Show PAPER SCRAPS MAY SOLVE shakespearean DISPUTE L LONDON 0 DON hope of a dennite definite settlement elern n t of f the claim that francis bacon lord rd Ver ulam wrote the plays of william shakespeare was offered in three faded blotched scraps of paper preserved under glass in a show case in the british museum dr robin flower deputy keeper of manuscripts of the museum said that lie he believed after years of study that the fragments were writ mw ten by shakespeare and thus were the only original shakespearean writings known to exist aside from a few mere signatures the three fragments in untidy writing are ranged in the museum alongside open pages of a manuscript book in bacons bacans neat scholarly hand they are three pages from the play on sir thomas more and are part of the world famous collection of tile the museum abek the collection of robert harley and his son edward in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the conditions in which these pages were written dr flower explained pla ined imply that they were the original composition of a journeyman dramatist called in by his company to patch up a play to certain features of which a censor might have been expected to object and the great lawyer bacon or the magnificent nobleman the seventeenth earl of oxford whom wild the theorists orits prefer to shakespeare as the author of Shake plays do not fit easily in this role it was as in 1769 more than years after Shake death that trie ine theory was first advanced that bacon really wrote shakes peares plays little attention was caused then burthe but the theory was revived in 1848 |