Word: baconian
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...Baconian Acrostics...
...theories is that they slight the creative imagination by putting it in a sexual straitjacket and by insisting that dreams and images are determined mechanistically. "I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud," he writes, "with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying from their natural nooks upon the love life of their parents." Nabokov may yet get his wish to see Shakespeare in heaven, laughing at Freud (in hell, naturally) for his bad interpretations of Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth...
...turned out that Bacon wrote not only Shakespeare, but all of Marlowe, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne's Essays. The Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford boom was drummed up in 1920 by a Gateshead schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney, a proper foil for the Baconian camp's George M. Battey. The fact that De Vere died in 1604, and The Tempest, for example, contains allusions to events after 1604, puts a crimp in the thesis-but to a cultist, what's in a crimp...
...Detroit physician named Orville Owen went so overboard on his own cipher theory that he declared Bacon was not only Shakespeare but also such authors as Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and Robert Burton. Another Baconian found his inspiration in the fact that both Bacon and Shakespeare used the word honorificabili-tudinitatibus. He divided the word into two parts, spelled the first backward (BACIFIRONOH), declared this to be an anagram for FR BACONO. From the rest of the letters, he got HI LUDI TUITI NATI SIBI, which taken all together spelled "These Plays, produced by Francis Bacon, guarded for themselves...
...problem: "The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery," he wrote, "and I tremble every day lest something should turn up." Among those who have gone further and insisted that William Shakespeare was a mere pen name are men as different as Mark Twain (a whole-hog Baconian), Sigmund Freud (he rooted for the Earl of Oxford), Bismarck, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1931, Britain's Gilbert Slater caused a flutter by declaring that Shakespeare was a seven-man syndicate consisting of Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lady Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe and the Earls of Oxford, Derby...