Last week's issue of The Spectator magazine tacitly confirmed that Bacon is Shakespeare. Judith Flander's review of Rodney Bolt's new book "History Play: The Lives and Afterlives of Kit Marlowe" opened with the following paragraph, from Nabakov's 1947 novel Bend Sinister:

"‘His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner … On the wet morning of 27 November 1582, he is Shaxpere and [his prospective wife] is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it.’ Thus Nabokov on the mystery of Shakespeare. "

The person who originally said that the "glory of God is to hide a thing, etc" was, of course, Solomon, in Proverbs 25:2, but it was Francis Bacon who made the quotation his own. It appears so frequently in his works, for example here, that one might almost say it was his favourite quotation. Beyond question then, Nabakov was identifying that it was Bacon, in his opinion, who had written the works of Shakespeare. Thus, via Bolt via Flanders the Spectator has confirmed what we know and the world will one day embrace: Bacon is Shakespeare.