Francis Bacon’s Contribution To Shakespeare: A New Attribution Method

A paradigm shift is advocated, away from a single-author theory of the Shake-speare work towards a many-hands theory. Here, the middle ground is adopted between competing so-called Stratfordian and alternative single-author theories. In the process, arguments are advanced as to why Shake-speare's First Folio (1623) presents as an unreliable document for attribution, and why contemporary opinion characterised Shakspere of Stratford as an opportunist businessman who acquired the work of others. The limitations of current methods of authorship attribution are highlighted, and an entirely new Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP) method is introduced which, unlike current stylometric methods, is capable of detecting multiple contributors to a text. Using the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, rare phrases and collocations in a target text are identified together with the authors who used them. This allows a DNA-type profile to be constructed for the possible contributors to a text that also takes into account direction of influence. The method's facility to identify multiple hands brings powerful new evidence to bear on crucial questions such as the author of the Groats-worth of Witte (1592) letter, the contributors to 3 Henry VI, the extent of Francis Bacon's contribution to Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and the scheduling of Love's Labour's Lost at the 1594-5 Gray's Inn Christmas revels for which Bacon wrote entertainments. The treatise also provides detailed analyses of the nature of the complaint against Shakspere in the Groats-worth letter, the identity of the players who performed The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn in 1594, and the reasons why Shakspere could not have had access to Virginia colony information that appears in The Tempest, which an insider such as Bacon was privy to. With a Foreword by Sir Mark Rylance, this meticulously researched and penetrating study is a thought-provoking read for the inquisitive student in Shakespeare Studies.