grammar-school, and who was "outbraving better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse." He further accused this uneducated playwright of "translating twopenny pamphlets from the Italian, without any knowledge even of its articles, evidently meaning (as we have already pointed out) the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' the 'Taming of a Shrew,' and, perhaps, the 'Comedy of Errors,' of 1584, 1586, and 1587 respectively, the scenes of which are laid in Italy.

In the same year (1589) Nash published his 'Anatomy of Absurdity.' In this we find another bitter arraignment of the reputed author of the Shake-speare dramas. He says, under the thin disguise of the plural number:

"These buzzards think knowledge a burden, tapping it before they have tunde it, venting it before they have filled it, in whom that saying of the orator is verified, 'they come to speak before they know.' They contemn arts as unprofitable, contenting themselves with a little country grammar knowledge, thanking God with the abcedarie priest in Lincolnshire, that he never knew what that Romish, popish Latin meant."

Mr. Samuel Neil, in his 'Shakespere: a Critical Biography,' makes the following comment on the above:

"It is quite evident that Nash was here gnashing his teeth in spite at the achievements of a 'country grammar '-school scholar, then rising into fame. . . . Nash was an intimate of Robert Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Peele, Maunday, and Chettle, who felt their reputation waning before this brighter light. It is held, therefore, with great probability that the above is a notice of Shakspere." Page 24.

Elze quotes this passage in his 'William Shakespeare' and inquires,

-

"At whom can this squib from the pen of a learned man and directed at a self-taught man from the country be aimed at, if not at Shakspere?... The passages in question do not, indeed, mention Shakspere by name, but describe him so unmis

takably that there can be no doubt as to whom they refer.". Pages 141-142.

In 1591, Nash referred slightingly to the play of 'Hamlet,' especially to the soliloquy on Suicide and Doubt, as nothing but mere empty sound on a "paper drum." No other person than Shakspere has ever been suggested as the object of these diatribes.

Fortunately, however, we are not limited to blind calumniators for testimony to Shake-speare's eminence as a dramatist in the decade 1580-90. Spenser testifies to it in two of his poems, written in or about the years 1590-91, as follows: "And he, the man whom nature's self had made,

To mock herself, and Truth to imitate,

With kindly counter under mimic shade,

Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late."

The Tears of the Muses, 1590.

Will was the familiar name by which Shakspere was known. Heywood notices it:

"Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill
Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will."

Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, 1635.

The phrase "dead of late" means, of course, unproductive

only.

"And there, though last, not least, is Aetion,

A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
Doth, like himself, heroically sound.”

SPENSER'S Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1591.

As to the subject of these references, there can, it would seem, be no room for two opinions. The only poet or reputed poet, then living, whose Christian name was William, and whose patronymic had a martial sound, was William Shakspere. To have drawn from Spenser so high an encomium in 1590, the author of the plays, whoever he was, must have been deemed a man of genius, not to say (in popular opinion) at the head of the profession, several years prior thereto.

"When Spenser arrived in London in 1589, there can be little doubt that Shakespeare was already known and famous as a playwriter." MORRIS' Life and Works of Edmund Spenser.

"We say advisedly that there is no absolute proof that Shakespeare had not written 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'The Comedy of Errors, 'Love's Labor's Lost,' 'The Taming of the Shrew,' and 'All's well,' amongst his comedies, before 1590; we believe that he alone merited the high praise of Spenser; that it was meant for him. We cannot doubt that

'He, the man whom nature's self had made

To mock herself and Truth to imitate,'

was William Shakspere."-KNIGHT's William Shakespeare, 347.

The efforts of the critics to break the force of Spenser's allusions to the reputed author of the Plays are among the chief curiosities of literary criticism.

We are now met by two important interrogatories, namely: I. Was Shake-speare the sole author of these early plays? II. Who, in fact, was the author of them, William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, as his contemporaries seem to have unwillingly believed, or Francis Bacon?

I. Was Shake-speare the sole author of these early plays? The playwrights who at one time or another have been credited with the honor of having assisted Shake-speare, or of having been assisted by him, in the composition of these works, are Greene, Nash, Lodge, Marlowe, Kyd, and Peele. Of these, Greene and Nash may be set aside at once; they were our author's persistent, uncompromising, bitter enemies. Lodge, too, is out of the question. Besides being Greene's boon companion, he had no dramatic gifts. Not a particle of evidence can be adduced to show either that he wrote or was capable of writing a line in the Shake-speare drama. All his attempts at composition for the stage were acknowledged failures. It is as a lyric poet only that he is entitled to remembrance. Marlowe's name is chiefly associated, so far as Shake-speare is concerned, with the Taming of the Shrew,'

both in its earlier and later forms. Nothing could be more preposterous than this assumption, for the play was published in its first imperfect draft several times during a full period of fourteen years after Marlowe's death, and its improved version not until 1623. Marlowe died in 1593. In the case of the second and third parts of King Henry VI.,' the authorship of which is sometimes assigned to Marlowe, the absurdity is still greater. Those plays continued to be printed in their original forms for a period of twenty-six years after Marlowe died, and were revised (as we shall show in the following chapter) by the author of them for the folio subsequently to 1619. No contemporary evidence of any kind whatever has been adduced to connect Marlowe with any of the Shake-speare dramas. The theory that Peele had anything to do with the early plays of Shake-speare does not deserve a moment's notice. It is merely the unsupported guess-work of critics, living three hundred years after those plays were produced and showing no aptitude for the task they have assumed. A still greater vagary is that relating to Kyd. Indeed, this whole structure of Shakespearean collaboration, reared with so much toilsome effort, is built on a singular misconception. It has always hitherto been believed that Greene's attack on the author, or reputed author, of Shake-speare was due to a sudden ebullition of feeling, and that ebullition in turn the result of jealousy over a play to which the two, Greene and Shake-speare, had jointly contributed. The quotation of a line from it in the 'Groatsworth of Wit' seemed to lend plausibility to this view. But we now know that Greene's outbreak in 1592 was not a sudden or isolated one; it was rather the culmination of a long series of similar outbreaks, covering a period of several years. Greene quoted from the 'True Tragedy' to identify, and he misquoted to ridicule, his antagonist. No one pretends that Shake-speare had any coadjutor in the composition of the Two Gentlemen of Verona' (1584), or 'Hamlet' (1586), or the 'Comedy

of Errors' (1587), or 'Love's Labor's Lost' (1588); why assume that he had, not one but three or four, as the commentators do, in the historical play of 'King Henry VI.,' one part of which was published in the folio for the first time, and the other two, in accordance with the author's well-known custom, only after extensive revisions?

"There is not the slightest contemporary hint that Shakespeare ever entered into the joint authorship of a play with any one else." HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS's Outlines, ii. 409.

"It is impossible to withhold from him the 'praise of being one of the great founders of our dramatic literature, instead of being the mere follower and improver of Marlowe, and Greene, and Peele, and Kyd.'” — KNIGHT's Shakespeare, i. xliii.

II. Who, in fact, was the author, William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon, or Francis Bacon?

William Shakspere was born at Stratford-upon-Avon in March or April, 1564. His father, John Shakspere, is mentioned for the first time in the records of the town under date of 1552, soon after which (1557) he was elected a member of the corporation. During eleven years succeeding he seems to have risen uninterruptedly in the esteem and confidence of his fellow-townsmen, holding various public offices of gradually increasing responsibility, until in 1568 he became High Sheriff or Chief Magistrate of the borough. Then business reverses began to overtake him; and finally, in 1577, when his son William was thirteen years of age, deprived him altogether of whatever opportunities, beyond those afforded by the village grammar school, he may have contemplated or desired for the education of his children. Indeed, his financial affairs soon became so wretched that in 1578 he was exempted by name on the town records from a weekly levy of fourpence for relief of the poor; and in 1592 it is recorded of him that he failed to attend church, as required by law, "for fear of process for debt.