Bacon is Shakespeare
Bacon is Shakespeare
The Art of Forgetting is a three part series of talks which I gave in London in 2009, 2012 and 2016, on the literary activities of Francis Bacon and Anthony Bacon in the 1590s.
The first was delivered to the Francis Bacon Society, in Senate House, London in 2009. The talk explores certain political and literary events which took place in London in the year 1593 in London, and their consequences for the history of the Elizabethan theatre.
"Good signors all, when shall we laugh, say when?", exclaims Bassanio on his entrance in the first Act of The Merchant of Venice.
This line contains the key to the entire play. In this presentation, I reveal secrets that have been hidden in this play for 400 years.
In this presentation I tackle, and solve, the problem of Shakespeare's most enigmatic work, the "most mysterious poem in the English language", The Phoenix and the Turtle.
The talk was given as part of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust's 2017 Annual Conference at the Globe Theatre in London, preceded by a reading of the poem by Mark Rylance and friends.
This presentation, given to the Francis Bacon Society in 2019, is a sequel to my earlier talk on The Merchant of Venice.
It explores certain legal aspects of the play which shed light on Francis Bacon's role both in the development of equity law and as the hidden author of this work.
In 1977, art historian and pioneer computer artist Lillian Schwartz made a remarkable observation with potentially far-reaching implications for the Shakespeare authorship debate.
She took a copy of the famous “Droeshout” portrait of William Shakespeare which appears in the First Folio of 1623, and scanned it into her computer. Then she did the same with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth 1. She overlaid the two images one on top of the other, scaling them to the same size. Then, adjusting their relative transparency so that they could be readily compared, she noticed something very strange: there were certain portions of the Shakespeare portrait which exactly reproduced the features of Elizabeth.
It was not a question of an approximate copy, or a close facsimile, or a loose likeness. There was an exact reproduction of the key sections.
In February 1933, an article appeared in Baconiana entitled “Shakespeare Shows Up The Earl of Oxford in All's Well That Ends Well: The principle characters of the Comedy Identified. It was by Henry Seymour, and can be read in full on sirbacon.org here. In short, the article demonstrates that the character of Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well is based on Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who was also Francis Bacon’s (non-biological) cousin. Now, Oxfordians make great sport of attempting to locate their man in nearly every play, an exercise which is for the most part pure projection and fantasy, but in the case of this play, they are certainly correct. The action in All’s Well that Ends Well depicts some key episodes in Oxford’s life to a remarkably exact degree, as Seymour conclusively demonstrates and contemporary Oxfordians have been only too happy to agree (for example, see here.)
