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Chief exponents.

Its vogue in America.

Extent of the litera

ture.

resembling Toby Matthew's: 'The Book of Controversies issued under the name of F. Baconus hath this addition to the said name, alias Southwell, as those of that Society shift their names as often as their shirts' ('Reliquiæ Wottonianæ,' 1672, p. 475).

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Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, d. 1855), in his Romance of Yachting' (1848), first raised doubts of Shakespeare's authorship of the plays and poems associated with his name. There followed in a like temper 'Who wrote Shakespeare?' in 'Chambers's Journal,' August 7, 1852, and an article by Miss Delia Bacon in 'Putnam's Monthly,' January 1856. On the latter was based The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon,' with a neutral preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne (London and Boston, 1857). Miss Delia Bacon, who was the first to spread far abroad a spirit of scepticism respecting the established facts of Shakespeare's career, died insane on September 2, 1859. Mr. William Henry Smith, a resident in London, seems first to have suggested the Baconian hypothesis in 'Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays? a letter to Lord Ellesmere ' (1856), which was republished as 'Bacon and Shakespeare' (1857). The most learned exponent of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an American lawyer, who published at New York in 1866 'The Authorship of the Plays attributed to Shakespeare,' a monument of misapplied ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2 vols.). Bacon's 'Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,' a commonplace book in Bacon's handwriting in the British Museum (London, 1883), was first edited by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian theory; it contained many words and phrases common to the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the argument from parallelisms of expression to its extremest limits. The Baconian theory has found its widest acceptance in America. There it achieved its wildest manifestation in the book called 'The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cypher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays' (Chicago and London, 1887, 2 vols.), which was the work of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly of Hastings, Minnesota. The author pretended to have discovered among Bacon's papers a numerical cipher which enabled him to pick out letters appearing at certain intervals in the pages of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays. Many refutations have been published of Mr. Donnelly's arbitrary and baseless contention.

A Bacon Society was founded in London in 1885 to develop and promulgate the unintelligible theory, and it inaugurated a magazine (named since May 1893 'Baconiana '). A quarterly periodical also called 'Baconiana,' and issued in the same

interest, was established at Chicago in 1892. 'The Bibliography of the Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy,' by W. H. Wyman, Cincinnati, 1884, gives the titles of two hundred and fifty-five books or pamphlets on both sides of the subject, which were published since 1848; the list was continued during 1886 in Shakespeariana,' a monthly journal published at Philadelphia, and might now be extended to fully twice its original number.

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The abundance of the contemporary evidence attesting Shakespeare's responsibility for the works published under his name gives the Baconian theory no rational right to a hearing; while such authentic examples of Bacon's effort to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. Defective knowledge and illogical or casuistical argument alone render any other conclusion possible.

INDEX

sonnet form of a letter of Helen,
53; date of production, etc., 77-
78. For editions see Section xvii.
(Bibliography), 163-82

America, enthusiasm for Shakespeare
in, 192; copies of the First Folio
in, 170

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ABBEY, Mr. E. A., 192
Abbott, Dr. E. A., 206
Actor, Shakespeare as an, 26-7
Actors: entertained for the first time
at Stratford-on-Avon, 6; return of
the two chief companies to London
in 1587, 20; the players' licensing
Act of Queen Elizabeth, 21; com- Amner, Rev. Richard, 179
panies of boy-actors, 21, 24, 109-'Amoretti,' Spenser's, 57
IIO; companies of adult actors in
1587, 21; the patronage of the
company which was joined by
Shakespeare, 21, 22; women's
parts played by men or boys, 23-
24; tours in the provinces, 24-5;
foreign tours, 25-6; Shakespeare's
alleged scorn of their calling, 27;
'advice' to actors in Hamlet, 27;
their incomes, 99-102; the strife
between adult actors and boy-
actors, 9-13; patronage of actors
by King James, 118-20; substitu-
tion of women for boys in female
parts, 187-8

Amphitruo of Plautus, the, and a
scene in The Comedy of Errors, 32
Anthia and Abrocomas,' by Xeno-
phon Ephesius, and the story of
Romeo and Juliet, 33

Adam, in As You Like It, played by
Shakespeare, 26

Adaptations by Shakespeare of old
plays, 32-3

Adaptations of Shakespeare's plays
at the Restoration, 186
Adulation, extravagance of, in the
days of Queen Elizabeth, 66
Esthetic school of Shakespearean
criticism, 187

Alleyn, Edward, manages the amal-
gamated companies of the Admiral
and Lord Strange, 22-3; his large
savings, 103

Allot, Robert, 173

All's Well that Ends Well: the

Antony and Cleopatra: allusion to
the part of Cleopatra being played
by a boy, 24; date of entry in the
'Stationers' Registers,' 128; date
of publication, 128; the story
derived from Plutarch, 128; the
'happy valiancy' of the style, 128.
For editions see Section xvii. (Bib-
liography), 163-82

Apollonius and Silla, Historie of, 107
'Apologie for Poetrie,' Sidney's,

allusion to the conceit of the im-
mortalising power of verse in, 57;
on the adulation of patrons, 66
'Apology for Actors,' Heywood's,

90

Arcadia,' Sidney's, 125
Arden family, of Warwickshire, 4,
94-5

Arden family, of Alvanley, 96
Arden, Alice, 4

Arden, Edward, executed for com-
plicity in a Popish plot, 4
Arden, Joan, 7
Arden, Mary.
Mary

See Shakespeare,

Arden, Robert (1), sheriff of Warwick-

shire and Leicestershire in 1438, 4
Arden, Robert (2), landlord at Snit-
terfield of Richard Shakespeare, 2,
4; marriage of his daughter Mary
to John Shakespeare, 4, 5; his
family and second marriage, 4; his
property and will, 4-5
Arden, Thomas, grandfather of
Shakespeare's mother, 4
Arden of Feversham, a play of un-
certain authorship, 44
Ariel, character of, 135
Ariodante and Ginevra, Historie of,

106

Ariosto, I Suppositi of, 78; Orlando
Furioso of, and Much Ado about
Nothing, 106

Aristotle, quotation from, made by
both Shakespeare and Bacon, 208
Armado, in Love's Labour's Lost,
31, 38

Armenian language, translation of
Shakespeare in the, 199

Arms, coat of, Shakespeare's, 93-7
Arms, College of, applications of the
poet's father to, 2, 93-7
Arne, Dr., 187

Art in England, its indebtedness to
Shakespeare, 191-2

As You Like It: allusion to the
part of Rosalind being played by
a boy, 24; acknowledgments to
Marlowe (III. v. 80), 39; adapted
from Lodge's 'Rosalynde,' 106;
hints taken from 'Saviolo's Prac-
tise,' 106; its pastoral character,
106. For editions see Section xvii.
(Bibliography), 163-82

relations with the trade of butcher,
10; on the poet at Grendon, 19;
lines quoted by him on John
Combe, 142; on Shakespeare's
genial disposition, 148; value of
his biography of the poet, 203
Autobiographical features of Shake-
speare's plays, 78-80, 202; of
Shakespeare's sonnets, the ques-
tion of, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62
Autographs of the poet, 231-4
'Avisa,' heroine of Willobie's poem,
59 seq.

Ayrer, Jacob, his Die schöne Sidea,
133

BACON, Miss Delia, 210
Bacon Society, 210
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy (Ap-
pendix II.), 208-11
Baddesley Clinton, the Shakespeares
of, 2

Bandello, the story of Romeo and
Juliet by, 33; the story of Hero
and Claudio by, 106; the story of
Twelfth Night by, 107

'Bankside' edition of Shakespeare,

181

Barante, recognition of the greatness
of Shakespeare by, 197
Barnard, Sir John, second husband
of the poet's granddaughter Eliza-
beth, 150

Barnay, Ludwig, 195

Barnes, Barnabe, the probable rival
of Shakespeare for Southampton's
favour, 65; his sonnets, 65
Barnfield, Richard, his adulation of
Queen Elizabeth in 'Cynthia,' 69;
chief author of the Passionate
Pilgrim,' 90

Asbies, the chief property of Robert
Arden at Wilmcote, bequeathed to
Shakespeare's mother, 4; mort-Bartholomew Fair, 34
gaged to Edmund Lambert, 7; Bartlett, John, 207
proposal to confer on John Lam-
bert an absolute title to the prop-
erty, 15; Shakespeare's endeavour
to recover, 97-8
Ashbee, Mr. E. W., 165
Aspley, William, bookseller, 71, 105,
166, 173

Assimilation, literary, Shakespeare's
power of, 37, 56 seq.

Aston Cantlowe, 4; place of the mar-
riage of Shakespeare's parents, 5
'Astrophel and Stella,' 52; the praise
of 'blackness' in, 58-9
Aubrey, John, the poet's early bio-
grapher, on John Shakespeare's
trade, 3; on the poet's knowledge
of Latin, 9; on John Shakespeare's

Barton collection of Shakespeareana
at Boston, Mass., 192
Barton-on-the-Heath, 7; identical
with the 'Burton' in the Taming
of The Shrew, 78

Baynes, Thomas Spencer, 207
'Bear Garden in Southwark, The,'
the poet's lodgings near, 23
Bearley, 4

Beaumont, Francis, on 'things done
at the Mermaid,' 87
Bedford, Edward Russell, third Earl
of: his marriage to Lucy Harington,
76

Bedford, Lucy, Countess of, 76
Beeston, William (a seventeenth-
century actor), on the report that

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