Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony appear both to have had a passion for the drama. Anthony, soon after his return in 1592 from his travels, left his brother to take up his abode in Bishopsgate, near the Bull Theatre, where several of the Shakespeare plays were acted. Their mother, Lady Anne Bacon, was gravely concerned at her sons' taste for stage performances, and wrote that she trusts " they will not mum nor mask nor sinfully revel at Gray's Inn"; but Francis Bacon continued through life to be the " chief contriver " of the masques at Gray's Inn. Lady Anne was a masterful woman, whose rigid Puritan opinions her sons might not openly offend. Anthony, while travelling abroad, once hired a Roman Catholic servant, to his mother's grave displeasure, and sent him on some errand to England. Lady Anne straightway clapped the man in gaol as a Papist, and refused the entreaties of both her sons to let him out. Surveying Francis Bacon's life, his character and education, his intellectual training and social experience, his poetical imagination and dramatic taste, and his various learning, are not these the very qualities which the plays themselves demand for their author, in all of which William Shakspere seems hopelessly deficient ? IV. COMPARISON OF THE PLAYS WITH BACON'S PROSE WORKS. IF the contrast between Shakspere's life and Bacon's life, and between their intellectual endowment and training, points to Bacon rather than Shakspere as the probable author of the plays, what is the internal evidence of the plays themselves ? The more closely the plays are examined, the larger looms the difficulty of attributing them to Shakspere, and the closer appears their affinity with the prose works of Bacon. Under a superficial difference of style, inherent in the difference o...