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The miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous enough to stagger my credulity remain. I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592-3 was the ex-butcher's boy. Meanwhile these five plays, written by somebody before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr. Furnivall's eleven; and they fairly frighten him, if he be a "Stratfordian."
This gross neglect, infamous in Will, may thus have been practised by the Great Unknown himself. In 1911 Mr. The evidence of Ben Jonson to the identity of Shakespeare the author with Shakspere the actor, is "the strength of the Stratfordian faith," says Mr. Greenwood. It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood's forty-seven pages about the evidence of Jonson.
The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon's works, that he was such a student. Mr. Collins, "a violent Stratfordian," overproved his case. If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as well as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were so learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion he WAS, in the opinion of Mr. Collins.
"The Stratfordian," says Mr. Greenwood, "will ingeminate 'Genius! Had I to maintain the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh heavily on bookless Will's rusticity and patois.
"Will, even Will," says the Stratfordian, "could not have composed the five, much less the eleven, much less Mr. Greenwood reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean plays "before 1592" as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian of whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of feu Mr. Bludyer of The Tomahawk.
And as Mr. Can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so, tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter? But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case.
Meanwhile, let the doubter take up any popular English books of Shakespeare's day: he will find them replete with much knowledge wholly new to him which he will also find in Shakespeare. Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the facts staggered him, as a "Stratfordian." A friend told me that he too was equally moved. I replied that these pseudoscientific "facts" had long been commonplaces.
The banner-cry of the Baconians is the word "Impossible!" To these arguments, the orthodox Stratfordian is apt to reply, that he finds in the plays and poems plenty of inaccurate general information on classical subjects, information in which the whole literature of England then abounded.
And as Mr. Can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so, tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter? But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case.
It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high style, and making speeches over them." This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's apprentice.
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