[Original]

F a matter so indifferent as the number of pebbles in Demosthenes' mouth when he practiced oratory on the beach, no effort of credulity can be predicated. But when a proposition is historical and capable of proving itself, it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. It would be interesting, for example, to compile a catalogue of the reasons why A, B, and C, and their friends, doubt the real Shakespeare story, and cling to the manufactured tradition. A will tell us he believes it because somebody else (Bacon will do as well as anybody) wrote enough as it was, and was not the sort of man who would surrender any of the glory to which he was himself entitled, to another. B, because, when somebody else wrote poetry (for example, Bacon's "Paraphrase of the Psalms"), his style was quite another than the style of the dramas. C, because he is satisfied that William Shakespeare spent some terms at Stratford school, and was any thing but unkind to his wife. D, because the presumption is too old to be disturbed; as if we should always go on believing in William Tell and the man in the moon, because our ancestors believed in them! And so on, through the alphabet. It is so much easier, for instance, to believe that miracles should appear by the page, or that universal wisdom should spring fully armed from the brain of a Warwickshire clown, than that Francis Bacon, or somebody else, should write anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de plume the name of a living man, instead of inventing one de novo.

Now, say the New Theorists, if at about that time, a living nomme de plume should happened to be wanted, whose name was more cheaply purchasable than that of a young "Johannes Factotum," of the Blackfriars, who, by doing any thing and every thing that was wanted, and saving every honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever appears to have allowed himself out of his increasing prosperity) * and a county seat?

Four or five years before our historical William Shakespeare had bethought himself of wandering to London, one James Burbage, father of Richard, the actor, had built the Blackfriars Theater, a plain, rough building on the site of the present publishing office of the "Times."

* We happen on traces of the fact that William
Shakespeare's particular weakness was his "noble descent"
very often, in exploring the annals of these times, and that
his fellow actors by no means spared his weakness. "It was
then a current joke to identify Shakespeare with 'the
Conqueror,' or 'Rufus,' as if his pretensions to descent
from the Norman dukes were known" ("Ben Jonson's Quarrel
with Shakspeare,"
"North British Review," July, 1870). And certain lines in
the "Poetaster" are supposed to be a fling at this weakness
of Shakespeare, as the whole play is believed to be a hit at
Marlow (id.). We shall see how this weakness was fostered by
the new set into which circumstances forced Shakespeare,
later on.

Before its door (for the Blackfriars will answer as well as the Globe) we may, perhaps, imagine a rustic lad—fresh from Stratford, and footsore from his long tramp, attracted by the crowd and the lights, standing idle and agape. Possibly, then, riding up, some gallant threw young William his horse's bridle, and William Shakespeare had found employment in London. By attention to business, William, in time, may have, as Rowe thinks, come to control the horse-holding business, and take his predecessors into his pay; until they became known as "Shakespeare's boys," and the young speculator's name penetrated to the inside of the theater. In course of time he becomes a "servitour" (what we now call a "super," i. e., supernumerary) inside, and ultimately (according to Rowe, an actor himself, and the nearest in point of time to William Shakespeare to write his biography) "the reader" * of the establishment; and naturally, therefore, stage editor of whatever is offered. He has no royal road to learning at his command, nor does he want one. The "knack at speech-making," which had delighted the rustic youth of Stratford, mellowed by the new experiences which surround him, is all he needs. Not only the plays of Greene and others, which he now remodeled (and improved, no doubt), but essays of his own, became popular. The audience (we shall see more of them further on) called for "Shakespeare's plays," and his name came to possess a market value.

* In this capacity he read and accepted Ben Jonson's "Every
Man in his Humour," which was the beginning of the intimacy
which ended with their lives.

The dramas we now call "Shakespearean" surely did appear in his lifetime, and under his name. Were they ever performed at his theater? Let us glance at the probabilities.