The reader will next find in the two poems a general style and manner of versification very different from that which characterizes the poetry of Drayton and Dekker. Drayton makes his principal personage, whether hero or heroine, the narrator, generally summoning them from the mansions of the dead to recite their woes, their sufferings or their achievements, and the poetry is of the narrative or descriptive style. This characteristic of Drayton was noted by Schlegel when he wrote his eulogy upon the play of Sir John Oldcastle, in the mistaken belief that he was eulogizing Shakespeare. Dekker also indulged in the descriptive style, as will manifestly appear to the reader who will peruse his "Canaan's Calamity" (which follows the Venus and Adonis versification), or any one of his lengthy poems.

On the other hand, the poet of the Venus and Adonis. and the Rape of Lucrece is distinguished by his philosophical utterances. Hazlitt's criticism embodies the truth when he says: "The two poems appear to us like a couple of ice houses. They are about as hard, as glittering and as coid. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses and not of his subject--not of what his characters would feel, but of what they shall say. The whole is labored up-hill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his skill in wrestling with them. A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it." Venus philosophizes about jealousy, nature, love, death, the world, and beauty.

In the Rape of Lucrece, Tarquin, after rising from his couch and lighting his torch, devotes ten full long stanzas of the poem to premeditation upon the dangers of his

enterprise; eight more to solicitation; while Lucrece uses ten more stanzas in reply. After the accomplishment of his purpose, fifteen more stanzas are consumed by Lucrece in a digressive address to Night, eight more similarly to Opportunity, fourteen more to Time as the master of opportunity, eight more she spends in caviling and apostrophizing Day, four in addressing the birds of the morning, and especially Philomel, and then she uses five more stanzas in the making of her will. As Rolfe says, in his introduction to the poems, "In Lucrece, the action is delayed, and delayed that every minute particular may be described, every minor incident recorded. In the newness of her suffering and shame, Lucrece finds time for an elaborate tirade appropriate to the theme 'Night,' another to that of 'Time,' another to that of 'Opportunity.' Each topic is exhausted. Then studiously a new incident is introduced, and its significance for the emotions is drained to the last drop in a new tirade." There is nothing in all this to remind one of anything similar either in Drayton or Dekker, nor in any other writer of the time except Bacon. It reminds us of Bacon's Essay upon Death, upon Love, upon Beauty, upon the Vicissitude and Mutations of Time and upon Nature. It recalls also his remarks in his letter of advice to Essex upon Opportunity, Vol. 5, p. 247. “I will shoot my fool's bolt," he says, "since you will have it so. The Earl of Ormond to be encouraged and comforted. Above all things, the garrison to be instantly provided for. For opportunity maketh a thief."

Since writing the above, I have been favored with a perusal of "The Mystery of William Shakespeare," by Webb, in which the author calls attention to another peculiarity of the writer of the poems; namely, that he

was versed in the law; and he affirms that if anything is certain in regard to the poems, it is certain that the author was a lawyer. Now, neither Drayton nor Dekker were lawyers. "The poems," he says, "sparkle with a frosty brilliance which led Mr. Hazlitt to compare them with palaces of ice. This frosty brilliance, according to Professor Dowden, is the light with which the ethical writings of Bacon gleam, and which plays are the worldly maxims which constitute his philosophy of life."

Finally, the accomplished Shakespearean scholar observes that "the poems abound with endless exercises and variations on such themes as Beauty, Lust, and Death; as Night, Opportunity, and Time. In reality they are essays of the philosopher in verse; and even Love is treated in the poems exactly as he treats it in the Essays. In the poems, the Queen of Love proposes to sell herself to the young Adonis. The consideration is to be 'a thousand kisses,' the number to be doubled in default of immediate payment; the deed is to be executed without delay; and the purchaser is to set his sign-manual on her wax-red lips. The Roman matron, in her agony of shame, makes the abridgment of a will in which she bequeaths her resolution to her husband, her honor to the knife, her shame to Tarquin, and her fame to those who still believed in her purity; and Collatinus is to oversee the will.”

There is one other fact to be considered which militates against the Drayton theory. The poem of Venus and Adonis is singularly free from Warwickshireisms, to use a word of Morgan. What he says at page 11 of his "Study in the Warwickshire Dialect" is unanswerable. "If the Venus and Adonis was written in Warwickshire by a Warwickshire lad who had never been out of it, it ought to

contain a little Warwickshire word to betray the precincts of its writer and its conception. Richard Grant White loved to imagine young Shakespeare, like young Chatterton and many another young poet, coming up to London with his first poem in his pocket. 'In any case, we may be sure that the poem,' he says, 'was written some years before it was printed; and it may have been brought by the young poet from Stratford in manuscript, and read by a select circle, according to the custom of the time, before it was published.' If William Shakespeare wrote the poem at all, it would seem as if Mr. White's proposition is beyond question, so far as mere dates go. But if the result of a glossary of the Warwickshire dialect, as paralleled with the poem, is to discover no Warwickshire in a poem written by a Warwickshire man in Warwickshire, or soon after he left it to go elsewhere, it would look extremely like corroboration of the evidence of the dates by that of the dialect."

I have followed the path of the two poems, and that path points Baconward. The facts elicited by my examination are before the reader and he can draw his own conclusion from those facts. Bearing in mind that William Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon is eliminated from consideration because of his illiteracy, he will understand that the question of the authorship of the poems and plays is to be determined only by the weight, not of direct, but of circumstantial evidence. Consequently, his opinion as to the authorship of the poems may differ from and be better than mine, especially if he will carefully study the two poems.

CHAPTER XXX.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA AND THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

EXAMINED.

"Faith, thou hast some crotchets in thy head now.”

-Merry Wives of Windsor, ii, 1.

It was not my design in writing this book to prepare and give to the reader an examination and analysis of all the Shakespeare plays, because the examination is only for the purpose of trying to identify, if possible, some one or more of the writers of the plays.

I have therefore limited the consideration of the plays to a part only, including therein some of those which Meres in his "Palladis Tamia" referred to and which were composed before 1598. The reader of course will understand that I am not seeking to extol the beauties or to criticise the blemishes, if any, of the plays examined. In the consideration of the question of the authorship of the plays specified in this and the succeeding chapters, I shall endeavor to bring the facts before the reader, so that he and I can draw our own conclusions and opinions from the facts. In order not to be tedious, I have confined my examination to a consideration of the style of a few of the participants in their composition.

I will begin with the two plays entitled Troilus and Cressida and the Taming of the Shrew.

The first fact to which I will call the reader's attention, as attested by reliable evidence, is that the play of Troilus and Cressida was originally written by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle.