On the occasion of Lord Francis Bacon's Birthday and the quatrocentenary of the publication of the earth-shattering The Proficience and Advancement of Learning,[editor's note: these words were written in 2005], I would like to take this opportunity for self-examination and explore what it means to me to be a Baconian. Few Stratfordians have read and understood the works of Francis Bacon, and increasingly it becomes true that fewer and fewer Baconians read and understand the works of Shakespeare, analysis of text replacing understanding of the matter. What makes us Baconians is an understanding of both men, their thoughts and their writings.

This dedicatory letter examines two concepts, first, that the core of Baconian belief is that the works of Bacon and Shakespeare exhibit the workings of a single mind. Second, that the Stratfordians are not in truth our enemies, but our allies in the search for truth, as their interest, respect and admiration of Bacon's hidden works gives them renewed life and substance, a man of great fame, and a great name "though he be known by another".

As a youth, I enjoyed the study of great contributors to human thought, reading everything in the library on Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Newton, and even the darker side of kings, rulers and dictators. By age 12 1 had read everything available on William Shakespeare, my parents being very enamored of his plays, but I cannot count a single book in our local library that served as a major biography of Lord Francis Bacon. Even in the books on great men of science. Bacon was nothing more than a footnote.

As a youth I both studied and acted Shakespeare's works, Macbeth of course being the favorite of so many of my gender, while the girls were wild about Romeo and Juliet. The advantage of this training was that it was impossible to memorize the difficult lines of a forgotten language without pondering their purpose and meaning from time to time, and I always pictured these divine words being written by candle light in a dark cupboard overlooking the Globe Theatre or some such place, a pen in the right hand, a cup of ale sitting by the left, as befitted the known history of my dear Will Shakespeare. My first school project was a model of the globe theatre, a labor of love that suited my imagination of the times and the actor Shakespeare. I never once doubted the authenticity of such a great man as was William Shakespeare, and when whisper came to my ears in later years that there were those who questioned, I considered them at best to be heretics, at worst conspiracy theorists.

The indomitable scrutiny of scientific method became my adult life, the precision of mathematics my eye toward the world, with Shakespeare and the arts reserved for leisure. That there was mathematical precision in the complex plots and wording posed by Shakespeare was not wasted on me. A harmony of the spheres, both heavenly and learned, to be discovered in spending an evening at the theatre watching a Shakespeare production. Richard Burton in turtleneck was my highest pleasure, seeing these plays carry themselves to the hearer without costume, set or scenery. What heretic-dolt would question the worth of such a man as Shakespeare?

Years fell away, and with them many of the heroes of my boyhood. Daniel Boorstein permanently dislodged Isaac Newton from his pedestal in The Discoverers, while Copernicus, Galileo, and even Tycho Brahe were lowered a notch by careful reading of their history and works. History draws the best of men to place on the pedestal, and discards the essence which made them men. The progression of science was then the act of several in succession, with no great thinker to point the way. Yet there were always these short footnotes about a man named Bacon, who influenced a great man this way or that in his work. It was only by fortune that while researching an old manuscript, I stumbled upon private writings of a group of Masons long dead that revered Lord Verulam more than any other man, and I set out to discover the quick of the matter, not knowing where it would lead. Montague's volumes on Bacon were the first available for purchase, and my first personal introduction to Francis Bacon. I discovered in Bacon the essence of scientific thought, the matter of which confined him to footnotes, and gained no high esteem among historians. It was surprising to find in the reading that this was the position that comforted Bacon most, to be in the shadows, behind the curtain, an incredible influence on the minds of his readers, but only a footnote in history. History and humility had never before seen his kind.

As I read The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, I not only understood Bacon's profound influence on the course of science and education, I saw in the lines the serious and conservative side of William Shakespeare. The words were different, the style more careful and corrected, but the thoughts, concepts and conclusions varied little from those of the great Poet/Actor, the plays a great quantity of speech, the other of quality and brevity of speech, but the same speech nonetheless. One could remove the antagonist of a play, reading only the protagonist, and find himself reading Francis Bacon in vernacular. On occasion the antagonist would reveal the controversial side of Bacon's own argument, as a dialogue of the ancients. A standard technique, but why would the arguments be so like those of Bacon to seem to have been written by the same hand?

The list of authors and great men that have understood both Bacon and Shakespeare and reached the same conclusion as I, is a long and worthy list, where I humbly add my name to the bottom. The list of phrases, discussions and common errors of ommission or admission examined and evident in the two works is impressive on the Baconian side, but I would not ask any person to take a side based only on such extracted and isolated evidence. One must not only read, but reach an understanding through reading, of what the author is attempting to accomplish in the writing.

A true Baconian has read and understands the writings of both William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, and holds as a core the certainty that these writings are of the same mind, the same wit, and the same pen. Stratfordians search for the source documents used or mimicked by Shakespeare, while Baconians search for the influences that charted the direction of Bacon's thoughts and realizations. These are not mutually exclusive exercises, and Baconians could do more to absorb the reasonable and learned scholarship of Stratfordians into their philosophy, rather than exploit those tidbits that make for good argument.

Where a Stratfordian indicates source material as Greek in origin, the translation being directly from the Greek, we pounce, while we should pause and source the library that held the book. Each of us has a scientific obligation, set forth by Francis Bacon himself, to examine the facts with the utmost of wit and ability, and not to attack our adversary, rather educate him as the need arises. I read wild accounts of the secret letter that instigated The Tempest, and how Shakespeare could not have had access to this information, yet I hold in my digital library a book entitled A Discovery of the Bermvdas, otherwise called the Ille of Devils, by Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Sommers, and Captayne Newport, "with diverse others", published in 1610, within three months of the arrival of the crew of that ill-fated adventure. I don't even see this book referenced by Stratfordians, yet it is without a doubt the kernel around which The Tempest was constructed.

I have a few problems with Stratfordian scholarship, to be certain, but no more than I experience with Baconian scholarship, and have always attempted to extract the pertinent from the biased. The education of Shakespeare is only one of several points in which I believe the Stratfordians to have done the superior work. This work tends to focus on the Middle School at Stratford, and demonstrates quite adequately that it was one of the best in England, though fails to demonstrate that Shakespeare could have learned enough Greek to have written direct translations from Greek authors, as is sourced by some Stratfordians. Ben Jonson himself makes the admission that Shakespeare's learning equated to "little Latin and lesse Greeke". This is not a problem in my mind, as Ben Jonson also had little formal education, but had the advantage of private tutelage under the learned Camden.

We know from exhaustive Stratfordian scholarship that an Oxford scholar was employed at the Stratford Middle School for the sum of 20 pounds per annum, the repair for the school and the hiring of an assistant being taken from that salary. In contrast, the same wage could be gained by presenting one English translation of a Latin work for publication, or 10-12 pounds for one foul play transcribed through the new art of short-hand, as most certainly was done with the foul plays of William Shakespeare.

We have no record that William Shakespeare attended Stratford Middle School, though this is widely assumed. We also have no evidence that William's father, mayor of the town and successful businessman, though presumed illiterate, did or did not follow the convention of the time for a man of his position and hire a servant (usually one with religious training) whose duties were private masses as befit the law, education of the children, evening readings, and the drafting of official documents in Latin. If indeed William's father was illiterate, someone most certainly served in this capacity, and this servant would be of such need as to be indisposable in the intercourse of business and public affairs. We do know that such a servant would have drawn 8-10 pounds per annum, plus room and board, possibly higher as the duties and usefulness increased. Compare this to the average wage of a worker, a mere 4 pounds per annum.

Why Stratfordians have not focused on this possibility is beyond me, as this a person who would normally be employed by a successful businessman and politician of the time. This being the reality of the time, the controversy over the education of William Shakespeare and the quality of teaching at the Stratford Middle School would be moot, while the identification of this unknown servant and his training would be paramount to the Stratfordian cause. In a small town, the Mayor's servant could well be the same individual who teaches in the Stratford Middle School, but no name has yet to be uncovered, and no records leading to solution of this problem. I bring this example to mind only to demonstrate that many Stratfordians, as do Baconians, exhibit the fault of misunderstanding and misinterpreting this period of English history, and any argument not built on a solid foundation will not survive the tides of time.

The core of Baconian belief is that the works of Bacon and Shakespeare exhibit the workings of a single mind. This connection can only be made by studying and understanding the works of the two men. Most recently I deduced through investigation that the "To the Reader" poem in the First Folio was written by the same author who penned the "Epistle Dedicatorie", and reached the conclusion that these were both the work of Ben Jonson, even though the latter was signed by John Heminge and Henry Condell. A great amount of study went into this identification, which could have been saved by a small amount of research on the web, where it is revealed that Stratfordians have been aware of this connection for quite some time. Stratfordians did not follow up with the observation that this reduces the number of letters in favor of Shakespearean authorship to the tenuous number of three, with Ben Jonson's letters remaining highly suspect to Baconian readers, Ben being a fellow and "good pen" of Francis Bacon, and the coincidence of his reversal of heart toward the author Shakespeare once he began in Bacon's employ. The need for careful (and less critical) study of scholarly research on both sides of the fence is in order if a balance is to be reached, as we find ourselves reinventing points of argument already conceded by past scholarship.

On the Baconian side of the argument, we need to understand the influences on the life of Bacon, the persons and the circumstances, that form conjunctions in his work and the works of William< Shakespeare. Some Baconians simply do not understand, that the mind of Bacon was such that he would rather direct men's genius than his own. The old and tired argument that Bacon wrote this and that, aside from Shakespeare, is to ignore the innate genius of the man himself. Many others gathered facts, performed histories, wrote plays, that were proofed and polished by Francis Bacon. This does not make them his work, rather the father of the work, first for enticing the young man into the study, and second, for the polish of the work that grew to the benefit of the young man who did the work. In no other case than Shakespeare, is the author of the suspected work other than a young man of college standing. Logic of pattern dictates that there are other influences in the Shakespearean plays apart from Bacon, friends and colleagues.

If one absorbs the letters of Anthony Bacon and understands the genius of his humor, it becomes
very easy to see his influence in the early Shakespearean works, and how this influence is so absent in works after the death of Anthony. Francis reverts to his serious side in his own works, a labor of years, polished and perfected, unlike the early plays by Shakespeare, waiting for the right time to release these to the world. That time was not the reign of Elizabeth, but that of James. Later plays by Shakespeare fall in place with events in the life of Francis, and have a much more polished surface than the fool-heartiness of Anthony's influence. In my mind Bacon replaces Anthony with Tobie Matthew as his wit's interpreter, though this does not happen for a period of time. Baconians often speak as if Bacon's works somehow spring from his own well of genius, ignoring the fact that Bacon himself makes it a point to indicate that his true genius is in absorbing the best of others and forming it into something of use, and his ability lies in the fact that he is able to get others to do the work his mind sets forth. Again, a shadow figure, overwhelming in idea and direction, an astute manipulator of his position and capacity to accomplish this goal. Even in death. Bacon demanded a secrecy and silence surrounding his work, a natural extension of the identical roll he performed in life. Admiration of his humility and lack of malice are recorded by his survivors, and comments gathered from among his admirers, as well as those made by Bacon himself, support this view.

I joined the Baconian Heresy by understanding, not by revulsion to orthodox teaching or my dislike of the current position. As a convert from the "old religion", I am not willing to shuck the corn with the silk, for true Stratfordians admire the same man as I, but call him by the name William Shakespeare, "though he be known by another." They know nothing of Bacon and would not soil themselves with our cause, yet they hold in reverence the same man, the same being, as we revere. I for one understand the depths of Stratfordian reverence, and I applaud it. I am their brother, sharing what they perceive as a man who "knew the world". I am also a Baconian, a step higher in the evolution of thought, now knowing what once I only dimly perceived, the works of Bacon and
Shakespeare exhibit the workings of a single mind, a mind inseparable.

My birthday wish on this occasion is that others may see as I see.

GC