Edwin Durning-Lawrence - The Shakespeare Myth

In the "Promus," which is the name of Bacon's notebook now in the MSS. department of the British Museum, Bacon tells us that "Tragedies and Comedies are made of one Alphabet." His beautiful prayer, described as the Form and Rule of our Alphabet, was first published in 1679 in "Certaine Genuine Remains of Sir Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam and Viscount St. Albans," where it appears as a fragment of a book written by the Lord Verulam and entituled, "The Alphabet of Nature." In the preface we are told that this work is commonly said to be lost. "The Alphabet of Nature" is, of course, "The Immortal Plays," known to us as Shakespeare's, which hold "The Mirror up to Nature," and are now no longer lost, but restored to their great author, Francis Bacon.

I HAVE shewn on pp. 6 to 9 that the title page of the 1623 Folio of the Plays known as Shakespeare's is adorned with a supposed portrait of Shakespeare, which is, in fact, a putty-faced mask supported on a stuffed dummy wearing a coat with two left arms, to inform us that the Stratford clown was a "left-hand," a "dummy," a "pseudonym," behind which the great Author was securely concealed.

This fact disposes once and for all of the Shakespeare myth, and I will now proceed to prove by a few contemporary evidences that the real author was Francis Bacon.

I place before the reader on page 11 a photographically enlarged copy of the engraved title page of Bacon's work, the De Augmentis, which was published in Holland in 1645. "De Augmentis" is the Latin name for the work which appeared in English as the Advancement of Learning.

This same engraved title page was for more than one hundred years used for the title page of Vol. I. of various editions of Bacon's collected works in Latin, which were printed abroad. The same subject, but entirely redrawn, was also employed for other foreign editions of the De Augmentis, but nothing in any way resembling it was printed in England until quite recently, when photo-facsimile copies were made of it for the purpose of discussing the authorship of the "Shakespeare" plays. In this title page we see in the foreground on the right of the picture (the reader's left) Bacon seated with his right hand in brightest light resting upon an open book beneath which is a second book (shall we venture to say that these are the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum?), while with his left-hand in deepest shadow, Bacon is putting forward a mean man, who appears to the careless observer to be running away with a third book. Let us examine carefully this man. We shall then perceive that he is clothed in a goat skin. The word tragedy is derived from the Greek word tragodos, which means an actor dressed in a goat skin. We should also notice that the man wears a false breast to enable him to represent a woman; there were no women actors at the time of Shakespeare's plays. The man, therefore, is intended to represent the tragic muse. With his left hand, and with his left hand only, he grips strongly a clasped sealed, concealed book, which by the crossed lines upon its side (then, as now, the symbol of a mirror) is shewn to be the "Mirror up to Nature," the "Book of the Immortal Plays," known to us under the name of Shakespeare, which, together with Bacon's De Augmentis and his Novum Organum, makes up the "Great Instauration," by which Bacon has "procured the good of all men."

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The scene of the play is Navarre and one of the characters is Biron. A passport given to Bacon's brother Anthony in 1586 from the court of Navarre, is signed "Biron." (British Museum Add. MS. 4125).

This has a new title and a Prologue in the Folio. This extremely learned play which we are told was "never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger… or sullied with the smoaky breath of the multitude," has recently been shewn by Mrs. Hinton Stewart to be a satire upon the court of King James I.

The above very strongly confirms Mrs. Gallup's reading of the Cypher, viz.: that there are twenty-two new plays in the Folio. The Tempest, with Timon of Athens and Henry VIII., seems to be largely concerned with the story of Bacon's fall from his high offices in 1621, and Emile Montégut, writing in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" of August, 1865, says that the Tempest is evidently the author's literary testament.

This stuffed dummy is surmounted by a mask with an ear attached to it not in the least resembling any possible human ear, because, instead of being hollowed, it is rounded out something like the back side of a shoehorn, so as to form a sort of cup to cover and conceal any real ear that might be behind it.