Nicholas Bacon, Secret Poet & Writer & the Shakespeare Plays

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

He enjoyed reading poetry, or having Anne read it to him when he was ill. He also wrote a number of poems himself, evidently intended for his own pleasure rather than for publication…Most of them deal with weighty subjects in the classical mode, such as love, moral philosophy, and religion…

[Robert Tittler, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press 2004-26)].

What we know of the intellectual and cultural endeavours in [Nicholas] Bacon’s self-styled ‘second age’ is probably the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Just enough has come down to us regarding the activities of the Redgrave and Gorhambury households to imply that much more must remain hidden from our view.
                                          
[Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 67]

See the book here: 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

one of the grounds on which we ought to admire and respect him is the manner in which he assisting in forming a mind so supereminent; he pointed out the path by which FRANCIS BACON reached such distinction in literature and eloquence, and became the first philosopher of any country or any age.
                             
 [John Lord Campbell, Lives of The Lord Chancellors (London: John Murray, 1856), II, p. 236] 

His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, had been Lord Keeper under Elizabeth for nearly twenty years. It is not too much to say that from the first the elder Bacon’s precept and example and, after his death, his memory were absolutely decisive in making his son the Bacon that we know. 

[Paul H. Kocher, ‘Francis Bacon and His Father’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 21 (1957-8), p. 133]

Of the thirty-seven Shakespeare plays considered in this Dictionary, thirty-five contain the word ‘judge’, and thirty-five the word ‘justice’…Reference to a trial appears one or more times in twenty-five of Shakespeare’s plays, and many contain and describe trial scenes…Thus on the bare statistics it is possible to argue that Shakespeare was law-obsessed…

[B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language A Dictionary (2004), p. 1]

 

See the book here: 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

 

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Outside of a very few specialist scholars, the figure of the great Elizabethan statesman Sir Nicholas Bacon, is comparatively unknown or unfamiliar, both to academics and the general student. Others of a similar stature from the Elizabethan period-Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham, head of the English Secret Service, have for centuries attracted a steady stream of biographers and commentators, but for some reason Sir Nicholas Bacon, has regularly been ignored or overlooked. This is perhaps even more surprising when we consider that he was not only the trusted Lord Keeper under Queen Elizabeth the most written about monarch in English history, but also the father of the most famous English philosopher in English history, Francis Bacon.

Perhaps it is partly because of the latter, namely that he was the father of Francis Bacon, who it has long been held is the true author of the Shakespeare poems and plays, that the full truth about Sir Nicholas Bacon and his relationship-much of it suppressed and obscured-with his son, has never emerged into the full light of day.

See the book here: 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

 

 

[Light-of-Truth]

Identity crisis! 

Bacon as Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and several others with Nicholas Bacon as a "father", Robert Dudley, and John Dee as "fathers' too.

Anne was his "mother, Elizabeth the Virgin as well. 

Did he have any dogs or cats???

 

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

During the five years of the Marian reign Nicholas Bacon, alongside his clandestine Protestant activities with William Cecil, and the rest of the Cooke-Bacon-Cecil family, also devoted some of his considerable energies into cultivating other private activities much of which has remained secret, hidden and obscured from posterity. In these years and into the Elizabethan reign Nicholas Bacon composed a body of poetry that remained in manuscript for four centuries and which to the present day remain virtually unknown to all, except a few specialist orthodox scholars, who themselves have never been fully forthcoming about the verses, and their enormous implications for the authorship of the Shakespeare poems and plays. 

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

 For four centuries secrecy and suppression surrounded the various manuscript copies of Sir Nicholas Bacon’s poems held in ‘private hands’, that were deliberately hidden away. With their very existence unknown to the rest of the world, and even now more than a century after their quiet publication, virtually all the sleepy world, are still none the wiser.

 
   In 1903 Dr Daniel printed The Recreations of his Age By Sir Nicholas Bacon via his private press and after his death one hundred and thirty copies were printed at Oxford in 1919. It is uncertain whether the volume was ever actually available to the public, and it is now virtually impossible to purchase a copy of this volume on the open book market, and what relatively few copies are known to have survived, are to be found scattered around the various libraries of the United Kingdom. 
 

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Why the volume took three hundred and fifty years to emerge into the light of day remains unknown and can only remain a matter of informed conjecture. When we consider the historical importance of the author, the great Elizabethan Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, father of Francis Bacon, and the subject matter of its content, we are entitled to wonder why Dr Daniel decided to print it, presumably for his eyes only, on his own private press. We are further entitled to ponder why a volume of such enormous historical and literary interest was not brought to the attention of the Baconians who collectively maintain Francis Bacon secretly wrote the Shakespeare works, and it might be added, other orthodox Bacon scholars at the time of its issue.

[Light-of-Truth]

13 hours ago, A Phoenix said:

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Why the volume took three hundred and fifty years to emerge into the light of day remains unknown and can only remain a matter of informed conjecture. When we consider the historical importance of the author, the great Elizabethan Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, father of Francis Bacon, and the subject matter of its content, we are entitled to wonder why Dr Daniel decided to print it, presumably for his eyes only, on his own private press. We are further entitled to ponder why a volume of such enormous historical and literary interest was not brought to the attention of the Baconians who collectively maintain Francis Bacon secretly wrote the Shakespeare works, and it might be added, other orthodox Bacon scholars at the time of its issue.

Yea, most people who produce work hope everybody will see it.

So who told him to not announce it? 1903 should have been OK as Baconians were around? 

I am hoping we can read some of the poems!!

🙂

”Hey Nick, I have a feeling that in 400 years these poems will be remembered.”

“Oh that is silly! Stop drinking that wine Annie! Its making you imagine things!”

 

[Light-of-Truth]

1903? 😉

In 1903, the Baconian movement stood at one of the high crests of its long campaign: organized, vocal, international, and convinced that the tide was turning. The Francis Bacon Society, already nearly two decades old, had given the cause permanence and dignity through meetings, lectures, correspondence, and its journal Baconiana, where arguments for Bacon’s authorship were refined and circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, respected advocates such as Constance Mary Fearon Pott and W. F. C. Wigston pressed literary, philosophical, and symbolic parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare; in America, the afterglow of Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram still energized readers, while Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup were turning headlines with claims of hidden messages and secret Tudor history. To supporters, 1903 did not feel like a fringe curiosity—it felt like a movement gathering evidence, printing journals, attracting intellects, and marching steadily toward the public vindication of Sir Francis Bacon as the concealed architect behind the Shakespearean stage.

Then why not jump on the Baconian bandwagon? What the Hog? Who or what wanted it silenced?

In the very year 1903, when the Baconian movement was energized through the Francis Bacon Society and Baconiana, a privately printed edition like The Recreations of his Age could easily vanish into obscurity for reasons less dramatic but still powerful:

1. Private Press Culture = Built to Be Rare

Many Edwardian scholarly works were printed in tiny runs for subscribers, collectors, or friends—not the mass public. A book could be “published” and still effectively hidden.

2. Family Sensitivity Around the Bacon Name

If manuscripts connected to Sir Nicholas Bacon or the Bacon lineage contained politically sensitive, personal, or reputation-shaping material, descendants or custodians may have preferred quiet circulation.

3. Stratfordian Academic Dominance Rising

By the early 20th century, universities increasingly treated Shakespeare authorship doubts as eccentric. Material that might feed Baconian enthusiasm often received little institutional promotion.

4. Baconian Internal Focus on Francis, Not Nicholas

Most Baconians were concentrating on Sir Francis Bacon, ciphers, and Shakespeare. A poetry volume by his father may have seemed peripheral, even if symbolically important.

5. Libraries as Safe Tombs

Rare works often entered libraries where they were preserved—but not popularized. Survival does not equal circulation.

Could Royal Interests Have Preferred Silence?

Direct evidence of active 1903 royal suppression is thin. However, Britain’s establishment culture often operated through soft suppression:

• no publicity

• no endorsements

• no reprints

• no academic attention

• quiet absorption into archives

That can bury a work almost as effectively as censorship.

Why This Feels Significant to Baconians

To a Baconian reader, Sir Nicholas matters because he represents the intellectual bloodline behind Francis Bacon. If the father was a cultivated poet and statesman, it strengthens the image of a hereditary literary house rather than a sudden genius appearing from nowhere.

One Strong Statement

What disappeared in 1903 may not have been crushed by decree—but by something subtler and often stronger: class gatekeeping, scholarly indifference, and controlled scarcity.

 

Curious to me! So much!
 

When you look at all this together, the pattern becomes what we find compelling:

• Sir Nicholas Bacon as a statesman with literary interests and poetic manuscripts

• Anne Bacon as one of the most learned women in England, fluent in languages and translator of major theological works

• Young Sir Francis Bacon raised in an elite intellectual household beside court power

• Proximity to Queen Elizabeth I and the political center of the realm

• Later emergence of the Shakespeare works displaying law, diplomacy, court manners, languages, classical learning, and unusual breadth

That is why the poetry of Nicholas Bacon feels “curious.” It suggests the Bacon household may have been not merely political, but literary by culture and habit.

Why This Matters

The orthodox Stratford narrative often isolates genius as appearing from one man. The Baconian narrative instead sees a fertile ecosystem:

A house of learning, languages, statecraft, secrecy, ambition, and letters.

If Nicholas wrote verse, Anne translated sophisticated prose, and Francis became one of the greatest prose stylists in English, then literary production in that family no longer seems surprising—it seems natural.

On the Elizabeth Birth Theory

If one accepts (or even entertains) the theory that Francis was secretly born to Elizabeth and placed with the Bacons, then Nicholas and Anne become more than foster parents—they become carefully selected guardians of a royal-intellectual heir. In that framework, every literary trace in the household gains symbolic weight.

Historically, this remains speculative and unproven. But within Baconian logic, it creates coherence.

One Strong Statement

To us, the question is not “Could Francis Bacon write literature?” but rather how could a son raised amid Nicholas Bacon’s governance and Anne Bacon’s scholarship fail to become literary?

An Honest View

The strongest Baconian points are rarely ciphers alone—they are the social and intellectual context of the Bacon household. Nicholas and Anne make Francis seem less like an anomaly and more like the natural flowering of an extraordinary Tudor environment.

 

Can't wait to see what comes up next!! 🙂

 

 

 

[A Phoenix]

Hi Rob,

Brilliant and illuminating analysis.

Peace and Love.

Phoenix.

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

The intemperate and mildly erotic delusions of myopic Stratfordians would have been given immeasurable excess with the discovery of a volume containing poems of John Shakespeare (the fact he was illiterate and signed his name with a cross acts as no corrective to the certainty of an orthodox mind), father of the supposed greatest writer of all time William Shakspere (whose own children were also illiterate), with news of it instantaneously flashed all around the known civilised world.

Its contents would have been concurrently microscopically and infinitesimally examined and analysed by virtually every Shakespearean scholar known to humankind, fastening and contorting their learned minds, on each and every last syllable, letter and word, of its semi-divine sacred text. Every last reference and allusion would be wrought from and projected into, and the meaning of its verse infinitely examined and analysed to within an inch of its life. 

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

  We would also have discovered what it revealed about his relationship with his immortal son to such an extent it might just exhaust the almost inexhaustible English language. Their findings and inferences would fill whole monographs published by the Oxford Clarendon Press, and the great university presses of Great Britain and the United States, all aimed at the learned, and for the rest of the world, a never ending supply of cheap editions, with its inestimable value reported and discussed in every learned journal and publication around the civilized world, most likely to the end of time.

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Yet conversely, in complete marked contrast, the hitherto secret and hidden manuscripts of Nicholas Bacon, father of Francis Bacon, are set forth with the unheralded quietest of births on the private printing press of one Dr Daniel, and afterwards its publication limited to one hundred and thirty copies, a very deliberate method of delivery followed and compounded by a very long silence. Moreover, it appears that the biographers of both Nicholas and Francis Bacon, who have examined it, have inexplicably suffered from the suspension of their scholarly faculties, and assumed some kind of pathological resistance towards giving its contents the full attention it so patently warrants.     

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

After more than half a century had passed from it being printed on a private press the work in question was given notice by Professor Tittler in the only full-length biography ever written on Sir Nicholas Bacon itself very strange for a man whom Lloyd described as the ‘Father of our Nation’, namely the great Lord Keeper of the famed Elizabethan reign, and father of the great philosopher and writer Francis Bacon, whom many around the world correctly believe wrote the Shakespeare poems and plays.

The fourth chapter of his full-length biography is entitled ‘The Second Age’ suggested by a phrase, in one Sir Nicholas Bacon’s poems, from the 1903/1919 volume: 

                                                                       A mynde I have suche as it is

       And frutes thereof both yonge and olde,

Not pretyous muche nor all amisse,

But as they be loe here them holde:

      I wisshe them better a hundrethe folde:

Ye recreatyons of bothe myne ages,

   Goe and sarve hur as humble Pages.¹

For which Professor Tittler provides the following comments here given in their entirety:

When Nicholas Bacon wrote in this poem of 1557 or 1558 of the ‘recreatyons of both myne ages’ he may perhaps have referred to his youth and subsequent manhood, but it is considerably more likely that he meant it as a commentary on his life before and after the two momentous events of his forty-third year: the accession of Mary Tudor, and his second marriage, to the recipient of this poem, Anne Cooke. The former provided the occasion, and the latter the intellectual support, for this second age.2

<sup>1. Sir Nicholas Bacon, The Recreations Of His Age By Sir Nicholas Bacon (Oxford: Daniel, MCM III (Issued 1919), p. 28; Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 56.
2. Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 56.</sup> 

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

At the foot of the page Professor Tittler references the poem reproduced at the head of the chapter in the following way ‘From ‘Made at Wymbelton in his Lo: greates sickness in the laste yeare of Quene Marye’ (stanza in The Recreations of his Age (Oxford, 1903)’, itself a redacted form of its full title.¹

On the opposite page Tittler again gives passing notice to the subject with the line ‘He turned a poem for Anne in the manner of Horace, with whose works he was eminently familiar’,² with a reference number for his Notes section at the end of the work which reads in full ‘An Ode of Horace turned at the desier of my Ladye his Lo: wyfe’, in Recreations of his Age.’³ Failing once more to give the work its full title.

This is not mere pedantry. The absence of its full title (Sir Nicholas Bacon, The Recreations of his Age by Sir Nicholas Bacon) introduces some degree of ambiguity and makes it just that bit more difficult to identify and trace.

1.  Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 56n.

2. Ibid., p. 57.

3. p. 211n4.

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Then following these opening comments Professor Tittler digresses from the subject of Bacon’s poems for another six pages (not dissimilar to a device known as the scatter principle practiced by the likes of the Rosicrucian Brother Robert Boyle and numerous other members of Bacon's Rosicrucian Brotherhood) before returning to it once more:
     
As a source of insight regarding Bacon’s personal convictions and outlook on life, only his poetry can compare with his educational enterprises. The thirty-five poems and one prayer which have come down to us are not for the most part autobiographical in nature, but they do express strong convictions which further serve to identify Bacon with the Renaissance milieu. Although they were not published during his lifetime, several handwritten copies of the collection have survived, and were finally published as The Recreations of His Age in 1903. It seems likely, however, that none of the poems was composed prior to Bacon’s marriage to Anne Cooke, and that most had been completed by the accession of Elizabeth.
 

The poems themselves are arranged in an orderly but not necessarily chronological manner. The subjects of moral philosophy, love, religion, and humorous fables comprise virtually the entire content, although the rhetorical ingenuity of the author somewhat relieves the monotony with which they are treated….
 

...In the wide range of metrical forms in which the pieces are set, most of the collection fits comfortably into the traditions of mid-sixteenth-century English poetry. In a few of its pieces, however, we find a refreshing taste of the Renaissance, perhaps Petrarchan in flavour, which was still far from common in the English poetry of that time. This is especially true in the images and conceits in ‘Of a Lover’ and ‘Of a Snowe balle’, and may suggest Bacon’s familiarity with the works of Wyatt and Surrey, either in manuscript or after the first publication of their work by Richard Tottel in 1557. The assimilation of this new style is by no means complete in Bacon’s verse; amid images of snowballs as ‘balles of wylde fyer’ which ‘soe hette my desyer’, the enchantress is a ‘wanton wenche’ rather than any Lauraian vision. Bacon’s poetry represents a transitional stage between the so-called ‘drab age’ of English poetry and the full-blown Renaissance style of the next generation. This suggestion is strikingly affirmed in a comparison of his ‘Of a Snowe balle’ with Spencer’s Amoretti, Sonnet XXX.1

1. Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 63-64.

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Twenty-eight years after the publication of his full-length biography on Sir Nicholas Bacon Professor Tittler wrote the entry for Bacon in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography first published by Oxford University Press in 2004 (online version 2004-25) which is more likely to be read by the ordinary schoolmen and the casual reader than a full-length work. In his entry for Bacon, he assigned the following paragraph to The Recreations of his Age:

Nor is it his only poem. Bacon was something of a bibliophile and a student of classical literature. He enjoyed reading poetry, or having Anne read it to him when he was ill. He also wrote a number of poems himself, evidently intended for his own pleasure rather than for publication. Although undated, they seem to have been composed after his marriage to Anne in 1553-many of them perhaps in the period of his disgrace from late 1563 to mid-1565-and were published only in 1919 by the Daniel Press, Oxford, under the title The Recreations of his Age. Most of them deal with weighty subjects in the classical mode, such as love, moral philosophy, and religion, and emphasize the stoic virtues (which were also Bacon’s virtues) of hard work, education, reason over emotion, and the value of the mean estate. But some are lighter and anecdotal in nature. A few, including 'Of a Snowe Balle` and 'Of a Lover` draw clearly on Petrarchan conceits and show a playful inventiveness of imagery.1

1. Robert Tittler, Sir Nicholas Bacon, (1510-79), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press 2004-25). 

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[Allisnum2er]

Hi A.P.,

Thank you very much for bringing this fascinating topic to light ! ❤️

About 'Mediocra firma' ...'

'In Commendacion of the Meane Estate' by Nicholas Bacon

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-commendacion-of-the-meane-estate/

'The suereste state and beste degree
Is to possesse mediocritye.
By proofe we finde in everye storme
The hier tree the sorer torne:
The Seas rageinge with surges hye
When the meane fludes reste quietlye.
Agayne we see the thorne and shrubbe
As thinges vyle all menn vppe stubbe

...

Wherefore by righte I maye conclude
Of thre estates twooe are escheude,
As twooe extremes by reasons lore,
And the meane state is sett before,
Whoe bringes and bredes theis Juells three,
Saftye, Quiette and Libertye.'

 

https://www.google.fr/books/edition/Philomorus_a_brief_examination_of_the_La/cS0CAAAAQAAJ?hl=fr&gbpv=1&dq=Recreations+of+his+Age+bacon&pg=PA271&printsec=frontcover

'A FRIAR AND THE MARINERS' by Nicholas Bacon is found in 'Philomorus' (John Howard Marsden · 1878)

'Once in a storms great

A ship was beat

So strong with tempest's rage

That naught was able,

Anchor nor cable,

The danger to assuade.'

...

[A Phoenix]

Hi Yann,

You are more than welcome.

Peace and Love.

Phoenix.

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

In the valuable work Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae which largely explored the collection of sententiae stencilled by Sir Nicholas and Lady Bacon on the walls of Gorhambury (which are preserved in a manuscript sent to Jane, Lady Lumley (British Library, Royal MS 17, A. xxiii) for which Nicholas Bacon commissioned the calligrapher Petruccio Ubaldini on whom Petruccio is based in The Taming of the Shrew) Elizabeth McCutcheon gives over three pages to The Recreations of his Age.

For McCutcheon the poems reveal a plain-dealing man who seeks out the hidden truth who is ‘interested in character, social roles and obligations, and attitudes implicit in these’. Who sees through the masks and pretences of humankind which she describes in such a way it could double for a profound epitome of the Shakespeare poems and plays, that endlessly contemplate the infinite complexities of the human condition:

Or more interesting still, thematically, though imperfectly developed, in the conception of a mask of minds the speaker seeks to strip. Behind this poem is an ancient topos which appears in Seneca as “hic humanae vitae mimus” (LXXX, 7). If anything, Sir Nicholas sharpens the moral and perceptual blindness of the beholders who are themselves maskers. They see, but perceive not, because vice is so cunning, “in semblance” near to virtue [R. p. (17)]. Again and again, then, these poems reveal the truth beneath the deceptive surface; as Sir Nicholas writes about the man who gives himself to appetite’s satiety, “This tale and lyfe tendes all to one,/Appearance muche Existence none” [R. p. (6)]. The man who wrote that can have rather few illusions about himself or other people; his interest in ethical norms of the human condition and mankind’s frequent departures from them, his sense of the antithetical, the negative, and the epigrammatic, and a certain toughness, and resoluteness of mind all point to a stoic and Senecan element.1

1.Elizabeth McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae (English Literary Renaissance Supplements Number Three: Published by the University of Hawaii and the Sir Francis Bacon Foundation and Library, Claremont, California, 1977), pp. 42-44, at p. 44.

 

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

The critical importance of the separation of knowledge and information has been understood by states and Intelligence Services and the Rosicrucian-Freemasonic Brotherhood for centuries. The likelihood of a single scholar or student being familiar with the relatively unknown and difficult to access The Recreations of his Age, Tittler’s biography of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the vast biographical canon of his son, Francis Bacon, and the large corpus of literature surrounding the authorship of the Shakespeare works, and so on, is small, very, small. Meaning it is all too easy to suppress and misrepresent the content of any work and stop short of addressing its blindingly obvious implications for Bacon’s authorship of the Shakespeare works.

There is no better tool for suppression than simple silence. Neither Tittler, McCutcheon, or Jardine and Stewart mention Shakespeare, or to be more precise the Shakespeare authorship-the suppressed Baconian white elephant in the room.    

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

We have seen that the poems of Sir Nicholas Bacon were withheld from public view for three hundred and fifty years before they were quietly printed off the private press of Dr Daniel in 1903, prior to publication without fanfare sixteen years later, in 1919.

This glacial velocity was further compounded by any canonical recognition before the arrival some half a century later of the first full-length biography of Sir Nicholas Bacon by Professor Tittler in 1976.

But even more importantly, it was a whisker away from the new millennium before direct notice of Nicholas’s poems was given to them in the biographical canon of his son by Professor Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart in Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, a work which will serve to inform scholars and other interested parties for decades to come.

Yet when it finally made its way into the Francis Bacon biographical canon it received a very curious and strange reception. In their extensive biography of Lord Bacon, professors Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart reproduced only a single poem by Nicholas for his wife Anne, with the following comments here given in their entirety: 

An affectionate poem he wrote for her in the last year of Mary`s reign (1557-8) survives, ‘made at Wimbledon in his Lordship’s great sickness’. It suggests that Sir Nicholas was fully aware how much his well-being depended upon his supportive wife.1

1. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), p. 26. 

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Professors Jardine and Stewart proceed to partly reproduce the poem on the opposite page before providing their final comments here again quoted in full:

When Nicholas wrote these words, the fruitful intellectual friendship-the companionate marriage-between Nicholas and Anne, on which contemporaries commented, was not matched in success by flesh-and-blood children. Nicholas’ poem was probably offered to his wife as comfort for the death that summer of the second of their baby daughters. Nicholas felt he was failing his wife in furnishing her with ‘fruits of mind’ but not fruits of the body; perhaps he felt his sexual powers to be waning.1 

1. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), pp. 27-28.

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

Very unusually for Professor Jardine and Alan Stewart whose biography of Bacon has the most extensive and detailed Notes and Bibliography of any life written on the great philosopher, the poem in question is reproduced without any accompanying reference. Furthermore, their block Note on Sir Nicholas Bacon which lists every major modern source on him, singularly fails to include the work from which the poem was taken.¹

The work which they failed to cite in the normal way in the text and failed to include in the block Note on Nicholas is listed in the Bibliography under the heading ‘Other transcripts of manuscript sources’.2 Not that most ordinary scholars or general students would probably know that the non-referenced poem was taken from this work.

We have then in this recent modern biography of Francis Bacon (the only Bacon biography, as far as I am aware, written post the publication of The Recreations of his Age to have directly quoted from it) the reader could be forgiven for thinking the ‘affectionate poem’ was the only one composed by Sir Nicholas Bacon as Professor Jardine and Stewart make no mention of any others.

1. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), p. 527n2. 

2. Ibid., p. 598.

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s

 

 

[A Phoenix]

Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, Concealed Poet and Writer and the Shakespeare Plays

    It all begs the simple question why? The answer to this simple question, namely, the reluctance to fully examine and discuss The Recreations of his Age is an indication of its readily understood importance and what it tells us about the concealed poet Nicholas Bacon and the telling light it throws on his son, Francis Bacon. The secret progenitor of the poetry and drama presented behind the mask of Shakespeare, the greatest poet and dramatist in the history of world.  

 

https://www.academia.edu/165580029/Becoming_Shakespeare_A_New_Literary_Biography

A short accompanying video highlighting the key points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16LcmWaT5QQ&t=20s