Is Shakespeare Dead? / From My Autobiography

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rite that word, it is not kind, it is not courteous. The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call us the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend t

n inferences, not upon known and established facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am g

; and we have now arrived

itten the Works, we infer that somebody did. Who

eason is, because there's 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 agai

ar 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 an

takes ages to bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him. This one was not matched before his t

acon was. They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment-both natural and acquired-for the miracl

hich 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 d

ng; 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 vernac

spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the thugs presume it-on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when they have the handling of it. They know by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to stay tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to d

they would have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers-all by their patented method "presumption." If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers were his father. And the

ng horses in front of a theatre, but as a practicing lawyer-a great and successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere t

ngless, they are inebriate extravagancies-intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the moon at the full-and not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. "At every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law; he seems almost to have thought in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end