Edwin Durning-Lawrence

Edwin Durning-Lawrence was a British barrister, politician, collector, and writer best remembered as an advocate of the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship. Bacon Is Shake-speare sets out his claim that Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare and supplements the argument with a reprint of Bacon’s Promus of Formularies and Elegancies. Issued in 1910, this study uses portraits, title pages, word patterns, and disputed biographical evidence to advance a position rejected by mainstream Shakespeare scholarship. Durning-Lawrence represented Truro in Parliament from 1895 to 1906 and assembled a large library focused on Bacon, Shakespeare, Defoe, and seventeenth-century literature. His archival papers preserve correspondence, clippings, and research connected with the authorship controversy. The book is valuable today not as proof of its central assertion, but as a substantial document of how early twentieth-century Baconian campaigners collected, arranged, and interpreted material. It also reflects the intersection of his interests in bibliography, public debate, and historical print.