We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian arguments against Will Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and poems.  Their chief argument for Bacon is aut Diabolus, aut Franciscus, which, freely interpreted, means, “If Bacon is not the author, who the devil is?”

We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them, namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early years of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent place in the world of the drama.  His authorship is explicitly vouched for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic, Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had been one of Henslowe’s “hands,” and lived into the Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within, and his “mellifluous Shakespeare” is “Will,” as his Beaumont was “Frank,” his Marlowe “Kit,” his Fletcher, “Jack.”  The author of Daiphantus (1604), mentioning the popularity of Hamlet, styles it “one of friendly Shakespeare’s tragedies.”  Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known and friendly character.  The other authors of allusions did not need to say who their “Shakespeare” was, any more than they needed to say who Marlowe or any other poet was.  We have examined the possibly unprecedented argument which demands that they who mention Shakespeare as the poet must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly that he is also the actor.

“But all may have been deceived” by the long conspiracy of the astute Bacon, or the Nameless One.  To believe this possible, considering the eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival playwrights, is to be credulous indeed.  The Baconians, representing Will almost as incapable of the use of pen and ink as “the old hermit of Prague,” destroy their own case.  A Will who had to make his mark, like his father, could not pose as an author even to the call-boy of his company.  Mr. Greenwood’s bookless Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power of “bumbasting out a blank verse,” is a rather less impossible pretender, indeed; but why and when did the speaker of patois, the bookless one, write blank verse, from 1592 onwards, and where are his blank verses?  Where are the “works” of Poet-Ape?  As to the man, even Will by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was “a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant, smooth wit.”  To his fellow-actors he was “so worthy a friend and fellow” (associate).  To Jonson, “he was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed so freely that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.”  If Jonson here refers, as I suppose he does, to his