THE STAGE: To Man From Mankind's Heart

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and human existence is the commentary upon them. Every age and every man, in his seven ages, finds a reflection in Shakespeare's universal mirror. The passion and the poetry echo in the corridors of the mind, and truer than "the infancy of truth" will go on echoing to the last of time.

^{* The first to set the Bacon thesis really sizzling was an Ohio-born schoolteacher named Delia Bacon, no kin. Bent on digging up the Bard, she invaded Holy Trinity Church, lantern in hand, one night in 1856, only to be appalled by the question of whether she should dig up Raleigh or Bacon instead. Unhinged by this quandary, she died hopelessly insane three years later. In 1888 Ignatius Donnelly, a onetime Congressman from Minnesota, uncorked the following numbers game: on page 53 of the histories in the first Folio he found the word Bacon ("I have a gammon of Bacon"), which, counting downward, proved to be the 371st spoken word on the page ("I then divided that number, 371, by 53, the number of the page, and the quotient was seven!"). According to the Donnelly lucky-seven countdown, it 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?}