Ben Jonson,
Green, and Marlowe (some of these men of surprising genius) must take a
lower place, for the master of revels is come. William Shakespeare is
here. His life is not lengthily but plainly writ. He might have said,
as did Tennyson's Ulysses, "I am become a name." It would seem that a
man at such a time, with such a reputation, would have naught to fear
from iconoclasm, however fierce. He, in a sense, was known as Raleigh
or Essex were not. He has put himself into human history, and made the
world his debtor. The existence of a man whose personality was
admitted by his contemporaries must be believed in. Stories concerning
him haunted the byways of London and literature. Ben Jonson paid him a
tardy tribute. Men received him as they received Chaucer. But the
spirit of the age finds him vulnerable. Delia Bacon, Smith, O'Connor,
Holmes, and Donnelly are leaders who deny Shakespeare's identity. I
may note Donnelly, an American gentleman of research and painstaking
which would be creditable to a German scholar. He must be allowed to
be a man of ingenuity. His method of discovering that Shakespeare was
not himself has all the flavor of an invention. It glitters, not with
generalities, but ingenuities. A sample page of his folio, covered
with hieroglyphics which mark the progress of finding the cipher which
he thinks the plays contain--such sample page is certainly a marvel,
even to the generation which has read with avidity "Robert Elsmere" and
"Looking Backward." A peculiarity in it all is, that his explanation
makes marvelous doubly so. To believe that a man should have hidden
his authorship of such works as the plays of Shakespeare makes a draft
on the credulity of men too great to be borne. Why Junius should not
have revealed himself is not difficult to discover. His life was at
stake. But why the author of "The Tempest," or "King Lear," or "The
Merchant of Venice," should have concealed his personality so carefully
that three centuries have elapsed before men could discover it--this is
an enigma no man can solve. In general, it is objected by
non-believers in Shakespeare that it is impossible to conceive of a man
whose rearing possessed so few advantages as did that of Shakespeare,
having written the plays attributed to him. This is really the strong
point in the whole discussion. All other arguments are subordinate.
It is admitted that it does seem impossible for the poacher and wild
cou