humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

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Nashe's Dedication to Greene's Menaphon
is replete with clues to the identity of the author
of Hamlet.

I'll post the evidence for Bacon, see how your c
andidate shapes up.

Here's the first clue:

1. It is a COMMON PRACTISE now a dales. . .

Bacon was accused by someone (perhaps
Nashe) of thinking himself too good to
PRACTISE at COMMON pleas with the impli-
cation that Bacon wanted to abandon law.

Common pleas is 13c., Anglo-Fr. "communs
plets" hearing civil actions by one subject
against another as opposed to pleas of the
Crown.

The charge that Bacon wanted to quit law
comes up repeatedly. While it's true that
Bacon wanted to be a founding member of
his father's proposed English Academy of
Arts and Sciences more than he wanted to
practise law, the Queen wasn't interested in
founding an academy (they's been lying
to us about this era, Elizabethan England
never had a Renaissance).

After Bacon obtained his post-graduate
degree in law, Bacon stayed with law.

Spedding, under the heading

Reply To Charges Of Arrogance

printed Bacon's letter to Burghley in which
Bacon gives a summary of the unpleasantness
(not naming his accusor), then adds an explan-
ation for his seeming aloofness:

I find also that such persons as are of nature
bashful (as myself is), whereby they want that
plausible familiarity which others have, are often
mistaken for proud. But once I know well and
I most humbly beseech your Lordship to believe,
that arrogancy and overweening is so far from
my nature, as if I think well of myself in anything
it is in this that I am free from that vice . . .

Lansd. MSS. 51. f. 9: original.

The letter has credibility because Bacon's friends
call him 'sweet,' 'gentle,' and 'kind.'