Christina Waldman’s book, Francis Bacon’s Hidden Hand in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: A Study in Law, Rhetoric and Authorship is being published in July 2018 by Algora Publishing with a foreword by Simon Miles. The book explores the function and identity of Bellario, the old Italian jurist whose hand guides Portia’s courtroom performance, although he never actually “appears” in the play. Is Bellario’s identity linked to Francis Bacon, as Mark Edwin Andrews proposed in Law v. Equity in The Merchant of Venice: a Legalization of Act IV, Scene I (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1965)?
Appendix IV of the book includes Maureen Ward-Gandy’s 1992 forensic handwriting comparison of the handwriting in a fragment of manuscript, found in binder’s waste, which is clearly a scene variation of The Play of Henry IV, Part One, with the handwriting of Francis Bacon and other contemporaries. In her report, Ms. Ward-Gandy concluded that the handwriting in that drafted scene matched that of Francis Bacon.
Hidden Hand is available from the publisher, https://www.algora.com/545/book/details.html, Amazon, and other sources.
Ms. Waldman would also like to draw your attention to Mather Walker’s essay, “The Symbolic AA, Secrets of the Shakespeare First Folio.” Under the heading “The Secret of Old Eleusis: Plucking Out the Heart of His Mystery,” and under the picture from the Rosicrucian Digest 2000 (about 7/8 down on the scroll bar), there is an acrostic in the opening lines of the poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” written in 1594. The first letters spell FBLAWAO, with the word “law” spelled in the middle. She had not seen this most likely explanation of the name “Bellario” until the book was already published, but has no doubt that the timing is exactly as it should be.
