Bacon is Shake-Speare: Together with a Reprint of Bacon's Promus of Formularies and Elegancies

In 1910, a baronet and devoted scholar set out to prove one of literature's most enduring conspiracies: that William Shakespeare was a fraud, and the plays bore the true imprint of Francis Bacon's mind. Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence was neither crank nor fool, but a respected figure convinced that the Stratford man's alleged ignorance made the plays' legal, classical, and philosophical depth impossible. This book presents his case with conviction, centering on the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, a collection of Bacon's private notes that Durning-Lawrence believed contained the seeds of Shakespeare's greatest phrases. What emerges is less a definitive proof than a window into early 20th-century anxieties about authorship, class, and what it means to be 'educated.' The argument has long been debunked, but the book remains a fascinating artifact of literarydetectives gone wrong, and a reminder that the Shakespeare authorship question once commanded the attention of serious minds.