admiration, delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up
and claim the authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or
two? One reason is, because there are a dozen that are
recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you remember
“Beautiful Snow”? Do you remember “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,
Rock Me to Sleep”? Do you remember “Backward, turn, backward, O
Time, in thy flight! Make me a child again just for tonight”? I
remember them very well. Their authorship was claimed by most of
the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every
claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least–to
wit, he could have done the authoring; he was competent.
Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven’t.
There was good reason. The world knows there was but one man on
the planet at the time who was competent–not a dozen, and not
two. A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and
then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching
across the plain–footprints that were three miles apart, each
footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with
forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any doubt
as to who made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?
Where there two? No–the people knew who it was that had been
along there: there was only one Hercules.
There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn’t be two;
certainly there couldn’t be two at the same time. It takes ages
to bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.
This one was not matched before his time; nor during his time;
and hasn’t been matched since. The prospect of matching him in
our time is not bright.
The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not
qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.
They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment–both
natural and acquired–for the miracle; and that no other
Englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed,
anything closely approaching it.
Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor
and horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has
synopsized Bacon’s history–a thing which cannot be done for the
Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn’t any history to synopsize.
Bacon’s history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his
death in old age–a history consisting of known facts, displayed
in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and
conjectures and might-have-beens.
Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen,
and had a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was
“distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian: she
corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his
APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor
Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration.” It is the
atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations
and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the
parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere
saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep
subjects; and with polite culture. It had its natural effect.
Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use
for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education.
This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know,
because we have no history of him of an informing sort. There
were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do
and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to
the dead languages. “All the valuable books then extant in all
the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a
single shelf”–imagine it! The few existing books were in the
Latin tongue mainly. “A person who was ignorant of it was shut
out from all acquaintance–not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but
with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of
his own time”–a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for
his fictitious reputation’s sake, since the writer of his Works
would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before