Bacon and Shakspere

In Short

This concise polemic attacks the traditional attribution of Shakespeare's works to the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon. Analyzing five surviving signatures alongside parish records, historical letters, and Elizabethan poetry, the text demonstrates that the famous actor was illiterate and unable to spell his own name. Through detailed comparisons of contemporary correspondence, legal terms, and disguised poetic signatures like Ignoto, the author argues that Francis Bacon penned the sonnets and plays in secret. Armed with timeline parallels and textual clues, this nineteenth-century tract endures as a sharp, meticulously documented specimen of early Baconian authorship theory.

The Story

The argument opens with a close visual and palaeographic examination of the only five known authentic signatures of William Shakespeare, affixed to a 1613 mortgage and his 1616 will. The narrative demonstrates how these scrawls—varied, malformed, and clearly laboring over basic letterforms—resemble the hesitant marks of an illiterate person copying a set sample rather than the fluent hand of a prolific dramatist. The text contrasts these crude signatures with a suspected nineteenth-century forgery discovered in Chicago, proving that even an unlettered man signs his name with consistent habits, whereas the historical actor's name was spelled in dozens of incompatible ways by contemporaries, local clerks, and family members. This lack of basic literacy extends to his family, including his daughters, who could neither write nor recognize standard handwriting.

Shifting from the actor to the real mind behind the works, the text turns to the Sonnets, published in 1609 but written around 1590. The narrative dismantles the mystery of "Mr. W. H." by mapping the poems onto the life of the young, handsome Earl of Essex and his early friendship with Francis Bacon. The verses reflect the exact plight of Bacon during the early 1590s—a brilliant, impoverished lawyer bewailing his outcast state while seeking advancement through a high-born favorite at court. Legal phrasing throughout the sonnets further confirms that their true creator was deeply versed in English law, a profile that fits the future Attorney General but completely contradicts a common actor.

The text then tracks Bacon’s life as a concealed poet operating under various disguises. It traces his hand in anonymous court masques, early coronation verses for Queen Elizabeth, and pseudonymous pastorals published under the mark "Ignoto" in Elizabethan anthologies like England's Helicon. By unravelling complex publishing overlaps involving Marlowe, Raleigh, and Barnfield, the narrative shows how Bacon’s distinct poetic voice was systematically misattributed to others. Finally, the work initiates a chronographic side-by-side comparison of Bacon and Shakespeare year by year. While Bacon sits in Parliament and drafts foundational philosophical works, the young actor remains in Stratford-upon-Avon killing calves "in a high style." The work concludes by laying the groundwork for a complete historical timeline designed to fully vindicate Bacon's character and secret legacy.

How It Unfolds

The evidence of the scrawls The text evaluates five surviving signatures, showing how each letter—from the initial capital S to the terminal syllables—is awkwardly shaped and inconsistent, proving the signer could barely write.

The signature forgeries The analysis exposes a pretended Shakespeare autograph found in a 1632 Folio in Chicago as a clear tracing of a genuine will signature, highlighting how genuine illiteracy differs from deliberate fraud.

The mystery of the sonnets The narrative redates the composition of the sonnets to 1590, matching their themes of courtly favor, poverty, and legal obligation to Francis Bacon’s relationship with the young Earl of Essex.

The concealed poet Ignoto The text investigates misattributed Elizabethan verse, identifying Bacon as the secret author behind the widespread pseudonym "Ignoto" and linking his lines to phrases found throughout the Shakespearean canon.

The chronographic parallel The closing section sets up a year-by-year comparison between Bacon's documented political and literary rise and the sparse, provincial record of the Stratford actor.

The People

• Francis Bacon wants career advancement, financial stability, and a private outlet for his supreme literary genius. Frustrated by political rivals like Lord Burleigh and Lord Coke, he conceals his dramatic work to protect his public standing, operating as a secret poet who uses the stage and pseudonyms to voice his art.
• William Shakspere wants commercial success as an actor and theatre shareholder in London. Unable to read or write beyond a crudely copied signature, he serves as an convenient front for Bacon's plays, leaving behind a legal record defined by small-town property suits, grain hoarding, and illiteracy.
• Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex wants political influence and royal favor as Queen Elizabeth’s favorite. A handsome, cultured patron of the arts, he becomes the inspiring figure addressed in Bacon's sonnets, supporting Bacon with gifts of land when court appointments fail.
• Queen Elizabeth wants loyal service and order among her competing court factions. She favors young courtly figures like Essex while withholding immediate advancement from Bacon, indirectly driving Bacon to pursue secret literary labor.

In Its Own Voice

"The solution of the whole mystery is in the fact that Shakspere was unable to write or even to spell his own name." Context: The text concludes its microscopic examination of the five surviving legal autographs and inconsistent contemporary spellings.

"How preposterous to believe that a common-place play actor, with a wife and children, addressed such sentiments to the bride of his dearest friend!" Context: The narrative reflects on the intimate, highly cultured legal metaphors within the sonnets, arguing they could only pass between courtly figures.

"P. S.--The most prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another." Context: The author cites a letter from Toby Matthew to Francis Bacon as private proof that Bacon published under a famous pseudonym.

What It's Really About

At its core, the text is an exercise in historical revisionism and textual forensic analysis. It tackles the fundamental mismatch between the sophisticated legal, courtly, and philosophical erudition of the plays and the mundane, uneducated life recorded for the Stratford actor. The argument challenges accepted literary authority by insisting that physical evidence—such as surviving handwriting, legal documents, and publication records—must take precedence over tradition. Underneath the central claim of Baconian authorship lies a broader inquiry into how social class, anonymity, and political self-preservation shaped Elizabethan publishing, questioning how historical reputations are constructed, disguised, and passed down to posterity.

Why Read It Today

This short treatise will fascinate fans of literary mysteries, historical revisionism, and Shakespearean scholarship. Reading it feels like sitting beside a sharp, obsessive nineteenth-century detective who lays out archival evidence piece by piece across an editorial desk. The prose is clear, direct, and unsparingly argumentative, devoid of fluff and packed with detailed textual comparisons.

The primary difficulty for modern readers lies in its dense reliance on period details—such as vintage orthography, obscure sixteenth-century poetry anthologies, and detailed biographical timelines of Elizabethan aristocrats. It requires an interest in palaeography and archival debate to fully enjoy the hyper-fixation on letterforms and signatures. Yet what remains with the reader is the sheer vigor of the thesis. Regardless of whether one accepts the Baconian premise, the book offers an extraordinary masterclass in how close reading, historical alignment, and document analysis can turn standard literary history upside down.