Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Bacon, rise!

BEN JONSON: To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author
(revised by Smithson, Baconian Essays, p. 118).

It has been remarked in our chapter on the Origins that the case
for attributing Shakespeare to Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam,
Viscount St. Albans, is the oldest of the unorthodox theories,
though whether it goes back to the seventeenth or to the eighteenth
century must remain a matter of individual opinion. In one sense,
of course, it must go back to Bacon himself, for most Baconians
firmly believe that in 1623 he edited the First Folio, putting into
the text certain cryptic allusions to be deciphered in the late nine-
teenth century by Mrs. Windle, Ignatius Donnelly, Mrs. Gallup,
and Mrs. Henry Pott. In this sense, the first Baconian was Bacon. ¹
It is even believed by at least one advocate of a rival theory that
Bacon deliberately fooled posterity by means of these ciphers into
thinking him the author of the works, thereby robbing the real
author--the Earl of Rutland--of his rightful glory. ²

Our present chapter concerns the continuation of the Baconian
case from the mid-Victorian age. It was continued both in time
and in extent, it having gradually dawned on Baconians that Bacon
was not simply the author of Shakespeare but of most of Eliza-
bethan literature. Mr. Edward D. Johnson, the present President
of the Francis Bacon Society, ^* considers that Bacon wrote, besides
his own undisputed works, the whole of Shakespeare, most of the
works of Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Spenser, Nashe, Kyd, and
Burton, and also Cervantes' Don Quixote (The Shaksper Illusion,
pp. 91-104, 170 sq.). In believing so, Mr. Johnson is echoing the
beliefs, or some of them, of many Baconians of past generations.

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