ABSTRACT
We have already had occasion (see p. 20) to refer to the attitude of Queen Elizabeth towards the play Richard II, and Baconians, Oxfordians, and Derbyites all mention it as an example of the danger incurred by a dramatist in Tudor times and as a motive for their particular candidate to keep his authorship secret. There is, however, much more in the story than this, and properly the further details concern Bacon alone. I should therefore have treated it in the chapter on the Baconian case if Titherley had not made one of his buccaneering raids upon it. Of course, as we have repeatedly seen, all the theorists on occasion make use of the same factors as evidence in support of their different candidates, but most of them confine these operations to factors that could apply equally well to anyone. Titherley has no such limitations; he appropriates almost every point that is raised, no matter how impossible it may be to connect it with Derby, as he did in the case of the ‘Promus’ (see pp. 165-167), and, as we shall see later, he does in the case of the Northumberland Manuscript (see pp. 228-234). He calls this the Inductive Method. I suspect the Baconians have another word for it.
