Francis Bacon’s Hidden Hand in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Could Bacon be Bellario in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice? This is the first book-length exploration of the mysterious Bellario, the old Italian jurist whose advice Portia seeks out. The play gives very few clues about Bellario’s identity.

In a book published in 1965, Mark Edwin Andrews asserted that Francis Bacon was Bellario, based on the abundance of legal terms the playwright used accurately and the uncanny parallel Andrews found between the role Bacon played twenty years later in an important court case, Glanvill v. Courtney, and the play’s courtroom drama with Shylock.

As part of the Shakespeare authorship argument, this book explores whether the play's author modelled Bellario on Francis Bacon or, indeed, whether Bacon himself could have been the real author of the play. Bacon was an innovator and reformer, an original thinker whose ideas helped pave the way for the modern world. Because Bacon took “all knowledge to be his province” and his genius touched upon many areas, this book explores a wide range of topics; for example, law, history, philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric, theology, and overlaps, such as the historical connections between law and literature. It looks at words coined by Bacon and used by Shakespeare, and explores punning, which the Elizabethans considered an art form. It sheds light on many riddles in the play, based on clues within the work itself and in the writings of Bacon, looking closely at individual characters such as Portia, Shylock, Bassanius, and Gratiano.

It is hoped this book will appeal to lawyers who, as Daniel Kornstein predicted, all seem to eventually make their pilgrimage to The Merchant of Venice, to students of history, literature, law and pre-law, theatre, and legal historians, and to students of Bacon and "Shakespeare" at a variety of levels.