Physical description

Hard cover book. Bacon is Shakespeare
Author: Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence
Author: Francis Bacon
Author: William Shakespeare
Editor: Francis Bridges Bickley
Publisher: Gay & Hancock Ltd
Date: 1910
Further Information: Red Cloth hardcover with lettering to spine in gilt. The brown spine has a Library label with an inscription.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with the typed text PAT 822.3 DUR
Paste down front end paper has a sticker from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute and Free Library covered by a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute
Front loose end paper has handwriting in black ink " Presented to the Warrnambool Mechanics Institute Sept. 131910 by the writer

Summary

The book argues that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were really written by Francis Bacon, because their breadth of knowledge could not belong to an uneducated man from Stratford-upon-Avon. The chapters cover the Stratford monument, bust and portrait, and the so-called ‘signatures’. The work’s best-known argument is that the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love’s Labour’s Lost is an anagram of a Latin sentence naming Bacon’s ‘offspring’. The book also claims that the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare is a cryptographic picture. The second half is a reprint of Bacon’s Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, a notebook of phrases that Baconians treat as a source of parallels with the plays. The Promus is a set of Bacon’s private notes from around 1594.