And don't forget our local hero Ignatius Donnelly, state senator, lieutenant governor, three-time U.S. Congressman, and author of The Great Cryptogram, advocating Bacon's authorship. There's nothing wrong with throwing rocks at elite icons, and it's to be expected elites will throw rocks at popular icons. Maybe there is an inconsistency between the wide berth poets claim for eccentricity and crankiness and the guild feeling that wafts around Father William, but that doesn't make the case any easier to accept on the merits. Contemporaries over decades thought he wrote his own plays. In the artificial world of law, if Herbert, Oxford, or Bacon perpetrated a fraud, their successors couldn't come along 300-400 years later and claim they were lying when they said Shakespeare did it.
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