Johannes Factotum and the plays which he gave in to the manager.
They seemed to be just the kind of work which Shakespeare would be
likely to write. BE LIKELY TO WRITE, but 'the father of the rest,'
Mr. Smith, believed that Shakespeare COULD NOT WRITE AT ALL.

We live in the Ages of Faith, of faith in fudge. Mr. Smith was
certain, and Mr. Bucke is inclined to suspect, that when Bacon
wanted a mask he chose, as a plausible author of the plays, a man
who could not write. Mr. Smith was certain, and Mr. Bucke must deem
it possible, that Shakespeare's enemy, Greene, that his friends,
Jonson, Burbage, Heming, and the other actors, and that his critics
and admirers, Francis Meres and others, accepted, as author of the
pieces which they played in or applauded, a man who could write no
more than his name. Such was the tool whom Bacon found eligible,
and so easily gulled was the literary world of Eliza and our James.
And Bacon took all this trouble for what reason? To gain five or
six pounds, or as much of that sum as Shakespeare would let him
keep. Had Bacon been possessed by the ambition to write plays he
would always have written original dramas, he would not have assumed
the part of Nicholas Nickleby.

There is no human nature in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer
passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap
neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate
illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured
of this method that he publishes 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece'
under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the
actor's care all his sonnets to the Queen, to Gloriana, and for
years these manuscript poems are handed about by Shakespeare, as his
own, among the actors, hack scribblers, and gay young nobles of his