Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare

A New Attribution Method

Barry R Clarke Routledge 2019 Pb, 310pp, ind, £24.99, ISBN 9780367225445

Some beliefs are so daft that often only the most intelligent can believe in them. Barry R Clarke is a professional logic puzzle compiler, blessed with a knack for abstract thought most of us can barely conceive. But is his effort to show that Francis Bacon had a hand in Shakespeare’s works also a puzzle with a logical solution? Or is it an idea that only a great intellect could conceive, like a classic locked-room mystery that is plausible only on the printed page? The answer largely depends on the methods he devised to arrive at his assertion that the Stratford man was more play broker than playwright, an opportunist who bought plays from other dramatists and took credit for them (“an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” in Robert Greene’s words).

At the heart of Clarke’s argument is Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP), a technique he developed to compare phrases in a target text with the Early English Books Online database of almost everything published from 1473 to 1700 to identify rare phrases, revealing a ‘DNAtype profile’. This is claimed to be superior to stylometric comparison, which may falsely conflate dramatic and nondramatic works for criteria such as sentence length.

The RCP method is applied to five full Shakespeare plays, Act 1 of Pericles, and a half-dozen other nondramatic works. Comparison of rare matches is of varying persuasion, with the relative merits of the statistical weight of the occurrence of a phrase in the target text and the database often straining my understanding since some phrases shared by the plays and Bacon’s writings plainly match, while others share only a word or two. From a plethora of impeccably referenced sources, The Tempest bears Francis Bacon’s most significant influence, bolstered by his privileged access to reports about the Virginia Company’s New World exploits, an undeniable influence on the play. Clarke also detects Bacon’s influence on Love Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night, also concluding that Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and Anthony Munday were involved in the third part of Henry VI.

Valid as it may be to dissect the works to find fragments common to both authors (surely an improvement on the cryptographic approach that gave Bacon-as-Shakespeare research such a bad reputation), was Bacon capable of exposing his soul as well as Shakespeare (or other candidates) could? Can numbers and snippets ever tell us that?

A control baseline to establish the soundness of the RCP method is missing; how do we know that prolific author X wrote his contemporary, the equally prolific Y? How do we know which expressions were vernacular and which were peculiar, or coincidental? Clarke’s RCP is a promising and powerful new technique that needs more testing to ascertain its validity.

Clarke does a brilliant job of casting doubt on the Stratfordian myth (as does Bacon devotee Sir Mark Rylance in his foreword), and framing Bacon’s theatrical and political career. But the yarn he splices from the threads of Bacon and Shakespeare is weaker than I would like, despite being replete with research that, while engrossing, is not directly relevant.

I may need someone brighter than myself to interpret in more digestible terms why Clarke’s argument is more convincing than my dim sense, blinded by a myriad of semi-relevant details, tells me. I want a prominent Stratfordian to ‘cross the floor’, like a scientist recanting a paradigm made obsolete by better evidence, a practice not customary for the keepers of the humanities, accustomed to hunkering ever deeper in silos of myth.

Still, paper by paper, book by book, a tipping point is getting closer until one day those who don’t accept the ‘School of Shakespeare’ will be looked at askance. For as anyone really worth their salt in high-stakes publishing knows, having a stable of authors who can shore up the front of a profitable but incapable or otherwise ‘too busy’ author is one of the great publishing ploys, naming no names. Their works are on the bestseller charts right now.

Derived from a PhD dissertation, this intricate work uses a methodology I cannot claim to fully understand, although I am in broad agreement with its conclusions that Shakespere of Stratford was more complex and wily than the literary superhero of Stratfordian legend, and that Sir Francis Bacon had the ability and the agenda to have been involved with some of his oeuvre. Short of first-hand written proof (WHERE is the Northumberland Manuscript?!), the mystery of Shakespeare, a literary-political project whose aims and methods are cloaked in unwritten history, will only deepen, due to and in spite of the great efforts of those like the very clever and logical Mr Clarke.

Jerry Glover

★★★★★