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From: imunro@fas.harvard.edu (Ian Munro)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Bacon/Shakespere
Date: 21 Nov 1997 02:26:23 GMT

Dan Hartung (dhartung@mcs.REMOVETHIS.net) wrote: : Jen_Shien <Jen_Shien@MSN.com> wrote in article
: <650655$mgu@suriname.earthlink.net>...
: > I have heard that there is a popular story that Sir Francis Bacon is
: > William Shakespeare because they were born on the same year, had similar
: > interests, and died 3 years apart. This should be an Urban Legend in
: > High academic gee circles.

: Much more than a popular story, this is a remarkably persistent
: academic minority view (albeit held by perhaps a handful of scholars
: at any given time).

"Academic" is perhaps the wrong word here, since one of the big points of the anti-Stratfordians is that the academy has too much of a stake in Will Shaxpur to properly assess their counterclaims.

: There are other candidates for the title "author of
: Shakesepeare's plays", but Bacon is the name most often mentioned.

That's historically true, but in recent years "serious" anti-Stratfordians have favoured the Earl of Oxford. The popularity of this viewpoint may be due to the current Earl of Oxford being a fervent supporter of the movement, or it may be due to the newer bunch wanting to disassociate themselves from people like Ignatius Donnelly.

: Most of the proponents seem to hold the view that Shakespeare himself
: was too low-born, or uneducated, or something to have been the author
: of what are credited as the greatest works of English lit'ra'toor.

In a nutshell. So to speak. The reasons why Bacon, Oxford, Queen Elizabeth, Marlowe, etc. would be a better choice tend to be more arcane (see below).

: The majority of experts now believe that Shakespeare was not the
: author of 100% of every play attributed to him; some portions of some
: plays were written by students, and at least one was perhaps finished
: posthumously. One may have been a collaboration.

That's sort of correct, although I don't know what "written by students" is supposed to mean. Collaboration is almost certain in more than one play, too. One big problem with the anti-Stratfordian viewpoint is that it starts out with bad assumptions about the writing of drama (indeed, the writing of most literature) in the period. Without turning this into a seminar, let's just say that an acceptable modern equivalent for an early modern dramatic "author" would be "screenwriter."

I've managed to dig up part of a long post I made on this subject a few years ago (pre-Dejanews); it's appended after my .sig. It doesn't do much to explain the authorship controversy, but it does draw attention to some of its funnier moments.

Ian "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

     And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;
     More than enough am I that vex thee still,
     To thy sweet will making addition thus." Munro

--
"There you go! 'Goneril.' It's in Shakespeare. Don't let me see anyone ever say there are no people named after venereal diseases."

--Sharon Fenick

Below is a fairly brief synopsis of the arguments of some of the more prominent anti-Stratfordians, carefully arranged for the purpose of laughing at them. Though many of these date back to the turn of the century, this is a controversy which is still going strong, despite the dismissive reaction of anyone who actually studies Shakespeare for a living. Some of these have a nodding relationship with clever debunking, which is how I justify posting them here, but many are just strange. On the off chance that anyone is still reading at this point, I apologize for the length of the post.

All anti-Stratfordians base their argument on the impossibility of "the man from Stratford" writing the plays due to his lack of education, his anonymity and his supposed limited knowledge of the law, the battlefield and the court. But many find much evidence in Shakespeare's writing to support their claims. Cryptography and anagrams are especially popular with the Baconian school. One Dr. Isaac Platt, by extracting certain letters from a famous line from _Hamlet_,

     The funerall baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
         ^ ^ ^    ^^      ^^      ^^        ^^    ^

gets an anagram of "FR. BACONI NATI," which according to his Latin means that Francis Bacon wrote the plays. Ignatius Donnelly, one of the most famous of the Baconians, used a complicated cipher to drag "More...low ...or...Shak'st...spur...never...writ...a...word...of...them" and other similar messages out of the text of the First Folio. Mrs. Windle, in her 1881 _Report to the Trustees of the British Museum_ (not that they asked for it, of course), used a rather different cipher pattern to reveal the "under-reading" of _Othello_, which begins:

        A tale, oh!  I tell, oh!
      Oh dell, oh!  What wail, oh!
       Oh hill, oh!  What willow!
     What hell, oh!  What will, oh!
       At will, oh!  At well, oh!
              I dwell, oh!

Which apparently is "suggestive of the spirit presence of the [true] author." The "To the Reader" poem which fronts the First Folio is a favourite target of such investigations; one critic discovered that by highlighting and rearranging the "significant" letters in the poem one gets "Franciscus St. Albanus." Unfortunately, another more recent observer has found that by pulling out different "significant" letters you can get "Gertrude Stein writ this Great Work of Literature."

The background stories devised to explain why the imposture took place can be fascinating. Wallace Cunningham, author of _The Tragedy of Francis Bacon, Prince of England_ (1940), demonstrates that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by a group of about 20 noted writers (all Freemasons, incidentally), including Ben Jonson, Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser. They called themselves "The Wild Goose Club" and would meet for dinner once a month at a particular inn, where William Shakespeare was their usual waiter.

Calvin Hoffman, in _The Murder of the Man who was "Shakespeare"_, claims that Christopher Marlowe was not killed in a bar fight in 1593: the whole thing was in fact faked by Marlowe's alleged lover, Thomas Walsingham (thus the "Mr. W.H." to whom the sonnets are dedicated), who thought that Marlowe was likely to be executed for atheism. Safely dead, Marlowe could assume the nom de plume of "Shakespeare" and keep writing. Hoffman based his argument in part on a study which determined the average word length used by Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe and a bunch of other people. This was accomplished by counting the letters in over two million words in their writings. The finding: both Shakespeare and Marlowe averaged *exactly* four letters, an extraordinary result.

Maria Bauer uses an "anagramatic code" in her _Francis Bacon's Great Virginia Vault_ to find amazingly prescient messages scattered through the text of the plays: "In the Shakespeare works there is frequent mention of the date June 9, 1938, which marks the beginning of the collapse of the Shakespeare myth." As it turns out, this is exactly when Bauer herself first came across evidence of the Great Virgina Vault, which apparently houses the manuscripts of all the plays and many other neat things as well. Much shoveling in graveyards in Jamestown and Williamsburg unfortunately turned up nothing. (Hoffman and Delia Bacon (the greatest of the Baconians) also ended up digging in crypts and graveyards, with similar results.)

When it comes to literary interpretation, the non-cryptographic anti-Stratfordians are quite, um, conservative in their philosophy. Typically they believe that the characters in the play must correspond on a one-to-one basis with real people, and that the play or poem is merely a filter through which the true story emerges. Thus, Hamlet's dying order to Horatio, "tell my story," takes on incredible significance if you know that Horatio is the false Shakespeare and Hamlet is the true one--be he Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Queen Elizabeth, Marlowe, or whoever. Thomas Looney's main argument for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is that Oxford was the closest approximation to a royal prince at the time; he is therefore Hamlet, and thus Shakespeare as well. Similary, Henry Pemberton argues that Shakespeare is really Walter Raleigh, as Hamlet's line about Claudius--"Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!"--could only be spoken by someone who hated James I as much as Raleigh did.

Such identification of the main character of a play with Shakespeare himself is an old critical practice, much frowned on today but very popular in the nineteenth century. To use it in service of authorship claims seems rather circular to me, but I'm hardly a neutral observer. The anti-Stratfordians argue that those who mock their beliefs (as I'm doing) are largely motivated by professional investments: there's a lot of money and prestige invested in Shakespeare being Shakespeare, and as a result people who study Shakespeare within orthodox institutions become narrow-minded and protective of their turf. It's certainly true that we know precious little about Shakespeare's life, and Shakespeare's plays and poems contain much that could be described as mysterious and inexplicable. Secret messages aside, however, there seems to be little reason to believe any of this. Here at afu we know how hard it is to disprove a negative assertion; in the absence of any compelling argument to the contrary there seems to be little reason to abandon the man from Stratford.