Word: baconian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Reason for this ghoulish hocus-pocus was that a minor Elizabethan historian of doubtful veracity once wrote that when Spenser was buried, a cluster of poets, including Shakespeare, placed poems in their own handwriting in his grave. For 20 years the Baconian Society has been pleading to have the grave examined, arguing that comparison of the handwriting of the poems would prove once & for all that it was Bacon who wrote Shakespeare...
Ignatius Donnelly was known in his own day as the foremost exponent of the Baconian theory (that Bacon wrote Shakespeare). Author of an emphatic volume that traced civilization's origins to a vanished continent (Atlantis: The Antediluvian World), Donnelly would have been a queer bird in any aviary. But he seemed still queerer against his own hard-working background of Niniger, Minn., and his writings were all the more exceptional in view of his political career. Lieutenant governor of Minnesota when he was 28, Donnelly was a Republican Congressman at 32, held that post throughout the Civil...
...Baconian studies were his greatest efforts in the field of daffy scholarship, but Atlantis: The Antediluvian World was his most sensational book. In Lost Atlantis James Bramwell has placed it in perspective against some 1,700 other works about the sunken continent, acknowledges that for many believers in the Atlantis theory Donnelly's masterpiece is the "beall and end-all of Atlantean studies." Author Bramwell himself takes the Atlantis myth seriously, but his main purpose is to review Atlantean writing from Plato to the findings of contemporary geologists. The result is another literary oddity, a smoothly-written, ironic...
...years she received several letters daily from a onetime editor of the Harvard Lampoon, who wrote her that she resembled a "beautiful white horse," but disappointingly "would wander off onto the Baconian theory...
...seems a pity that a man of Professor Kittredge's learning should be so narrow-minded as to refuse to listen to, or be shown the proofs the Baconians have to offer. Once, I was told, Professor Kittredge advised the members of his English class at Radcliffe not to read any books on the Baconian theory...