The later evolution of the Baconian case involved the ascription to Bacon of the works of Marlowe and most of the other Eliza bethan dramatists ; the theorists, from Smith onwards, having, in general, no perception of the nature of versification; and to the list were further added Lyly's Euphues, Spenser's poems, the Arte of English Poesy ascribed to Puttenham, the whole works of Nashe, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. As students may discover for themselves, the phraseology supposed at first to have been special to the works of Bacon and Shakespeare is normal in Elizabethan literature. Accordingly, when "Baconian" phrases were found in Florio's translation of Montaigne, Ignatius Don nelly ascribed that translation to Bacon; and Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence rounded the theory by the larger inference that Bacon was the real author of Montaigne's Essais in the original, having composed them as a youthful exercise in French.
Started in England, the Baconian campaign was, for a time, specially furthered in the United States by the work of Judge Nathaniel Holmes on The Authorship of Shakespeare (1866-86). Later, I. Donnelly contributed in his large work, The Great Cryp togram (1888), the theorem that Bacon had embedded in the plays a cipher narrative declaring his authorship. That claim, which was met by the demonstration that on Donnelly's methods any narrative could be extracted from any book of sufficient size, was rejected even by many Baconians. But Donnelly's simpler procedure of deducing identity of authorship from use of really common words and phrases was accepted and acclaimed by Lord Penzance (On the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, 1902) who dismissed the cipher. The summary of the movement is that, whereas it originated in a comprehensive ignorance of Elizabethan literature apart from Bacon and Shakespeare, the extension of knowledge forced upon its adherents has led to the ascription by them of practically the whole literature to Bacon.
Though the extravagances and the exposures of the procedure presumably checked acceptance of the theory, it was diligently developed until recent years, and is still represented by a Bacon Society and its periodical, Baconiana. Mrs. E. W. Gallup's cipher (The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, 1900) was an enterprising advance on Donnelly's; but when it was pointed out that the cipher had made Bacon employ Pope's future transla tion of Homer, faith was chilled; and the "anti-Stratfordian" temper found new outlets. In 1912 appeared the work of Prof. Celestin Demblon, of Brussels, Lord Rutland est Shakespeare, ascribing the authorship of the plays to Roger Manners, 15th earl of Rutland. This appears to have been suggested by the previous German work of Karl Bleibtreu, Der wahre Shakespeare (1907).
In 1919 came the rival theory of Prof. Abel Lefranc of the College de France, Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare"; William Stanley, Comte de Derby, introducing a third claimant; and in 192o a fourth was presented by J. Thomas Looney, in his Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Since that date there has been a lull in the production of claimants. Each of the works cited negates the others, though all assume that the Stratford actor cannot possibly be the true author.
The theories, advanced by Baconians, proceed thus from a nega tive supposition. For instance, there is no proof that any of the four peers, above mentioned, ever wrote a line of blank verse. The "Shakespearean" reply to the Baconian theories may be stated. It is asserted by the orthodox authorities that Bacon ians merely evade the incontrovertible evidence for the author ship by "Shaxper" or Shakespeare of the poems published by him as his work, and the bulk of the contents of the folio volume of plays published as his, though criticism has long recognized that a number are adaptations or collaborations. Over and above other contemporary tributes to the actor-author, we have insuperable testimony in the poems by Ben Jonson prefixed to the Folio, wherein the "orthodox" claim for Shakespeare as a trained classi cal scholar is forestalled by the friendly avowal that he had "small Latin and less Greek." (This testimony W. H. Smith declared to be quite inapplicable to the playwright, but applicable to Bacon as an inferior Latinist.) The further claim for the playwright as exceptionally skilled in legal technicalities was possible only through inattention to the contemporary drama. Students can see for themselves that in three or four plays of Jonson and Chapman, though neither was a lawyer, there is much more parade of technical legal knowledge than is to be found in the entire Folio. Such parade was, in fact, a common feature of the drama, poetry and prose literature of the age. All the "anti" theories, finally involve the assumption that the plays and poems could be more or less widely known to be the secret work of one or another aristocrat, while Jonson, the most widely associated literary man of the age, knew nothing about it. Thus a kind of thesis which finds its motive in the as sumed improbability of the possession of abnormal literary genius by an actor who had left school at 14, has accumulated through all its variants a mass of improbabilities not to be matched in speculative research on any other field. It is, in fact, only as an extraordinary growth of critical extravagance that the Bacon Shakespeare movement and its sequelae can hold literary attention.