superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the
matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the
previous controversies have informed me, concerning which
illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:
WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply
read and of limitless experience? I would put aside the guesses,
and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have
beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are justified-in-presumings, and
the rest of those vague spectres and shadows and indefinitenesses,
and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict rendered by the jury
upon that single question. If the verdict was Yes, I should feel
quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor, manager,
and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even
village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen
and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him,
did not write the Works.

Chapter XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Restated bears the heading
"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert
testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine,
as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle
the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the
Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.



CHAPTER VIII