We all have our personal equations in the way of belief.  That the plot of the “nom de plume” should have evaded discovery for a week, if the actor were the untutored countryman of the hypotheses, is to me, for one, absolutely incredible.  A “concealed poet” looking about for a “nom de plume” and a mask behind which he could be hidden, would not have selected the name, or the nearest possible approach to the name, of an ignorant unread actor.  As he was never suspected of not being the author of the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a country ignoramus, manifestly incapable of poetry, wit, and such learning as the plays exhibit.  Every one must judge for himself.  Mr. Greenwood fervently believes in what I disbelieve. {22a}

“Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves at all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays . . . " says Mr. Greenwood.

Very few care now.  They know the actors’ names:  in vain, as a rule, do I ask playgoers for the name of the author of their entertainment.  But in Elizabeth’s time the few who cared were apt to care very much, and they would inquire intensely when the Stratford actor, a bookless, untaught man, was announced as the author of plays which were among the most popular of their day.  The seekers never found any other author.  They left no hint that they suspected the existence of any other author.  Hence I venture to infer that Will seemed to them no unread rustic, but a fellow of infinite fancy,—­no scholar to be sure, but very capable of writing the pieces which he fathered.

They may all have been mistaken.  Nobody can prove that Heywood and Ben Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not mistaken.  But certain it is that they thought the Will whom they knew capable of the works which were attributed to him.  Therefore he cannot possibly have been the man who could not write, of the more impulsive Baconians; or the bookless, and probably all but Latinless, man of Mr. Greenwood’s theory.  The positions already seem to me to be untenable.

CHAPTER II:  THE “SILENCE” ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

Before proceeding further to examine Mr. Greenwood’s book, and the Baconian theories, with the careful attention which they deserve, we must clear the ground by explaining two points which appear to puzzle Baconians, though, to be sure, they have their own solutions of the problems.

The first question is:  Why, considering that Shakespeare, by the consent of the learned of most of the polite foreign nations, was one of the world’s very greatest poets, have we received so few and such brief notices of him from the pens of his contemporaries?

“It is wonderful,” exclaims Mr. Crouch-Batchelor, “that hundreds of persons should not have left records of him. {27a} We know nearly as much about the most insignificant writer of the period as we know of him, but fifty times more about most of his contemporaries.  It is senseless to try to account for this otherwise than by recognising that the man was not the author.”