Shakespeare

I remember once lunching with rare Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern — this would be back in Queen Elizabeth’s time, when I was beginning to be known in the theatrical world — and seeing a young man with a nobby forehead and about three inches of beard doing himself well at a neighboring table at the expense of Burbage the manager.
“Ben,” I asked my companion, “who is that youth?” He told me that the fellow was one Bacon, a new dramatist who had learned his technique by holding horses’ heads in the Strand, and who, for some reason or other, wrote under the name of Shakespeare. “You must see his Hamlet,” said Ben enthusiastically. “He read me the script last night. They start rehearsals at the Globe next week. It’s a pippin. In the last act every blamed character in the cast who isn’t already dead jumps on everyone else’s neck and slays him."

P.G. Wodehouse, "My Life as a Dramatic Critic"

The Story of the Learned Pig (1786):

My parents, indeed, were of low extraction; my mother sold fish about the streets of this metropolis, and my father was a water-carrier celebrated by Ben Jonson in his comedy of Every Man in his Humour . . . I soon after contracted a friendship with that great man and first of geniuses, the ‘Immortal Shakespeare,’ and am happy in now having it in my power to refuse the prevailing opinion of his having run his country for deer-stealing, which is as false as it is disgracing. The fact is, Sir, that he had contracted an intimacy with the wife of a country Justice near Stratford, from his having extolled her beauty in a common ballad; and was unfortunately, by his worship himself, detected in a very awkward situation with her. Shakespeare, to avoid the consequences of this discovery, thought it most prudent to decamp. This I had from his own mouth. With equal falsehood has he been father’d with many spurious dramatic pieces. Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, the Tempest, and Midsummer’s Night Dream, for five; of all which I confess myself to be the author.

I nodded. His meaning had not escaped me. If you analyzed it, it was the old Bacon and Shakespeare gag. Bacon, as you no doubt remember, wrote Shakespeare’s stuff for him and then, possibly because he owed the latter money or it may be from sheer good nature, allowed him to take the credit for it. I mentioned this to Jeeves, and he said that perhaps an even closer parallel was that of Cyrano de Bergerac.

P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning

Mark Twain's essay on the Shakespeare authorship question

You’ve probably heard the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. The real story is quite interesting, and it has ramifications that extend far beyond the question of who wrote Romeo and Juliet.

We go back to 1560. Elizabeth, queen of England, aged twenty-six, had gotten pregnant. This was a problem, not so much because of the “virgin queen” thing, but because the father was the most hated man in England. His name was Robert Dudley, and Elizabeth was madly in love with him. To give you some indication of why he was so unpopular, when Elizabeth became pregnant he naturally fancied the throne, but he happened to be already married. So he had his wife murdered, one of several homicides in the course of his career. The court ruled her death an accident, but everyone knew he was responsible; a marriage was out of the question, Elizabeth would have faced open rebellion from her subjects.

So when the blessed event arrived in January 1561, they bundled him up and handed him off to the neighbors, the Bacons, and said good luck. Someone called him Francis. An insulting and inauspicious beginning, but he was ideally placed for his education; Lady Anne Bacon was one of the most learned women in England. At some point, probably before he was sent to Cambridge at age twelve, Francis learned of his parentage. Talk about growing up fast: your mother is the queen, your father is a brazen killer, you might become king, and if you breathe a word about it to anyone, you are dead. That’s why we have Hamlet and Macbeth, plays about murderous climbers bent on the throne—it was Bacon’s truly outrageous fortune to have such a father.

Pregnancy portrait of Elizabeth I, Hampton Court Palace

These events conspired to give Bacon an intense sense of purpose and responsibility at an early age. He took to reading as no person has done before or since, and he was already reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin at age seven. When Macaulay said he had “the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men,” this is what he meant. Bacon represents the summary and end of philosophy; it only remains to determine the extent of his pseudepigrapha, and interpret.

He began publishing upon leaving Cambridge in 1576, aged fifteen, with The Anatomie of the Minde, a small book of essays on Greek and Roman philosophy, and a book known as Anti-Machiavel, the most comprehensive rebuttal to Machiavelli ever undertaken. The last works we can confidently ascribe to him are the alchemy tracts that went out under the pseudonyms Eugenius and Eirenaeus Philalethes in the 1650s. This one features the same motto as his Novum Organum, from Daniel: “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

Caveat: This woman is a good researcher, but she promotes the Freemasons. You get a lot of that in the Francis Bacon community,
I was even kicked off the forum at sirbacon.org for posting anti-Freemasonry material.

Shakespeare and the Heroic Archetype

William Smedley, The Mystery of Francis Bacon

Henry Pott, Bacon-Shakespeare Parallelisms

My book on some of Bacon's pseudepigrapha