The Bacon-Shakspere theory in one way benefits literary students. The opportunity of studying, on parallel lines of date and action, the lives of the two greatest writers of the greatest period of English literature is too good to be lost. The Baconian theory acts as a filum labyrinthi in the mass of materials of the period, and much matter that might otherwise be passed as unimportant is carefully sifted in reviewing what has come down to us from a Past that was once a Present.

The proceedings of the Bacon Society tell us, “The contention of the Baconians is that William Shakspere had no hand whatever in the production of either the plays or the poems–that he was an uneducated man, who could just manage to write his own name; that there is not a particle of evidence that he ever wrote, or could write, anything else.” They also accuse him of every sin and crime, short of murder, to take away his character, and thus argue from his want of character an incapacity to have produced his poems. It is reasoning in a circle with a vengeance, when the argumentum ad hominem is thus made to contradict the argumentum ad rem. The personal animus shown in the way their proofs are presented, discounts from the validity of their conclusions. The Baconians are unwise, they try to prove too much. They say Shakspere was utterly illiterate and unable to write any of his works.