Woodward Collection
The Woodward Collection of printed books on the subject of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, has now been fully catalogued onto the Library's online catalogue (UNLOC). This has been achieved through the generous support of the Francis Bacon Foundation, an American organization founded to support Baconian scholarship.
Parker Woodward (1845-1931) was a Nottingham solicitor deeply interested in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. His Baconian collection was presented to the University of Nottingham in 1945 by his son, Mr W. O. Woodward. Augmented by a further Woodward gift (1978) and donations from the Bacon Society, it contains over 300 titles. All of the works concern in some way the claim that Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Albans, wrote the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare. Most of the literature was published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but there are also some earlier titles.
The collection includes a range of material on the Elizabethan dramatists, including plays by Beaumont & Fletcher, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, Robert Dodsley and others. Jonson and Steevens's 1785 edition of Shakespeare's works is held, together with the 1866 facsimile of the first folio of 1623, and various general studies of the life and works of Shakespeare. Francis Bacon's own works are represented in several editions including a 1671 publication Resuscitatio, or bringing into public light several pieces of the works …of Francis Bacon. There are a number of general, biographical studies of Bacon, and further more specialised studies on the Bacon-Shakespeare question by a range of authors, including Parker Woodward himself.
Bibliographic details of all these items can now be seen on our online library catalogue, thus making the collection more accessible to scholars and interested readers anywhere in the world.
Until this project was undertaken, the collection was served only by a card catalogue, made on the acquisition of the collection, and available only within Hallward Library. The cataloguing work now completed conforms to international bibliographical standards. As well as appearing on the University's online catalogue (UNLOC), it has also been added to COPAC, a union catalogue giving free access to the library records from university, research and national collections in the U.K.
We are grateful to the Francis Bacon Foundation for funding this project. The Foundation was founded in Los Angeles in 1937 by Walter and Louise Arensberg with the intention to promote 'research in history, philosophy, science, literature, and art, with special reference to the life and works of Francis Bacon.' They were particularly intrigued by the Shakespeare-Bacon debate, cryptography, alchemy, and other aspects of Bacon's age. Today the Foundation continues their work in supporting scholarship on Lord Bacon, his life and works, and his influence on science, law, political theory and literature. Its aim is to advance learning in these areas, and to disseminate a knowledge of Lord Bacon.
A general collection level description of the Woodward Collection provides more background information to the collection, and further detail about its subject strengths, and guidance on how to browse and search for items on the Library's online catalogue.
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