4/23/2020 I mentioned earlier that it is Shakespeare Day here on The Farm. Our Guide to Daily Readings asserts that today in the year 1564 William Shakespeare was born (some little controversy about this), and today in the year 1616 he died. What a world this opens up for blogging today!

[Aside. Here on The Farm we need a world to open up. An additional 0.64″ of rain fell over night bringing the total for the last 11 days to 6.47″. Mr. Big Food cannot get out to cut the range– or anything else for that matter. And he is behind in calculating his students’ class participation scores– a most tedious task– because he spent the better part of yesterday on the class discussion board as his students were trying to improve their class participation scores.]

The proper place to begin Shakespeare Day here on The Farm is with Francis Bacon. What follows is a repost from February 8, 2015. As I concluded at the time,

I’ll caution you to beware. You can get sucked into this Bacon is Shakespeare thing. It can affect your life. Someone can say “Shakespeare” and you can let him run on & on about Shakespeare and then you can say, “I have only one thing to say about that: Bacon is Shakespeare” and then you have blown your cover.

Or have you?

Five years later, I stand by that. It’s as if you can divide the world into two neat camps. Those who know what the hell you are talking about and those who don’t. Either way it’s fun stuff.

Stay tuned for more actual Shakespeare and Shakespeare-related stuff throughout the day.

Originally posted February 8, 2015

Francis Bacon is William Shakespeare.

The claim, more precisely, is that William Shakespeare did not write “the plays known as Shakespeare’s” which

are at the present time universally acknowledged to be the “Greatest birth of time,” the grandest production of the human mind. [Written by] the greatest genius of all the ages.

William Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Bacon did. Bacon is Shakespeare.

This, my Friends, is the reason to collect and peruse crappy old books: Books reveal the truth. I would never have known I’d been lied to all of these years had I not come across Bacon is Shakespeare by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bart. (1910– a first edition).

Before I briefly survey the evidence for this claim, I feel compelled to let you know that not everyone is convinced. Remember the other day when posted a little photograph of something E.T. Sykes wrote inside the cover of a crappy old book and I said, “You will want to keep this in mind going forward?”

This is the poorest excuse for an argument I’ve ever read. E.T.S.

E.T. Sykes wrote that inside Bacon is Shakespeare. But don’t take E.T.’s word for it. Decide for yourself if Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence “draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument” (Shakespeare Bacon, Love’s Labour’s Lost V, i, 18).

Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence’s book is a real treasure. Truth be told, though, he lost me around Chapter X and the cryptic discussion of “Honorificabilitudinitatibus” a supposedly nonsensical word in Love’s Labour’s Lost. If you do the math on this word– I said it was cryptic– and allow that “Fra” stands for “Francis”– you can discover all sorts of interesting things. Most interesting of course is that Bacon is Shakespeare.

Before I hit Chapter X I was convinced that Bacon is Shakespeare. The man William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon A) cannot even write his own name as evidenced in his last will and testament signed by his lawyer; 2) did not travel and therefore could not possibly have known Venice; iii) was an actor for crying out loud! How does an actor know court manners and such?  d) was an actor for crying out loud! How does an actor know the law? 5) is not the man in the monument!

This is the funerary monument to William Shakespeare (1564-1616) at Stratford-on-Avon as depicted by William Dugdale’s drawing in Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656.

This is the monument today. They are not the same.

Between the cryptic ciphers and the monuments Sir Edwin presents much much more evidence that Bacon is Shakespeare. I’m convinced. But it is Bacon month so I’m sort of obligated to believe Bacon is Shakespeare this month.

One final note. Though I’ve linked to a few things regarding the Baconians’ arguments, I’ll caution you to beware. You can get sucked into this Bacon is Shakespeare thing. It can affect your life. Someone can say “Shakespeare” and you can let him run on & on about Shakespeare and then you can say, “I have only one thing to say about that: Bacon is Shakespeare” and then you have blown your cover.

Or have you… ?