I will not do them wrong; I rather choose
To wrong the dead, to wrong myself, and you,
Than I will wrong such honourable men . . .
You will compel me, then, to read the will?
SHAKESPEARE: Julius Caesar.

The Baconian Theory, as we saw in the first part of this book, has
both a negative and a positive side. Since most Baconian works be-
gin with the negative and then go on to treat of the positive, I shall
adopt the same procedure here.

The negative side consists in brief of a denial that Shakespeare
could have written the plays and poems attributed to him. As it
was succinctly stated in one of the early proceedings of the Bacon
Society:

'The contention of the Baconians is that William Shakspere had no
hand whatever in the production of either the plays or the poems--
that he was an uneducated man, who could just manage to write
his own name; that there is not a particle of evidence that he ever
wrote, or could write, anything else.'

Many Baconians go so far as to call him an illiterate: for example,
'The most unlearned of men, William Shakespeare of Stratford,
who never seems even to have attempted to write a single letter of
his own name'; 'There is no proof that he could write at all'; There
is no evidence to show that Will Shaksper could either read or write'
( Durning-Lawrence, The Shakespeare Myth, p. 32; Walter Ellis,
The Shakespeare Myth, p. 4; Edward D. Johnson, The Shaksper
Illusion, p. 48).

The evidence for this presumed illiteracy falls under several
heads, each of which we must examine in turn. First, it is (quite
correctly) stated that there is not a single letter in existence which
is known to have been written by Shakespeare. As we have already
noted (p. 133 above), there is not a single letter surviving from the
pen of Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Beaumont, Tourneur, or

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