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 j 

 in Shakespeare conspicuously absent. The word 

 " injunctions " occurs five times in the plays, once 

 perhaps with a reference to its legal use (" Mer- 

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

 find any exhibition of a knowledge of chancery 



