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 impor