Excerpt from Baconian Essays Henry james, in a letter to Miss Violet Hunt, thus delivers himself with regard to the authorship Of the plays and poems Of Shakespeare I am a sort of haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. Now I do not for a moment suppose that in so writing the late Mr. Henry James had any intention Of affixing the stigma of personal fraud upon William Shakspere of stratford-upon-avon. Doubtless he used the term fraud in a semi - jocular vein as we so often hear it made use of in the colloquial language of the present day, and his meaning is nothing more, and nothing less, than this, viz., that the belief that the plays and poems Of Shake speare were, in truth and in fact, the work Of the man from Stratford (as he subsequently, in the same letter, styles the divine William) is one of the greatest Of all the many delusions which have. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.