The Saucy Little Bark

What possible connection can there be between the Sonnets of Shake-Speare, published, we are told in 1609, and Francis Bacon's life and death, which is supposed to have taken place on Easter Sunday, 1626?

That is a very pertinent question.

What is a Sonnet? It is essentially a spasm of personal emotion. A sensitive nature has been touched by some concrete fact. It may be a primrose, some personal abstract joy, a dishonour, a death. Around this something, the poet weaves his thought in words. The greater the poet, the more magically he hides the coarse grain of sand, transforming it into a wonderfully iridescent jewel.

Beauty on the Body of Truth has produced an imaginative child. A new creation. Wordsworth thus fashions his poem on "a primrose by the river's brim"; Francis Thompson, "The Hound of Heaven"; Tennyson, "In Memoriam." And in every great poem, universal man reads into it a bit of his own personal experience. The definite motif of the poet is unknown or forgotten.

"Any man who believes that William Shaksper of Stratford wrote Hamlet or Lear is a fool." - - John Bright

We first hear of Shake-Speare's suggared Sonnets among his private friends in 1598 in Meres' Palladis Tamia - how many, we do not know; but they were not the full, complete body of verse evetually published. A year later, two Sonnets were published in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim. In the Quarto they are numbered 29 and 34 as though to suggest they were among the last written. Nothing more is heard of them. Then on May 20th 1609, ten years later, a book called Shake-Speare's Sonnets was entered at Stationers' Hall by one Thomas Thorpe. The identity of the man we do not know beyond the fact that there was a publisher of this name. How he came to be associated in any way with the Sonnets we do not know. It has never been established that he ever had the actual manuscripts in his possession. It has, however, been hitherto supposed that the T.T. of the Dedication refers to Thomas Thorpe in whose name the book was entered; that the manuscript was stolen from Shaksper's desk; and that Thorpe published them well knowing they were stolen.

"At the end of the Sonnets in the Quarto in bold lettering run these lines:

F I N I S.
            K. A.

In Elizabethan days the word Key was pronounced Kay. The phrase is, therefore a Master-Kay that will unlock many doors when it is spelt backwards. You will find it runs:

 A  K E Y  (K)  I S  I N  F


- - Alfred Dodd, 20th April 1930
     Liverpool