Shakespeare's Expostulation by Arthur Conan Doyle

    Masters, I sleep not quiet in my grave,
    There where they laid me, by the Avon shore,
    In that some crazy wights have set it forth
    By arguments most false and fanciful,
    Analogy and far-drawn inference,
    That Francis Bacon, Earl of Verulam
    (A man whom I remember in old days,
    A learned judge with sly adhesive palms,
    To which the suitor's gold was wont to stick) —
    That this same Verulam had writ the plays
    Which were the fancies of my frolic brain.
    What can they urge to dispossess the crown
    Which all my comrades and the whole loud world
    Did in my lifetime lay upon my brow?
    Look straitly at these arguments and see
    How witless and how fondly slight they be.
    Imprimis, they have urged that, being born
    In the mean compass of a paltry town,
    I could not in my youth have trimmed my mind
    To such an eagle pitch, but must be found,
    Like the hedge sparrow, somewhere near the ground.
    Bethink you, sirs, that though I was denied
    The learning which in colleges is found,
    Yet may a hungry brain still find its fo
    Wherever books may lie or men may be;
    And though perchance by Isis or by Cam
    The meditative, philosophic plant
    May best luxuriate; yet some would say
    That in the task of limning mortal life
    A fitter preparation might be made
    Beside the banks of Thames. And then again,
    If I be suspect, in that I was not
    A fellow of a college, how, I pray,
    Will Jonson pass, or Marlowe, or the rest,
    Whose measured verse treads with as proud a gait
    As that which was my own? Whence did they suck
    This honey that they stored? Can you recite
    The vantages which each of these has had
    And I had not? Or is the argument
    That my Lord Verulam hath written all,
    And covers in his wide-embracing self
    The stolen fame of twenty smaller men?
    You prate about my learning. I would urge
    My want of learning rather as a proof
    That I am still myself. Have I not traced
    A seaboard to Bohemia, and made
    The cannons roar a whole wide century
    Before the first was forged? Think you, then,
    That he, the ever-learned Verulam,
    Would have erred thus? So may my very faults
    In their gross falseness prove that I am true,
    And by that falseness gender truth in you.
    And what is left? They say that they have found
    A script, wherein the writer tells my Lord
    He is a secret poet. True enough!
    But surely now that secret is o'er past.
    Have you not read his poems? Know you not
    That in our day a learned chancellor
    Might better far dispense unjustest law
    Than be suspect of such frivolity
    As lies in verse? Therefore his poetry
    Was secret. Now that he is gone
    'Tis so no longer. You may read his verse,
    And judge if mine be better or be worse:
    Read and pronounce! The meed of praise is thine;
    But still let his be his and mine be mine.
    I say no more; but how can you for- swear
    Outspoken Jonson, he who knew me well;
    So, too, the epitaph which still you read?
    Think you they faced my sepulchre with lies —
    Gross lies, so evident and palpable
    That every townsman must have wot of it,
    And not a worshipper within the church
    But must have smiled to see the marbled fraud?
    Surely this touches you? But if by chance
    My reasoning still leaves you obdurate,
    I'll lay one final plea. I pray you look
    On my presentment, as it reaches you.
    My features shall be sponsors for my fame;
    My brow shall speak when Shakespeare's voice is dumb,
    And be his warrant in an age to come.