Secret Baconian clues in the Shakespeare Plays

A Phoenix · June 1, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND HAMLET AND ITS THEME OF DEATH AND HIS ESSAY AND TREATISES ON DEATH.

For centuries Shakespeare critics and commentators have been devoting space to the theme of death in Hamlet as well as writing essays and articles published in scholarly journals, and lengthy chapters in their works printed by prestigious university presses and publishing houses distributed all around the world. Not one of which (as far as the present writer is aware) draws attention to the several tracts and essays on the subject of death written by Bacon, nor consequently do they provide any detailed comparative analysis with Hamlet, a play saturated with the theme of death.

Of all the orthodox writings on Hamlet and the theme of death perhaps still the most direct and powerful is the chapter written by the great Shakespearean critic Professor Wilson Knight in his classic work The Wheels of Fire under the title ‘The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet’:

Now the theme of Hamlet is Death. Life that is bound for the disintegration of the grave, love that does not survive the loved one’s life-both, in their insistence on Death as the primary fact of nature are branded on the mind of Hamlet, burned into it, searing it with agony...Death is over the whole play…Those first scenes strike the note of the play-Death. We hear of terrors beyond the grave, from the Ghost (i. v.) and from the meditations of Hamlet (iii. i). We hear of horrors in the grave from Hamlet whose mind is obsessed with hideous thoughts of the body’s decay. Hamlet’s dialogue with the King about the dead Polonius (iv. iii. 17) is painful; and the graveyard meditations, though often beautiful, are remorselessly realistic…

The general thought of Death, intimately related to the predominating human theme, the pain in Hamlet’s mind, is thus suffused through the whole play…

Laertes and Hamlet struggling at Ophelia’s grave are like symbols of Life and Death…

…He is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with Death, and his consciousness works in terms of Death and the Negation of Cynicism. He has seen the truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the universe…¹

The compact ethos of Bacon’s essay Of Death serves as a kind of epitome or succinct comment on the well-known speeches and soliloquies in Hamlet on suicide and death and the relentless running theme of death in the play:

Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, is weak…And by him that spake only as a philosopher and natural man, it was well said, Pompa mortis magis terret, quam, mors ipsa: [it is the accompaniments of death that are frightful rather than death itself.] Groans and convulsions, and a discoloured face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, shew death terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; Love slights it; Honour aspireth to it; Grief flieth to it; Fear pre-occupateth it.²

Like his divine dramatic creation Hamlet Bacon was obsessed or all-consumed with the whole gamut of human existence and the full expanse of human life and death. It is certainly the case that non-specialist scholars would only be familiar with his brief essay Of Death found in the numerous editions of his Essays and have little or no idea that he wrote two full-length tracts on the subject of life and death. The first is entitled De vijs Mortis, et de Senectute retardanda, atque instaurandis uiribus or An Inquiry concerning the Ways of Death the Postponing of Old Age, and the Restoring of the Vital Powers, which may have been according to its modern editor Professor Graham Rees, destined for Part V of Instauratio magna (Great Instauration), Bacon’s planned restoration and systematic division of all sciences of human knowledge.³ The study of death, or, bringing about the prolonging of life, epitomizes as Professor Rees points out, the aims of Bacon’s philosophical programme ‘he believed that philosophy could improve material conditions and so in part restore prelapsarian felicity. He marked out the prolongation of life as the first and highest objective of the new philosophy. Realization of that ancient dream would be an outstanding fulfilment of a programme proposing a material soteriology for this world.’⁴ It was to these ends that in his last known years Bacon issued Historia Vitae & Mortis published at the very time the last revised version of Hamlet was being printed in the Shakespeare First Folio published in 1623.

1. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire Essays In Interpretation Of Shakespeare’s Sombre

Tragedies (Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 34-5, 42, 44. See also Richard D. Altick,

‘Hamlet and the Odor of Mortality’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 5 (1954), pp. 167-76;

Richard Fly, ‘Accommodating Death: The Ending of Hamlet’, Studies in English

Literature, 24 (1984), pp. 257-74; Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity

in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1997), ‘To know my stops’:

Hamlet and Narrative Abruption’, pp. 216-42 and ‘Accommodating the Dead: Hamlet

and the Ends of Revenge’, pp. 243-64.

2. Spedding, Works, VI, pp. 379-80; Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon A Critical Edition

Of The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 343; Michael Kiernan, ed., The

Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Oxford Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 9-10.

3. Graham Rees, ed., Philosophical Studies c.1611-c.1619 (Oxford Clarendon Press,

1996), p. xxxv. The Latin text and English translation of An Inquiry concerning the

Ways of Death are produced side by side on pp. 270-359.

4. Ibid., p. lxv; and Graham Rees with Maria Wakely, eds., The Instauratio magna Part III:

Historia naturalis et experimentalis: Historia ventorum and Historia vitae & mortis

(Oxford Clarendon Press, 2007), p. xlvi.

A Phoenix · June 2, 2022

FRANCIS BACON INSTRUCTS THE ACTORS IN HAMLET CORRESPONDING TO PASSAGES IN SHORT NOTES FOR CIVIL CONVERSATIONS AND HIS ESSAY OF BOLDNESS:

In readiness for the play-within-the play Hamlet instructs and directs the players on the art of acting and oration ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue’ (3:2:1-2) (resembling the entry ‘The tongue trippes upon teeth’ in Bacon’s private note-book the Promus of Formularies and Elegances:¹

HAMLET

do not saw the air too

much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in

the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say the

whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget

a temperance that may give it smoothness….

Suit the action to the word,

the word to the action, with this special observance:

that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.

[Hamlet: 3:2:4-8, 17-9]

In his Short Notes for Civil Conversations Bacon’s advice for private conversation is the same advice as Hamlet’s to the players:

It is necessary to use a steadfast countenance, not wavering with action, as in moving the head or hand too much, which sheweth a fantastical, light, and fickle operation of the spirit, and consequently like mind as gesture: only it is sufficient, with leisure, to use a modest action in either.²

In the recent Oxford Clarendon edition of Bacon’s Essays its editor Professor Kiernan compares the above passage in Hamlet to the opening lines in his essay Of Boldness:

Question was asked of Demosthenes; What was the Chiefe Parte of an Oratour? He answered, Action, what next? Action; what next again? Action. He said it, that knew it best; And had by nature, himselfe, no Advantage, in that he commended. A strange thing, that that Part of an Oratour, which is but superficiall, and rather the vertue of a Player; should be placed so high, above those other Noble Parts, of Invention, Elocution, and the rest: Nay almost alone, as it were All in All.³

1. Constance M. Pott, The Promus Of Formularies And Elegances (Being Private Notes,

circ. 1594 hitherto unpublished) By Francis Bacon illustrated And Elucidated By

Passages From Shakespeare (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883), p. 226n543.

2. Spedding, Works, VII, p. 109. This is pointed out by N. B. Cockburn in The Bacon

Shakespeare Question The Baconian theory made sane (Guildford and Kings Lynn:

Biddles Limited, 1998), p. 493.

3. Michael Kiernan, ed., The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Oxford Clarendon

Press, 2000), pp. 37/197. See also Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

(Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 201-5.

Edited June 2, 2022 by A Phoenix

A Phoenix · June 3, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND THE UNPUBLISHED SPEECHES OF HIS FATHER LORD KEEPER SIR NICHOLAS BACON IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE WHICH FRAMES AND INFORMS ONE OF THE CENTRAL THEMES OF THE PLAY.

In the recent groundbreaking chapter ‘The Assize Circuitry of Measure for Measure’ in her work Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) Professor Strain frames and commences it with the policy words set out by Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon in his parliamentary speeches:

In his closing oration, the Lord Keeper [Bacon] addressed the country’s provincial magistrates, admonishing them to put into practice the statutes that were especially prioritised by central policy. He warned of the dangers of bad justices who failed to enforce the law, and especially of negligent and corrupt officeholders who posed the most insidious threat to order by inviting the contempt of all authority…At the turn of the seventeenth century, the court of Assize was responsible for overseeing and reforming the execution of local justice and governance throughout the country. The court was an itinerant tribunal that convened twice a year, generating a cyclical representation of central authority in which judges from the Westminster courts brought legal expertise, the voice of the sovereign and the Privy Council, and imposing ceremonial grandeur to their sessions in the English counties. Through its operations, the national policies of the Privy Council were disseminated and corrupt or incompetent local officers were identified and reformed (corrected, fined, shamed or removed from office)….The Assizes, I argue, supply a historical analogue through which the representation and reformation of legal administration in Measure for Measure can be newly analysed.¹

The major features of the Assize system-the stages of its cyclical structure, the aspects of legal spectacle, the alternating surveillance and exposure of local office holders, the expectation that justice and legal process transformed private into public knowledge, the tensions between central and local authorities, between Assize judges and JPs, and between the rule of law and its execution-all inform the plot and the characterisation of legal officers in Measure for Measure.²

…This limitation of central government inspired Bacon’s most ambitious proposal for legal reform, a system of regular provincial visitations to evaluate the performance of local officers. As an advisor to James I, to his favourites and as Lord Chancellor, his son Francis would take pains to advocate and institute the investigation of local officers as a vital function of the Assize judges who were already responsible for holding court throughout the country during law-term vacations…I argue that the Assize judges’ responsibility for the oversight of local justice informs the structure and ethics of Measure for Measure.3

In a letter of advice to the king’s favourite the Duke of Buckingham [Francis] Bacon explained to him in a section ‘touching the Laws (wherein I mean the Common Laws of England)’, of the importance of the Assizes which if rightly administered serves as a balance between the prince and the people, and a benefit to the kingdom. He tells Buckingham that King James would be well advised to take advantage of his circuit judges, and make use of them as important sources of information and intelligence for the purposes law and order and the well-being of his kingdom and people:

…that the Judges of the Law may be always chosen of the learnedst of the profession (for an ignorant man cannot be a good judge) and of the prudentest and discreetest, because so great a part of the Civil Government lies upon their charge; and indeed little should be done in legal consultations without them, and very much may be done by their prudent advices, especially in their Circuits, if right use were made of them: Believe me Sir, much assistance would be had from them, besides the delivering of the gaols, and trying of causes between party and party, if the King by himself (which were the best) or by his Chancellor did give them the charge according to occurrences at their going forth, and receive a particular accompt from them at their return home; They would then to the best intelligencers of the true state of the Kingdom, and the surest means to prevent or remove all growing mischiefs within the body of the Realm.⁴

The same advice presented here by Bacon informs the modus operandi of the Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure via the device that frames from its outset the central plot of the play, one which runs throughout its entirety to the final act, when the Duke who has been secretly surveilling his state, legal officials, and citizens, finally reveals his true identity:

The same coupling of local surveillance and legal spectacle that was orchestrated by the Assize judge is easily observed in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in which Duke Vincentio secretly surveys the operations of the Viennese justice system and then exposes its corrupt elements in trial.⁵

1. Virginia Lee Strain, Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh

University Press, 2019), pp. 133-4.

2. Ibid., p. 146.

3. Ibid., p. 18.

4. Spedding, Letters and Life, VI, pp. 18-9.

5. Virginia Lee Strain, Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh

University Press, 2019), pp. 139-40.

A Phoenix · June 4, 2022

FRANCIS BACON, MEASURE FOR MEASURE AND THE SECRECY OF GOVERNMENT.

The provenance and progenitor of Measure for Measure should have been obvious to any Shakespeare scholar from the Duke’s first speech on the inner workings of the science of government. The Duke (Bacon) says, to Escalus, that when it comes to understanding the nature of the people, the city’s institutions, and the standards of law and justice, he Escalus is more knowledgeable in theory and in practice, than any he remembers:

DUKE

Of government the properties to unfold

Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse,

Since I am put to know that your own science

Exceeds in that the lists of all advice

My strength can give you. Then no more remains

But this: to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,

And let them work. The nature of our people,

Our city’s institutions and the terms

For common justice, you’re as pregnant in

As art and practice hath enriched any

That we remember.

He gives Escalus papers.

There is our commission,

From which we would not have you warp.

[Measure for Measure: 1:1:3-14]

In The Advancement of Learning Bacon devotes a long passage on government and law, much of which is an epitome of the combined interwoven central themes of government and law in Measure for Measure:

Concerning Government, it is a part of knowledge secret and retired, in both these respects in which things are deemed secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some because they are not fit to utter. We see all governments are obscure and invisible…Such is the description of governments. We see the government of God over the world is hidden, insomuch as it seemeth to participate of much irregularity and confusion...

1. Spedding, Works, III, pp. 473-6.

Light-of-Truth · June 4, 2022

Quote

Concerning Government, it is a part of knowledge secret and retired, in both these respects in which things are deemed secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some because they are not fit to utter.

This is something I wrestle with. I do not understand what I see happen at times. 9/11/2001 being the BIG example. It was not as it appeared to the world. Even since then, things that happen I question.

But who I am to know Government secrets that shape the future of the Globe. I trust Bacon's plan is unfolding even when it appears to be the opposite of what he dreamed. Even Bacon was not sure how it would ultimately unfold.

Sonnet 144 (Simple cipher of SIR FRANCIS BACON) that begins the 14th Tier on Line 2002. The 13th Tier ended with Line 2001 where the Floating Capstone separates and floats above with Bacon's EYE of Providence in it.

http://www.light-of-truth.com/pyramid-GMT.php#14

TWo loues I haue of comfort and dispaire,
Which like two spirits do sugiest me still,
The better angell is a man right faire:
The worser spirit a woman collour'd il.
To win me soone to hell my femall euill,
Tempteth my better angel from my sight,
And would corrupt my saint to be a diuel:
Wooing his purity with her fowle pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd finde,
Suspect I may,yet not directly tell,
But being both from me both to each friend,
I gesse one angel in an others hel.
Yet this shal I nere know but liue in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

"The better angell is a man right faire"? The Rosicrucian brotherhood?

"The worser spirit a woman collour'd il"? Lady Liberty of the United States of America?

The USA is Bacon's New Atlantis, yet it may be hijacked for moments sometimes by greed and hate by the Powers that Be.

I just don't know what to think. Without being privy to the secrets that the Governments have, it's hard to understand nor judge. UGH

A Phoenix · June 5, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND THE INTERRELATED BACONIAN THEMES IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

In Measure for Measure we see the intertwining of nature (in the fullest sense of the word) and the law (in the fullest sense of the word) which at its highest level is seen in theological, philosophical and scientific terms, as the immutable law of nature wonderfully captured by Professor Hanson in her essay ‘Measure for Measure and the Law of Nature’:

The purpose of this essay is to suggest that in posing this question, Measure for Measure, with its ambiguous entwining of law and nature, engages not only with questions of civil law such as the relationship between law and equity, absolutism and common law, and civil and religious authority, but also with contemporary discourse regarding the idea of a law of nature, that is, of compelled regularity within the order of physical creation...When Measure for Measure was first staged in 1604 the potential for such a concept to structure an autonomous domain of scientific inquiry was already evident, particularly in the writings of Francis Bacon, but the idea was still imbricated with questions both of theology and of political sovereignty.¹

With Escalus given the papers of his commission one of the lords summons Angelo and the Duke speaks with Escalus about his impending plan to place Angelo in charge of government while he is away:

DUKE (to Escalus)

What figure of us think you he will bear?-

For you must know we have with special soul

Elected him our absence to supply,

Lent him our terror, dressed with our love,

And given his deputation all the organs

Of our own power. What think you of it?

ESCALUS

If any in Vienna be of worth

To undergo such ample grace and honour,

It is Lord Angelo.

[Measure for Measure: 1:1:16-24]

Concerning this passage Rivier and Santin-Guettier in their article entitled ‘If? What if? Hypothesis as a Leitmotif in Measure for Measure’ headed by the quotation ‘If a man will begin in certainties, he shall end in doubts; But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties’ (Bacon, Advancement of Learning, I, 1605, p. 147)’ make the following observation:

As Francis Bacon’s acknowledgment quoted above implies, if things were all clearly settled in advance, there would be no space for self-awareness or pardon. This is particularly revealing in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, contemporary to this quotation, where, from the beginning, nothing is obvious and considered at face value. The Duke’s question to Escalus, while he is about to appoint Angelo as the deputy of Vienna in his absence, “What think you of it?”(1.1.21), sets the tone, showing that despite decisions made, doubts remain. In his answer, Escalus voices the first hypothetic clause of the play “If any in Vienna be of worth, (…) It is Angelo” (1.1.22-4).²

In his article ‘Vincentio’s Selves in Measure for Measure’ Professor Hunt explains that the Duke intends to perform a scientific experiment to test Angelo’s mettle to the fullest, a Baconian scientific test, to see whether his much vaunted integrity and moral fortitude is capable of dealing in an upright and honest manner as the newly appointed head of the Vienna government:

Closely bound up with Vincentio’s Machiavellian use of Angelo to protect himself from censure for his lax enforcement of Viennese law is his testing of him to see whether power will corrupt this puritanical man. Its deeply enigmatic purpose makes this latter behaviour appear Machiavellian. “There is a kind of character”-handwriting, or engraved pattern-“in thy life,” Vincentio tells Angelo, “[t]hat to th’observer doth thy history/Fully unfold” (1.1.27-29). But if Vincentio believed that Angelo’s life had “fully unfold[ed]” him to an observer, he would not need to “assay” it (3.1.162)-subject his “mettle” to a trial-to experimentation….

In 1605, Sir Francis Bacon published his revolutionary The Advancement of Learning, which prepared the way for the widespread recovery of the modern scientific method, where an experiment determined the probability of a hypothesis through conducting a number of tests on the make-up of a subject.³

1. Elizabeth Hanson, ‘Measure for Measure and the Law of Nature’ in The Law in

Shakespeare, eds., Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (Hampshire: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010), pp. 249-65, at p. 251.

2. Estelle Rivier et Anne-Marie Santin-Guettier, ‘If? What if? Hypothesis as a Leitmotif in

Measure for Measure’, English Linguistics, 17 (2013), pp. 88-103, at p. 103.

3. Maurice Hunt, ‘Vincentio’s Selves in Measure for Measure’, College Literature, 46

(2019), pp. 684-711, at pp. 690, 705n15.

Edited June 5, 2022 by A Phoenix

Lawrence Gerald · June 5, 2022

Excellent and clear research on M 4 M , Thank you A. P.!

Allisnum2er · June 6, 2022

Good morning A Phoenix,

First of all thank you for your last 3 instructive posts about Measure for Measure.

I always await with interest and anticipation each of your posts, knowing that it will be a joy to learn more about Francis Bacon through and thanks to your outstanding research and your brilliant synthesis.

I would like to take the opportunity today to share with you my take on the end of Measure for Measure.

Today is the 157th day of the year and 157 is the simple cipher of WILLIAM TUDOR I and FRA. ROSI. CROSSE

In my opinion, if one play of the First Folio is clearly signed by Francis Bacon, it is Measure of Measure.

And I think that its place in the First Folio plays a role !

Indeed the play ends on page number 84 ( 84 being the simple cipher of ELIZABETH ) that is the 102th page of the First Folio (and ONE HUNDRED TWO = WILLIAM TUDOR I = 157), on the 51th leaf ( CUPID = 51 simple cipher and CUPID = 74 reverse cipher, 74 being the simple cipher of WILLIAM and TUDOR ! )

What a better place to conceal that he was the son of Queen Elizabeth Tudor !

"So bring us to our Pallace, where wee'll show what's yet behinde, that meete you all should know."

https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/102/index.html%3Fzoom=850.html

https://archive.org/details/sylviasylvarvmor00baco/page/256/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/minervabritannao00peac/page/33/mode/2up

Edited June 6, 2022 by Allisnum2er
Reference to Minerva Britanna

A Phoenix · June 6, 2022

Good morning Maestro, the feeling is mutual. I too always look forward to your posts. I have read a substantial number of works and writings by Baconians but I have to say you have a complete unique perspective and way of seeing things, that no one else has previously been able to discern, read and decipher, in the same manner you do.

I know that Rob (prompted by our Kate) has introduced a WOW button but when reading your posts I never needed one-I just kept saying WOW out loud as I was reading down the page-as I just have reading your post on Measure for Measure.

Today is the 157 (Fra Rosicrosse in simple cipher) day of year which in the fullness of time wiill be celebrated in every corner of the globe as WORLD DAY: for which our children, and our children's children, will bless Lord Bacon and his Rosicrucian Brotherhood.

I have an all-conusming profound love of Lord Bacon and his divine Rosicrucian Brotherhood and their god-like statement of intent of a UNIVERSAL REFORMATION OF THE WHOLE WORLD, is in my view, the greatest statement of intent in all human history. In absolute gratitude for all they have done for humankind I for one will eternally bless them.

To celebrate this divine 157th day of the year I will put up a post on one of his Rosicrucian plays.

Love Phoenix.

Light-of-Truth · June 6, 2022

Happy Day 157 everyone! 🙂

A Phoenix · June 6, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST: A BACON FAMILY AFFAIR.

1.

The comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost is set in Navarre a kingdom between France and Spain at a time when Bacon was in France when some of the historical events referred or alluded to in the play were happening and the kingdom where his brother Anthony Bacon, an intimate friend and correspondent of King Henry of Navarre, spent several years of his life^.1 It was (among other reasons) most likely out of respect for a living king that Francis Bacon named the monarch in the play Ferdinand, King of Navarre and why the Princess of France (modelled on Princess Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre and Queen of France (with whom Bacon had a secret love affair) is not given a name in the play.² The lords attending the King of Navarre in the play Berowne, Longueville and Dumaine are named after historical persons-Duc de Biron and Duc de Longueville military leaders and loyal servants of Henry of Navarre, and Geraud de Lomagne, a Huguenot commander or Duc de Mayenne who made peace with Henry Navarre, now Henry IV of France, in 1595. With Boyet, the lord attending the Princess of France in the play, named after another of King Henry of Navarre’s lords named Boyresse. The passports of Anthony Bacon and his train providing them with official permission to travel through Navarre and parts of France, are signed by Biron, Lomagne and Boyresse.³ The character Don Adriano de Armado is based upon the notorious Antonio Perez, a Spanish statesman and secretary of King Phillip II who left Spain in November 1591, and twice travelled to England as an envoy to King Henry IV of France and Navarre in April and July 1593, where he formed a close friendship with Francis and Anthony Bacon, remaining in England until July 1595.⁴ One of the Ladies-in-Waiting attending the Princess of France is named Katherine, Christian name of Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s younger sister Katherine Cooke Killigrew. Two of the other characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost Anthony Dull and Sir Nathaniel were named by Bacon after his two brothers Anthony Bacon and Sir Nathaniel Bacon.

1. For the time Anthony Bacon spent in Navarre and his close relationship with King

Henry of Navarre see Daphne Du Maurier, Golden Lads A Study of Anthony Bacon,

Francis and their friends (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1975), passim.

2. For Bacon’s love affair with Princess Marguerite, Queen of Navarre see W. Owen,

Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story, 5 vols, (Detroit and New York: Howard

Publishing Company, 1894); Elizabeth Wells Gallup, The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir

Francis Bacon discovered in his works, 5 vols, (Detroit, Michigan: Howard

Publishing Company: London Gay and Bird, 1899); Granville C. Cunningham,

Bacon’s Secret Disclosed In Contemporary Books (London: Gay and Hancock, Ltd,

1911), pp. 128-65.

3. British Library, BL Add MSS. 4125, fol. 4; 4126 fols.3, 4; A. Chambers Bunten,

‘Notes On Anthony Bacon’s Passports of 1586’, Baconiana, December1925, Vol.

XVIII No. 69 (Third Series), pp. 93-104; Jean Overton Fuller, Francis Bacon A

Biography (London and The Hague: East-West Publications, 1981), p.122; Peter

Dawkins, The Shakespeare Enigma (London: Polair Publishing, 2004), p. 253/438-

9.

4. For Antonio Perez and Francis and Anthony Bacon see Spedding, Letters and Life,

I, pp. 324-5; Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune The Troubled Life

of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), pp. 161-3, 181-3; N. B.

Cockburn, The Bacon-Shakespeare Question: The Baconian theory made sane

(Guildford and Kings Lynn: 1998), pp. 130-1.

A Phoenix · June 6, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST AND

THE LETTERS OF HIS MOTHER LADY ANNE BACON

AND BROTHER ANTHONY BACON

2.

In the play the constable Anthony Dull arrives telling the king that he bears a letter containing important news. The entrance of Anthony (Anthony Bacon) with a letter mockingly described from the ‘magnificent Armado’ (Antonio Perez) provides an opportunity for some scoffing merriment and mirth for Berowne (mouthpiece for Bacon) at the expense of Costard, the Clown (the archaic meaning of Costard is the head (OED) following the death of Sir Nicholas Bacon the head of the family was Lady Anne Cooke Bacon.

In her groundbreaking and revealing article ‘Scoff Power in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Inns of Court: Language In Context’, Professor Magnusson presents a series of quotations from the letters of the Puritanical Lady Bacon, to her two sons Francis and Anthony (as well a letter from Anthony to Francis) in which Lady Bacon reveals her knowledge and concerns that Francis and Anthony show them to their friends to be derided and scoffed at. Just like the kind of scoffing and mocking putdowns found in the letter written by Armado and throughout Love’s Labour’s Lost:

Her letters are also, however, remarkable for how forcefully they reveal her anxieties about how they will be read and received among her sons’ male companions. Her wish is that the letters will be read privately by Anthony and Francis; her fear is that her words will be read in company and circulated among the throngs of young men she habitually pictures hanging about her sons and contaminating their judgement-and being read in this company that they will be subjected to derision and mockery, and set at nought: ‘Let not your men see my letters’, she instructs, ‘I write to you, and not to them’; ‘Read not my letters either scoffingly or carelessly, which hath been used so much’;…Your men and your brother’s pry into every matter and listen.’ I believe that Lady Bacon had good reason to imagine she was being caricatured and classified by self-assured packs of scornful young men who were being made privy to her letters.

The scoffing putdowns that Lady Bacon anticipated for letters delivered and communally read out at Gray’s Inn typify much of the speech action of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The display of wit charged by critique of other people’s words begins in the first scene with Berowne’s mockery of the King’s decrees and accompanying penalties, quickly followed up by the use of Armado’s letter as entertainment.¹

That Inns of Court men took pastime, delight and hurt in shaming performances of one another’s words can be illustrated from the Bacon family correspondence I invoked earlier…Anthony Bacon’s manuscript commonplace book contains the draft or copy of a letter to Francis at Gray’s Inn in which he accuses his brother of being party to the mocking recital of his correspondence from the Continent....The circulation of letters out of the sender’s control and their parodic performance in Love’s Labour’s Lost is usually regarded as a purely theatrical convention, but the Bacon correspondence makes it clear that the quipping recitation of private letters was a recognisable practice within this community of young men, a prime occasion for the production of lacerating wit.²

1. Lynne Magnusson, ‘Scoff Power In Love’s Labour’s Lost And The Inns of Court:

Language In Context’, Shakespeare Survey, 57 (2004), pp. 196-208, at p. 201. For

the quotations from the letters of Lady Bacon & Anthony Standen to Anthony

Bacon in corresponding order see Spedding, Letters and Life, I, p. 114; Lambeth

Palace Library MS 653.183; Letters and Life, p. 113; LPL MS 650.224; Thomas

Birch, Memoirs Of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, From the Year 1581 till her Death

(London: printed for A. Millar, 1754), I. p. 68.

2. For the letter from Anthony to Francis Bacon see Edinburgh University Library

Laing MS iii. 193, fo. 142^v-143^r partly quoted by Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart,

Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz,

1998), p. 103 cited in Lynne Magnusson, ‘Scoff Power In Love’s Labour’s Lost

And The Inns of Court: Language In Context’, Shakespeare Survey, 57 (2004), p.

207.

Edited August 29, 2022 by A Phoenix

A Phoenix · June 6, 2022

FRANCIS BACON, LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST AND HIS COLLECTION OF MSS

KNOWN AS THE NORTHUMBERLAND MANUSCRIPT THAT ORIGINALLY

HELD COPIES OF HIS SHAKESPEARE PLAYS RICHARD II AND RICHARD

III, AND THE LONG WORD ‘HONORIFICABILITUDINITABUS’

3.

In her study of Love’s Labour’s Lost Dr Yates observes ‘Quite clearly this light-hearted atmosphere of the Gray’s Inn Revels [organised by Bacon] is the atmosphere of Love’s Labour’s Lost’. It ‘is my belief’ Love’s Labour’s Lost took its ‘immediate inspiration from the Gray’s Inn Revels’ and ‘various other jokes and allusions in the play may also be connected with the slang and customs current in Gray’s Inn.’¹ The speeches of the counsellors by Bacon in Gesta Grayorum ‘are undoubtedly reflected in the first scene and first line of the play’:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live registered upon our brazen tombs.

The plan which the King of Navarre draws up at the beginning of the play follows the advice of the second counsellor. He will live in philosophy; he will seek the light of truth and study things hid and barred from common sense, and so achieve fame. Berowne’s protest,

O, these are barren tasks too hard to keep,

Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep,

recalls the cheerful advice of the sixth counsellor, and in the play, as in the revels, it is that advice which is eventually taken.²

A manuscript copy of the six speeches or ‘Orations at Gray’s Inn Revels’ from the Gesta Grayorum were originally present together with his Shakespeare plays Richard II and Richard III in Bacon’s MSS collection otherwise known as the Northumberland Manuscript. On its outside cover there are scribbled variants of his name-Baco, Bacon or Francis Bacon together with his pseudonym Shakespeare or William Shakespeare. Scribbled above the entry for the play Richard II appears ‘By Mr. ffruancis William Shakespeare’ and little further down the page the word ‘Your’ is written twice across the name, or more accurately, the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare’.³ Above to the left of the entry for ‘Orations at Gray’s Inn’ appears the word ‘Honorificabiletudine’ a shortened version of ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5:1:41).

The long word appears in the scene with Anthony Dull (Anthony Bacon), the curate Sir Nathaniel (Sir Nathaniel Bacon) with the schoolmaster Holofernes (identified by some as Gabriel Harvey tutor to Bacon at Cambridge) which begins with an hilarious criticism of Armado’s (Antonio Perez with whom Bacon had a close relationship) verbosity, speech patterns and pronunciations. Armado arrives with Costard and Moth who all enter the banter. In an aside to Armado’s page boy Moth, Costard (perhaps a send up of Lady Anne Cooke Bacon) says ‘I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus (5:1:39-41). In a passage littered with Latin words and phrases, Armado asks Holofernes ‘are you not lettered?’ to which Mote answers:

Yes, yes, he teaches boys the horn-book. What is

a, b spelled backward with the horn on his head?

[Love’s Labour’s Lost: 5:1: 45-6]

The Latin for horn is cornu thus B A spelt backwards is Ba cornu, i.e., meaning yo[u] Bacon. On page 136 of the First Folio ‘What is Ab speld backward with the horn on his head’ is printed on the 33^rd line: 33 is Bacon in simple cipher.⁴

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T U W X Y Z

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

B A C O N

2 1 3 14 13=33

LORD, SUCH FOOLS THESE MORTALS BE!

1. Frances A. Yates, A Study Of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Cambridge University Press,

1936), pp. 155-7.

2. Ibid., p. 156.

3. James Spedding, ed., A Conference Of Pleasure, Composed For Some Festive

Occasion About The Year 1592 By Francis Bacon. Edited, From A Manuscript

Belonging to The Duke of Northumberland (London: printed by Whittingham and

Wilkins, 1870), pp. xxi-xxiv; Frank J. Burgoyne, ed., Collotype Facsimile & Type

Transcript Of An Elizabethan Manuscript Preserved at Alnwick Castle,

Northumberland (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), pp. xiii, xx.

4. Shakespeares Comedies Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True

Originall Copies (London: printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), p.

136. As far as I am aware it was first pointed out by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence,

Bacon is Shake-speare (New York: The John Mcbride Co., 1910), pp. 103-4, and

plates XX and XXI.

A Phoenix · June 7, 2022

FRANCIS BACON, KING LEAR, HIS ESSAY OF EMPIRE AND THE BALANCE OF POWER IN EUROPE.

In the article ‘The Balance of Power in King Lear’s Kingdoms’ Professor Atushiko Hirota examined and explored how King Lear represents the concept of the balance of power in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, the central predominant principle of European international relations explored by Bacon in his essay Of Empire:¹

Michael Sheehan points out that “Sir Francis Bacon in his essay ‘Or Empire’ was outlining specific policy guidelines for maintaining a balance of power.’²In this essay Bacon writes, “First, for their [the kings’] neighbours: there can no general rule be given (the occasions are so variable), save one, which ever holdeth: which is that princes do keep due sentinel, that none of their neighbours do overgrow so (by increase of territory, by embracing of trade, by approaches, or the like), as they become more able to annoy them than they were."³

After thus stating the guideline, Bacon goes on to discuss the example of Henry VIII: “During that triumvirate of kings, King Henry the Eighth of England, Francis the First King of France, and Charles the Fifth Emperor, there was such a watch kept, that none of the three could win a palm of ground, but the other two would straightways balance it, either by confederation, or, if need were, by a war.”⁴

1. Atsuhiko Hirota, ‘The Balance of Power in King Lear’s Kingdoms’, in

Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances Proceedings of the Ninth

World Shakespeare Congress, eds., Martin Procazka, Michael Dobson, Andreas

Hofele and Hanna Scolnicov (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014),

pp. 60-7, at pp. 60-1.

2. Michael Sheehan, The Balance of Power: History and Theory (London:

Routledge, 2000), p. 36, cited in the above at p. 61

3. Brian Vickers, ed., The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (Oxford University

Press, 1999), p. 44, cited in the above at p. 61.

4. Ibid., p. 44, cited in the above at p. 61.

A Phoenix · June 9, 2022

FRANCIS BACON CONCEALS AND REVEALS HIS AUTHORSHIP OF CYMBELINE FIVE TIMES IN ONE LINE.

In Cymbeline Posthumus refers to the false boast of Giacomo:

This yellow Giacomo in an hour-was’t not-?-

Or less-at first? Perchance he spoke not, but

Like a full acorned boar, a German one,

Cried ‘O!’ and mounted; found no opposition

[Cymbeline: 2:5:14-17]

This is a very witty allusion to its author, Bacon. The name Bacon is of Germanic origin, a boar is a wild pig from which bacon is derived, and for good measure ‘acorn’ phonetically sounds like Bacon, and with the initial letter from the next word ‘boar’ it yields the anagram, Bacon, and when we add the letter ‘f’ from the word ‘full’, the anagram F Bacon.

A Phoenix · June 10, 2022

FRANCIS BACON, THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, CORIOLANUS AND MENENIUS'S FABLE OF THE BELLY.

When writing The Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon also had in mind Coriolanus. When the play was written still remains undetermined. It seems the first version of it cannot have been composed before 1605, since the first scene of the play draws on William Camden’s Remains of a Greater Work Concerning (1605) for one or two of its minor details with most Shakespeare commentators placing its date of composition or revision around 1607-8. There is no known performance of the play until 1681. It was first printed in the 1623 First Folio. The principle source of the play is the English translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans which includes Menenius’s fable delivered in the first scene of the play, for which Bacon also drew on a number of other sources:

In writing Coriolanus, Shakespeare depended primarily upon Plutarch…he also had recourse to Livy, the chronicler of Coriolanus, Marcus Curtius, and the fortunes of republican Rome. It has long been recognized that lines 134-139 in Menenius’ fable of the belly, those concerned with the distribution of nourishment through the blood derive from Livy’s, not Plutarch’s version of the tale. Those six lines are important in that they provide tangible evidence that Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita was in Shakespeare’s mind when he was meditating Coriolanus. But they matter far less than a series of overall attitudes, attitudes peculiar to this play, which I believe Shakespeare owed not to any one, particular passage in Livy, but to his history as a whole….¹

The work closest to Coriolanus in date, which refers to the Menenius fable is Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning:

First therefore amongst so many great Foundations of Colledges in Europe, I finde strange that they are all dedicated to Professions, and none left free to Artes and Sciences at large. For if men iudge that learning should bee referred to action, they iudge well: but in this they fall into Error described in the ancient Fable: in which the other parts of the body did suppose the stomache had beene ydle, because it neyther performed the office of Motion, as the lymmes doe, nor of Sence, as the head doth: But yet notwithstanding it is the Stomache that digesteth and distributeth to all the rest: So if any man thinke Philosophie and Vniuersalitie to be idle Studies; hee doth not consider that all Professions are from thence serued, and supplyed. And this I take to bee a great cause that hath hindered the progression of learning, because these Fundamental knowledges haue bene studied but in passage.²

In discussing the wide influence of Aristotle’s Politics in ‘Coriolanus, Aristotle, And Bacon’, its author F. N. Lees points out Bacon’s essay Of Friendship with its ‘god or beast’ idea, an element of Aristotelian thought ‘embedded’ in the ‘consciousness’ of Bacon which rests behind Coriolanus, suggests that ‘Bacon knew Coriolanus before he wrote the essay.’3 For which there seems a good chance as he wrote both of them!

1. Anne Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, And Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus’’, Shakespeare

Survey, 38 (1985), p. 116.

2. Michael Kiernan, ed., The Advancement of Learning (Oxford Clarendon Press,

2000), pp. 57/252; G. W. Kitchin, ed., (introduction by Arthur Johnston) The

Advancement of Learning (London: Everyman Library, 1973), pp. 64, 241;

Arthur Johnston, ed., The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (Oxford

Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 62, 263; Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon A Critical

Edition Of The Major Works (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,

1996), pp. 171, 611.

3. F. N. Lees, ‘Coriolanus, Aristotle, And Bacon’, Review in English Studies, 2

(1950), p. 123.

A Phoenix · June 11, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND HIS AUNT THE COUNTESS ELIZABETH RUSSELL (YOUNGER

SISTER OF HIS MOTHER LADY ANNE BACON) AND ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

The phrase used for the title of his Shakespeare play ‘All is well that endes well’ was entered by Bacon into his private manuscript note-book The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies (c. 1594-6) containing a large collection of words, turns of phrase and lines in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and English, which find correspondence, resemblance and parallel throughout the Shakespeare canon.¹

Shakespeare scholars place the date at which All’s Well That Ends Well was written between 1603 to 1607 with the vast majority of critics favouring the more narrow band of 1604-5. The central plot derives from Boccaccio’s Decameron read in its original Italian, a French translation by Antoine le Macon, and the version of it in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure where Bacon found the story of Beltramo de Rossiglione and Giglietta de Narborne. In addition to his principal source Bacon created several other characters: the king, Lafeu, Parolles, Lavatch, and most importantly the Dowager Countess of Rossillon/Roussillon who in modern times is now viewed as the critical role in the play, one based upon a very real and formidable character. In his groundbreaking work the Shakespeare and the Countess (2015) Dr Laoutaris explains that the character of the Countess Roussillon is based upon the real life person of the Countess Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell and partly reflects her relationship with her son Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby:

The Dowager Countess has a problem. Her wayward son is a rash and unbridled boy who scorns her strenuous endeavours to find him a suitable wife. Worse still, since his father’s death, he keeps bad company and thinks nothing of gadding about with a ‘very tainted fellow, and full of wickedness’. Now he has run away to the wars, and plans to indulge in a dissolute life until he is ready to choose his own wife. That is the final straw. ‘He was my son,’ she exclaims in exasperation, ‘But I do wash his name out of my blood.’ Of course, these words are spoken in anger. She has no intention of abandoning her son. She decides instead to hatch a plot to bring him into blessed matrimony with the woman of her choice.

This may sound like a summary of Elizabeth Russell’s labours with her son Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, but the Dowager Countess in this instance is really a boy actor dressed as a woman performing in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.²

This is the opening paragraph in Laoutaris’s chapter ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ in his Shakespeare and the Countess in which he brilliantly marshals the textual evidence in the play alongside the known biographical details of the Dowager Countess Lady Russell to compelling demonstrate she and the Dowager Countess of Rossillon/Roussillon are one and the same. Being an orthodox Shakespeare scholar Dr Laoutaris does not present any of it in a Baconian context and in fact does not mention Bacon once in his chapter on All’s Well That Ends Well’. This is all the more astonishing because the formidable Dowager Countess Lady Russell, was the younger sister of Bacon's mother Lady Anne Bacon, who was married to John, Lord Russell the son and heir to Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford who was Bacon’s godfather and early political patron, a family whose provenance and history Bacon was intimately familiar with.

In the first quarto of I Henry IV the name of Lady Russell’s husband John, Lord Russell was originally rendered ‘Rossill’. This is probably due to the Russells descent from the family of ‘Rosel’ or ‘Rozel’ originating from Lower Normandy in France, who traced their pedigree back to the noble Betrand family prior to the Norman Conquest.The link between Rosel/Rozel/Rossill/Russell with the names of the Dowager Countess of Rossillon/Roussillon and the Dowager Countess Lady Russell leaves little or no doubt the two are one and the same. But this merely represented the start of what included allusions to private letters, unpublished information and manuscripts, and the private family history of the Cooke-Bacon-Russell family known to the author of All’s Well That Ends Well, which helped to draw the character of the Dowager Countess Roussillon based upon his aunt the Dowager Countess Lady Russell, as well as informing other themes and details scattered throughout the play.

1. C. M. Pott, The Promus Of Formularies And Elegancies (Being Private Notes,

circ. 1594, hitherto unpublished) By Francis Bacon Illustrated And Elucidated

By Passages From Shakespeare (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883), p.

314n 949; Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight, eds., Early Writings 1584-1596

(Oxford Clarendon Press, 2012), pp. 561 B846/933 who do not point out that it

is the title of a Shakespeare play. For a discussion, see N. B. Cockburn, The

Bacon Shakespeare Question The Baconian theory made sane (Surrey: Biddles

Limited, 1998), pp. 509-64.

2. Chris Laoutaris, Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to

the Globe (Penguin Books, 2015), p. 402.

A Phoenix · June 12, 2022

FRANCIS BACON AND HIS TWO UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT WORKS TEMPORIS PARTUS MASCULUS (c. 1603) AND COGITATA ET VISA (c. 1607) AND ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL (c. 1603-1607).

Over in Paris the king laments his ill-health and asks Bertram, Count of Roussillon how long ago Helen’s father died ‘How long is’t Count,/Since the physician at your father’s died?’ (1:2:69-70). He tells him ‘Some six months since, my lord (1:2:71). ‘If he were living’ the king says ‘I would try him yet’ remarking ‘Nature and sickness/ Debate it at their leisure’ (2:1: 72-4), earmarking another Baconian passage to come.

Alone with Helen, the Dowager Countess Roussillon discovers the secret of her love for Bertram and learns of her plan to travel to Paris in the hope of curing the king with the medical knowledge she has inherited from her father.

After the king has bid farewell to the young lords off to fight in the Italian wars, save Bertram, who longs to go with them but has been forbidden to leave, Lafeu enters with potentially life-changing news. On his knees before the king he informs him that ‘I have seen a medicine/That’s able to breathe life into a stone’ (2:1 72), an allusion to the philosopher’s stone, a legendary alchemical substance, also known as the elixir of life, for the rejuvenation of an ill or dying man, and the prolonging of life or achieving immortality, long linked with Lord Bacon’s secret Rosicrucian Brotherhood. On the subject of medicine and the prolonging of life Bacon wrote the full-length treatise The History of Life and Death With Observations Natural and Experimental for the Prolongation of Life first published in Latin in the same year as the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio where All’s Well That Ends Well first saw print, that was not translated into English until 1638.¹

The king asks Lafeu ‘What ‘her’ is this?’, to which he replies ‘Why, Doctor, She. My lord, there’s one arrived,/If you shall see her’ (2:1:78-9) and the king agrees to grant her an audience. It is in these scenes of the play points out Professor Farrington in his article ‘The Plot Of All’s Well That Ends Well: A Baconian Source’ involving an illness and a cure which (‘I can show, derived from two unpublished Latin writings of Bacon’) ‘the failure of the physicians is made the ground for an attack on the whole tradition of medicine. Not only its competence but its philosophy is impugned, and when the tables are turned on the doctors by the success of Helena’s cure, not only the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians but the great names of Galen, among the ancients, and Paracelsus among the “moderns”, are made objects of hilarious scorn.’²Helen enters and tells the king that her dear father left her secret medical remedies possessed of the power to cure his malignancy.

In his Cogitata et Visa (c. 1607) which Bacon privately circulated in manuscript (not translated or published until after his recorded death) he castigates the official medical teaching on diseases:

In the existing narrowness of men’s fortunes what is most deplorable for the present and ominous for the future is that men, against their own interests, try to protect their ignorance from its due ignominy, and to make do with the little they have. The Medical Practitioner, in addition to the particular reserves incidental to the practice of his art (on which he relies for the safeguarding of its reputation) summons also to his aid a comprehensive reserve as to the possibilities of his art as a whole. That is to say, he seeks to transform the present limitations of his art into a permanent reproach against nature and whatever his art cannot achieve he artfully declares to be impossible in nature.³

When the king’s cure is made known in All’s Well That Ends Well, the arrogance, limitations and ignorant delusions of the royal physicians becomes a source of ironical amusement and contempt.

Here, writes Professor Farrington, the mention of Galen and Paracelsus, confirms the provenance of the passage. For in another of Bacon’s manuscripts Temporis Partus Masculus (c. 1603), also not translated or published until after his recorded death, he delivered a scathing attack on the medical profession in which Galen and Paracelsus figure as the chief villains:⁴

Is that Galen I see there, narrow-minded Galen, who deserted the path of experience and took to spinning idle theories of causation? You there, Galen, are you the man who rescued from infamy the ignorance and idleness of the medical profession? Was it you who lodged the profession in a safe shelter by setting such limits to the art and duty of medicine as should suit their sloth? Did you take it upon you to pronounce this disease incurable, and that, cutting short the patient’s hopes and the physicians labours?...

…..there on the other side I see the alchemists arrayed, Paracelsus among them….

…Now it is the turn of Hippocrates to appear, that product and puffer of ancient wisdom. Who would not laugh to see Galen and Paracelsus running to take shelter under his authority...

...[who] brings out a few maxims which Galen and Paracelsus take for oracles and quarrel with one another for the honour of interpreting. But in truth the oracle is dumb.⁵

1. Gibson., nos. 147 & 153.

2. Benjamin Farrington, ‘The Plot Of All’s Well That Ends Well: A Baconian

Source’, Baconiana, Vol. LII, No. 169 (September 1969), p. 15.

3. Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy Of Francis Bacon: An Essay On Its

Development From 1603 To 1609 With New Translations Of Fundamental

Texts (Liverpool University Press, 1964), p. 73.

4. Benjamin Farrington, ‘The Plot Of All’s Well That Ends Well: A Baconian

Source’, Baconiana, Vol. LII, No. 169 (September 1969), pp. 17-8.

5. Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy Of Francis Bacon: An Essay On Its

Development From 1603 To 1609 With New Translations Of Fundamental

Texts (Liverpool University Press, 1964), pp. 64-5, 67-8.

Edited June 12, 2022 by A Phoenix

A Phoenix · June 13, 2022

FRANCIS BACON HIS SPEECHES AND PROSE WRITINGS ON THE

UNION OF ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND AND THE WINTER’S TALE.

In recent times Professor Donna Hamilton in ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Language of the Union, 1604-1610’ and Professor Christopher N. Warren in Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 in which he devotes a whole section to ‘The Tragicomic Law of Nations: The Winter’s Tale and the Union’ (by which they mean the proposed union of England and Scotland which dominated the political agenda from 1603 to 1610), explored the subject in the years leading up to the writing of The Winter’s Tale, in which these matters are encoded within it. At the very epicentre of the political process of the union between England and Scotland (reflected in the accounts of Hamilton and Warren) stood Bacon who through his parliamentary activity and speeches and his private and published writings did more than anyone else to help guide the matter to a satisfactory conclusion.

In 1603 Bacon published a treatise entitled A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of Kingdoms of England and Scotland in which he fully supported the idea and at the same time he was heavily involved in the parliamentary sessions from 1604 to 1610 wherein the divisive question of the union dominated the political agenda, with Bacon central to every aspect of it. In the autumn 1604 Bacon was working on the Anglo-Scottish committee and he also wrote Certain Articles or Considerations touching the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland in which he addressed in some detail the legal and political changes that were necessary for a successful union. In 1605 Bacon further promoted the union with a new ‘History of Britain’ project which he returned to again some years later. His most pressing arguments for the union were presented in a long speech in the House of Commons on 17 February 1607 ‘Concerning the Articles of Naturalization’, further augmented with his other related writings Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Great Britain and his essay Of the Greatness of Kingdoms included in the second edition of his Essays published in 1612. It was during the latter part of this period that Bacon wrote The Winter’s Tale dated by Shakespeare scholars somewhere between 1609 and 1611.

In his Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 Professor Warren points to how Bacon’s prose writings and The Winter’s Tale addressed the same themes:

In his work of tragicomic jurisprudence, A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of Kingdoms of England and Scotland, Bacon emphasized, like Polixenes and The Winter’s Tale more broadly, how time blurred the boundaries between nature and art. Works of art and works of nature each contributed to the kind of union Bacon advocated, as man’s art work of compositio would be perfected by the natural work (opus naturae) of time. Time, so central to the re-emerging harmony of The Winter’s Tale, was well understood to be both a legal phenomenon and a natural one.¹

In ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Language of the Union, 1604-1610’, Professor Donna Hamilton writes:

The rhetoric of the Union-one of the most significant controversies in the first decade of the reign of James-was a mystified language that represented many of the issues of the Union metaphorically.... The ability of later readers to access some of the more particular aspects of a text depends on their refamiliarizing themselves with the contexts in which the writing was embedded. ForThe Winter’s Tale, that task includes the language of the Union controversy by reading such documents as the speeches of King James, the Union pamphlets, the parliamentary debates, and various diaries and letters, including the papers of Francis Bacon.2

The language of naturalization recurs in The Winter’s Tale in the scenes that treat the fate of the infant Perdita, the child born to Hermione but rejected by Leontes. Convinced that Leontes will come to love the child he now considers a bastard if he will but look on it, Paulina describes Perdita’s situation and in the same language in which Bacon and others had spoken in defense of the naturalization of the post-nati….3

1. Christopher N. Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 (Oxford

University Press, 2015), pp. 96-126, at p. 117.

2. Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Language of the Union, 1604-1610’, Shakespeare Studies, 21 (1993), pp. 228-50, at p. 229.

3. Ibid., p. 239, see also, 232, 235, & 236.

A Phoenix · June 14, 2022

FRANCIS BACON HIS ESSAY OF GARDENS AND THE WINTER'S TALE.

In Act 4 Scene 4 of The Winter's Tale Perdita explicitly refers to the Proserpina myth which is presented in relation to a list of flowers which bears striking similarities with Bacon’s essay Of Gardens:¹

O Proserpina,

For the flowers now that, frighted, thou letst fall

From Dis’s wagon!-daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breadth…

[The Winter’s Tale: 4: 4: 116-22]

In his essay Of Gardens Bacon writes:

God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which buildings and palaces are but gross handyworks; and a man shall ever see that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection. I do hold it, in the royal ordering of gardens, there ought to be gardens for all the months of the year; in which severally things of beauty may be then in season. For December, and January, and the latter part of November, you must take such things as are green all winter: holy; ivy; bays; juniper; cypress-trees; yew; pine-apple trees; fir-trees, rosemary; lavender …and sweet marjoram, warm set…the French marigold…²

For you there’s Rosemary and Rue. These keep

Seeming and savour all the winter long.

A fair one to you. Well fit our ages

With flowers of winter.

[The Winter’s Tale: 4: 4: 74-5 & 78-79]

Here’s flower’s for you:

Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram

The marigold, that goes to bed wi’th’ sun,

And with him rises, weeping. These are flowers

Of middle summer.

[The Winter’s Tale: 4: 4: 103-7]

In his essay Of Gardens:

'In April follow, the double white violet; the wall-flower; the stock-gilliflower; the cowslip; flower-de-lices…'³

Now, my fair’st friend,

I would have some flowers o’th’ spring that might

Become your time of day…

bold oxlips, and

The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,

The flower-de-luce being one.

[The Winter’s Tale: 4: 4: 112-14 & 125-27]

In his essay Of Gardens:

In May and June come pinks of all sorts, specially the blush-pink; roses of all kinds, except the musk, which comes later; honey-suckles; strawberries; bugloss; columbine; the French marigold; flos Africanus; cherry-tree in fruit; ribes; figs in fruit; rasps; vine-flowers; lavender in flowers; the sweet satyrian, with the white flower; herba muscaria; lilium convallium; the apple-tree in blossom.⁴

Sir, the year growing ancient

Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth

Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’th’ season

Are our carnations and streaked gullyvors,

Which some call nature’s bastards. Of that kind

Out rustics garden’s barren, and I care not

To get slips of them.

[The Winter’s Tale: 4: 4: 79-84]

This passage is discussed by Professor Pitcher in his modern Shakespeare Arden edition of The Winter’s Tale in that extra knowing reserved way of his which reminds us of Bacon’s classic method of delivery of simultaneously concealing and revealing in a way readily discerned and understood by the initiated:

Polixenes asks why she won’t plant gillyflowers and she replies that ‘piedness’-streaks of colours on white petals-shows they are not entirely natural. Art (in this case cross-fertilization) has produced an adulterated hybrid with Nature. Polixenes responds with the old explanation that Nature is made better by this art, and that art is only Nature anyway because everything comes from Nature. By grafting cuttings on to uncultivated trees, gardeners fertilize their barks with higher-grade strains. Grafting strengthens plants and flowers, thus changing Nature for the better. There is nothing wrong in this: ‘make your garden rich in gillyvors, he tells, Perdita, and ‘do not call them bastards’.

…just around the date of The Winter’s Tale, the art and Nature debate had come alive again, and it seemed possible that art might give back to Nature some of its former fecundity. Francis Bacon argued that experimental science, still a fledgling, might eventually do this. Nature, because of the Fall, could only deliver a single harvest a year, but art-by which Bacon meant natural science, in particular manipulating seeds-might discover how to grow two or three crops annually. So too with human bodies: new drugs might alleviate suffering and infirmity, and surgical experiments show what medicine could do for ‘the body of man’.⁵

1. Spedding, Works, VI, p. 486n1:

'The scene in the “Winter’s Tale,” where Perdita presents the guests with flowers suited

to their ages, has some expressions which, if this Essay had been contained in the

earlier edition, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it. As I

am not aware that the resemblance has been observed, I will quote the passage to

which I allude in connexion with those which remind me of them.'

2. Spedding, Works, VI, pp. 485-7: Mary Augusta Scott, ed., The Essays Of

Francis Bacon (New York: Charles Scribner, 1908), p. 211-13..

3. Spedding, Works, VI, p. 486; Mary Augusta Scott, ed., The Essays Of

Francis Bacon (New York: Charles Scribner, 1908), pp. 212-13.

4. Spedding, Works, VI, p. 487; Mary Augusta Scott, ed., The Essays Of

Francis Bacon (New York: Charles Scribner, 1908), p. 215. See also Robert M.

Theobald, Shakespeare Studies In Baconian Light (London: Sampson Low,

Marston & Co., Lt, 1901), pp. 181-3 and Edward George Harman, The

“Impersonality” Of Shakesepeare (New York: Haskell House Publishers Lrd.,

1971), pp. 181-3.

5. John Pitcher, ed., The Winter’s Tale (Arden Shakespeare, 2010), pp. 55-6. See

also Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 275.

Allisnum2er · June 14, 2022

Good evening A Phoenix, each of your posts is a Lotus Flower ! Thank you for the stunning Bouquet that you offer us ! ❤️

Lawrence Gerald · June 14, 2022

On 6/13/2022 at 9:46 AM, A Phoenix said:

FRANCIS BACON HIS SPEECHES AND PROSE WRITINGS ON THE

UNION OF ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND AND THE WINTER’S TALE.

In recent times Professor Donna Hamilton in ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Language of the Union, 1604-1610’ and Professor Christopher N. Warren in Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 in which he devotes a whole section to ‘The Tragicomic Law of Nations: The Winter’s Tale and the Union’ (by which they mean the proposed union of England and Scotland which dominated the political agenda from 1603 to 1610), explored the subject in the years leading up to the writing of The Winter’s Tale, in which these matters are encoded within it. At the very epicentre of the political process of the union between England and Scotland (reflected in the accounts of Hamilton and Warren) stood Bacon who through his parliamentary activity and speeches and his private and published writings did more than anyone else to help guide the matter to a satisfactory conclusion.

In 1603 Bacon published a treatise entitled A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of Kingdoms of England and Scotland in which he fully supported the idea and at the same time he was heavily involved in the parliamentary sessions from 1604 to 1610 wherein the divisive question of the union dominated the political agenda, with Bacon central to every aspect of it. In the autumn 1604 Bacon was working on the Anglo-Scottish committee and he also wrote Certain Articles or Considerations touching the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland in which he addressed in some detail the legal and political changes that were necessary for a successful union. In 1605 Bacon further promoted the union with a new ‘History of Britain’ project which he returned to again some years later. His most pressing arguments for the union were presented in a long speech in the House of Commons on 17 February 1607 ‘Concerning the Articles of Naturalization’, further augmented with his other related writings Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Great Britain and his essay Of the Greatness of Kingdoms included in the second edition of his Essays published in 1612. It was during the latter part of this period that Bacon wrote The Winter’s Tale dated by Shakespeare scholars somewhere between 1609 and 1611.

In his Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 Professor Warren points to how Bacon’s prose writings and The Winter’s Tale addressed the same themes:

In his work of tragicomic jurisprudence, A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of Kingdoms of England and Scotland, Bacon emphasized, like Polixenes and The Winter’s Tale more broadly, how time blurred the boundaries between nature and art. Works of art and works of nature each contributed to the kind of union Bacon advocated, as man’s art work of compositio would be perfected by the natural work (opus naturae) of time. Time, so central to the re-emerging harmony of The Winter’s Tale, was well understood to be both a legal phenomenon and a natural one.¹

In ‘The Winter’s Tale and the Language of the Union, 1604-1610’, Professor Donna Hamilton writes:

The rhetoric of the Union-one of the most significant controversies in the first decade of the reign of James-was a mystified language that represented many of the issues of the Union metaphorically.... The ability of later readers to access some of the more particular aspects of a text depends on their refamiliarizing themselves with the contexts in which the writing was embedded. ForThe Winter’s Tale, that task includes the language of the Union controversy by reading such documents as the speeches of King James, the Union pamphlets, the parliamentary debates, and various diaries and letters, including the papers of Francis Bacon.2

The language of naturalization recurs in The Winter’s Tale in the scenes that treat the fate of the infant Perdita, the child born to Hermione but rejected by Leontes. Convinced that Leontes will come to love the child he now considers a bastard if he will but look on it, Paulina describes Perdita’s situation and in the same language in which Bacon and others had spoken in defense of the naturalization of the post-nati….3

1. Christopher N. Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations 1580-1680 (Oxford

         University Press, 2015), pp. 96-126, at p. 117.

2. Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The Winter’s Tale  and the Language of the Union, 1604-1610’, Shakespeare Studies, 21 (1993), pp. 228-50, at p. 229.

3. Ibid., p. 239, see also, 232, 235, & 236.

Lawrence Gerald · June 14, 2022

So Bacon is brilliantly using metaphor as a device in Winters Tale with the subject of naturalization and the fate of infants.

A Phoenix · August 23, 2022

21 POINTS OF EVIDENCE CONFIRMING FRANCIS BACON’S AUTHORSHIP OF THE PLAYS OF HENRY IV AND THE SO-CALLED DERING MANUSCRIPT THE EARLIEST KNOWN MANUSCRIPT OF A SHAKESPEARE PLAY

The Henry IV plays are some of the most Baconian in the whole of the Shakespeare canon and are replete with references and allusions not only to their author Francis Bacon but to several members of the Bacon family and his St Albans home at Gorhambury, the Bacon family estate.

1] Our supreme philosopher-poet and dramatist hilariously sends himself up in the character Francis, the drawer, who serves drinks at the Boar’s Head and in a similar manner he uses his own Christian name for the effeminate character Francis Feeble, one of the men enlisted to fight for King Henry IV.

2] He alludes to his father Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon in the form of Saint Nicholas in reference to a case presided over by the great Elizabethan Lord Keeper. In Act 2 Scene 1 two Carriers engage in some lively banter in a scene which contains allusions to his father Sir Nicholas Bacon. The First Carrier points the way by cueing the allusions to come with ‘be hanged, and come away’ (2:1:22) the first of half-a-dozen uses of ‘hang’ and ‘hangman’ as the scene unfolds. Gadshill says ‘Sirrah, if they meet not with Saint Nicholas’s clerks, I’ll give thee his neck’ (2:1:61-2). To which the Chamberlain replies ‘No, I’ll none of it: I pray thee keep that for the hangman, for I know thou worshippest Saint Nicholas as truly as a man of falsehood may’ (2:1:63-5). The passage alludes to a story later recalled by Francis Bacon in his Apophthegms relating to a case presided over by his father the great Elizabethan Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon:

Sir Nicholas Bacon, being appointed a Judge for the Northern Circuit, and having brought his Trials that came before him to such a passe, as the passing of sentence on Malefactors, he was by one of the malefactors mightily importuned for to save his life, which when nothing that he had said did avail, he at length desired his mercy on the account of kindred: Prethee said my Lord Judge, how came that in? Why, if it please you my Lord, your name is Bacon, and mine is Hog, and in all ages Hog and Bacon have been so near kindred that they are not to be separated. I but replied Judge Bacon, you and I cannot be kindred, except you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged.

[Michael Kiernan, ed., The Historie of the raigne of King Henry the seventh and other works of the 1620s (Oxford Clarendon Press, 2012), pp. 651-2]

The above episode relating to Sir Nicholas Bacon is also succinctly alluded to in The Merry Wives of Windsor when Mistress Quickly a character modelled upon Lady Bacon’s younger Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell exclaims:

‘Hang-hog’ is Latin for bacon, I warrant you.

[The Merry Wives of Windsor: 4: 1: 43]

3] Much of the action in the play takes place at the Boar’s Head Inn-a boar is a wild pig from which is derived bacon-a convenient device for suggesting the Bacon’s Head Inn.

4] The inspiration for the character of Mistress Quickly hostess of the Boar’s Head Inn came in the shape of Lady Elizabeth Hoby Cooke Russell (the younger sister of Bacon’s mother Lady Anne Cooke Bacon), as pointed to by the orthodox Shakespeare scholar Professor Alice-Lyle Scoufos:

It is tempting to see in this historical episode a Fang and Snare “exion” with Falstaff and Mistress Quickly heading towards litigation. Could Lady Russell’s overbearing mannerisms, her pretentious intellection, her colourful and eclectic vocabulary have had an important bearing on the creation of that wondrous and voluble character Mistress Quickly?

[Alice-Lyle Scoufos, Shakespeare’s Typological Satire A Study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979), p. 245]

5] One of Falstaff’s motley crew Sir John Russell was named after Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell’s husband John, Lord Russell (Sir John Russell) whose marriage Bacon most likely attended and with whom he was in regular contact for at least a decade.

Bacon’s uncle John, Lord Russell was the son of Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford, part of a Bedford dynasty whose private and political relationship with the Bacons stretched back to the reign of Henry VIII. Before the end of the Henrician reign Nicholas Bacon was mixing in the Protestant private and social circles of John, Lord Russell (future first Earl of Bedford), and it was probably through his political patron Lord Russell that Nicholas Bacon was elected as MP for Dartmouth, Devon in 1545. Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford also a close ally of Sir Nicholas Bacon with whom he sat on the Privy Council, was godfather to Francis Bacon, for whom he secured the seats of Bossiney, Cornwall in 1581 and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in 1584.

6] The little known brother of the Cooke sisters Lady Anne Cooke Bacon and Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, William Cooke had a son known as William Cooke of Highnam Court in Gloucestershire, whose name served for the cook William Cook at the Gloucester home of Robert Shallow, Justice of the Peace.

In Act 5 Scene I in 2 Henry IV on his way back from his campaign Sir John Falstaff and Bardolph arrive at Robert Shallow’s house, a Gloucestershire Justice of the Peace, who with the help of his steward Davy prepares to entertain Falstaff and Bardolph with a dinner. When Shallow refers to his cook he is called William Cook.

SHALLOW Davy, Davy, Davy; let me see, Davy; let me

see. William Cook-bid him come hither.-Sir John,

you shall not be excused.

DAVY Marry, sir, thus: those precepts cannot be served.

And again, sir: shall we sow the headland with wheat?

SHALLOW With red wheat, Davy. But for William Cook;

are there no young pigeons?

DAVY Yes, sir. Here is now the smith’s note for shoeing

and plough-irons.

SHALLOW Let it be cast and paid. Sir John, you shall not

be excused.

DAVY Sir, a new link to the bucket must needs be had;

and, sir, do you mean to stop any of William’s wages,

about the sack he lost at Hinkley Fair?

SHALLOW A shall answer it. Some pigeons, Davy, a couple

of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty

little tiny kickshaws, tell William Cook.

[2 Henry IV: 5:1:1-24]

7] Repeated play or punning on the name BACON.

In I Henry IV one of the Carriers says:

I have a gammon of bacon and two races of ginger to be delivered as far as Charing Cross.

``I Henry IV: 2:1:25]

As arranged Falstaff, Prince Hal, Poins, aided by Gadshill, Harvey and Russell gather to attack the hapless travellers and relieve them of their bounty. As the robbery begins to unfold Falstaff cries out:

Strike, down with them, cut the villains’ throats! Ah, whoreson caterpillars, bacon-fed knaves! They hate us youth. Down with them, fleece them!

[I Henry IV: 2:2:81-3]

And again:

Hang ye, gorbellied knaves, are ye undone? No, ye fat chuffs; I would your store were here. On, bacons, on! What, ye knaves! Young men must live. You are grand-jurors, are ye? We’ll jure ye, faith.

[I Henry IV: 2 :2: 86-89]

8] Needless references to St Albans location of the Bacon family country seat at Gorhambury:

In I Henry IV Falstaff and Sir John Russell with their company march through the Midlands towards Shrewsbury. The scene is taken up with a long speech by Falstaff complaining that his bedraggled company have but a shirt and half between them containing a needless reference to St Albans:

There’s not a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half-shirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over the shoulders like a herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Albans, or the red-nose innkeeper of Daventry. But that’s all one; they’ll find linen enough on every hedge.

[I Henry IV: 4: 2: 42-8]

What appears to be another seemingly superfluous reference to St Albans is found in 2 Henry IV:

I warrant you, as common as the way between Saint Albans and London.

[2 Henry IV: 2: 2: 159-60]

9] Following the robbery scene Hal and Poins return to the Boar’s Head Inn (Bacon’s Head Inn). Hal is fraternising with the bar staff and he and Poins perplex the drawer Francis before the other robbers arrive. In his speech Prince Hal sets the scene:

Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by their christen names, as ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’, and ‘Francis’.

[I Henry IV: 2 : 5: 6-8]

To while away the hour Hal invites Poins to play a witty joke on the barman Francis to confuse and disorientate him. In the First Folio in the Histories section on page 56 (Fr. Bacon in simple cipher) the following exchange between Hal, Poins and the barman Francis is very carefully and deliberately arranged in a single column for a very specific purpose, where the Christian name of Francis is repeated 33 times, the number representing Bacon in simple cipher.

[For a facsimile see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), p. 19]

10] In I Henry IV Bacon even thoughtfully left a couple of his secret signatures in the form of an acrostic F BACO and anagram F BACON:

And for this cause a-while we must neglect

Our holy purpose to Ierusalem.

Cosin, on Wednesday next, our Councell we will hold

At Windsor, and so informe the Lords:

But come your selfe with speed to vs againe,

For more is to be said, and to be done,

[Shakespeares Comedies Histories, & Tragedies (London: printed by Isaac Jaggard,and Edward Blount, 1623), p. 49; William Stone Booth, Subtle Shining Secrecies (Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1925), p. 179]

11] The title pages of the 1598 quarto edition of I Henry IV and 1600 quarto edition of 2 Henry IV contain numerous Baconian-Rosicrucian ciphers.

[For these deciphered title pages see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), pp. 25-6. For a discussion of Bacon’s cipher systems see Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning (London: printed for Henrie Tomes, 1605), P4v and Francis Bacon, Opera Francisci Baronis De Vervlamio, Vice-Comitis Sancti Albani; Tomvs Primvs: Qui continet De Dignitate & Augmentis Scientiarum Libros IX. Ad Regem Svvm (Londini, In Officina Ioannis Haviland, 1623), pp. 277-83. The simple cipher system is illustrated by Gustavus Selenus in Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae Libri IX (Luneberg, 1624), Book 4 Chapter 6 page 141. See A. Phoenix, The Fraudulent Friedmans: The Bacon Ciphers in the Shakespeare Works (2022), pp. 1-340 (81 illustrations; 756 references)]

12] Above the first page of the 1600 quarto edition of 2 Henry IV appears the Baconian-Rosicrucian AA headpiece and the same headpiece appears over the first page of the 1604 edition of I Henry IV. Across the top of the page headed ‘Actor’s Names’ in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio for 2 Henry IV appears another Baconian-Rosicrucian AA headpiece which is of a different design.

[For facsimiles of these see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), pp. 27-9]

13] Resemblances, Correspondences and Parallels between Bacon’s acknowledged writings and Henry IV.

There are lines, sentences and passages identical in thought and similar in expression, providing resemblances, correspondences and parallels between Henry IV and around twenty of Bacon’s acknowledged writings, among them: unpublished manuscripts, The Promus of Formularies and Elegances (1594-6) and The Northumberland Manuscript (1596); in the unpublished private correspondence A Letter of Advice to Fulke Greville (1595-6); the unpublished political tracts Observation upon a Libel (1592) and A True Report of the Detestable Treason intended by Dr Roderigo Lopez (1594); as well as the unpublished dramatic entertainment Of Love and Self-Love (1595), all written before Henry IV. Likewise in his printed writings Meditationes Sacre (1597), The Advancement of Learning (1605), The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), Of Beauty, Of Empire and Of Seditions and Troubles (1612), Arguments of Law (1616), Novum Organum (1620), History of King Henry VII (1622), De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Sylva Sylvarum (1626) and New Atlantis (1626).

[See A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), pp. 93-103]

14] Both Professor Hardin Craig and John Baker have repeatedly and emphatically demonstrated that the so-called Dering Manuscript pre-dates the earliest 1598 quarto edition of I Henry IV, and that it is a manuscript of Shakespeare’s play when it was originally one and not two plays with the latter stating that the Dering MS is an authorial fair copy of Henry IV.

[Hardin Craig, ‘The Dering Version Of Shakespeare’s Henry IV’, Philological Quarterly, 35 (April 1956), pp. 218-9; Hardin Craig, A New Look at Shakespeare’s Quartos (Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 43-52, 112-17; John Baker ‘Found: Shakespeare’s Manuscript of Henry IV’, pp. 1-46]

15] Professor Hardin Craig and John Baker further correctly observed that the Dering manuscript is written in a normal late Elizabethan secretary hand with no obvious Jacobean inter-mixtures. In fact the hand of Dering is nowhere present in the so-called Dering manuscript a very simple fact which at a stroke completely and incontrovertibly exposes and demolishes this whole charade and irrefutably demolishes a fraud or illusion (secretly known to some for more than a century) once and for all.

[For facsimiles of Dering’s known handwriting and that in the so-called Dering MS see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), pp. 64-8]

16] In the 1590s Francis and Anthony Bacon set up a literary workshop employing writers, translators, scribes, and copyists for the distribution of private manuscripts, plays, masques and other dramatic entertainments from where the so-called Dering manuscript & Bacon’s Northumberland Manuscript originated.

17] Bacon’s collection of MSS otherwise known as The Northumberland Manuscript, which once contained his Shakespeare plays Richard II and Richard III, dates from around 1596-7. On its outside cover written in a contemporary hand there are more than a dozen examples of various forms of the name Bacon or Francis Bacon and his literary mask Shakespeare or William Shakespeare. Above the entry for the Shakespeare play Richard II is written ‘By Mr. ffrauncis William Shakespeare’ and where the name ‘William Shakespeare’ has been written further down the page the word ‘Your’ is written twice across it, so it thus reads ‘Your William Shakespeare’, by one of the scribes he employed. The writing on the outer cover of the manuscript is chiefly in one hand with occasional words in another, and a few words written at angle, possibly by a third. One of the hands was undoubtedly Bacon who was also responsible for the monogram signature ‘W.S.’ at the top right hand corner.

[James Spedding, ed., A Conference Of Pleasure, Composed For Some Festive Occasion About The Year 1592 By Francis Bacon. Edited, From A Manuscript Belonging To The Duke of Northumberland (London: printed by Whittingham & Wilkins, 1870), pp. xxi-xxv & Frank J. Burgoyne, ed., Collotype Facsimile & Type Transcript Of An Elizabethan Manuscript Preserved at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), pp. ix-xxiv. For a facsimile of the outer cover see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), p. 69]

18] The main content of Bacon’s Northumberland MSS is written in two or more hands and as with the so-called Dering manuscript one of these works within it known as Leicester’s Commonwealth is written by two different scribes whose identity remains unknown. On examining the facsimiles it appears that the hand of one of the scribes who copied out Leicester’s Commonwealth in the Northumberland MSS was responsible for copying out the so-called Dering MS from the second page onwards.

[For facsimiles of the handwriting in Leicester’s Commonwealth see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), pp. 70-1]

19] The so-called corrector’s hand in the so-called Dering manuscript is Bacon’s own cramped hand as one would expect from the author of the play.

20] The so-called Dering manuscript is a single-five act Shakespeare play ofHenry IV and is earlier than the first printed quarto of The Historie of Henrie the fourth issued in 1598 and the quarto edition of The Second part of Henrie the fourth printed in 1600. The MS represents the play as Bacon originally composed it when it was one play and not two before developing his original version into two separate parts. We can moreover be reasonably precise regarding the date of the manuscript. It is widely agreed Henry IV followed closely upon Richard II as not only is Henry IV next chronologically its predecessor Richard II clearly points to a sequel. The earlier Richard II is believed to date to around late 1595 or early 1596 and Henry IV was probably written in manuscript sometime in 1596. The unique and earliest known extant manuscript of a Shakespeare play-the holy grail of Shakespeare scholarship.

21] The two page manuscript relating to Henry IV written in the hand of Francis Bacon.

In 1988 a unique manuscript dating from around four hundred years ago briefly emerged from the shadows. It comprises a single leaf of paper which has on its recto and verso fifty-seven lines of blank verse dialogue between three characters, a Tapster, and two thieves, in a scene similar to the robbery scene at Gads Hill in I Henry IV.

In July 1992 the world-renowned Sotheby’s offered the Tapster Manuscript for sale which their experts described as ‘a manuscript of the same date and bearing a striking similarity to a scene from Shakespeare’s “Henry IV Part 1”. In placing a sample of the handwriting in the Tapster Manuscript alongside a letter in Bacon’s hand from 1595 its advertisement states:

Two graphologists have confirmed that both the play scene fragment and the letter are probably written by the same person.

[For a facsimile of the Sotheby Advertisement see A. Phoenix, ‘Francis Bacon and the so-called Dering Manuscript of Henry IV’, (2022), p. 91]

The Baconian scholar Francis Carr, Director of the Shakespeare Information Institute, submitted the Tapster Manuscript for close examination to the internationally renowned forensic handwriting expert Maureen Ward Gandy who was accredited by the Law Society and regularly used by both US and UK Law Enforcement and Government Agencies. In her detailed twenty-five page report Gandy compared the writing in the Tapster Manuscript to some thirty seventeenth century writers and the known handwriting of Bacon. She concluded it was of ‘high probability’ that the handwriting in this Henry IV fragment was written in the hand of Francis Bacon.

[Maureen Ward Gandy, ‘Comparison of Elizabethan Writing to Establish Common Authorship’, 24 July 1992, pp. 1-20 and afterwards reviewed for Lawrence Gerald (www.sirbacon.org) 2 July 1992]

Edited August 24, 2022 by A Phoenix

Light-of-Truth · August 23, 2022

Everything you present A. Phoenix makes sense and fits.

For me, 20 years ago I started to actually find some cool ciphers. The first few years were exciting for me, but I was chasing windmills. I stuck with it, for whatever reason. Passion, enjoyment, but on a level Knowing I was knocking on the door with total confidence it would open. Hard to explain.

I had a used modern version of the Shakespeare works back then, and I'd say pure luck landed me in the Henry IV plays. I think I did poke around in King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest I did read and found my treasure hunter rhythm early on.

But Henry IV, both 1 and 2, seemed to produce wild results at every turn. Page numbers, line counts, word/letter counts, Simple, Reverse, Short, and Kaye cipher counts, curious suggestive word play with Bacon, Francis, other terms that set me off like "secret" this and that.

I saw Bacon, of course, but Dee as well. Rose Cross is huge as well. Bacon's life was woven into Henry IV! Overt, and covert, yet everywhere!

These two Henry IV plays, in any form from any year, may be the "Introduction" to Baconian cipher treasure hunting. That may sound odd, but believe me, I am not joking.

Were the two Henry IV plays developed when Bacon's good pens learned how to do what they did with and for Bacon? Easy enough for amateurs like me to discover hundreds of years later? I felt from the beginning I was in the classroom with Bacon as the instructor teaching all of us how to weave certain numbers into a play and how to leave clues for we to find them generations later. Now A. Phoenix may be putting a year and time frame on that fabulous work. And I Iove it! At the beginning of the entire Shakespeare game!!

And the Folger Bacon Rosicrucian Shakespeare Library may be secretly and proudly holding the collection of manuscripts of Shakespeare's works with Bacon's handwriting that we all have dreamed of. I thought they were buried in Williamsburg. But now I think maybe they were for a couple hundred years and ended up in the FBR Library in front of the United States Capital when Williamsburg was dug up in the early 1900's by those who had the resources to do so. They were connected to and with the Mr. Folger.

Believe me, I am stubborn, when I make up my mind is rarely nor easily changed. I'm not a good "Baconian Method" kind of guy. But right now I am leaning towards that Bacon's Vault is at the Library, safe and secure, to be revealed one day.

One day we'll all celebrate the revelations flowing out of the B'Hive today! This recent episode is a biggie. I hope to live to see it recognized someday!!

Edited August 23, 2022 by Light-of-Truth

Secret Baconian clues in the Shakespeare Plays

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