Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Seventy-two Coincidences between Bacon and Shakespeare 1

1. Shakespeare eulogizes the people of Kent County (and of no other) in England, the home of the Bacon family.
2. Both authors were aristocrats.
3. Both were educated at the same university.
4. Each was extraordinarily self-confident that his own writings were immortal.
5. Shakespeare’s vocabulary is the largest ever attained by any individual in any language or in any age of the world. Bacon’s is equally remarkable for its extent and richness.
6. Both seem to have acquired all knowledge then existing, Bacon having made this one of his professed aims in life.
7. Both considered themselves old men before they were thirty-seven or thereabouts.
8. Both were great orators.
9. Both were profound lawyers.
10. The scenes of the early plays are those where Bacon had spent his youth.
11. Both had a colloquial use of the French language.
12. Immediately before the historical drama of Henry VI., was written, Bacon visited the English battle-grounds, described in that drama, in France.
13. Bacon had special opportunities, as an attaché of the English embassy in France, to investigate the career of Joan of Arc. The author of the drama of Henry VI., must actually have investigated it.
14. Both wrote sonnets.
15. Florio published a sonnet the author of which he described as (a) his friend; (b) a person of high rank; and (c) a concealed poet. Bacon answers to this description in every particular.
16. In the last days of Elizabeth, both authors feared the rising democracy.
17. Both were familiar with the private rules that govern the Inner Temple in London, an institution for lawyers to which the public were not admitted.
18. Both favoured the use of commonplace books, the dramatist advocating it at the time when Bacon was actually keeping one.
19. Both names were inscribed in the handwriting of the time on one of Bacon’s private portfolios, [Northumberland MSS.] the latter containing, inter alia, some of Bacon’s manuscripts and among them two of the Shakespeare plays.
20. The first of the Shakespeare poems to be published was dedicated to one of Bacon’s most intimate friends, [Southampton,] a nobleman whose consent (for the want of which a play-actor would have lost his ears) had not been previously obtained.
21. This poem was written before the reputed poet’s arrival in London, with no possible education beyond that afforded by the Stratford grammar school. And yet, as agreed by all scholars who have examined the subject, it bears every mark of collegiate elegance and culture.
22. Both were familiar with the art of play-acting, one laying down rules for it in Hamlet, and the other superintending exercises of the kind as a recognized proficient therein among the young lawyers of Gray’s Inn.
23. Shakespeare made a practice of using the plots of others for his dramas, and Bacon, in writing history, acknowledged his dependence on authors who had preceded him and given him the main facts. The method which one acted upon the other explained and defended.
24. Bacon’s brother [Anthony] was residing in Navarre and in constant correspondence with Francis at the time when the comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost was written. The scene of the play is laid at the court of Navarre. It deals with the mode of study then in vogue in the world, the one that caused Bacon’s disgust at Cambridge and induced him to leave the University without completing his course or taking his degree.
25. Bacon was an undergraduate at Cambridge at the time when Dr. Caius was conducting himself in so exciting a manner among the students there. The doctor is ridiculed under his own name in the Merry Wives of Windsor.
26. One of the historical plays of Shakespeare was devoted to the reign of King John, but no mention is made in it of the Magna Charta, the great event of the reign. Bacon disapproved of every effort of the people to gain a part in the government.
27. The author of the plays gives in the drama of Henry VI., an erroneous view of the character of the Duke of Gloucester. It is the view that was taken of it at the Duke’s home at St. Albans. Bacon lived at St. Albans.
28. Bacon became debtor to a Jew and was arrested in the street for non-payment under circumstances designed to disgrace him. It was but a month or two afterward that Shakespeare produced the Merchant of Venice with Shylock as its principal character.
29. The author of Troilus and Cressida as intimated in the preface to it, was not only a member of the nobility, but also a popular lawyer. Bacon was both a nobleman and a lawyer.
30. Both of our authors had great admiration for the character of Julius Cæsar, one calling him “the noblest man that ever lived,” and the other, “the worthiest man that ever lived.” Shakespeare wrote a drama and Bacon a biography of him. Both were impressed with Cæsar’s work on the calendar.
31. In Shakespeare’s series of historical dramas the reign of Henry VII., is strangely omitted; but Bacon wrote a history of it in prose, beginning at the exact point where Shakespeare left off in the preceding drama, and leaving off at the exact point where Shakespeare began again in the next.
32. The author of the Plays dramatised Woolsey’s downfall from the Lord Chancellorship of England in the play of Henry VIII., first published in 1623. Bacon fell from the same high office in 1621, and died in 1626. The reputed poet died at Stratford in 1616.
33. Shakespeare portrayed the symptoms of insanity in several of the plays published after 1603. Bacon had sole charge of his mother, who was violently insane from 1601 to 1610.
34. Both authors knew that the tidal current through the Bosphorus always flows from east to west, Shakespeare mentioning the fact in one of his dramas; not however in the first edition of this drama, published six years after the reputed poet’s death at Stratford, but in the second, published one year later still.
35. When the author of the plays was obliged to seek a new name for his famous buffoon, he adopted that of Sir John Falstaff. The selection has never been satisfactorily accounted for, but it is now known that at the date of its adoption Bacon had an associate in the practice of law named John Halstaff.
36. Both authors had an idiosyncrasy for writing words in one language with the alphabet of another.
37. Both were familiar with the Spanish language.
38. Both were familiar with the Italian language.
39. Both were familiar with the Greek language.
40. Both held the opinion that foul odors were the cause of epilepsy.
41. Both authors adopted the theory that the centre of the earth is cold, at precisely the same time and against the otherwise universal opinion of mankind.
42. Both opposed the Copernican theory, and continued to oppose it through life, even after it had been generally accepted.
43. Both changed their views relating to the cause of the tides at the same time, in the same manner, and against universal opinion.
44. Both also changed their minds late in life regarding the philosophic connection between motion and sense.
45. The two were further agreed on an abstruse and purely technical matter in the science of music, but neither opinion was expressed until many years after the death of the reputed poet at Stratford, and then at the same precise time.
46. The difference between nature and art was defined by the two in the same terms and simultaneously.
47. In one of the early plays judicial torture was condemned; but in a later edition, after Bacon had been obliged by command of the King to take part in a case of the kind, the condemnatory passage was omitted.
48. Both authors wrote on the subject of envy, one a drama and the other an essay. The drama was first published in 1623 and the essay in 1625, with the same sentiments in the two productions.
49. Both took great interest in efforts to secure repeal of obsolete laws, one writing a drama on the subject and the other twice proffering his services to the government to that end.
50. The writings of both were brought into complete and permanent form and finally published for preservation at the same time, the Shakespeare plays and poems in 1623; Bacon’s Novum Organum and De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1620–23.
51. The two were alike at enmity with Sir Edward Coke.
52. Both declared that Queen Elizabeth had lived and died a virgin.
53. Both produced works that were despised by contemporaries.
54. Bacon was condemned for bribery against his protestations of innocence in 1621. The dramatist, in the name of one of his characters, disclaimed charges of bribery after 1619 and before 1623.
55. Each had a dark period in his life, due to a scandal of the same kind and producing the same effect.
56. Each associated closely together in ridicule and contempt two physicians, one who was born in Asia Minor and had been dead more than a thousand years, and the other born in Switzerland and had been dead nearly a hundred years, with no apparent connection between them.
57. Each has been considered by excellent judges the greatest intellectual force that ever existed in the world.
58. Each has acquired the title, given by general consent, of “the wisest of mankind.”
59. The great drama of The Tempest, which has so long been an enigma to scholars, is simply an application of Bacon’s philosophy to mankind.
60. Timon of Athens was unknown until it was published in 1623, two years after Bacon’s downfall. Its subject is prodigality, one of the causes of Bacon’s distress at that period of his life.
61. Both authors were in the habit of making frequent revisions of their writings for the press, even after the writings had been printed; in some instances, after they had been printed several times.
62. Both authors left an extraordinarily large number of their works to be published posthumously. Bacon confessing that he did it on principle.
63. Cardinal Wolsey’s lament over fallen greatness, as given in the drama of Henry VIII., exactly befits Bacon’s personal experience.
64. Both authors claim to have led disappointed lives.
65. Both sought consolation in like examples of distress in others.
66. Bacon investigated the question how long consciousness can exist after every sign of life in the body has disappeared; Shakespeare illustrated Bacon’s erroneous and absurd conclusions in the death of Desdemona.
67. Philip Henslow had extensive dealings with London dramatists during nearly all of Shakespeare’s life, but though keeping a diary, never mentions Shakespeare by name.
68. Both authors are known to have read George Sandy’s book of Travels and to have quoted from it.
69. The tragedies of Shakespeare and the Essays of Bacon are equally and strangely reticent on the subject of a future life.
70. The inscription under the bust at Stratford applies, not to Shaksper, the play-actor, but to Bacon.
71. The frontispiece in the Shakespeare Folios represents the author behind a mask.
72. Bacon advises all interpreters of human nature and life, such as he acknowledged himself to be and such as we know the author of the Shakespeare Poems and Plays to have been, to write under pseudonyms.