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What can I say about this? That I think it's a crock? Well yes, I do, but it's interesting that they were out to get Shakespeare long before the modern era. There are so many objections one could raise to the arguments put, but I'll just leave it as an historical document that has value in that regard. When the charge is that he could not write, I don't mean figuratively; I mean literally. The book claims he was unable to write at all.
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021
Bacon and Shakspere
by William Henry Burr (1886)
The writing of a 'illiterate' that is produced in evidence:
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| "Will signatures" |
Bacon having begun to produce plays for Shakspere’s theater before 1590, the authorship of which was afterward assumed by the actor and proprietor, it became necessary also to avoid being publicly known as a writer of sonnets. Therefore, in view of the circulation and ultimate publication of this poem, he facetiously disguised the identity of the writer by calling himself “Will.” Three years later he dedicated a published poem to his young friend Southampton under the name of “William Shakespeare,” and again another in 1594. But the “Sonnets” were not published until 1609, when Essex had been dead eight years, and his widow had been married six years to a third husband. It would never do for the Solicitor-General to be known as the author of such a poem; so when it came out in print it was dedicated to “Mr. W. H.” by “T. T.,” and no one until a few years ago ever seems to have suspected that Bacon wrote the poem, nor, so far as we are aware, has any one ever suspected until July 31, 1883, that “W. H.” was the accomplished and famous Earl of Essex.
The young widow Sidney was the only daughter of the Queen’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, for whom Bacon drafted an important state paper in 1588 on the conduct of the government toward Papists and Dissenters. And that Bacon was intimate with the Secretary’s daughter, aye, even one of her lovers, appears from many of the Sonnets addressed to her. He describes her playing on the harpsichord, envies the keys “that nimbly leap to kiss her hand,” and says:
“Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.”
And from other passages it is quite evident that he had often kissed her.
No fact has been found incompatible with Bacon’s authorship of the “Sonnets.” The following line might seem to indicate a writer past the age of 29:
“Although she knows my days are past the best.”
But in 1599, when Shakspere was only 35, this very verse was published as his in the “Passionate Pilgrim,” where Sonnet 138 appears as number one.
But again, we have a letter written in 1592 by Bacon to his uncle, Lord Treasurer Burleigh, in which he says:
“I wax somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.”
At the age of 31 he thinks himself “somewhat ancient” two years earlier he apprehends that forty winters will entirely deface the youthful Earl’s beauty; and to the lovely young widow he says: “My days are past the best.”
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