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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I
219
evident that, besides other Bacon manuscripts, those of the
tragedies of Richard the Second and Richard the Third had
also lain between the same book-covers. The first part of
the manuscripts themselves has been preserved, the second
part, that containing the Tragedies, has been burnt. These
facts Mr. Spedding established in the introduction, adding
that the names of " Francis Bacon " and "William Shakes
peare " are scribbled something like
a dozen times on the
cover, but he omits to state the principal fact, viz., that the
two names are so arranged above the two titles of the
Dramas as to show clearly that the writer first intended to
designate " Francis Bacon " as the author of those two plays,
but finally wrote the name of " William Shakespeare
"
(the
pseudonym). The entry reads :
By Mr. Francis William Shakespeare
Rychard the second
Bacon Rychard the third.
The word " Francis " is
emphasised by being again written
in a reversed direction over the word " Francis."
This fact, the most important feature of the page,
is the
very one which Mr. Spedding overlooked or disregarded,
representing the whole matter as an accident. An accident
that two tragedies (which an actor is said to have written)
should be found among the written work of the scholar
Bacon and between the covers of the same work, before
the printing of the tragedies
! The result did not fit in with
his account, and Mr. Spedding, or the Duke of Northumber
land, inhibited the further sale of the book, so that it became
exceedingly scarce and was but little known, uritil it was
reproduced in facsimile by Mr. F. J. Burgoyne in 1904.
4. Strange things seem to have happened between Mr.
Spedding and " Shakespeare " anyhow. The learned editor
has read Shakespeare far too little and has sounded far too
shallowly the depths of a mind and genius like Bacon's to
have ever felt or discovered the association and relationship
of thought which links the science shown in his prose-