Baconian theory
Baconian theory,a term for the notion that Shakespeare's works were really written by Sir Francis Bacon, the first phase of the Authorship Controversy.
Although first espoused in print by Delia Bacon in 1856—closely and more comprehensibly followed in 1857 by Dr William Henry Smith, author of Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth—this idea had independently occurred in 1785 to the Revd James Wilmot, rector of Barton-on-the-Heath, near Stratford, but at the age of 80 Wilmot, perhaps renouncing the heresy, had all his papers on the subject destroyed, and we know of his speculations only from an Ipswich antiquary who had visited him in 1805.
Smith claimed that Shakespeare's works were too refined to have been written by a mere actor from Warwickshire, and on the basis of alleged verbal parallels between the Shakespeare canon and the published writings of Bacon (such...
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