When Hamlet first appears alone on stage, his self-directed speech is immediately recognizable as a soliloquy. Francis Bacon’s Of Truth presents an address by a solitary speaker to an audience: an expository monologue, it equates to a soliloquy of another kind (one familiar in English plays from medieval times onwards). Moreover, both discourses are concerned with truth. Hamlet seeks to establish—to his own satisfaction—the truth of his newly and radically defamiliarized circumstances. Bacon’s speaker seeks to establish his position and potentially to re-position his readers within a world described as admiring truth but loving and delighting in falsehood. Each disingenuously uses a technique at the heart of Humanist pedagogy, the deployment of classical or otherwise ancient authority, to do so and thereby emphasizes how malleable and equivocal that technique is. To explore the affinities between these texts is to appreciate more clearly how each is a self-conscious exercise in fiction-making, for each insistently re-interprets its world and, in doing so, fables it anew.