“Shakespeare was my stenographer, gentlemen,” said Lord Bacon. “If you want to know the whole truth, he did write Hamlet, literally. But it was at my dictation.”
“I deny it,” said Shakespeare. “I admit you gave me a suggestion now and then so as to keep it dull and heavy in spots, so that it would seem more like a real tragedy than a comedy punctuated with deaths, but beyond that you had nothing to do with it.”
“I side with Shakespeare,” put in Emerson. “I’ve seen his autographs, and no sane person would employ a man who wrote such a villanously bad hand as an amanuensis. It’s no use, Bacon, we know a thing or two. I’m a New-Englander, I am.”
“Well,” said Bacon, shrugging his shoulders as though the results of the controversy were immaterial to him, “have it so if you please. There isn’t any money in Shakespeare these days, so what’s the use of quarrelling? I wrote Hamlet, and Shakespeare knows it. Others know it. Ah, here comes Sir Walter Raleigh. We’ll leave it to him. He was cognizant of the whole affair.”
“I leave it to nobody,” said Shakespeare, sulkily.
“What’s the trouble?” asked Raleigh, sauntering up and taking a chair under the cue-rack. “Talking politics?”
“Not we,” said Bacon. “It’s the old question about the authorship of Hamlet. Will, as usual, claims it for himself. He’ll be saying he wrote Genesis next.”
“Well, what if he does?” laughed Raleigh. “We all know Will and his droll ways.”
“No doubt,” put in Nero. “But the question of Hamlet always excites him so that we’d like to have it settled once and for all as to who wrote it. Bacon says you know.”
“I do,” said Raleigh.