the field.  If he has any part in the whole I suspect that it is “the lion’s part,” but Mr. Greenwood does not commit himself to anything positive.  We shall find (if I am not mistaken) that Mr. Greenwood regards the hypothesis of the Baconians as “an extremely reasonable one,” {7a} and that for his purposes it would be an extremely serviceable one, if not even essential.  For as Bacon was a genius to whose potentialities one can set no limit, he is something to stand by, whereas we cannot easily believe—­I cannot believe—­that the actual “Author,” the “Shakespeare” lived and died and left no trace of his existence except his share in the works called Shakespearean.

However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we cannot, as in Bacon’s case, show how he was occupied while the plays were being composed.  He must, however, have been much at Court, we learn, and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology.  Was he Sir Edward Coke?  Was he James vi and I?

It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the “Anti-Willians” in a shape which will satisfy them.  The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible.  I can only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to understand them.  I conceive the Baconians to cry that “the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature, attributed to a man named William Shakespeare.”  Of a man named William Shakspere (there are many varieties of spelling) we certainly know that he was born (1564) and bred in Stratford-on-Avon, a peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant country town.  There is absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford boy of his standing) ever went to Stratford school.  His father, his mother, and his daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand.  As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death inform us, he was a butcher’s apprentice; and also a schoolmaster “who knew Latin pretty well”; and a poacher.  He made, before he was nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls “ante-nup.”  He early had three children, whom he deserted, as he deserted his wife.  He came to London, we do not know when (about 1582, according to the “guess” of an antiquary of 1680); held horses at the door of a theatre (so tradition says), was promoted to the rank of “servitor” (whatever that may mean), became an actor (a vagabond under the Act), and by 1594 played before Queen Elizabeth.  He put money in his pocket (heaven knows how), for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best house in his native bourgade.  He obtained, by nefarious genealogical falsehoods (too common, alas, in heraldry), the right to bear arms; and went on acting.  In 1610-11 (?) he retired to his native place.  He never