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 B.GOND E.DITION 
 
 ' Tputh is like a Torch : 
 The nnope it's Shook, it Shines." 
 
 RORUL.MR TOPICS, No. 1. 
 
 Brief for plaintiff 
 
 'Bacon r^. Shake^p^eare, 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN REED. 
 
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"Truth is like a Torch : The more it's Shook, it Shines. 
 
 Popular Topics, No. i. 
 
 Brief for Plaintiff. 
 
 Bacon vs. Shakespeare. 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN REED. 
 
 CHICAGO : 
 
 Rand, McNally & Co., Printers and Publishers 
 
 1890. 
 

 Copyrighted, i8go, by Edwin Reed. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 In the following Brief for the Plaintiff, Bacon vs. 
 Shakespeare, in an action of ejectment, now on trial, it is 
 intended to cite such facts only as are generally agreed 
 upon by both parties, and in the main to let those facts, 
 trumpet-tongued, speak for themselves. Like the lines 
 that mark the sea-coast on our maps, each separate proof 
 shades off in a thousand fine corroborating circumstances, 
 which are often very interesting, as well as important for 
 a full knowledge of the subject. Mr. Donnelly's cipher, 
 for the present purpose at least, is clearly beyond sound- 
 ings. For further information, the reader is respectfully 
 referred to the works of Delia Bacon, Mrs. Pott, Richard 
 Grant White, Dr. Rolfe, Judge Holmes, Appleton Morgan, 
 and last, but not least, our own Donnelly; not to mention 
 numerous others which the world, it is to be feared, will 
 soon be too small to contain. 
 
 (3) 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 We may say of improbabilities, as we do of evils : 
 choose the least. 
 
 It is antecedently improbable that the Shakespeare 
 Plays, for which the whole domain of human knowledge 
 was laid under contribution, were written by William 
 Shakespeare, for he was uneducated. 
 
 It is also antecedently improbable that Francis Bacon, 
 whose name for nearly three hundred years has been a 
 synonym for all that is philosophical and profound, who 
 was so great in another and widely different field of labor 
 that he gave a new direction for all future time to the 
 course of human thought, was the author of them. 
 
 And yet, to one or the other of these two men we must 
 give our suffrage for the crowning honors of humanity. 
 
 In the claim for Shakespeare, the improbability is so 
 overwhelming that it involves very nearly a violation of 
 the laws of nature. No man ever did, and, it is safe to 
 say, no man ever can, acquire knowledge intuitively. 
 One may be a genius like Burns, and the world be 
 hushed to silence while he sings; but the injunction, 
 
 (5) 
 
6 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 " In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread," is 
 as true of intellectual as it is of physical life, everywhere. 
 The fruit of the tree of knowledge can be reached only 
 by hard climbing, the sole instance on record in which it 
 was plucked and handed down to the waiting recipient 
 having proved a failure. 
 
 In the case of Bacon, however, the improbability is 
 one of degree only. It is, in fact, not entirely without 
 precedent. Fortune has more than once emptied a whole 
 cornucopia of gifts at a single birth. What diversity, 
 what beauty, what grandeur in the personality of Leo- 
 nardo da Vinci ! He was author, painter, sculptor, archi- 
 tect, musician, civil engineer, inventor — and in each 
 capacity, almost without exception, eminent above his 
 contemporaries. His great painting, the Last Supper, 
 ranks the third among the products in this branch of 
 modern art, Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto and 
 Michael Angelo's Last Judgment being respectively, 
 perhaps, first and second. At the same time, he was the 
 pioneer in the study of the anatomy and structural 
 classification of plants ; he founded the science of 
 hydraulics ; he invented the camera obscura ; he pro- 
 claimed the undulatory theory of light and heat; he 
 investigated the properties of steam, and anticipated 
 by four centuries its use in the propulsion of boats ; and 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 7 
 
 he barely missed the great discovery which immortaHzed 
 Newton. Indeed, we see in Leonardo da Vinci, not a 
 mountain only, but a whole range of sky-piercing peaks ! 
 Another illustrious example is Goethe, scarcely in- 
 ferior to Bacon, whatever the claims made for the latter, 
 in the brilliancy and scope of his powers. As a poet, 
 Goethe was a star of the first magnitude, a great blaze of 
 light in the literary heavens. His Faust is one of the 
 six great epic poems of the world. As a writer of prose 
 fiction he stands in the front rank, his "Wilhelm 
 Meister " a classic side by side with "Ivanhoe," " Mid- 
 dlemarch," and "The Scarlet Letter." By a singular 
 coincidence, also, as compared with Bacon, he was one of 
 the master spirits of his age in the sphere of the sciences. 
 An evolutionist before Darwin, he beheld, as in a vision, 
 what is now becoming clear, the application of law to all 
 the phenomena of nature and life. In botany, he made 
 notable additions to the then existing stock of knowl- 
 edge; and throughout the vast realm of biology he not 
 only developed new methods of inquiry, but he spread 
 over it the glow of imagination, without which the path 
 of discovery is always doubly difficult to tread. In the 
 light of precedents, therefore, the claim made in behalf 
 of Bacon to the authorship of the Plays can not be dis- 
 credited. 
 
8 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 The reader is now asked to measure the relative im- 
 probabilities in question for himself. 
 
 E. R. 
 
 Chicago, September i, 1890. 
 
T 
 
 IN THE TRIBUNAL OF HISTORY. 
 
 Bacon ) 
 
 vs. r Brief for Plaintiff. 
 
 Shakespeare. ) 
 
 I. It is conceded that the author of the Shakes- 
 peare Plays was not only the greatest genius of his age — 
 perhaps of any age — but a man of most profound and 
 varied scholarship. 
 
 He was a linguist, many of the Plays being based on 
 Greek, Spanish, and Italian productions which had not 
 then been translated into English. Latin and French 
 were seemingly as familiar to him as a mother tongue. - 
 It is believed that not less than six foreign languages, 
 living and dead, were included in his repertory. 
 
 He had intimate acquaintance with ancient and mod- 
 ern literature, numerous authors, from the age of Plato 
 down to his own, being drawn upon for illustration and 
 imagery in the composition of these works. 
 
 He was a jurist — 
 
 '* "With a deep technical knowledge of the law," 
 and an easy familiarity — 
 
 (0) 
 
10 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 " With some of the most abstruse proceedings of English juris- 
 prudence." — Lord Chief y us tic e Ca7npbell. 
 
 His fondness for legal phrases is remarkable, but it 
 is still more remarkable that — 
 
 " Whenever he indulges in this propensity, he uniformly lays 
 down good law." — Idem. 
 
 One of the sonnets (46) is so intensely technical in 
 its phraseology that — 
 
 " Without a considerable knowledge of forensic procedure, it can 
 not be fully understood." — Idem. 
 
 He was a philosopher — 
 
 " There is an understanding manifested in the construction of 
 Shakespeare's Plays equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's 
 Novum Organum." — Carlyle. 
 
 " He was inconceivably wise.'' — Emerson. 
 
 " From his works may be collected a system of civil and eco- 
 nomical prudence." — Dr. Johnson. 
 
 The author's mind was thus not only a fountain of 
 inspiration from its own illimitable depths, but enriched 
 with all the stores of knowledge which the world had 
 then accumulated. 
 
 2. Shakespeare's family was grossly illiterate. His 
 father and mother made their signatures with a cross. 
 His daughter Judith, also, at the age of twenty-seven 
 years, could not write her name. The little we know of 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. U 
 
 his own youth and early manhood affords presumptive 
 proof of the strongest kind that he was uneducated. 
 
 3. The Shakespeare family had no settled or uni- 
 form method of spelling their name. More than thirty 
 different forms have been found among their papers and 
 on their tombstones, and in contemporaneous public 
 records. Shakespeare himself wrote it invariably one 
 way, and it appeared in his published works invariably 
 in another.* 
 
 4. Shakespeare's handwriting, of which we have 
 five specimens in his signatures to legal documents, was 
 not only almost illegible, but singularly uncultivated and 
 grotesque, wholly at variance with the description given 
 of the manuscripts of the Plays in the preface to the 
 folio edition of 1623. The editorial encomium was in 
 these words: 
 
 Shakespeare's method of spelling the name, so far as it can be 
 deciphered from his autographs, was Shakspere; on the fly-leaves of 
 his works It was printed Shakespeare. His brother. Gilbert, wrote it 
 i^hakespeir. In a mortgage deed by the corporation of London, it 
 IS ^haksper. The indorsement on an indenture between Shakespeare 
 and two of his neighbors in Stratford, spells it Shackspeare. Among 
 other forms discovered in the records of the family are the following- 
 ^haxpur Chacksper, Schakespeire, Shagspere, Shakaspeare, Shayks- 
 pere, and Schakespayr. Wise publishes a list of four thousand varia- 
 tions, so thorough has been the search in every direction for anything 
 that would throw light on the man Shakespeare, and help, as Emer- 
 son says, to marry his life to his verse." 
 
12 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 '' His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he 
 uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a 
 blot in his papers." 
 
 In this connection, we reproduce the five autographs 
 of Shakespeare, the only acknowledged specimens of his 
 penmanship in existence, m fac-simile : 
 
 Mr. C. F. Gunther, of Chicago, has in his possession 
 what he considers a sixth specimen, recently discovered, 
 and bearing on its face, as one evidence at least of its 
 genuineness, the same marks of difficult and painful 
 labor characteristic of the others. We append a fac- 
 simile of this one also : 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 13 
 
 5. Shakespeare made no mention of any literary 
 property in his will. He was careful to specify, among 
 other bequests, his "second-best bed," but not a book, 
 not a copy of one of his own books, not even a man- 
 uscript, though such immortal dramas as Macbeth, Tem- 
 pest, and Julius Caesar were unpublished at the time of 
 his death. 
 
 6. No letter written by him to anyone has come 
 down to us, and but two addressed to him, and those 
 making no reference to literature. An inspection of his 
 autograph is alone sufficient to explain the paucity of his 
 correspondence, if not its absolute non-existence. The 
 original manuscripts of the Plays have, without excep- 
 tion, strangely disappeared. 
 
 7- It is believed that Shakespeare left his home in 
 Stratford and went to London sometime between 1585 
 and 1587. He was then twenty-one to twenty-three 
 years of age. One of the first of the Shakespeare Plays 
 to be produced on the stage was Hamlet, and the date not 
 later than 1589. It was founded on a foreign tragedy of 
 which no translation then existed in English. As first 
 presented, it was probably in an imperfect form, being 
 subsequently rewritten and enlarged into what is now, 
 perhaps, the greatest individual work of genius the 
 human mind has produced. To assume that Shakes- 
 
14 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 peare, under the circumstances in which he was then 
 placed, at so early an age, fresh from a country town 
 where there were few or no books, and from a family cir- 
 cle whose members could not read or write, was the 
 author of this play — even in its rough state an uncut 
 diamond — would seem to involve a miracle as great as 
 that imputed to Joshua — in other words, a suspension of 
 the laws of cause and effect. 
 
 8. Setting aside Shakespeare, Bacon was the most 
 original, the most imaginative, and the most learned man 
 
 of his time. 
 
 " The most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever be^n 
 bestowed on any of the children of men." — Macaulay. 
 
 " His imagination was fruitful and vivid; a temperament of the 
 most delicate sensibility." — Montagu. 
 
 " He belongs to the realm of the imagination, of eloquence, of 
 jurisprudence, of ethics, of metaphysics; his writings have the grav- 
 ity of prose, with the fervor and vividness of poetry." — Welsh. 
 
 "Who is there that, hearing the name of Bacon, does not 
 instantly recognize everything ol genius the most profound, of litera- 
 ture the most extensive, of discovery the most penetrating, of obser- 
 vation of human life the most distinguishing and refined." — Edmund 
 Burke. 
 
 " Shakespeare and the seers do not contain more expressive or 
 vigorous condensations, more resembling inspiration; in Bacon, they 
 are to be found everywhere." — Taine. 
 
 Addison, referring to a prayer composed by Bacon, 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. ^^ 
 
 says that "for elevation of thought and greatness of 
 expression it seems rather the devotion of an angel than 
 
 a man." 
 
 The critics all concur in ascribing to Bacon a paitic- 
 ularly powerful poetic faculty. No man ever had an 
 imagination, says Macaulay, " at once so strong and so 
 thoroughly subjugated. In truth, much of Bacon's life 
 was passed in a visionary world, amidst things as strange 
 as any that are described in the Arabian tales'" 
 
 9. Bacon came of a family eminent for learning. 
 His father, Nicholas Bacon, was Lord Chancellor and 
 Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth ; his mother, 
 daughter of Sir Anthony Coke, tutor of the king. 
 
 Of Bacon's mother, Macaulay writes : 
 
 "She was distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian. 
 She corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his 
 Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Archbishop 
 Parker could suggest a single alteration. She also translated a series 
 of sermons on fate and free-will from the Tuscan of Bernado Och- 
 ino. Her sister, Katherine, wrote Latin hexameters and pentameters 
 which would appear with credit in the Musse Etonenses. Mildred, 
 another sister, was described by Roger Ascham as the best Greek 
 scholar among the young women of England, Lady Jane Gray always 
 excepted." 
 
 10. Bacon had an insatiable craving for political 
 preferment, and, as abundantly shown on many occasions, 
 
16 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 he was perfectly willing to be false to himself in order to 
 secure it. The reputation of being a poet, and particu- 
 larly a dramatic poet, would have compromised him at 
 court. In those days, play-acting and play-writing were 
 considered scarcely respectable. The first theater was 
 erected in London in 1575, ten or twelve years only 
 before the earliest production of Hamlet. The Gov- 
 ernment, in the interest of public morals, frowned upon 
 the performances. The Lord Mayor, in 1597, at the 
 very time when the greatest of the Shakespeare Plays 
 were coming out, denounced the theater as a " place for 
 vagrants, thieves, horse-stealers, contrivers of treason, 
 and other idle and dangerous persons." Taine speaks 
 of the stage in Shakespeare's day as " degraded by the 
 brutalities of the crowd, who not seldom would stone the 
 actors, and by the severities of the magistrates, who 
 would sometimes condemn them to lose their ears." He 
 thus describes the play-house as it then existed : 
 
 " On a dirty site on the banks of the Thames rose the principal 
 theater, the Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy 
 ditch, on which was hoisted a red flag. The common people could 
 enter as well as the rich; there were six-penny, two-penny, even 
 penny seats; but they could not see it without money. If it rained, 
 and it often rains in London, the people in the pit — butchers, mer- 
 cers, bakers, sailors, apprentices — received the streaming rain upon 
 their heads. I suppose they did not trouble themselves about it; it 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 17 
 
 was not so long since that they began to pave the streets of London, 
 and when men like these have had experience of sewers and puddles, 
 they are not afraid of catching cold. 
 
 "While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after their 
 fashion — drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruits, howl, and now and then 
 resort to their fists ; they have been known to fall upon the actors 
 and turn the theater upside down. At other times, when they were 
 dissatisfied, they went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding, or toss 
 him in a blanket. When the beer took effect, there was a great up- 
 turned barrel in the pit, a peculiar receptacle for general use. The 
 smell rises, and then comes the cry, ' Burn the juniper ! ' They 
 burn some in a plate on the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the 
 air. Certainly, the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted 
 at anything, and can not have had sensitive noses." 
 
 It may easily be imagined that Bacon, considering his 
 high birth, aristocratic connections, and aspirancy for 
 official honors, and already projecting a vast philosophi- 
 cal reform for the human race, would have shrunk from 
 open alliance with an institution like this. 
 
 II. To his confidential friend, Sir Tobie Matthew, 
 Bacon was in the habit of sending copies of his books as 
 they came from the press. On one of these occasions, he 
 forwards, with an air of mystery, and half apologetically, 
 certain works which he describes as the product of his 
 " recreation," called by him, also, curiously, "works of 
 the alphabet," upon which not even Mrs. Pott's critical 
 acumen has been able to throw, from sources other than 
 
18 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 conjecture, any satisfactory light. In a letter addressed 
 to Bacon by Matthew while abroad, in acknowledgment 
 of some " great and noble token of favor," we find this 
 sentence : 
 
 *' The most prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation or of 
 this side of the sea, is of your Lordship's name, though it be known 
 by another." 
 
 It has been suggested, not without reason, that the 
 *' token of favor" sent to Matthew was the folio edition 
 of the Shakespeare Plays, published in 1623. It is cer- 
 tain that Matthew's letter was written subsequently to 
 January 27, 1621. 
 
 12. Bacon kept a commonplace book, which he 
 called a Promus, now in the archives of the British 
 Museum. It consisted of several large sheets, on which 
 from time to time he jotted down all kinds of suggestive 
 and striking phrases, proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, and 
 quaint turns of expression, found in the course of his 
 reading, and available for future use. With the excep- 
 tion of the proverbs from the French, the entries, one 
 thousand six hundred and eighty in number, are in his 
 own handwriting. These verbal treasures are scattered, 
 as thick as the leaves of Vallambrosa, throughout the 
 Plays. Mrs. Pott finds, by actual count, four thousand 
 four hundred and four instances in which they are re- 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 19 
 
 produced there — some of them, in more or less covert or 
 modified form, over and over again. We can almost see 
 the architect at work, imbedding these gems of beauty 
 and wisdom in the wonderful structures to which, accord- 
 ing to Matthew, he gave the name of another. Scarcely 
 a trace of them appears in Bacon's prose works. They 
 seem to constitute a store-house of materials for exclusive 
 use in the composition of the Plays. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Promus is 
 the group of salutatory phrases it contains, such as good- 
 morning, good-day, and good-night, which had not then 
 come into use in England, but which occur four hundred 
 and nineteen times in the Plays. These salutations, 
 however, were common at that time in France, where 
 Bacon, as attache of the British Embassy, had spent 
 three years in the early part of his life. To him we are 
 doubtless indebted for these little amenities of speech. 
 
 13. In 1867 there was discovered in a private library 
 in London a box of old papers, among which were some 
 manuscripts of Francis Bacon, bound together in the 
 form of a volume. In the table of contents on the title- 
 page, among the names of other compositions known to 
 be Bacon's, appear those of two of the Shakespeare Plays, 
 Richard II. and Richard III., though the Plays them- 
 selves have been abstracted from the book. Judge 
 
20 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 Holmes adds the following piece of information in regard 
 to this discovery: 
 
 " The blank space at the side and between the titles is scribbled 
 all over with various words, letters, phrases, and scraps of verse in 
 English and Latin, as if the copyist were merely trying his pen and 
 writing down whatever came into his head. Among those scrib- 
 blings, beside the name of Francis Bacon several times, the name of 
 William Shakespeare is written eight or nine times over. It is also 
 at least a singular coincidence that the extraordinary word 'honorifi- 
 cabilitudino,' found here, but not in any dictionary then issued, occurs 
 in Love's Labor's Lost." 
 
 14. At the death of Queen Elizabeth, John Davis, 
 the poet and courtier, went to Scotland to meet James I. 
 To him, while on the journey northward. Bacon ad- 
 dressed a letter, asking kind intercession in his behalf 
 with the King, and expressing the hope, in closing, that 
 he (Davis) would be "good to concealed poets." 
 
 15. Stratford, the home of Shakespeare, is not 
 referred to in any of the Plays, nor the beautiful river 
 Avon, on which it is situated ; but St. Albans, the resi- 
 dence of Bacon, is mentioned twenty-three times. Ten- 
 der memories of Yorke Place, where Bacon was born, and 
 of the County of Kent, the home of his father's ancestry, 
 are conspicuous in more than one of the Historical 
 Plays. 
 
 16. Bacon was remarkably painstaking in all the 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 21 
 
 minutiae of his work. He rewrote the Noviun Orga?ium 
 twelve times, and the Essays thirty times, before he 
 deemed them fit for the press. No wonder the editors of 
 the Plays remarked upon the beauty and neatness of the 
 copy. 
 
 17. With the exception of a brief but brilliant 
 career in Parliament, and an occasional service in un- 
 important causes as attorney for the crown, Bacon seems 
 to have been without employment from 1579, when he 
 returned from France at the age of eighteen, to 1598, 
 when he published his first volume of Essays. Here 
 were nineteen of the best years of his life apparently run 
 to waste. The volume of Essays was a small i2mo, 
 containing but ten out of the fifty-eight sparkling gems 
 which subsequent editions gave to the admiration and 
 delight of posterity. His philosophical works, excepting 
 a slight sketch in 1585, did not begin to appear till sev- 
 eral years later. In the meanwhile, he was hard pressed 
 for money, and failing to get relief (unhappily, before the 
 days of Samuel Weller) in a vain effort to marry a 
 wealthy widow, he was actually thrown into prison for 
 debt. 
 
 That he was idle all this time, under great pecuniary 
 pressure, his mind teeming with the richest fancy, it is 
 impossible to admit. Such a hypothesis is utterly incon- 
 
22 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 sistent with the possession of those fixed, almost phe- 
 nomenal, habits of industry with which he afterwards 
 achieved magnificent results. On this point, indeed, we 
 have interesting testimony from his mother. A woman 
 of deep piety, mindful of the proprieties of her station 
 in life, she evidently became alarmed over some mystery 
 connected with her son. Probably she had a suspicion 
 of its nature, for not even the genius that created Ham- 
 let could subdue maternal instincts. In a letter to An- 
 thony, the brother of Francis, under date of May 24, 
 1592, she expresses her solicitude, as follows: 
 
 " I verily think your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been 
 much caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then 
 musing nescio quid^ when he should sleep.'' 
 
 At another time, when the two brothers were together 
 at Gray's Inn, and full of enthusiasm, as she knew, for the 
 wicked drama, she wrote, begging them — 
 
 " Not to mum nor mask, nor sinfully revel." 
 
 It may be added, that with the appointment of Bacon 
 to high office, and his advent into public life, the pro- 
 duction of the Shakespeare Plays suddenly ceased. 
 
 18. Ben Jonson was Bacon's private secretary, and 
 presumably in the secret, if there were any, of his em- 
 ployer's literary undertakings. In this fact we find the 
 
 * I know not what. 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 23 
 
 key to the exquisite satire of the inscription, composed 
 by him and printed opposite Shakespeare's portrait in the 
 folio of 1623, of which the following, in reference to the 
 engraver's art, is an extract : 
 
 " O, could he but have drawn his wit 
 As well in brasse, as he hath hit 
 His face, the print would then surpass 
 All that was ever writ in brasse." 
 
 19. Bacon's authorship of the Plays was not unsus- 
 pected during his life-time. When he was appointed by 
 the Queen to join in the prosecution of Essex for trea- 
 son, and was assigned to that count of the indictment 
 which charged connivance with the play-actors in pro- 
 ducing the play of Richard II., he protested, on the 
 ground that his name was already bruited about in that 
 connection, and that it would now be said of him, in deris- 
 ion, that he gave in evidence his own tales. These 
 rumors could have originated only in the recognized 
 inadequacy of the reputed authorship. 
 
 20. With the exception of the isolated play of King 
 John, the historical series, depicting English history, 
 extends from the deposition of Richard II. to the birth 
 of Elizabeth in the reign of Henry VIII. In this long 
 chain, there is one break, and one only — the important 
 period of Henry VII., when the foundations of social 
 
24 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 order, as we now have it, were firmly laid. The omission, 
 on any but the Baconian theory of authorship, is inexpli- 
 cable, for the dramatist could hardly have failed, except 
 for personal considerations, to drop his plummet into the 
 richest and most instructive experiences of political life 
 that lay in his path. The truth is. Bacon wrote a history 
 of the missing reign in prose, which exactly fills the gap. 
 The one is tongued and grooved, as it were, into the other. 
 21. The Plays, as they came out, were first published 
 anonymously. Several of them had been in the hands 
 of the public for years before the name of Shakespeare 
 appeared on the title-page. Other plays, not belonging 
 to the Shakespearean canon, and most of them of very 
 inferior merit, were also given to the world as Shakes- 
 peare's. We have fifteen of these heterogeneous compo- 
 sitions attributed to the same " divine " authorship — 
 geese and eagles coming helter-skelter from a single 
 nest — at a time when Coke, the law officer of the govern- 
 ment, declared poetasters and playwrights to be fit sub- 
 jects for the grand jury as vagrants." It was enough for 
 the impecunious authors of these plays that Shakespeare, 
 manager and part proprietor of two theatres, and amass- 
 ing a large fortune in the business, was willing, apparently, 
 to adopt every child of the drama laid on his door-step. 
 This accounts for the venomous shaft which Greene in 
 
'BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 25 
 
 his envy aimed at him. Greene was a writer for the 
 stage, and took occasion one time, in a little squib 
 addressed to his professional brethren, to refer to one 
 " Shake-scene " as " an upstart crow, beautified with our 
 feathers." It is evident, nevertheless, that Shakespeare 
 was a favorite no7n de plume with the dramatic wits of his 
 time. 
 
 2 2. The first complete edition of the Plays, substan- 
 tially as we now have them, was the famous folio, from 
 the author's manuscripts, of 1623. Its titles number 
 thirty-six, and may be classified, for our present purpose, 
 as follows : Plays previously printed, in various quartos, 
 at dates ranging from 1597 to 1609, ten; those not previ- 
 ously printed, but known to have been produced on the 
 stage, sixteen; lastly, those, so far as we know, entirely 
 new, ten. Of the Plays in the first class, it is found, by 
 comparison, that several had been rewritten, and in some 
 cases greatly enlarged, during the fourteen years, or 
 more, since the period of their first appearance. The 
 same is probably true of some in the second class, though 
 on this point we are, naturally enough, without means of 
 verification. In any event, however, it is certain that 
 the compositions which were new, together with those 
 which, by changes and accretions, had been made new, 
 constitute no inconsiderable part of the book. Who did 
 
26 BACON VS. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 this work ? Who prepared it for the press ? Shakespeare 
 died in 1616, seven years before the folio was published, 
 and for six years before his death he had lived in Strat- 
 ford, without facilities for such a task, and in a social 
 atmosphere in the highest degree unfavorable for it. On 
 the other hand. Bacon retired to private life in 1621, at 
 the age of sixty, in the plenitude of his powers, and 
 under circumstances that would naturally cause him to 
 roll this apple of discord, refined into the purest gold, 
 down the ages. 
 
 The most astonishing feature of this controversy is 
 the light it has thrown on the literature of the Eliza- 
 bethan age. Among the great men who made that age 
 famous, no one, with the exception of Jonson, seems to 
 have taken any notice either of Shakespeare or of the 
 sublime creations which bear his name. Bacon's silence, 
 itself very significant, and Jonson's doubtful panegyrics 
 are explained ; but what shall we say of Raleigh, Sydney, 
 Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Herbert, Walton, Pym, and the 
 rest ? Imagine the inhabitants of Lilliput paying no 
 attention to Gulliver ! 
 
 "Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece 
 in the tinie of Pericles, there was never any such society; yet their 
 genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe." — 
 £merson. 
 
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF. 27 
 
 The popular prejudice against the drama, behind 
 which, as an almost impenetrable veil, the Shakespeare 
 Plays were once hid, is only now passing away. Josiah 
 Quincy tells us that, as late as in 1820, it was whispered 
 among the boys fitting for college at Phillips Academy, 
 in Andover, Mass., that a professor in the neighboring 
 theological seminary had among his books, to the evi- 
 dent jeopardy of his soul, the works of a playwright, 
 named Shakespeare ! 
 
 If Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare Plays, as 
 it now appears probable that he was, it is difficult to 
 exaggerate, in a literary point of view, the importance of 
 the discovery. To our own countrywoman, Delia Bacon, 
 belongs the everlasting honor, and also, alas ! in the long 
 line of the world's benefactors, the crown of martyrdom. 
 
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