Show PAPER JL PA 4 JL IPER SCRAPS MAY SOLVE shakespearean DISPUTE 10 LONDON hope of 0 a definite settlement of the claim that francis bacon lord Ver ulam wrote the plays of 0 william shakespeare was offered in 16 three tided faded blotched scraps scraps of paper preserved under glass in iii a show case in the british museum dr robin flower deputy keeper of manuscripts of the museum said that he believed after afeei years of study that the fragments were writ 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 ofa 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 Har harleman lelan collection of thi the museum I 1 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 lifey th eyvere 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 hay have been expected to object and the great lawyer bacon or the magnificent nobleman the seventeenth earl ol of oxford whom wild theorists prefer to shakespeare as the author of Shake plays do not fit easily in this role i it was in 1769 more than years after Shake death that the theory was first advanced that bacon really wrote shakes peares plays little attention was caused then but the theory was revived in 1848 |