Word: baconianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...