“If Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays,” said Silvester, “they wouldn’t have been so bad.”
“There seems to me to be only one argument,” said Professor Morgan, “in favour of the Bacon theory, and that is that the range of mind displayed in Shakespeare’s plays is so great that it would have been child’s play for the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays to have written the works of Bacon.”
“Yes,” said Hall, “but because it would be child’s play for the man who wrote my plays to have written your works and those of Professor Newcastle—which it would—it doesn’t prove that you wrote my plays.”
“Bacon was a philosopher,” said Willmott, “and Shakespeare was a poet—a dramatic poet; but Shakespeare was also an actor, an actor-manager, and only an actor-manager could have written the plays.”
“What do you think of the Bacon theory?” asked Faubourg of the stranger.
“I think,” said the stranger, “that we shall soon have to say eggs and Shakespeare instead of eggs and Bacon.”
This remark caused a slight shudder to pass through all the guests, and Mrs. Bergmann felt sorry that she had not taken decisive measures to prevent the stranger’s intrusion.
“Shakespeare wrote his own plays,” said Sciarra, “and I don’t know if he knew law, but he knew le coeur de la femme. Cleopatra bids her slave find out the colour of Octavia’s hair; that is just what my wife, my Angelica, would do if I were to marry some one in London while she was at Rome.”
“Mr. Gladstone used to say,” broke in Lockton, “that Dante was inferior to Shakespeare, because he was too great an optimist.”
“Dante was not an optimist,” said Sciarra, “about the future life of politicians. But I think they were both of them pessimists about man and both optimists about God.”