I therefore cannot doubt the authenticity of the works of William Shakespeare, or find in them anything that is inconsistent or incompatible with the accepted facts that are in our possession of the birth, parentage, education, youthful environments and the mature associations of the man.
NOTE. — I am indebted for the confirmation of the facts stated above to a recent work entitled "A Life of Shakespeare," by Sydney Lee, whose patient and exhaustive researches into Elizabethian literature entitle him to be classed as an authority that should forever dispose of that absurdity — the Baconian theory. F. W.
"How Knoweth This Man Letters, Having Never Learned?"
By WILLIAM BITTLE WELLS.
FOR those who are willing to meet it, the plays of Shakespeare present the most remarkable and perplex- ing problem in the history of the world's literature. Some put the question lightly aside with an air of superior wisdom, while others give it a hasty and superficial consideration, or else scoff at investigation, however fair-minded it may be, as an insult to the master-mind which conceived the splendid Shakespearean drama.
We have been prone to consider a discussion of the problem profitless; and yet when one is willing to throw aside prejudice and preconceived notions, based upon anything but facts and in- vestigation, and look at the question of the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare in a calm and dispassionate manner, he comes into touch at once with the most fascinating study in litera- ture, and faces a question in which no one who speaks the English language and who is conversant with its literature can afford to be unconcerned.
The first difficulty which confronts us in accepting Shakespeare as the author of the plays attributed to him is that of "marrying the man to his verse." Ever since any serious study of the plays has been undertaken this difficulty has been recognized, and the more the plays are studied the greater it becomes.
The lawyer who pores over his Shakes- peare finds unmistakable evidences that the author has at his finger tips the legal
phrases and usages of the Elizabethan age, and must, at some period of his life, have studied law. Dr. Abbott, of Stan- ford University, one of the college au- thorities in this country on law, and a thorough student of Shakespeare, is of this opinion. Lord Campbell, the chief justice of England, wrote a book to show -Shakespeare's remarkable familiar- ity with the science of jurisprudence. Richard Grant White says:
"Legal phrases flow from his pen as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of thought. * * * This could not have been picked up by hanging around the courts of London, 250 years ago." As to the correctness of Shakespeare's law. Lord Campbell, whose words should come to us with considerable weight, says :
"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of inheri- tance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."
The physician or surgeon who, after the weary rounds of the day, sits down by the evening lamp to refresh and com- pose his mind with "Hamlet" or "King John," or "Coriolanus," or "Julius Cae- sar," is lost with admiration and wonder at the remarkable knowledge of medi- cine that the pages display. He finds that the author of the plays was undoubt- edly acquainted with, and made known,.
