cerned in composing the works we call Shakespeare, surely Mr. Fleay uses those words and attempts that demonstration in his "Shakespeare Manual," and I read his conclusion to be that of thirty-nine plays not an orthodox Shakespearean ought to accept as canonical the list of thirty-six plays those innocent partners Heminges and Condell supposed to be Shakespeare's; that only twenty are "certainly" or "undoubtedly" Shakespeare's. And of the remaining nineteen any one having patience enough to tabulate the results of Mr. Fleay's demonstration1 will see that William Shakespeare, à la Fleay, can only retain about twofifths! So that whoever William Shakespeare was-it is not (according to the New Shakespeare Society) sacrilegious to show up poor Shakespeare stripped of about half the feathers which Greene declared, three hundred years ago, that William had wrongfully beautified himself with, provided the stripping be done regularly—that is, by means of "stopped" and "unstopped" endings, and so that the name of Francis Bacon is not brought anywhere into the neighborhood of the discussion.

Up to date, then, the external and internal evidence seems to agree in this: that the plays can be separated into text and stage-setting, and that the author of the text, while also author of the poems, was certainly not one and the same individual as the stage editor who sets these plays for his boards. So far, at least, Mr. Furnivall's demonstration of the numerous distinct prose and metrical styles (which he calls "periods ") in the 1" Shakespeare Manual,” pp. 22-56.

plays, and Mr. Fleay's demonstration that between these two there was at least one shrewd enough to know the public taste and turn the knowledge to gold, are not conflicting. The only difference between Mr. Fleay and myself I can draw from the "Shakespeare Manual" is that I am not sure that Mr. Fleay's man of shrewd and ready wit, who made these plays available for revenue, was not the very man we are after,William Shakespeare by name,- while Mr. Fleay believes him to have been a partner of Shakespeare's whose name is, so far, undiscoverable. I am inclined to so believe, because every record and every tradition as to William Shakespeare shows such to have been his character. Wayward, lovable, clever, brilliant was William Shakespeare, boy and man; and that he became rich as well is matter beyond dispute. Ben Jonson's plays were stuffed even fuller of classicisms than Shakespeare's, but they would not pay for a sea-coal fire. We may be very sure that it was Launce and Trinculo, Barnardine and Boult, the drunken porter in "Macbeth," young Gobbo, and the like, who, by catching the ears of the groundlings, paid Shakespeare's running expenses. Had these plays emptied the theater of the rabble then, we need not be ashamed to believe (because it is the historical fact) they would scarcely have survived to be studied by scholars now.

I have alluded to the Baconian theory because, while I do not accept it, I am not afraid of it; and, moreover, I am not adverse to saying that one of the strongest possible points in its favor is the fact that the esthetes cannot hear of it

without dispossession of their mental balance. In his Introduction to the "Leopold Shakespeare" (p. 124), Mr. Furnivall remarks: "The idea of Lord Bacon's having written Shakespeare's plays can be entertained only by folk who know nothing whatever of either writer, or are cracked, or who enjoy the paradox or joke. Poor Miss Delia Bacon, who started the notion, was, no doubt, then mad, as she was afterward proved to be when shut up in an asylum.1 Lord Palmerston, with his Irish humor, naturally took to the theory, as he would have done to the suggestion that Benjamin Disraeli wrote the Gospel of St. John. If Judge Holmes's book is not meant as a practical joke, like Archbishop Whateley's historic doubts, or proof that Napoleon never lived, then he must be set down as characteristic-blind, as some men are color-blind. I doubt whether any so idiotic suggestion as this authorship of Shakespeare's works by Bacon has ever been made before, or will ever be made again, with regard to either Bacon or Shakespeare. The tomfoolery of it is infinite." In other words, Mr. Furnivall assures us that a man to whom, from the records, not a day's schooling can be assigned, and whom the highest heights of Shakespearean fancy have never credited with more than one or two terms passed in childhood at a provincial grammar-school of the sixteenth century, could write in a score of differ

1 To be exact, Miss Bacon never was "shut up in an asylum." She became deranged from her intense excitement and the treatment her book received, undoubtedly. But she died in her own home, surrounded by friends, in Hartford, September 1, 1859.

ent literary styles; while Francis Bacon, foremost classical and contemporary scholar of his time, author of the "Essays" and the "Novum Organum,” could only have had one literary style, and therefore could not have anything to do with aught that was not frozen into the sententious mold of his acknowledged works. Granted that the Baconians if not crazy before absorbing their theory, speedily become so by championing it, and are only suffered to run at large by the charity of a long-enduring world, what would our experts in mental pathology say, should these Baconians be heard to assert that Lord Verulam lived in "periods," and that these periods were known to him familiarly as "light ending," "mistaken identity," "weak ending," "central pause," "tragedy," "comedy" and so on! Clearly, the rod and the dark room would come next.

William Shakespeare's genius appears to have been fully as practical as poetical. He elbowed his way from abject poverty to exceptional affluence. He found the play-house a tabooed thing, a vagabond pastime to be enjoyed by stealth. He made it a profession honored by the court and protected by the throne. He captured the populace and brought the city into his theaters. First to occupy the field, he held it alone and amassed a fortune. His successors had no such monopoly. For the next one hundred years in London no managerachieved an income like William Shakespeare's. The plays he mounted were prepared to catch all ears and enchain all tastes. They contain specimens of all known rustic English dialects of the periods they cover, put into the mouths of appro

priate speakers. William Shakespeare and his family and neighbors spoke Warwickshire dialect. The condition in life implied by a man's employment of one patois would seem to shut out the probability of his possessing facilities for acquiring a dozen others. No allusions to classical, philosophical or antiquarian lore were necessary to make these plays "draw": were rather inclined, had the allusions been recognized, to injure them. No practical stage-manager would have put them there (they were unnecessary to the mise en scène not only, but the audience would have yawned, or perhaps hissed at them); though, if pressed for time or not recognizing them himself, he might have omitted to weed them out. Had William Shakespeare, a practical stage-manager himself, thought them necessary, not being a scholar, he would perhaps have used a work of reference and so inserted them accurately; while a ripe scholar writing the plays might well have tossed in his learned allusions with lofty nonchalance, christened his characters with Greek and Hebrew derivations that only ripe scholars to-day recognize as apposite, and perpetrated the boldest and most astounding anachronisms with airy contempt for the mixed audiences in the pit and the rabble in the gallery. And withal, nothing is clearer in the context than that in every breath he breathed and in every syllable he penned this writer was patrician with the scorn of a Coriolanus for the mob who gave him their suffrages.

2 See "Venus and Adonis," a study in Warwickshire Dialect. Appleton Morgan. New-York: Press of the NewYork Shakespearean Society. 1885.