This book explores the question: "Who is Bellario?" in Shakespeare's play, "The Merchant of Venice," and what does his presence in the play tell us about the possible involvement of Francis Bacon in the play's authorship? It uses as a jumping-off place Mark Edwin Andrews' "Law versus Equity in 'The Merchant of Venice': A Legalization of Act IV, Scene 1 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1965).

Bellario is the old Italian jurist who supplies Portia with notes and garments for her court appearance before the Duke, on behalf of Antonio in the court case, "Shylock versus Antonio." No notice is usually taken of him. He never appears on stage. He is the guiding spirit of the play. What does that spirit represent?

Writing this book was like a treasure hunt where one clue led to another, taking me deeper and deeper into the writings and life of Francis Bacon, connections between law and literature, and even back to the legal renaissance of the twelfth century which began in Bologna with Irnerius who taught the Justinian Code, much of which had just been rediscovered after being lost for four centuries. The book explores the prudence of looking both backward and forward, Janus-style, in law and life.

Does it matter who wrote Shakespeare? It is an intriguing literary question to be sure, but if one begins to see Francis Bacon's hand in the plays, one will never look at them in the same way again, for he was wise, learned, and a lover of humanity who sought its betterment. People don't really know Francis Bacon, so they are sometimes too quick to make surface judgments, but the truth lies beneath the surface in this case, as in many, and requires a bit of digging.

The book also includes, in an appendix, UK forensic handwriting analyst Maureen Ward-Gandy's 25-page report, "Elizabethan Era Writing Comparison for Identification of 'Common Authorship'" (1992) in which she concludes that there is a high probability that the handwriting in the play fragment found in binder's waste in 1988--which has been called an "analog" to Shakespeare's "The First Part of Henry the Fourth" (dubbed "Play of Thieves and a Gullible Tapster" by the Folger Lost Plays Database)--is that of Francis Bacon (p. 20).