Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship

The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship contends that Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher, essayist and scientist, wrote the plays that are attributed to William Shakespeare.

[9] 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.

Realising that play-acting was used by the ancients "as a means of educating men's minds to virtue",[11] and being "strongly addicted to the theatre"[12] himself, he is claimed to have set out the otherwise-unpublished moral philosophical component of his Great Instauration project in the Shakespearean oeuvre.

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.

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.

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.

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 of 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.

[20][21] 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.

"[22] "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.

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.

[25] 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.

[33] Baconians Walter Begley and Bertram G. Theobald claimed that Elizabethan satirists Joseph Hall and John Marston alluded to Francis Bacon as the true author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece by using the sobriquet "Labeo" in a series of poems published in 1597–98.

A book on codes and cyphers entitled Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae, is said to depict Bacon writing a work and Shakespeare (signified by the spear he carries) receiving it.

[38] In his commentary on the Gesta Grayorum, a contemporary account of the 1594–95 revels, Desmond Bland[39] informs us that they were "intended as a training ground in all the manners that are learned by nobility [...:] dancing, music, declamation, acting."

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[42] – he and the Lord Chamberlain's Men were performing for the Queen at Greenwich on Innocents Day.

W. W. Greg suggested the following explanation: 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), 5.1.92–97: 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.

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.

"[55] 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 [...].

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",[57] 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.

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.

[61] Stratfordian scholars[62] 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.

[65] 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.

While it was believed that additional ambient spheres existed, they were thought to contain the other bodies in the sky that move independently from the rest of the stars, i.e. the Sun, the Moon, and the planets that are visible to the naked eye (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).

In Beerbohm's comic essay On Shakespeare's Birthday he declares himself to be unconvinced by Baconian theory, but wishes it were true because of the mischief it would cause – and because having one hero who was both an intellectual and a creative genius would be more exciting than two separate ones.

[68] In Rudyard Kipling's 1926 short story "The Propagation of Knowledge" (later collected in Debits and Credits[69] and The Complete Stalky & Co.), some schoolboys discover the Baconian theory and profess to be adherents, infuriating their English master.

An episode of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio program (27 May 1946) starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce uses the Baconian Cipher to call attention to a case involving a dispute over authorship of Shakespeare's works.

[75] Cartoonist Frank Cho claims to be a believer in Baconian authorship, and his comic strips such as Liberty Meadows occasionally have characters act as his mouthpiece for this matter.

"[76] "The Adventures of Shake and Bake", an SCTV skit that first aired 23 April 1982, parodies the Shakespeare/Bacon theory and features Dave Thomas as Shakespeare and Rick Moranis as Bacon.