Will Shakspere, spells his own "nom de plume" "Shakespeare," and has
his rewritings and transformations of the destitute author's work
acted by Will's company. What a situation for Bacon, or Sir Fulke
Greville, or James VI, or any "man in high position" whom fancy can
suggest! The plays by the original authors, whoever they were, could
only be obtained by the "concealed poet" and "man in high position"
from the legal owners, Shakspere's company, usually. The concealed
poet had to negotiate with the owners, and Bacon (or whoever he was)
employed that scamp Will Shakspere, first, I think, to extract the
plays from the owners, and then to pretend that he himself, even
Will, had "rewritten and transformed them."

What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how certain it
was that Will would blackmail the "man in high position"!
"Doubtless" he did: we find Bacon arrested for debt, more than once,
while Will buys New Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted from
the concealed poet of high position. {164a} Bacon did associate with
that serpent Phillips, a reptile of Walsingham, who forged a
postscript to Mary Stuart's letter to Babington. But now, if not
Bacon, then some other concealed poet of high position, with a
mysterious passion for rewriting and transforming plays by sad, needy
authors, is in close contact with Will Shakspere, the Warwickshire
poacher and ignorant butcher's boy, country schoolmaster, draper's
apprentice, enfin, tout le tremblement.

"How strange, how more than strange!"

The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as March
3, 1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for the
performances of many plays. He was paid as owner or lessee of the