All's Well That Ends Well

There have been several posts here reporting of documents from the Elizabethan/Jacobean era that directly link Francis Bacon to several Shake-Speare plays or poems. One that I overlooked was for the play “All’s Well That Ends Well”. Recently, Baconian researcher and author Barry Clarke revealed the photo copy below of the phrase “All is well that endes well” from Bacon’s ‘Promus’ notebook. As a reminder, this notebook of his was not used for his philosophical or legal writings but appears to have been used for his “works of my recreation” and hundreds of Promus entries have been found, in some form, in the Shakespeare works.  It takes a while to get used to how he (and others of that era) shaped their letters but experts have transcribed them so we can be sure of their authenticity. Below is the phrase mentioned “All is well that endes well”. 

The word that might be challenged here is the fourth word ‘that’. I’ve been able to confirm the first three letters (unusual as the first two letters are) but the last ‘t’ is a problem that I’d like to see an explanation for.

      Speaking of handwriting, I’ve mentioned earlier how a handwriting expert found that the handwriting of Francis Bacon matched that of the writer of the play portion for Sir Thomas More ‘Hand D’. Another play fragment was compared (back in 1992 it seems) to that of “30 well-known scholars and statesmen of the Elizabethan era” and was also found to match that of Bacon. Here’s a portion of it on the left.

The scene in the manuscript describes a conversation in which an innkeeper tells two thieves of "a man that lodged in our house/Last night that hath three hundred markes in gold." Similar conversations in an almost identical setting are described in Henry IV, Part 1.

The handwriting analysis was done by:

Maureen Ward Gandy B Ed CDE BCFE
Professional Consultant in Forensic Documents and Handwriting Specialist
(registered with the British Law Society)

Regardless of whether or not the scene description matches closely with that of Shake-Speare’s Henry IV, this is at least another piece of evidence that Francis Bacon did some playwriting.