Clasping my slender arms about his thigh-
'O, my dear master, cannot you,' quoth I,
Make me a poet? Do it, if you can,
And you shall see, I'll quickly be a man.'
Who me thus answer'd smiling: 'Nay,' quoth he,
'If you'll not play the wag, but I may see
You ply your learning, I will shortly read
Some poets to you.' Phoebus be my speed,
To 't hard went I; when shortly he began,
And first read to me honest Mantuan,
Then Virgil's Eclogues. Being entered thus
Methought I straight had mounted Pegasus,
And in his full career could make him stop,
And bound upon Parnassus' bi-clift top.

There is, therefore, neither difficulty nor mystery in the rise to literary pre-eminence of such mortals, and the Baconian may learn from Shakespeare himself a good deal more about the process by which such positions can be attained by men naturally gifted with intellects above the average. His description in Henry V. of the suddenly acquired knowledge of the young Prince, the wildness of whose salad days so closely resembles the early life of Shakespeare according to the traditions on which Baconians so strongly rely:

CANTERBURY. The courses of his youth promis'd it not.

The breath no sooner left his father's body,

But that his wildness, mortified in him,

Hear him but reason in divinity,

And all admiring, with an inward wish

You would desire the king were made a prelate:
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
You would say—it hath been all-in-all his study:
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle render'd you in musick;

Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks,
The air, a charter'd libertine, is still,

And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears,
To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences;

So that the art and practick part of life

Must be the mistress to this theorick:
Which is a wonder, how his grace could glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain :

His companies, unletter'd, rude, and shallow;
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,

Any retirement, any sequestration

From open haunts and popularity.

Henry V., I. i.

His sketch in Cymbeline of the rapid education of the child Posthumus in

all the learnings that his time

Could make him the receiver of; which he took,

As we do air, fast as 'twas minister'd ;

and, again, his picture of Orlando in As You Like It, one and all seem to indicate in a modest but forcible way that the writer of these passages was not unmindful when he penned them of his own marvellous advancement, and of whom one may yet say :—

This is he;

Who hath upon him still that natural stamp :

It was wise Nature's end in the donation,

To be his evidence now.

In the face of the foregoing remarks, it would be mere waste of time to enter on any extended discussion as to the actual schooling of Shakespeare when a boy at Stratford. As a matter of fact there is no direct evidence of his ever having gone to school at all, although, as Canon Beeching suggests, it may fairly be assumed that the eldest son of the chief Alderman of the town was sent there in due course. We do know, however, pretty well what the usual school curriculum was in the time of Shakespeare's boyhood, and it is not a little singular (though quite unimportant on the question of authorship) that the writer of Love's Labour's Lost, one of the earliest of the plays, and of the Merry Wives, seems to show a knowledgeable familiarity with the course of instruction pursued at such places of education.

We may, therefore, without hesitation, give the go-by to such arguments of the Baconians as are based upon any question relative to the amount of learning shown by the writer of the plays, for, however interesting it may be to investigate such matters for our own satisfaction and in our general desire to know all that can be known connected with so extraordinary a human being, the conclusions arrived at cannot by any possibility be said to affect the general question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works. The best judges of his own day, with Ben Jonson at their head, saw nothing to wonder at in such erudition as is found in either poems or plays, and one cannot help thinking that their acquaintance with the circumstances in which these works were written, the opportunities for self-instruction which were within the writer's reach, and the capacity of the man himself, provincial though he had been, as he moved amongst them, was of a somewhat sounder character than that possessed by even the most

' Cymbeline, V. v.

industrious gleaner of scandalous tradition and misreader of evidence to be found in the iconoclastic ranks to-day.

Much is at present known as to the conditions surrounding the writing and the staging of plays in Shakespeare's day; and although we have no actual account of how Shakespeare's own work was done, we cannot, from what we do know, imagine that the conditions in his case, at least in his early efforts, were very widely different from what is found in others. One has only to look through that most interesting volume (to be dealt with more fully later on) Henslowe's Diary, as edited by J. P. Collier for the Shakespeare Society in 1845, to see the very working of the hive-and there is no more remarkable feature in the play-production of those early days than the method of joint authorship which was on many occasions adopted.

Nothing was more common than for dramatists to unite their abilities and resources; and, when a piece on any account was to be brought out with peculiar despatch, three, four, five, and perhaps even six poets engaged themselves upon different portions of it. Evidence of this dramatic combination will be found of such frequent occurrence, that it is vain here to point out particular pages where it will be met."

Besides, it is well known that many of the best playwrights of the time had been actors as well-Marlowe, Kyd, R. Wilson, Peele, Lodge, and Ben Jonson almost certainly having at one time or another been of that class. Has it ever occurred to Baconians that the masked man they think Shakespeare to have been would have had a somewhat trying time of it under such a system of literary co-operation? How long do they imagine the uneducated rustic from a provincial town would have succeeded in wearing his visor down? Or are we to assume that none of the many who knew him behind the curtain ever saw him pen a verse, not to say a scene? Or again, is it that all his fellows' shared his secret, playing, before they were yet created, the parts of Horatio and Marcellus to his weird Hamlet as he exhorted them :

Never, so help you mercy!

How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself,

As I perchance hereafter shall think meet

To put an antick disposition on—

That you at such time seeing me, never shall

With arms encumbered thus, or this head-shake,

Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,

As, Well, well, we know; or, We could, an if we would; or, If we
list to speak; or, There be, an if they might;

Or such ambiguous giving out, to note

That you know aught of me : This not to do, swear;

So

grace and mercy at your most need help you!

GHOST (BACON, OF COURSE). Swear."

It was not so; and for the simple reason that even to imagine it is to strain average work-a-day credulity to breaking-point.

I have suggested that with the example of Plautus and others before us the exact amount of Shakespeare's learning, as shown in his works, cannot be regarded as a factor of any vital importance in determining the question of authorship. What is really important in the consideration of any difficulties that may present themselves in the matter is to ask ourselves what was Shakespeare's real school. The one satisfactory answer to that question is the playhouse. The precise date of his leaving Stratford is not known; there is a record of his being there in March 1587, and when next we hear of him he is in London in the year 1591, already an actor good enough to play before Royalty at Whitehall. The intervening years, no unimportant period in the education of a young man of high intellectual capabilities, is lightly passed over by Baconians, who do not seem to see the vast opportunities for self-education which it perhaps afforded. We know that Leicester's Company visited Stratford in 1587; and whether it was with them, or for the purpose of joining them in London, it is admitted by everyone that the young provincial came direct to the theatre in or about that time, and never ceased to be connected with it during all those years. What better school, then, could he possibly have attended? Design or happy accident led him, like Plautus, to the very head quarters of the profession to which all that was best in him was naturally directed. To both these towering intellects the stage meant more than any university. Here before his own eyes Shakespeare saw the finest actors of the day playing characters of every period and every rank of society, in plays penned by such playwrights as Kyd, Webster, Lyly, Greene, Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, and the other giants of Elizabethan times. Where else was such an insight to be obtained into the manners, the fashions, the ceremonies of social life in England or abroad, in the present or the past, in all their variations from Court to stable yard? Here, as it were, living kings, queens, and princes, home or foreign, with all their varied hosts of attendants, statesmen and cardinals, soldiers and philosophers, lovers, merchants, tyrants, lords, and clowns spoke and moved before him, filling him with completest knowledge of just those details of language, action and observance with which he was least acquainted. Here, too, and here only, was to be learnt the playwright's art of arts, stagecraft, an ignorance of which has so often proved to be the grave of many a would-be dramatist since his day. If, as there is reason to believe, he first tried a prentice hand at play-writing under the guidance of, or in conjunction with, the great play-makers who wrote for the Company to which he attached himself, and in which he afterwards became possessed of so large an interest, a mind such as his could not have failed to drink in vast draughts, fast as 'twas ministered,' of the knowledge that was theirs-and what that know

ledge was no student of the literature of Elizabeth's later days requires to be told, being only too well aware that Latin was then still a living tongue, and that the spirit of the classic world, its mythology and all else appertaining to it, were the breath of the nostrils of all who at the time took a pen in hand.

As to the precise amount of his knowledge of Greek and Latin, resulting from private study, or picked up from his colleagues, in addition to such store as he may have brought with him from Stratford, our best source of information is the works themselves. It is after all but a matter of opinion, and dogmatism on the subject gets us no further forward. There is, however, one view that should command respect, that which is embodied in Ben Jonson's well-known 'small Latin and less Greek,' relative though the phrase be at best. Jonson was himself a finished classical scholar; and it is possible that even if Shakespeare had become a fair classic, as we should now term it, the description so given of his deficiencies might not be very far from accurate. On the other hand, if this description be taken literally, as most Shakespearians are inclined to take it, it is conceivable that even the high standard of knowledge attributed to him by the late Professor Collins may have been the result of assistance given him by his more learned coadjutors, who may have supplied him with their own translations of some striking passages from the Greek tragedians or the Latin poets. Or, indeed, some such extracts from the classics may have been taken from plays that have since disappeared, for his power of borrowing was great. The more generally accepted opinion on the matter has been well expressed by Augustus De Morgan :

If Shakespeare's learning on certain points be very much less visible than Jonson's, it is partly because Shakespeare's writings hold it in chemical combination, Jonson's in mechanical aggregation.

Be this, however, as it may, the subject is at least one for reasonable discussion by all interested in the manner of the making of the plays and poems; and though one Shakespearian may differ widely from another on this point as on many others, it is quite unnecessary for Mr. Greenwood to tell us that their doing so is but another instance of The High Priests of Literature' being at loggerheads,' and that there is therefore a Shakespeare Problem,' which can only be solved by assuming that all Shakespeare's works were written by someone else of the same name. What Mr. Greenwood, in making such assertions, seems to forget is, that, for all their differences on minor matters, Shakespearians are absolutely at one on the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's writings; and the greater their differences on such minor points, the more logically valuable becomes their unanimity upon the main question.

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When a cynical American humorist some time ago pithily summed the Baconian theory by saying that Shakespeare's works were not