of the Chairman, to indulge at that editor’s expense in sundry personalities both “loose and humorous,” which being totally unfit for publication here are reserved for a private issue of “Loose and Humorous Papers” to be edited, with a running marginal commentary or illustrative and explanatory version of the utmost possible fullness, {279} by the Founder and another member of the Society.  To these it might possibly be undesirable for them to attract the notice of the outside world.  Reverting therefore to his first subject from various references to the presumed private character, habits, gait, appearance, and bearing of the gentleman in question, Mr. D. observed that the ascription of a share in the Taming of the Shrew to William Haughton (hitherto supposed the author of a comedy called Englishmen for my Money) implied a doubly discreditable blunder.  The real fact, as he would immediately prove, was not that Haughton was joint author with Shakespeare of the Taming of the Shrew, but that Shakespeare was joint author with Haughton of Englishmen for my Money.  He would not enlarge on the obvious fact that Shakespeare, so notorious a plunderer of others, had actually been reduced to steal from his own poor store an image transplanted from the last scene of the third act of Romeo and Juliet into the last scene of the third act of Englishmen for my Money; where the well-known and pitiful phrase—­“Night’s candles are burnt out”—­reappears in all its paltry vulgarity as follows;—­“Night’s candles burn obscure.”  Ample as was the proof here supplied, he would prefer to rely exclusively upon such further evidence as might be said to lie at once on the surface and in a nutshell.

The second title of this play, by which the first title was in a few years totally superseded, ran thus:  A Woman will have her Will.  Now even in an age of punning titles such as that of a well-known and delightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of Shakespeare for puns was notorious; but especially for puns on names, as in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for puns on his own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets.  It must now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence—­to the meanest intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and there or ever or anywhere address himself—­(loud applause) that the graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard by way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers of fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easily intelligible vaunt—­A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare].  In the penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase might be said to occur: 

   So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will.