Furthermore, alternative authorship theories failed to make any headway among academics.
Baconian cryptology
In 1880 Ignatius L. Donnelly, a U.S. Congressman, science fiction author and Atlantis theorist, wrote The Great Cryptogram, in which he argued that Bacon revealed his authorship of the works by concealing secret ciphers in the text. This produced a plethora of late 19th-century Baconian theorising, which developed the theme that Bacon had hidden encoded messages in the plays.
Baconian theory developed a new twist in the writings of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup. Owen's book Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893–95) claimed to have discovered a secret history of the Elizabethan era hidden in cipher-form in Bacon/Shakespeare's works. The most remarkable revelation was that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth. According to Owen, Bacon revealed that Elizabeth was secretly married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who fathered both Bacon himself and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the latter ruthlessly executed by his own mother in 1601. Bacon was the true heir to the throne of England, but had been excluded from his rightful place. This tragic life-story was the secret hidden in the plays.
Elizabeth Wells Gallup developed Owen's views, arguing that a bi-literal cipher, which she had identified in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, revealed concealed messages confirming that Bacon was the queen's son. This argument was taken up by several other writers, notably Alfred Dodd in Francis Bacon’s Personal Life Story (1910) and C.Y.C. Dawbarn in Uncrowned (1913). In Dodd's account Bacon was a national redeemer, who, deprived of his ordained public role as monarch, instead performed a spiritual transformation of the nation in private though his work: "He was born for England, to set the land he loved on new lines, 'to be a Servant to Posterity'". In 1916 Gallup's financial backer George Fabyan was sued by film producer William Selig. He argued that Fabyan's advocacy of Bacon threatened the profits expected from a forthcoming film about Shakespeare. The judge determined that ciphers identified by Gallup proved that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare canon, awarding Fabyan $5,000 in damages.
Orville Ward Owen had such conviction in his own cipher method that, in 1909, he began excavating the bed of the River Wye, near Chepstow Castle, in the search of Bacon's original Shakespearean manuscripts. The project ended with his death in 1924. Nothing was found.
The American art collector Walter Conrad Arensberg (1878–1954) believed that Bacon had concealed messages in a variety of ciphers, relating to a secret history of the time and the esoteric secrets of the Rosicrucians, in the Shakespearean works. He published a variety of decipherments between 1922 and 1930, concluding finally that, although he had failed to find them, there certainly were concealed messages. He established the Francis Bacon Foundation in California in 1937 and left it his collection of Baconiana.
In 1957 the expert cryptographers William and Elizabeth Friedman published The Shakespearean ciphers examined, a study of all the proposed ciphers identified by Baconians (and others) up to that point. The Friedmans had worked with Gallup. They showed that the method is unlikely to have been employed by the author of Shakespeare's works, concluding that none of the ciphers claimed to exist by Baconians were valid.
Credentials for authorship
Early Baconians were influenced by Victorian bardolatry, which portrayed Shakespeare as a profound intellectual, "the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature", as Thomas Carlyle stated. In conformity with these ideas, Baconian writer Harry Stratford Caldecott held that the Shakespearean work was of such an incalculably higher calibre than that of contemporary playwrights that it could not possibly have been written by any of them. Even mainstream Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness, wrote that "Had the plays come down to us anonymously – had the labour of discovering the author been imposed upon future generations – we could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now upon his head by almost common consent." "He was," agreed Caldecott, "all the things that the plays of Shakespeare demand that the author should be – a man of vast and boundless ambition and attainments, a philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a statesman."
Baconians have also argued that Shakespeare's works show a detailed scientific knowledge that, they claim, only Bacon could have possessed. Certain passages in Coriolanus, first published in 1623, are alleged to refer to the circulation of the blood, a theory known to Bacon through his friendship with William Harvey, but not made public until after Shakespeare's death in 1616. They also argue that Bacon has been praised for his poetic style, even in his prose works.
Opponents of this view argue that Shakespeare's erudition was greatly exaggerated by Victorian enthusiasts, and that the works display the typical knowledge of a man with a grammar school education of the time. His Latin is derived from school books of the era. There is no record that any contemporary of Shakespeare referred to him as a learned writer or scholar. Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont both refer to his lack of classical learning. If a university-trained playwright wrote the plays, it is hard to explain the many classical blunders in Shakespeare. Not only does he mistake the scansion of many classical names, in Troilus and Cressida he has Greeks and Trojans citing Plato and Aristotle a thousand years before their births. Willinsky suggests that most of Shakespeare's classical allusions were drawn from Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), since a number of errors in that work are replicated in several of Shakespeare’s plays, and a copy of this book had been bequeathed to Stratford Grammar School by John Bretchgirdle for "the common use of scholars".
In addition, it is argued that Bacon's and Shakespeare's styles of writing are profoundly different, and that they use very different vocabulary. Scott McCrea writes, "there is no answer for Bacon's different renderings of the same word—'politiques' instead of 'politicians', or 'submiss' instead of the Author's 'submissive', or 'militar' instead of the Poet's 'military'. These are two different writers."
Gray's Inn revels 1594–95
Gray's Inn law school traditionally held revels over Christmas: dancing and feasting were complemented by plays and masques. The evidence suggests that, prior to the revels of 1594 and '95, all performed plays were amateur productions. In his commentary on the Gesta Grayorum, a contemporary account of the 1594–95 revels, Desmond Bland informs us that they were "intended as a training ground in all the manners that are learned by nobility [...:] dancing, music, declamation, acting." James Spedding, the Victorian editor of Bacon's Works, thought that Sir Francis Bacon was involved in the writing of this account.
The Gesta Grayorum is a pamphlet of 68 pages first published in 1688. It informs us that The Comedy of Errors received its first known performance at these revels at 21:00 on 28 December 1594 (Innocents Day) when "a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the Players [...]." Whoever the players were, there is evidence that Shakespeare and his company were not among them: according to the royal Chamber accounts, dated 15 March 1595 – see Figure – he and the Lord Chamberlain's Men were performing for the Queen at Greenwich on Innocents Day. E.K. Chambers informs us that "the Court performances were always at night, beginning about 10pm and ending at 1am", so their presence at both performances is highly unlikely; furthermore, the Gray's Inn Pension Book, which recorded all payments made by the Gray's Inn committee, exhibits no payment either to a dramatist or to professional company for this play. Baconians interpret this as a suggestion that, following precedent, The Comedy of Errors was both written and performed by members of the Inns of Court as part of their participation in the Gray's Inn celebrations. One problem with this argument is that the Gesta Grayorum refers to the players as "a Company of base and common fellows", which would apply well to a professional theatre company, but not to law students. But, given the jovial tone of the Gesta, and that the description occurred during a skit in which a "Sorcerer or Conjuror" was accused of causing "disorders with a play of errors or confusions", Baconians interpret it as merely a comic description of the Gray's Inn players.
Gray's Inn actually had a company of players during the revels. The Gray's Inn Pension Book records on 11 February 1595 that "one hyndred marks [£66.67] [are] to be layd out & bestowyd upon the gentlemen for their sports and shewes this Shrovetyde at the court before the Queens Majestie ...."
There is, most importantly to the Baconians' argument, evidence that Bacon had control over the Gray's Inn players. In a letter either to Lord Burghley, dated before 1598, or to the Earl of Somerset in 1613, he writes, "I am sorry the joint masque from the four Inns of Court faileth [.... T]here are a dozen gentlemen of Gray's Inn that will be ready to furnish a masque". The dedication to a masque by Francis Beaumont performed at Whitehall in 1613 describes Bacon as the "chief contriver" of its performances at Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple. He also appears to have been their treasurer prior to the 1594–95 revels.
The discrepancy surrounding the whereabouts of the Chamberlain's Men is normally explained by theatre historians as an error in the Chamber Accounts. W. W. Greg suggested the following explanation:
"[T]he accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber show payments to this company [the Chamberlain's Men] for performances before the Court on both 26 Dec. and 28 Dec [...]. These accounts, however, also show a payment to the Lord Admiral's men in respect of 28 Dec. It is true that instances of two court performances on one night do occur elsewhere, but in view of the double difficulty involved, it is perhaps best to assume that in the Treasurer's accounts, 28 Dec. is an error for 27 Dec."Gesta Grayorum
The final paragraph of the Gesta Grayorum – see Figure – uses a "greater lessens the smaller" construction that occurs in an exchange from the Merchant of Venice (1594–97), 5.1.92–7:
The Merchant of Venice uses both the same theme as the Gesta Grayorum (see Figure) and the same three examples to illustrate it – a subject obscured by royalty, a small light overpowered by that of a heavenly body and a river diluted on reaching the sea. In an essay from 1603, Bacon makes further use of two of these examples: "The second condition [of perfect mixture] is that the greater draws the less. So we see that when two lights do meet, the greater doth darken and drown the less. And when a small river runs into a greater, it loseth both the name and stream." A figure similar to "loseth both the name and stream" occurs in Hamlet (1600–01), 3.1.87–8:
Bacon was usually careful to cite his sources but does not mention Shakespeare once in any of his work. Baconians claim, furthermore, that, if the Gesta Grayorum was circulated prior to its publication in 1688 – and no one seems to know if it was – it was probably only among members of the Inns of Court.
Promus
In the 19th century, a waste book entitled the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies was discovered. It contained 1,655 hand written proverbs, metaphors, aphorisms, salutations and other miscellany. Although some entries appear original, many are drawn from the Latin and Greek writers Seneca, Horace, Virgil, Ovid; John Heywood's Proverbes (1562); Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1575), and various other French, Italian and Spanish sources. A section at the end aside, the writing was, by Sir Edward Maunde-Thompson's reckoning, in Bacon's hand; indeed, his signature appears on folio 115 verso. Only two folios of the notebook were dated, the third sheet 5 December 1594 and the 32nd 27 January 1595 (1596). Bacon supporters found similarities between a great number of specific phrases and aphorisms from the plays and those written by Bacon in the Promus. In 1883 Mrs. Henry Pott edited Bacon's Promus and found 4,400 parallels of thought or expression between Shakespeare and Bacon.
The orthodox view is that these were commonplace phrases; Baconians claim the occurrence in the last two examples of two ideas from the same Promus folio in the same Shakespeare speech is unlikely.
Published work
There is an example in Troilus and Cressida (2.2.163) which shows that Bacon and Shakespeare shared the same interpretation of an Aristotelian view:
Bacon's similar take reads thus: "Is not the opinion of Aristotle very wise and worthy to be regarded, 'that young men are no fit auditors of moral philosophy', because the boiling heat of their affections is not yet settled, nor tempered with time and experience?"
What Aristotle actually said was slightly different: "Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; [...] and further since he tends to follow his passions his study will be vain and unprofitable [...]." The added coincidence of heat and passion and the replacement of "political science" with "moral philosophy" is employed by both Shakespeare and Bacon. However, Shakespeare's play precedes Bacon's publication, allowing the possibility of the latter borrowing from the former.
Arguments against Baconian theory
Mainstream academics reject the Baconian theory (along with other "alternative authorship" theories), citing a range of evidence – not least of all its reliance on a conspiracy theory. As far back as 1879, a New York Herald scribe bemoaned the waste of "considerable blank ammunition [...] in this ridiculous war between the Baconians and the Shakespearians", while Richard Garnett made the common objection that Bacon was far too busy with his own work to have had time to create the entire canon of another writer too, declaring that "Baconians talk as if Bacon had nothing to do but to write his play at his chambers and send it to his factotum, Shakespeare, at the other end of the town."
Horace Howard Furness wrote in a letter that, "Donnelly's theory about Bacon's authorship is too foolish to be seriously answered. I don't think he started it for any other purpose than notoriety. I believe he doesn't attempt to show that Bacon corrected the proof-sheets of the First Folio, and no human foresight could have told how the printed line would run, and have so regulated the MSS. To Donnelly's theory the pagination & the number of lines in a page are essential."
Mainstream academics reject the anti-Stratfordian claim that Shakespeare had not the education to write the plays. Shakespeare grew up in a family of some importance in Stratford; his father John Shakespeare, one of the wealthiest men in Stratford, was an Alderman and later High Bailiff of the corporation. It would be surprising had he not attended the local grammar school, as such institutions were founded to educate boys of Shakespeare's moderately well-to-do standing.
Stratfordian scholars also cite Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest and best-evidenced explanation (in this case that the plays were written by Shakespeare of Stratford) is most likely to be the correct one. A critique of all alternative authorship theories may be found in Samuel Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives. Questioning Bacon's ability as a poet, Sidney Lee asserted: "[...] such authentic examples of Bacon's efforts to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare."
At least one Stratfordian scholar claims Bacon privately disavowed the idea he was a poet, and, seen in the context of Bacon's philosophy, the "concealed poet" is something other than a dramatic or narrative poet. A mainstream historian of authorship doubt, Frank Wadsworth, asserted that the "essential pattern of the Baconian argument" consisted of "expressed dissatisfaction with the number of historical records of Shakespeare's career, followed by the substitution of a wealth of imaginative conjectures in their place."
In his 1971 essay "Bill and I," author and scientific historian Isaac Asimov made the case that Bacon did not write Shakespeare's plays because certain portions of the Shakespeare canon show a misunderstanding of the prevailing scientific beliefs of the time that Bacon, one of the most intensely educated people of his time, would not have possessed. Asimov cites an excerpt from the last act of The Merchant of Venice, as well as the following excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream:
In the above example, the reference to stars shooting madly from their spheres was not in accordance with the then-accepted Greek astronomical belief that the stars all occupied the same sphere that surrounded the Earth as opposed to separate ones. While it was believed that additional ambient spheres existed, they were thought to contain the other visible bodies in the sky, i.e. the Sun, the Moon, and the planets (whose name makes its way into English from the Greek word planetes, meaning "wanderers," as in the wandering bodies that orbited the Earth independently from the fixed stars in their sphere).