Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/163

144 portentous perhaps of all these colossal works, Mr. J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

The desire to see the face behind the mask is not only legitimate, but necessary; and, happily, it has not recently been exclusively confined to the Bacon-Ralegh-Oxford-Derby-Rutland-Southampton exponents of critical solitaire. The most priceless hour of the irrecoverable past, says William Archer, would be that in which one might meet the real Shakespeare face to face; and Professor Bradley says: ‘For my own part I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one.’

The author of the Shakespearean plays, we can say with perfect confidence, was not the advanced political thinker that Bacon was, or Ralegh, or Spenser, or even Marlowe. He was distinctly a traditionalist in politics and social theory. His attitude toward the state and sovereign was not Tudor, but Plantagenet; not renaissance, but feudal. It represents the feeling of Stratford much better than that of London.

The King in Shakespeare is nearly always the man