.
has veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his
work was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we
reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads
somewhere.

Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in
manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted;
and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's
property) in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed
it from him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because
this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest
impossibilities at that; whilst Mr Harris's play is serious both in
size, intention, and quality. But there could not in the nature of
things be much resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespear to have
been a broken-hearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person,
whereas I am convinced that he was very like myself: in fact, if I
had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank
verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his money than all the
other Elizabethans put together. Yet the success of Frank Harris's
book on Shakespear gave me great delight.

To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp
stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In
critical literature there is one prize that is always open to
competition, one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical
rank with it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation
on Shakespear. It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain
fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner
and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the
indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and men
who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a
gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat.
Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything
that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to
the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice
denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy,
every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of
mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is
expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is
extraordinarily qualified, by a rang