Three of the main arguments which Baconians urge against the claims of Shakespeare to the authorship of the Plays are, firstly, that Shakespeare left no books; secondly, that only five of his signatures have come down to us; and, thirdly, that he makes no reference to his plays in his Will. When we come to investigate these objections, it may be said, without hesitation, that they do not amount to a row of pins. There isn’t a rag of evidence, to employ Mr. Sinnett’s phrase, to show that he left no books, it is quite certain that he left as much manuscript as Peele or Marlowe or any of the dramatists of his period, and it would have been something more than extraordinary if he had made any reference to copyrights which he did not possess. The professional playwrights of the period sold their plays outright to one or other of the acting companies, and they retained no legal interest in them after the manuscript had passed into the hands of the theatrical manager. When Shakespeare had disposed of his dramas, he washed his hands of them, so to speak, and not a single play of the sixteen that were published during his lifetime was issued under his supervision. They belonged to the theatre for which they were written. Shakespeare was only conforming to the general custom in this matter in betraying no interest in work which did not belong to him. He was consistently and characteristically indifferent as to what became of his plays, and in this he forms a striking contrast to Bacon, who had a mania for preserving and publishing every particle of his writings. In Shakespeare, this neglect, if surprising, is at least consistent; in Bacon it is too antagonistic to what is known of his idiosyncracies to be entertained for a single moment. Bacon must have realised that his versification of the Psalms was of less merit than the poetry in the plays. Yet he carefully superintended the publication of the Psalms, in the same year in which they were written, and kept no copies of such plays as The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Coriolanus, Timon, Julius CÆsar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. These works of “supreme literary interest” were rescued from the dust-bin of the theatres, by the energy and affection of two of Shakespeare’s brother actors, what time Bacon was translating his philosophical works into Latin, and publishing the Psalms.

In the foregoing pages, Bacon’s character, and the incidents in his life have, it may be objected, been dealt with in a harsh and unsympathetic manner. Yet the facts set down are matters of history, and I claim for the comments, and the conclusions derived therefrom, that they are neither misleading nor exaggerated. It has been my endeavour to show that, while all that we know of Bacon’s private life and his public career—the evidence of his deeds, his sentiments, his prose, and his verse—prove him to have been a man incapable of conceiving the poetry of the Plays, there is nothing in the life of Shakespeare, when freed of the miserable misrepresentations and baseless accusations introduced by his traducers, which makes it difficult for us to regard him as the rightful author. One thing we must recognise in the writer of the greatest poetry of all times—his genius. We cannot argue that Shakespeare had genius—and, therefore, he wrote the plays—but we may transpose the argument and declare that Shakespeare wrote the plays, and therefore he had genius. But, cries the Baconian, Bacon also possessed genius. The fact is incontrovertible. His genius inspired him to draw up the scheme of his Magna Instauratio, to write his Essays, to invent a new philosophy, and a most ingenious cipher, but it did not prevent him from composing some miserably poor verses or enable him to discern the singular absence of merit in his metrical effusions. There is not a single “literary” argument of the hundreds put forward in support of Bacon’s claims to the authorship of the Plays which has validity, or even plausibility, to recommend it. There is not a single argument of the hundreds that have been advanced to deprive Shakespeare of his mantle which can stand the test of investigation. Carlyle declared Bacon to be as incapable of writing Hamlet as of making this planet. Spedding, who devoted thirty years of his life to the study of Bacon, emphatically asserts that, “if there were any reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author (of Shakespeare), I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not Bacon.” We know that Shakespeare put the plays on the stage, and acted in them, and that his intimate friends, his fellow actors, and the public, believed him to be the writer. We know, too, that Bacon had a distaste, if not a contempt, for the stage; that his lifelong complaint was his inability to secure time for his philosophic studies. To sum up in a sentence, it may be said that there is no reason to suppose that Bacon was the author of the Plays, while there is every reason to believe that he was not; and with respect to Shakespeare, there is no reason to believe he was not what he claimed to be, and there is tradition, the testimony of all who had the best means of knowing, to prove that he was.

Until very recent times, one of the most tangible arguments of the Shakespeareans was that Bacon had not claimed the authorship of the Plays. That argument, if it has not now been thrown down, is, at least, suspended. The existence of the bi-literal cipher which Mrs. Gallup preaches, though vigorously attacked, has not yet been exploded. But if the cipher which contains these claims is verified, in the face of all circumstantial evidence that prove the claims to be baseless and preposterous, we are practically convicting Bacon of one of the greatest and most impudent literary frauds that was ever perpetrated. Yet that is what I am prepared to find is the case. Nor am I without warrant for holding this opinion. When the existence of the bi-literal, and the word-cipher has been acknowledged, we shall find that there are four other forms of cipher, the “Capital Letter; Time, or as more oft called, Clocke; Symboll; and Anagrammaticke ... which wee have us’d in a few of owr bookes.” These ciphers are now being applied to decipher other messages which Bacon sent down the ages by this secret medium. Of the nature of these claims, I am, at the moment, unable to speak, but I am in a position to say that the contents are more sensational than any that have yet been revealed. The absolute proof of the authorship of the Plays is promised—but again we shall get no more than what Bacon considered constituted proof. In reality, it will form part of a gigantic fraud committed by one of the cleverest men that ever lived, it will disclose the flaw in “the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men;” it will prove, up to the hilt, the madness of Francis Bacon.

Finis.

E. Goodman & Son, Phoenix Printing Works, Taunton.