What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at
Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.



CHAPTER XI: THE FIRST FOLIO



"The First Folio" is the name commonly given to the first collected
edition of Shakespeare's plays. The volume includes a Preface signed
by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben
Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been
microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages
from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and
everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of
writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.

The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the
Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that
ALL the contents are published "according to the true original
copies." If ONLY MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases
the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The
Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface
(and certainly it looks like his work), {207a} speaking in the name
of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare's friends
"have collected and published" the plays, have so published them
"that whereas you were abus'd with divers stolne and surreptitious
copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious
impostors that exposed them: EVEN THOSE" (namely, the pieces