The gray-haired Queen, who in youth had called him her little Lord Keeper, will not lift a hand to aid him in his poverty, or to advance him in the State, regarding him as a man of study rather than of practice and experience; and so Bacon is known to have remained, bemoaning (as he himself says in a letter to Burleigh, written in 1592) "the meanness of my [his] estate; for though I can not accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get." * This is the very year, 1592, in which Robert Greene "discovers that a new poet has arisen who is becoming the only shake-scene in a county;" and so far forgets himself as to become "jealous" of "William Shakespeare, who, up to this time, has only been a "Johannes Factotum," of not much account until he borrows "our feathers." ** And so, until 1611, Bacon is driven to the Jews. Why should he not, in his pressing necessity for "lease of quick revenue," bethink him of the resources within himself, and seek a cover whereunder—without embarrassing his hope of future preferment—he may turn into gold his years of study and travel, by means of a quick pen?

In 1611, when he is suddenly created attorney-general, the Shakespearean plays cease abruptly, to appear no more for ever. William Shakespeare closes out his theatrical interest in London, and retires, to moneylending (as some say), in Stratford. He dies in 1616.

* Speckling, "Letters and Life of Bacon," vol. i, p. 108.
** Ante, p. 125

Lord Bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, and falls, in 1621. In 1623, while Bacon is again spending his time in the strictest privacy and retirement, there suddenly appears a folio, "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare," amended, revised, enlarged, and improved, including at least seventeen (Mr. Smith says twenty-three) plays which had never appeared or been heard of in Shakespeare's lifetime.

Few of us—outside the ranks of commentators, like Mr. Grant White, and others, who give their valuable lives to this study—dream how vast were the emendations and revisions, enlargements and corrections of the old Shakespearean plays given to the world in this folio of 1623. Mr. White says that in the one play of "Love's Labours Lost" there are inserted newlines in almost every speech.1 Another, "The Merry Wives of Windsor," according to Knight, ** has double the number of lines it originally possessed in 1600. The "Henry V." has nineteen hundred new lines. The "Titus Andronicus" has an entire scene added, and the "Much Ado about Nothing" and "The Lear" are so altered and elaborated, with curtailment here and enlargement there, as to lead Mr. Knight to declare that "none but the hand of the master could have superadded them." *** But, if William Shakespeare was the "master," how did his hand reach up out of the grave under Stratford chancel, where it had rested seven years, to make these improvements?

* Cited by Holmes, "Authorship of Shakespeare," third
edition, p. 71.
** "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 337.
*** Id.

And if William Shakespeare in his lifetime made those revisions for Heminges and Condell (who appear on the title-page of this folio of 1623 as editors, and announce in the preface that this edition is printed from the "true original copies") at Stratford (where, according to his own inventory, he had neither library nor books—nor bookcase, nor writing table, for that matter), why did he not print them himself, for his own benefit, instead of performing all this labor of emendation for somebody else? He could not have been fearful lest he would lose money by them, for they had been the foundation and source of all his fortune. Nor had he grown, in his old age, indifferent to gain (let the ghost of the poor "delinquent for malt delivered" assure us of that!). He could not have revised them for pure glory: for, in his previous career, while in London, he had shown no interest in them, permitting them to be surreptitiously printed by whoever, in the same town with himself, listed so to do. He had even allowed them to be mixed up with other people's trash, his name signed to all indifferently, and the whole made footballs of by the London printers, under his very nose, without so much as lifting a voice in protest, or to declare which were his and which were not. * Besides, if he had revised them for the glory of his own name, why did he not cause them to be printed? Nor can we suppose that he was employed to revise them, for pay, by Heminges and Condell, because, if they did so employ him, why did they carry the expense of the revision for seven long years, until he and his wife were both in their graves, before reimbursing themselves by printing the first folio for the market!

* See post, "The New Theory," where it appears that, at the
time Shakespeare was producing certain plays on his stage,
certain others were being printed and circulated, as his,
outside.

Last, and most wonderful of all, in this first folio are included all these entirely new plays which had never been heard of before! Who wrote those, and why? The answer to these riddles, the Baconians say, is that, when again at leisure, Bacon bethought himself of his scattered progeny, and—whether proposing to publicly own them or not—whether to secure them for posterity or merely for his own pastime—he devoted that leisure to a revision of the works by means of which he had bridged the first long interval in his career. At any rate, when the revision appeared, it is matter of fact that William Shakespeare was dead and in his grave, and speculation has nothing to do with that.

Besides the coincidence of the plays appearing during Bacon's first retirement: ceasing altogether at his first elevation, and appearing in revised and improved form again after his final downfall, and during his second privacy, the Baconians cite: I. Contemporary statements, which include (A), Sir Tobie Matthew's famous postscript: * "The most prodigious wit of these times is of your name, though he be known by another" (which Mr. Weiss ** explains, very lamely in our opinion, by arguing that the other name by which Bacon was known, and to which Matthew alludes, was "Viscount St. Albans); (B), a letter from Bacon