between Venice and Belmont is changed, and in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Milan and Verona are treated as seaport towns.

In Fleay's "Life and Works of Shakespeare," the author notes that there are discrepancies between Richard III and 3 Henry VI, in this, that Gray, in act one, scene three of the first-named play, is depicted as fighting for the Lancastrians, whereas in the second he is represented as a Yorkist, a fact which shows a different hand in the two plays.

It is amusing to read Verplanck's reflection. "The glorious uncertainty of the law," he says, "has been exemplified and commemorated in a large and closely printed volume, containing nothing but the mere title of legal decisions, once acknowledged to be law, and since reversed or contradicted as 'cases overruled, doubted, or denied.' The decisions of the critical tribunals would furnish material for a much larger work. And Shakespeare criticism by itself would supply an ample record of varying or overruled judgments."

In the Shakespeare case, evil has been caused by two errors the first, in the foolish belief that an ignorant man could write plays at all, and second, in the belief, as foolish and baseless as the first, that one man could be the sole composer of works containing over twenty thousand different words.

A late author, Webb, in his summary of evidence, presents the views of the commentators who ask the general reader to believe in the unity of Shakespeare, showing thereby that even they have no confidence in the theory. At page 20 of his chapter entitled "The Unity of Shakespeare," he says:

"To the Shakespearean scholars of the day, the plays of Shakespeare, like the Iliad of Homer, are a noise of many waters. Mr. Swinburne tells us that no scholar believes in the single authorship of Andronicus; that no scholar questions the part taken by 'some hireling or journeyman' in Timon, and that 'few probably would refuse to admit a doubt of the total authenticity or uniform workmanship of the Taming of the Shrew.' A host of experts, following in the footsteps of Malone, assert that the Second and Third parts of King Henry the Sixth include the work of Marlowe. The writers in the Henry Irving Shakespeare ascribe the last act of Troilus and Cressida to Dekker. Mr. Swinburne complains that the most characteristic portion of Macbeth has been attributed to Middleton. Mr. Phillips contends that the Merry Wives of Windsor has been interpolated by a botcher. Mr. Lee is as iconoclastic as the rest. Intolerant as he is of doubt as to the identity of Shakespeare, he, too, denies his unity. To him, Shakespeare is a noun of multitude, signifying many. He attributes one of the most striking scenes in Macbeth to a hack of the theatre; he suggests that the third and fifth acts of Timon were the work of a colleague with whom Shakespeare worked in collaboration; he holds that the vision of Posthumus in Cymbeline is a piece of pitiful mummery, which must have been supplied by another hand; and boldly carrying the judgment of Solomon into execution, he cuts the body of Henry the Eighth in two, and hands one half of it to Shakespeare and the other half to Fletcher.

"As the work of Shakespeare is said to have been interpolated by others, so the work of others is said to have been appropriated by Shakespeare. The Hamlet

mentioned by Nash in 1589 is attributed by Mr. Lee to Kyd; the King John which was published in 1590 is regarded by Mr. Marshall as an old play by an unknown writer; the Henry the Sixth, mentioned by Henslowe as performed in 1591, is described by Mr. Marshall as an old play which Shakespeare found at the theatre and slightly altered; the First part of the Contention, which was published in 1594, and the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which was published in 1595, Mr. Boas tells us, are considered by eminent critics as plays in the composition of which Shakespeare took no part; and the Taming of a Shrew, which was published in 1594, is regarded by Mr. Swinburne as the work of an author as nameless as the deed of the witches in Macbeth. And yet Mr. Lee admits that Shakespeare drew largely on the Hamlet which he has attributed to Kyd; Mr. Marshall acknowledges that Shakespeare was indebted for the materials of his play to the King John of the unknown writer; the old play, Henry the Sixth, appears in the Folio as the work of Shakespeare; Mr. Boas confesses that Shakespeare transferred some three thousand two hundred and fifty lines, with little or no alteration, from the Contention and the True Tragedy to his Lancastrian Trilogy; and Mr. Swinburne recognizes the fact that in the Taming of the Shrew all the force and humor, alike of character and situation, belong to Shakespeare's eclipsed and forlorn precursor; that he tempered and enriched everything in his precursor's play, but in reality he added nothing."

All these statements and opinions of commentators tend to show that it is absolutely silly and absurd to credit one man with the authorship of the Shakespeare

plays. If nothing else would be a bar, the fact that man's capacity in the use of words is limited to less than ten thousand words is a sufficient answer to the Shaksper claim or the Baconian claim or the claim for any other individual poet to the composition of the plays. The solution of the question of the true authorship is to be found in collaboration as to a majority of the plays, and the original composition of the play was very often supplemented by a revision. The reader will find that Henry the Fifth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and the Merry Wives of Windsor were so revised.

In the first edition of Henry the Fifth there were only eighteen hundred lines. Some one revised it before the Folio of 1623 was issued, by the addition of seventeen hundred more lines. In his notice of the revision of that play, Knight says, "In this elaboration the old materials are very carefully used up; but they are so thoroughly refitted and dovetailed with what is new that the operation can only be compared to the work of a skillful architect, who having an ancient mansion to enlarge and beautify with a strict regard to its original character, preserves every feature of the structure under other combinations, with such marvelous skill that no unity of principle is violated; and the whole has the effect of a restoration in which the new and the old are undistinguishable."

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE LEARNING OF THE AUTHOR OR AUTHORS OF THE POEMS

AND PLAYS.

“I'll talk a word with this same learned Theban.”

-King Lear, iii, 4.

Was the author of the Shakespeare plays and poems a man of great or little learning? Or if there were two or more authors, were they learned or unlearned? Every careful reader is entitled to an opinion of his own on that point, without the aid of critics or commentators; and I venture to say that the person who will read the Shakespeare plays and poems without consulting the commentators will call the writer or writers of them very learned unless he believes that he or they were gifted with supernatural powers. Let me make a broader assertion. If the poems of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece and the plays we are considering (divested of all reference to William Shaksper) could be put into the hands of a thorough scholar who had never before seen them or heard either of them or their reputed author, and if he were asked to read them carefully, and after such reading to give an opinion as to whether the chief composer of the plays and poems was a learned or an unlearned man, I am quite sure that he would say that the author of the poems and plays was a very learned person, and I think that my readers will agree with me.

Nevertheless, if the disinterested reader whom I have selected as above, after reading the poems and plays without previously knowing anything whatever of the life