Nicholas Bacon Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Nicholas Bacon

Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the great seal during the first twenty years of Elizabeth I's reign, was widely admired in his own age, not only for his political wisdom but also for his eloquence in expressing that wisdom. The latter, or rather the reputation for it, is largely responsible for his place in literary history. There have been few commentators on Bacon's rhetorical skill since the sixteenth century--probably because a collection of his speeches and orations has never been published. Some of his speeches in Parliament have been reproduced by parliamentary historians, from Sir Simonds D'Ewes in the seventeenth century to John Neale in the present, but never with any attempt to group them together. His poems have fared somewhat better: a limited (and expurgated) edition of them was published in 1919, and versions of the expurgated poems were published in 1992. Although several manuscript copies survive, apparently Bacon's poems were not widely circulated in his own day; thus, in contrast to his contemporary reputation as an orator, such reputation he has as a poet is entirely a modern one.

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