Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

106 FRANCIS BACON
were jealous), but, that he might receive no effectual assistance
from higher quarters, they spread reports that he was a vain
speculator, unfit for real business. Bacon was thus driven,
" against the bent of his genius, " to the law as his only resource.
Meanwhile he lived with his mother at Grorhainbury, St. Albans.
Any one who will be at the pains to study the Shakespeare
plays, in the order in which Dr. Delius has arranged them (and
which he considered to be the most correct chronological order),
will see that they agree curiously with the leading events of
Bacon's external life. So closely indeed do the events coincide
with the plots of the plays, that a complete story of Bacon's true
life has been drawn from them. The following notes may be
suggestive:
1st Henry VI. The plot is laid in France, and the scenes
occur in the very provinces and districts
of Maine, Anjou, Orleans,
Poictiers, etc., through which Bacon travelled in the
wake of the French court.
2nd Henry VI. The battle of St. Albans. The incident
recorded on the tomb of Duke Humphrey, in an epitaph toritten
circa 1621 (when Bacon was living at St. Albans), of the impostor
who pretended to have recovered his sight at St. Alban's shrine,
is the same as in the play. See 2 Henry VI. ii. 1.
The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, etc.,
Borneo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice, all reflecting
Francis Bacon's studies as a lawyer, combined with his correspondence
with his brother Anthony, then living in Italy.
When Francis fell into great poverty and debt, he was forced
to get help from the Jews and Lombards, and was actually cast
into a sponging-house by a " hard Jew, " on account of a bond
which was not to fall due for two months. Meanwhile Anthony,
returning from abroad, mortgaged his property to pay his
brother's debts, taking his own credit and that of his friends, in .
order to relieve Francis, precisely as the generous and unselfish
Antonio is represented to do in The Merchant of Venice. This
play appeared in the following year, and the hard Jew was
immortalised as Shylock. The brothers spent the summer and
autumn of 1592 at Twickenham.