Bacon Is Shakespeare!

When All Roads Lead to Rome

I have a general point here, and it has nothing to do with Francis Bacon or William Shakespeare. Please bear with me for a bit?

1.

When I was in college, the funniest book I read, or so I thought, was called Bacon Is Shakespeare, by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence.

You (lucky you!) can find a low-cost or possibly free edition in many places, including Amazon.

The book purported to show that the person who wrote the supposed plays of William Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon. What made the book funny, in the first instance, is how many of its chapters ended. They ended with a full indented paragraph, consisting of just three large words:

BACON IS SHAKESPEARE

(One thing to note: Sir Durning-Lawrence did not mean that Bacon is Shakespeare! That would make no sense. Bacon was Bacon, and Shakespeare was Shakespeare. What he meant was: Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. But BACON IS SHAKESPEARE is more vivid and much funnier.)

The three words were preceded with pomp and drama. Thus chapter 9 precedes BACON IS SHAKESPEARE with this: “The hour has come when it is desirable and necessary to state with the utmost distinctness that”

And chapter 10 gets there with this: “It is not possible that any doubt can any longer be entertained respecting the manifest fact that”

(Note the repetition of “any” and the use of the word “manifest,” preceding “that.”)

And chapter 11: “These two title pages were prepared with consummate skill in order to reveal to the world, when the time was ripe, that”

(Isn’t that great - only “when the time was ripe”?)

And chapter 12, at more length: “The moment we realise that BACON is HAMLET, we perceive that the purpose of the rumour is to reveal to us the fact that the highest point to which the actor, Shakespeare, of Stratford-on-Avon, attained was to play the part of Ghost to Bacon, that is to act as his ‘PSEUDONYM,’ or in other words, the object of the story is to reveal to us the fact that”

Okay, maybe you don’t find this so funny. If not, there might not be anything that I can say that will convince you that it really is. But I wrote for the Harvard Lampoon in college, and the writers there really could have come up with a parody of scholarship, which might have looked a fair bit like BACON IS SHAKESPEARE.

Sure, it would have been a trick to convert BACON IS SHAKESPEARE into a Saturday Night Live skit, but the great Jim Downey could have done it. He could do it today, I bet.

2

Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, author of the book, was a lawyer, and he wrote a lot of books. At least four were about Shakespeare (who Bacon, as you are now privileged to know now, was).

Durning-Lawrence was knighted in 1898.

3

Bacon Is Shakespeare is full of elaborate arguments. Here’s a flavor:

“As a matter of fact, not a single scrap of evidence, contemporary or otherwise, exists to show that Shakspere, the householder of Stratford-on-Avon, wrote the plays or anything else; indeed, the writer thinks that he has conclusively proved that this child of illiterate parents and father of an illiterate child was himself so illiterate that he was never able to write so much as his own name.”

Wow. And:

“Bacon had published eleven plays anonymously, when it became imperatively necessary for him to find some man who could be purchased to run the risk, which was by no means inconsiderable, of being supposed to be the author of these plays which included “Richard II.’; the historical play which so excited the ire of Queen Elizabeth. Bacon, as we have already pointed out, succeeded in discovering a man who had little, if any, repute as an actor, but who bore a name which was called Shaxpur or Shackspere, which could be twisted into something that might be supposed to be the original of Bacon’s pen name of Shake-Speare.”

Hmmm.

This is (still) wilder, and less comprehensible, unless you really love rabbit holes:

“As has been pointed out the numerical value of the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus is 287, and the numerical value of Bacon is 33. We have found Bacon from Ba with a horn, and we require the remainder of his name, accordingly deduct 33 from 287, and we get the answer 254 which is the number of the required page in the Cryptographic book of 1624.”

That passage gets at one of the core arguments of the book, which involves that long word, which can be found in Love’s Labour’s Lost. According to Durning-Lawrence, the word (Honorificabilitudinitatibus) is an anagram for hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin for “these plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.”

4

For decades, the phrase “BACON IS SHAKESPEARE” has occasionally come, unbidden, to the surface of my mind. It comes to the surface when I read or hear someone who is convinced of some big proposition, or is in the grip of some big proposition, and sees only arguments that support that proposition, and cannot see or acknowledge arguments that are inconsistent with it. The phrase comes to the surface when people seem emotionally committed to some big proposition, and will say whatever they can, or refer to whatever they can find, on its behalf.

But let me try to do better than that. In his writing, Durning-Lawrence was relentless, harsh (and somehow also sweet and a little charming), repetitive, confident, overconfident, dogmatic, shrill, obsessive, detail-oriented, impervious to counterarguments, reluctant to recognize counterarguments, and unwilling to put opposing views in anything like their strongest forms. In its most extreme form, BACON-IS-SHAKESPEARE-ism, as we might call it, enlists even preposterous arguments in favor of the (insert some capitalized proposition).

4

There is a lot of BACON-IS-SHAKESPEARE-ism out there.

For example: There is a prominent law professor who believes in originalism - the view that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning. He writes a lot. All of his work suggests that all roads lead to Rome, that is, that there are many different arguments in favor of originalism, and they are all good or convincing, and the arguments against originalism are all terrible, clueless, or in bad faith. (BACON IS SHAKESPEARE.)

For example: There is an economist who dislikes paternalism. He writes a lot. All of his work suggests that all roads lead to Rome, that is, that there are many different arguments against paternalism, and they are all good or convincing, and the arguments in favor of paternalism are all terrible and arrogant. (BACON IS SHAKESPEARE.)

For example: There is a psychologist who thinks that Kahneman and Tversky (two of the founders of modern behavioral science) are all wrong. He writes a lot. All of his work suggests that all roads lead to Rome, that is, that there are many different arguments against Kahneman and Tversky, and they are all good or convincing, and the arguments made by Kahneman and Tversky are all terrible, junk science, a product of elementary errors. (BACON IS SHAKESPEARE.)

Compare, if you would, the great Lawrence Solum, a strong defender of originalism who acknowledges the counterarguments and emphasizes that reasonable arguments, held by reasonable people, argue in different directions.

Or compare Riccardo Rebonato, a superb critic of paternalism who sees that some good roads do not lead to Rome. (See https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Liberties-Examination-Libertarian-Paternalism/dp/0230391559; okay, his book does cost $1062.30, which is maybe a bit much.)

Or compare Ralph Hertwig, a terrific psychologist who has fundamental disagreements with Kahneman and Tversky, but who respects their arguments (and does not spit all over them).

5

We do have to be careful here. Sometimes Bacon really is Shakespeare, in the sense that some claim, rejected by most or many, turns out to be true or right. (Galileo was right, after all.) Sometimes all of the best roads do lead to Rome. Often it’s correct to insist that the arguments in favor of some proposition are decisive, and that the counterarguments are weak.

BACON IS SHAKESPEARE is memorable because of the dogged and predictable repetition of that claim, always in indented capital letters; because of the gravity, formality, and pomp that precede it (“Plain as the plate appears to the instructed eye it seems hitherto to have failed to reveal to the _un_instructed its clear meaning that”); because the claim is preposterous (I am pretty sure of this: BACON IS NOT SHAKESPEARE); and because some of the arguments on behalf of the claim are so wild.

Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence is not a good role model, though he did write a really funny book.