took any interest in his unprinted manuscript plays; though rapacious, he never troubled himself about his valuable copyrights; never dreamed of making a collected edition of his works.  He died in 1616, probably of drink taken.  Legal documents prove him to have been a lender of small sums, an avid creditor, a would-be encloser of commons.  In his will he does not bequeath or mention any books, manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth.  It is utterly incredible, then, that this man wrote the poems and plays, so rich in poetry, thought, scholarship, and knowledge, which are attributed to “William Shakespeare.”  These must be the works of “a concealed poet,” a philosopher, a courtier moving in the highest circles, a supreme legist, and, necessarily, a great poet, and student of the classics.

No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a legist, a scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all the other qualifications so the author of the plays either was Francis Bacon—­ or some person unknown, who was in all respects equally distinguished, but kept his light under a bushel.  Consequently the name “William Shakespeare” is a pseudonym or “pen-name” wisely adopted by Bacon (or the other man) as early as 1593, at a time when William Shakspere was notoriously an actor in the company which produced the plays of the genius styling himself “William Shakespeare.”

Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding and of expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody, I have now summarised the views of the Baconians sans phrase, and of the more cautious or more credulous “Anti-Willians,” as I may style the party who deny to Will the actor any share in the authorship of the plays, but do not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.

Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side of the controversy is The Shakespeare Problem Restated, by Mr. G. G. Greenwood (see my Introduction).  To this volume I turn for the exposition of the theory that “Will Shakspere” (with many other spellings) is an actor from the country—­a man of very scanty education, in all probability, and wholly destitute of books; while “William Shakespeare,” or with the hyphen, “Shake-speare,” is a “nom de plume” adopted by the Great Unknown “concealed poet.”

When I use the word “author” here, I understand Mr. Greenwood to mean that in the plays called “Shakespearean” there exists work from many pens:  owing to the curious literary manners, methods, and ethics of dramatic writing in, say, 1589-1611.  In my own poor opinion this is certainly true of several plays in the first collected edition, “The Folio,” produced seven years after Will’s death, namely in 1623.  These curious “collective” methods of play-writing are to be considered later.

Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory that “William Shake-speare” (with or without the hyphen), on the title-pages of plays, or when signed to the dedications of poems, is the chosen pen-name, or “nom de plume,” of Bacon or of the Unknown.