Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/161

142 out of the common that they thought it worth while to record them. Shakespeare never killed a man as Jonson did; his voice was never heard, like Marlowe’s, in tavern brawls; nor was he ever, like Marston and Chapman, threatened with the penalty of having his ears lopped and his nose split; but his life was so gentle and so clear in the sight of man and of Heaven that no record of it has come down to us; for which failure I am fervently grateful, and as fervently hope that no future year will ever reveal even the faintest peep through the divinity which doth hedge this king.’

Unfortunately, it is precisely the man Shakespeare—in some circles derisively called the Stratfordian—who carries with him into obscurity the dramatic artist. Without him—ill-bred, ill-lettered, and in some ways perhaps ill-balanced as he was—the plays lose their coherent meaning and disintegrate into picture puzzles, in which mad ladies and gentlemen piece out the names and features of whom they will.

There was once a time when it seemed a mark of daring and original thought to assert the identity of Francis Bacon with the author of the Shakespearean dramas. That time is now past, and the mere Baconian is in sorry plight. His doctrine is as hackneyed as that of the Shakespearean, and it lacks the compensating satisfaction of reason. There are few joys in being illogical, when one must also be flat. Desperate cases produce desperate remedies, and super-Baconians have lately arisen, ready to supplant the pale ineffectual fires of their predecessors by yet brighter blazes of assumption. Such is the late E. G. Harman (Edmund Spenser and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon, 1914), who devotes 592 pages to proving that Bacon wrote not merely Shakespeare, but also all of Spenser.