Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not at Court, not in the study, did he meet them.  How then did he create his multitude of very low-lived persons?  Rustics and rural constables he may have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company.  So you have to admit “Genius,”—­the miracle of “Genius” in your Bacon,—­to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated with Bacon.

Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very different genius, education, and environment.  Burns could easily get at the Press, and be published:  that was impossible for Shakespeare at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics.  Suppose him to be a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist.  Tradition at Stratford says something about the humorist, and tradition, in similar circumstances, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy years.

Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney.  Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so lightly as Burns did,—­some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer, and was in troubles many.  Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main chance.  Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory.  His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.

Something must be done!  Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have seen and talked with them, and been attracted.  He was a practical man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a small brigade of boys as his deputies.  According to Ben Jonson he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent, that terrible bar!  The actors find that out; he is admitted within the house as a “servitor”—­a call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.

By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, “Shakescene” thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene’s three author friends:  whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.