Chapter 9

Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works?

Nobody knows.

We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been proved.
KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and
absolutely conclusive. We can infer, if we want to, like those
slaves . . . No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it is
not courteous. The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare
superstition call US the hardest names they can think of, and they
keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to
that level, let them do it, but I will not so undignify myself as
to follow them. I cannot call them harsh names; the most I can do
is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval; and this
without malice, without venom.

To resume. What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built
their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and
established facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to
be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything
else to resort to.

But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of
that sort.

Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we
infer that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some
more inferring.

Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a
tidal wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of
admiration, delight and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up
and claim the authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or two?
One reason is, because there's a dozen that are recognizably
competent to do that poem. Do you remember "Beautiful Snow"? Do
you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep"? Do you
remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight! Make me
a child again just for to-night"? I remember them very well.
Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who
were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible
argument in his favor, at least: to wit, he could have done the
authoring; he was competent.

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was
good reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet
at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not two. A long
time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a
procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--
footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a
mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed
to mush in it. Was there any doubt as to who had made that mighty
trail? Were there a dozen claimants? Were there two? No--the
people knew who it was that had been