Seven Weekend Reads
NEWS | 12 May 2025
In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon … The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.” Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker.
Author: Stephanie Bai.
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