The Theoretical Types of the Seventy-odd Shakespeares

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n So, Sir Francis Bacon, in addition to all thatnempiricism, philosophy, judicial and legal considerations, histories ofnassorted monarchs, natural history and everything else, also found the time innhis busy schedule to write the finest plays and poetry ever composed in thenEnglish language. Because, and I kid you not, writing the finest plays andnpoetry in the English language was beneath him. It would have mucked up hisnpolitical ambitions if it ever got out he was writing plays and poems and allnthat arty bejesus because that would have called his elevated credibility intonquestion. Hence, he cooked up this cunning plan of attributing his FinelynWrought Plays And Poems Ever Written to some geezer from near Birmingham, asnyou do.

William Shakespeare’s First Folio – or is it?

nThat’ll fool everybody, and he just had to get his works on thenstage, darlings, at any cost, even if it meant that posterity would never knownwhat a sacrifice he’d made. God forbid that it ever got out that a nobleman ofnhis high stature was soiling his paws by concocting wee conceits for thenentertainment of the rude mechanicals. But Bacon was way, way too smart fornthat. Because he used all these Finely Wrought Plays And Poems Ever Written (©)nto let it be known (to the initiated) that he was in fact the illegitimatenchild of Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and thus the heir to the thronenof England. And how, I hear you ask, did he manage this? Well, obviously, by anhidden cipher within the text, you numpty. This is where we begin to shufflentowards the really meaty stuff.

Ignatius Donnelly – The Great Cryptogram – 1888

nLet’s dolly back to that letter from Theta in Notesnand Queries from 1853. Why was it that Bacon and Shakespeare didn’t mentionneach other? To the Baconians the answer is simple, they were one and the samenperson and it wouldn’t do to draw too much attention to that fact. Bacon hadnwritten the plays himself, and had overseen the printing of them, how elsencould the hidden codes have been placed? I’ll give you the full-on crackersnlater, but don’t go there unless you can handle the sort of textual analysisnthat makes Kabbalists seem rational or any other cliché that seems apt here.

Catalogue of the Plays in the First Folio – 1623

nNaturally, the conspiracy deepens, because barmy knows no bounds. There weren’tnenough hours in the day for Bacon to have written the plays and the poems andnall that other stuff he spent his time doing – being Attorney General or LordnChancellor and such – so what did he do? Obviously, he gets a few of his mates innto give him a hand with the heavy lifting. You know, Sir Walter Raleigh (whennhe wasn’t busy circumnavigating the globe), the 6^th Earl of Derby,nthe 17^th Earl of Oxford, the 5^th Earl of Rutland and justnabout any other Elizabethan aristocrat that knew which end of a quill to hold.nOr other playwrights who weren’t busy wrighting plays of their own – KitnMarlowe, Ben Jonson, Colley Cibber, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene – indeed,nalmost any Elizabethan playwroughter who wasn’t called William Shakespeare.

Roger Payne’s bill for Binding the First Folio by William Shakespeare – allegedly

nIfnyou count them all up, there are just over seventy candidates for the post ofnthe ‘real’ William Shakespeare but of them all, Sir Francis Bacon remains innpole position. Delia Salter Bacon’s article of 1856 questioned Shakespeare’snauthorship of the plays but she didn’t, at that time, name any other names, butnshe was swiftly followed into print by William Henry Smith (yes, that WnH Smith, of the newsagent shops fame), who actually named Bacon – Smith hadnwritten a letter to Lord Ellesmere which was circulated initially as anprivately printed sixteen-page pamphlet during late 1856, before beingnreprinted in Littel’s Living Age in November 1856.

W H Smith

nThis was the cause ofna bit of a spat when Nathaniel Hawthorne accused Smith of plagiarising hisncountrywoman’s work without having had the good grace to give her a mention.nSmith refuted Hawthorne’s slight by claiming to have no knowledge of the goodnlady’s work and if he had, he would certainly have acknowledged it, sonHawthorne apologised and Smith accepted that apology and everything wasntickety-boo between them thereafter.

W H Smith – Bacon and Shakespeare – 1857

nIn 1857, both W H Smith and D S Baconnpublished books about Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare, and a convention soonndeveloped that Shakespeare was used to refer to the man fromnStratford-upon-Avon and Shake-speare was used to refer to the man whonhad written the plays. There were, of course, writers who rushed to the defencenof the Swan of Avon; one of the first was George Henry Townsend’s WilliamnShakespeare not an imposter (1857), which takes Smith’s arguments to task,nin particular.

George Henry Townsend – William Shakespeare not an Imposter – 1857

nIf anything comes over in this work, it’s how personallynTownsend takes Smith’s effrontery and how he responds in the sort of languagenyou’d expect from a wounded Victorian gentleman – with phrases like ‘ramblingnsentences’, ‘cheap literature’ ‘pestilent vapour’ or ‘this fungus’ bandiednaround with evident relish. Splendid stuff. And so the claims and counterclaimsnwere made, points raised and refuted, coincidences noted and differences foundnand if all these books have anything in common, other than their subject, it isnthe very size of the things.

Sir Francis Bacon

nIt’s almost as if there was a tacit backgroundnwager going on as to who could write the thickest book. ‘Weighty tome’ doesn’tnbegin to describe some of these literary doorsteps – Delia Bacon started itnwith a mere 582 pages, to be beaten by a nose by William Shakespeare anLiterary Biography by Karl Elze (587 pages), Nathaniel Holmes’s ThenAuthorship of Shakespeare ups the stakes to 696 pages but the prize potnmust be handed to Ignatius Donnelly and his The Great Cryptogram (1888)nwhich contains a length-and-a-half winning 998 pages. Crickey.

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