Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who
held the horses in the mean time; and who studied the books in
the garret; and who frolicked in the law-courts for recreation.
Also, who did the call-boying and the play-acting.
For he became a call-boy; and as early as ’93 he became a
“vagabond”–the law’s ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in
’94 a “regular” and properly and officially listed member of that
(in those days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.
Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two
theaters, and manager of them. Thenceforward he was a busy and
flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands
for twenty years. Then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration
he wrote his one poem–his only poem, his darling–and laid him
down and died:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
He was probably dead when he wrote it. Still, this is only
conjecture. We have only circumstantial evidence. Internal
evidence.
Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which
constitute the giant Biography of William Shakespeare? It would
strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them. He is a
brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of
Paris.
V
“We May Assume”
In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults
are transacting business. Two of these cults are known as the
Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one–the
Brontosaurian.
The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s
Works; the Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the
Brontosaurian doesn’t really know which of them did it, but is
quite composedly and contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN’T,
and strongly suspects that Bacon DID. We all have to do a good
deal of assuming, but I am fairly certain that in every case I
can call to mind the Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the
Shakespearites. Both parties handle the same materials, but the
Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and rational and
persuasive results out of them than is the case with the
Shakespearites. The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a
definite principle, an unchanging and immutable law: which is:
2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together, make 165. I believe this
to be an error. No matter, you cannot get a habit-sodden
Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon any other basis.
With the Baconian it is different. If you place before him the
above figures and set him to adding them up, he will never in any
case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of ten
he will get just the proper 31.
Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and
homely way calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the
ignorant and unintelligent. We will suppose a case: take a lap-
bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged
old Tom that’s scarred from stem to rudder-post with the
memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so
educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of him “all
cat-knowledge is his province”; also, take a mouse. Lock the
three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell. Wait
half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a
Baconian, and let them cipher and assume. The mouse is missing:
the question to be decided is, where is it? You can guess both
verdicts beforehand. One verdict will say the kitten contains
the mouse; the other will as certainly say the mouse is in the
tom-cat.
The Shakespearite will Reason like this–(that is not my
word, it is his). He will say the kitten MAY HAVE BEEN attending
school when nobody was noticing; therefore WE ARE WARRANTED IN
ASSUMING that it did so; also, it COULD HAVE BEEN training in a
court-clerk’s office when no one was noticing; since that could
have happened, WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN ASSUMING that it did happen;
it COULD HAVE STUDIED CATOLOGY IN A GARRET when no one was