Tavern is scene of literary dispute

A MAN who has made it his life's work to unmask the identity of William Shakespeare believes that a single leaf of a manuscript discovered in a book binding could prove that Francis Bacon was the true Bard. Loopy lettering and odd 'Bs' may be the crucial evidence, he believes.

Francis Carr, director of the Shakespeare Authorship Information Centre, is convinced it is a scene cut from the final version of Henry IV, Part I.

The scene, set in a tavern, features two thieves getting a tip-off about a man '. . . that hath 3 hundred marks in (gold) who carries yt unto the kings excheque'. In return, they offer their informer some tobacco: he has not tried it before and farcically chokes on it.

The catalogue entry of the manuscript, to be auctioned by Sotheby's on Tuesday, says it is 'the only extant contemporary analogue in manuscript of any of Shakespeare's plays', and a scene 'very similar to one in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I'.

Mr Carr maintains the handwriting is just like the one in a 1595 Bacon letter he has in a book. 'This is the first time a Shakespeare manuscript has been found written in the same hand as Francis Bacon. There are 22 plays in manuscript of the period, but none are by Shakespeare . . . there is not even a laundry-list in his writing.'

However, Peter Beal of Sotheby's is not intending to rewrite the catalogue. 'It's nothing like Bacon's handwriting. It has a generic resemblance in that the writing is Elizabethan. It's the same type of writing that Bacon used, but it has none of his idiosyncracies. Since the 19th century, Baconians have been seizing at any straw of resemblance.'

If it is by Bacon, Mr Carr says the manuscript's value would increase tenfold. Its current estimate is a mere pounds 10,000 to pounds 12,000.

Auctions, page 37

(Photograph omitted)