Bacon (or Bungay) cannot “take” them without permission of their legal owners,—­Shakspere’s or any other company;—­of any one, in short, who, as Ben Jonson says, “buys up reversions of old plays.”  How is he to manage these shabby dealings?  Apparently he employs Will Shakspere, spells his own “nom de plume” “Shakespeare,” and has his rewritings and transformations of the destitute author’s work acted by Will’s company.  What a situation for Bacon, or Sir Fulke Greville, or James vi, or any “man in high position” whom fancy can suggest!  The plays by the original authors, whoever they were, could only be obtained by the “concealed poet” and “man in high position” from the legal owners, Shakspere’s company, usually.  The concealed poet had to negotiate with the owners, and Bacon (or whoever he was) employed that scamp Will Shakspere, first, I think, to extract the plays from the owners, and then to pretend that he himself, even Will, had “rewritten and transformed them.”

What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how certain it was that Will would blackmail the “man in high position”!  “Doubtless” he did:  we find Bacon arrested for debt, more than once, while Will buys New Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted from the concealed poet of high position. {164a} Bacon did associate with that serpent Phillips, a reptile of Walsingham, who forged a postscript to Mary Stuart’s letter to Babington.  But now, if not Bacon, then some other concealed poet of high position, with a mysterious passion for rewriting and transforming plays by sad, needy authors, is in close contact with Will Shakspere, the Warwickshire poacher and ignorant butcher’s boy, country schoolmaster, draper’s apprentice, enfin, tout le tremblement.

“How strange, how more than strange!”

The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as March 3, 1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for the performances of many plays.  He was paid as owner or lessee of the House used by this or that company.  On March 3, 1591, the play acted by “Lord Strange’s (Derby’s) men” was Henry vi.  Several other plays with names familiar in Shakespeare’s Works, such as Titus Andronicus, all the three parts of Henry vi, King Leare (April 6, 1593), Henry V (May 14, 1592), The Taming of a Shrew (June 11, 1594), and Hamlet, paid toll to Henslowe.  He “received” so much, on each occasion, when they were acted in a theatre of his.  But he never records his purchase of these plays; and it is not generally believed that Shakespeare was the author of all these plays, in the form which they bore in 1591-4:  though there is much difference of opinion.