Contemporary Witness

Did any contemporary of Shakespeare strongly hint at or name the real author Shakespeare?

The answer is yes.

John Marston and Joseph Hall, in an exchange of satires that continued for two years, gave the game away. All copies of their books were subsequently ordered to be burnt. In his first book of Satires (1597) Hall criticises a poet he calls ‘Labeo’ (the name of a famous Roman lawyer), who has written erotic poetry anonymously. In Pygmalion’s Image (1598) Marston refers to Labeo as the writer of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. In his second book of Satires (1598) Hall infers that Labeo has used another person’s name to hide his authorship and thus be immune to satire. In Certain Satires Bk 1 (1598) Marston identifies Labeo with the motto, Mediocra firma, and in context with the Shakespeare poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

The motto was Francis Bacon’s heraldic motto, used only by himself and his brother, Anthony Bacon.

To identify someone by means of heraldry is an ancient and fairly exact method of identification. The additional labelling of the author Shakespeare as ‘Labeo’ completes the identification as being Francis Bacon, since of the two brothers it was Francis who was a qualified lawyer who lost favour with the Queen just as Antistus Labeo lost favour with the Roman Emperor.

Since it was on the poem Venus and Adonis that the signature of ‘William Shakespeare’ was first placed as the author, the Hall and Marston satires imply categorically that this signature was the literary pseudonym of Francis Bacon with respect to this and the following poem, Lucrece, and hence all subsequent Shakespeare works if indeed they were all written by one man.

(See the author's book, The Shakespeare Enigma)

The Francis Bacon Research Trust