I could never have expected that I should take a part in this
controversy; but acquaintance with The Shakespeare Problem Restated
(503 pp.), (1908), and later works of Mr. G. G. Greenwood, M.P., has
tempted me to enter the lists.

Mr. Greenwood is worth fighting; he is cunning of fence, is learned
(and I cannot conceal my opinion that Mr. Donnelly and Judge Holmes
were rather ignorant). He is not over "the threshold of Eld" (as
were Judge Webb and Lord Penzance when they took up Shakespearean
criticism). His knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly
superior to mine, for I speak merely, in Matthew Arnold's words, as
"a belletristic trifler."

Moreover, Mr. Greenwood, as a practising barrister, is a judge of
legal evidence; and, being a man of sense, does not "hold a brief for
Bacon" as the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems, and does
not value Baconian cryptograms. In the following chapters I make
endeavours, conscientious if fallible, to state the theory of Mr.
Greenwood. It is a negative theory. He denies that Will Shakspere
(or Shaxbere, or Shagspur, and so on) was the author of the plays and
poems. Some other party was, IN THE MAIN, with other hands, the
author. Mr. Greenwood cannot, or does not, offer a guess as to who
this ingenious Somebody was. He does not affirm, and he does not
deny, that Bacon had a share, greater or less, in the undertaking.

In my brief tractate I have not room to consider every argument; to
traverse every field. In philology I am all unlearned, and cannot
pretend to discuss the language of Shakespeare, any more than I can
analyse the language of Homer into proto-Arcadian and Cyprian, and so