manuscripts. Ireland was exposed by Malone, and he published a
confession of his forgeries in 1805. More skilful and far more
disturbing to Shakespearean scholarship are the forgeries of John Payne
Collier, extending over a period from 1835 to 1849. These included
manuscript corrections in a copy of the second Folio, and many documents
concerning the biography of Shakespeare and the history of the
Elizabethan theater. These forgeries have vitiated many of Collier's
most important publications, as his _Memoirs of Edward Alleyn_, and
_History of English Dramatic Poetry_.

[Page Heading: Forgeries]

We turn now from attempts to increase Shakespeare's writings to an
extraordinary effort to deny him the authorship of all his plays. Doubts
on this score seem to have been raised by Joseph C. Hart in his _Romance
of Yachting_, 1848, and by an article in _Chambers' Journal_, August 7,
1852. In 1856, Mr. W. H. Smith first proposed Bacon's authorship in a
letter to Lord Ellesmere, "Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's
plays?" These were followed by an article by Miss Delia Bacon in
_Putnam's Monthly_, 1856, and a volume, _The Philosophy of the Plays of
Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon_. Since Miss Bacon's book, her
hypothesis has resulted in the publication of hundreds of volumes and
pamphlets supporting many variations of the theory. Some are content to
view the authorship as a mystery, assigning the plays to an unknown
author. Others attribute the authorship to a club of distinguished men,
or to Sir Anthony Shirley, or the Earl of Rutland, or another. Others
give Bacon only a portion of the plays, as those containing many legal
terms. The majority, however, are thoroughgoing "Baconians," and the
most prodigious cases of misapplied ingenuity have been the efforts to
find in the First Folio a cipher, by which certain letters are selected
which proclaim Bacon's authorship; as _The Great Cryptogram_, 1887, by
Ignatius Donnelly, and _The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon_, 1900,
by Mrs. Gallup. Such cyphers are mutually destructive, and their
absurdity has been repeatedly demonstrated. Either they will not work
without much arbitrary manipulation, or they work too well and are found
to indicate Bacon's authorship of literature written before his birth
and after his death. Yet similar 'discoveries' continue to be announced.

The evidences supporting Shakespeare's authorship have been set forth
sufficiently in this volume