Bacon intimates that he was a concealed poet, and he expressly acknowledges that, at one period of his life, his head was wholly employed about Invention; but these were mere casual intimations, for it has been theorized that the letter containing the statement “be good to concealed poets” was probably written by Bacon on behalf of the poet, Davies.

Southampton, to whom Bacon is supposed to have addressed the Sonnets and dedicated the Poems, was, at the time they were composed, his bosom friend; but if Bacon’s secret was entrusted to Southampton, he kept it to the last. Matthew was his literary confidant and alter ego: but though Matthew occasionally cast a flash-light on the question, the light was immediately lost in the surrounding darkness. Ben Jonson was his literary assistant, his panegyrist, and his friend, and if there was any one who could have revealed the mystery of the Plays it was Jonson; but, unfortunately, much as Jonson has written on the subject, what he has given us is not a revelation but a riddle.

Even Bacon himself was a good concealer. We do not have an iota of written confessions from him regarding his married life and its consequences. If Bacon could keep that section of his private life so obscure to the public, then we must confess to the fact that he could have kept many other sections of his private life in obscurity.

Richard II., is in many respects the most interesting of the Plays. It was the first of the Plays that was published with the name of Shakespeare. It was catalogued in the Northumberland Papers among compositions which are acknowledged to have been the work of Bacon. It Is the only one of the Shakespearian Plays to which Bacon himself has explicitly referred. It is a play the performance of which was connected with one of the most mysterious episodes of his career.  A story of the first year of King Henry the Fourth had been dedicated to Essex shortly after his return from Ireland, and the play of deposing King Richard the Second was performed by his direction on the eve of his rebellion.

The Queen, who suspected that a conspiracy for her deposition was on foot, regarded the pamphlet as a “seditious prelude,” and conceiving herself to be King Richard, she denounced the performance of the play as an “act of treason.” The Queen refused to believe that the pamphlet was the work of the man whose name it bore, and she might well have supposed that the man whose name it bore was not in reality the author of the play. When Bacon demurred to appearing against Essex in the matter of the pamphlet, he objected that “it would be said he gave in evidence his own tales.” The Queen therefore suspected that he was the author of the “story of the first year of King Henry the Fourth,” which she regarded as a seditious prelude, and it is possible that she suspected him of being the author of the play of deposing King Richard the Second, the performance of which she punished as an act of treason.

There were grounds enough for the suspicion. The appeal of high treason with which the play commences is set out with all the precision and with all the prolixity of a lawyer. The conceits, which, as Mr. Coleridge remarks, are scattered through the play, are characteristic of the man who could never pass a jest, or resist the fascination of a quibble. The effusion or effervescence of words, the superfluous rhetoric which, as Mr. Swinburne says, flows and foams hither and thither through the play (pp. 36, 7), is characteristic of everything that Bacon wrote whether Essay or History, Philosophy or Logic.

The very stories related by Bacon and by Shakespeare are the same. In the De Augmentis Bacon tells the story of Anaxarchus who, when placed upon the rack to make him disclose the names of his confederates, cut his tongue out with his teeth, and spat it in the face of the tyrant; and so in Richard the Second when Bolingbroke is ordered by the king to forgive and to forget his wrongs.

In one of his speeches in the House, Bacon says, “let not this Parliament end like a Dutch feast in salt meats, but like an English feast in sweet meats” and even so, Bolingbroke in bidding farewell to Gaunt expresses such words.

In the Advancement, Bacon relates that Periander, being consulted how best to preserve a tyranny newly usurped, took the messenger into his garden, and topped the highest flowers; and even so the Gardener in Richard the Second, gives directions to his servants and bids them “Like an executioner, cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays, that look too lofty in our commonwealth.”

In his Natural History, as we have seen, Bacon represents the blooding of plants at certain seasons, and the terebration of fruit trees that show fair and bear not, in order to relieve them from being oppressed with their own sap (ss. 428, 464); and the Gardener in Richard the Second adopts the same course.

Bacon addressed a Discourse touching the plantation of Ireland to King James, and Shakespeare attributes a similar design to King Richard.

And when Bacon, after his fall, found himself in “the solitude of friends,” and bemoaned himself as in “the base court of adversity,” he might well have bethought him of the words of Richard when descending from the battlements of Flint Castle. And who but the author of The Wisdom of the Ancients would have bethought him of the “glistering Phaethon” under such circumstances, and associated the myth of legendary Greece with the surroundings of a feudal castle?

But the astonishing thing is this, that neither in his conversations with the Queen, nor in his consultations with Coke and Fleming, nor in his Declarations of the Treasons of Essex, nor in his Charge against Oliver St. John, does Bacon mention the name of the author of Richard the Second, though he must have been as familiar with the name of Shakespeare as with his own.

Virgil on his death-bed directed his Æneid to be burned; but Virgil never assigned the authorship of his epic to Bathyllus. True, if it can be shown that the Player was not the veritable Shakespeare the Figure in the Folio would not prove that he was. In any case his claim to the famous name is doubtful. He never assumed it. The name that he bore was Shakspere; he was known to his Stratford friends as Mr. Wm. Shak; and even the Stratford Monument gives his name Shakspeare. But the names were so similar, and the actor was so well known, that it was inevitable he should to some extent be supposed to be the famous author. It is possible, even, that he encouraged the idea. But the idea has no substantial support. The contemporaries of the great dramatist were loud in their admiration of his work, but they say nothing of the man. They talk of the honey-tongued Shakespeare, but they do not tell us who the honey-tongued Shakespeare was.

As to the Player, the great nobles who are said to have been his patrons are wholly silent. Southampton never alludes to him; Pembroke was not acquainted with him; Essex makes no mention of his name. Those who knew him best, and had the best means of knowing him, scouted his pretensions. Greene described him as a mere puppet who spoke the words of others; Jonson denounced him as a poet ape; and the Burbages, at whose theatre the Shakespearian drama was produced, only rank him with Hemming and Condell as one of their deserving men.

But his Bust stands as an everlasting memorial in Stratford Church and his Figure confronts us in the Folio. Belief in his authorship has engendered admiration, and admiration has developed into worship. His pretensions have been consecrated by authority, and have been hallowed by time, and are maintained with all the persistency of inherited belief. Shaksperiolatry has become a religion, and a religion once established bids fair to be immortal.

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace,” said Hendrix, and it is the love of power that has this Shaksperiolatry stacking billions of dollars for the Stratfordians.

Bibliography : Judge Webb. The Mystery of William Shakespeare, 1902