The Bacon- Shakespeare Folly 383 



picious circumstances were alleged. The whole 

 trial was begun and ended on the same day, the 

 jury were about twenty minutes in finding the cap 

 tain guilty, and three days afterward he was hung. 

 It was a case where reason was submerged and 

 drowned under a wave of angry prejudice shriek 

 ing for a victim. 



Now, if I did not forthwith write a play, and 

 take the occasion to ridicule the judge s charge to 

 the jury, it was because I could not write a play, 

 not because I did not fully appreciate the insult to 

 law and common sense which that unfortunate case 

 involved. In view of this and other experiences, 

 when I now read a play or a novel that contains 

 an intelligent allusion to some law case, I am far 

 from feeling driven to the conclusion that it must 

 have been written by a lord chancellor. 



If Shakespeare s dramas are proved by such 

 internal evidence to have been written by a lawyer, 

 that lawyer, by parity of reasoning, could hardly 

 have been Francis Bacon. For he was preemi 

 nently a chancery lawyer, and chancery phrases are 

 in Shakespeare conspicuously absent. The word 

 &quot; injunctions &quot; occurs five times in the plays, once 

 perhaps with a reference to its legal use (&quot; Mer 

 chant of Venice,&quot; II. ix.) ; but nowhere do we 

 find any exhibition of a knowledge of chancery 



