ly viewed, calf-butchering accounts for "Titus
Andronicus," the only play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare
ever wrote; and yet it is the only one everybody tried to chouse him out
of, the Baconians included.

The historians find themselves "justified in believing" that the young
Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and got haled
before that magistrate for it. But there is no shred of respectworthy
evidence that anything of the kind happened.

The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have happened into
the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in turning Sir Thomas Lucy
into Mr. Justice Shallow. They have long ago convinced the world--on
surmise and without trustworthy evidence--that Shallow IS Sir Thomas.

The next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford history comes
easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-steeling, and
the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised
vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the
young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh, SUCH a wild young scamp,
and that gratuitous slander is established for all time! It is the very
way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur
that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural
History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest
skeleton that exists on the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the
rest of him out of plaster of Paris. We ran short of plaster of Paris,
or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford
Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or
contained the most plaster.

Shakespeare pronounced "Venus and Adonis" "the first heir of his
invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at literary
composition. He should not have said it. It has been an embarrassment to
his historians these many, many years. They have to make him write that
graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped
from Stratford and his family--1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along
there; because within the next five years he wrote five great plays, and
could not have found time to write another line.

It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and poach
deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest likely
moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wretched from that
school where h