and left no trace of his existence except his share in the works
called Shakespearean.

However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this
advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we
cannot, as in Bacon's case, show how he was occupied while the plays
were being composed. He MUST, however, have been much at Court, we
learn, and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology. Was he Sir
Edward Coke? Was he James VI and I?

It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of
the "Anti-Willians" in a shape which will satisfy them. The task,
especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps
impossible. I can only summarise their views in my own words as far
as I presume to understand them. I conceive the Baconians to cry
that "the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature,
attributed to a man named William SHAKESPEARE." Of a man named
William SHAKSPERE (there are many varieties of spelling) we certainly
know that he was born (1564) and bred in Stratford-on-Avon, a
peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant country town. There is
absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford boy of his standing)
ever went to Stratford school. His father, his mother, and his
daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if
he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand.
As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death
inform us, he was a butcher's apprentice; and also a schoolmaster
"who knew Latin pretty well"; and a poacher. He made, before he was
nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls "ante-nup." He
early had three children, whom he deserted, as he deserted his wife.
He came to London, we do not know when (about 1582, according to the