years before Shakespeare began to write, in 1589, Peele addressed a farewell to the Earl of Essex, Norris and Drake on their expedition to Cadiz, in which he says:

Bid theater and proud tragedians,

Bid Mahomet, Scipio and mighty Tumburlain,
King Charlemagne, Tom Stucley and the rest
Adieu. To arms, etc.1

Now, we know that there is a play of Tamburlaine, attributed to Marlowe, and a play of Tom Stuckley, the author of which is unknown; hence we may reasonably infer that Mahomet, Scipio and King Charlemagne were also plays, then being acted on the stage. And the names imply that they were kindred in substance to Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus; that is to say, they dealt with vast characters and huge events, which naturally would fascinate the wild imagination of a young man of genius; and they touched upon subjects which might be reasonably expected to catch the attention. of one fresh from his academical studies. Tamburlaine ruled a great part of the world; so did Mahomet; so did Charlemagne; while the career of Scipio Africanus and his mighty victories was as extraordinary as the powers which Doctor Faustus, through his compact with the evil one, gained over the forces of nature, over life and the tenants of the grave.

And in addition to these lost plays there are fifteen other dramas that have survived the chances of time, and have been attributed by many commentators to the pen which wrote the Shakespeare Plays, to-wit: The Arraignment of Paris, Arden of Feversham, George-a-Greene, Locrine, King Edward III., Mucedorus, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The London Prodigal, The Puritan (or the Widow of Watling Street), A Yorkshire Tragedy, Fair Em, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Birth of Merlin. Many of these are now printed in all complete editions of Shakespeare's works. In addition to these, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which was not inserted by Heminge and Condell in the great Folio, was published in quarto in 1609, with the name of William Shakespeare on the title-page, and was played. at Shakespeare's play-house. It is now generally conceded to be the work of Shakespeare. There was also a play called Love's

1 School of Shak., vol. i, p. 153.

Labors Won, named by Meres in 1598 as the work of Shakespeare, which is either lost, or has survived under some other name. There was also another play entitled Duke Humphrey, attributed to Shakespeare during his lifetime, which was destroyed by the carelessness of a servant of Warburton, in the early part of the last century.

Now, it must be remembered that all of the list of fifteen plays given above, except The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Two Noble Kinsmen, were published during Shakspere's life-time, in nearly every instance with the name of William Shakespeare, or his initials, on the title-page, and The Merry Devil of Edmonton was announced as the joint work of Shakespeare and Rowley, and The Two Noble Kinsmen as having been written by Shakespeare and Fletcher.' So that we have just as good authority for assigning most of these plays to Shakespeare as we have for attributing to him those that go by his name. Besides, the critical acumen of learned commentators has discovered abundant evidence that they all emanated from the same mind which produced Hamlet and Lear.

I regret that the limitations of space in this book, already too bulky, prevent me from going fully into all these matters; but they are "not a relation for a breakfast," but a subject that may be recurred to hereafter.

The great German critics have, it seems to me, taken juster views upon these "doubtful plays," as they are called, than the English. Tieck refers to them in his Alt-Englisches Theater, oder Supplemente zum Shakspere, as follows:

Those dramas which Shakspere produced in his youth, and which Englishmen, through a misjudging criticism, and a tenderness for his fame (as they thought) have refused to recognize.

Tieck is speaking of George-a-Greene. He also, from internal evidences, attributes Fair Em, The Birth of Merlin, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Edward III., and Arden of Feversham, to Shakespeare; while Schlegel says that Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell, and The Yorkshire Tragedy, are "unquestionably Shakespeare's."

The Yorkshire Tragedy appeared in 1608 with Shakespeare's name on the title page; The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street, was

1 Morgan, Shakespearean Myth, p. 286.

published in 1607, as "written by W. S.;" The London Prodigal was published in 1605, as "by William Shakespeare;" the play of Thomas Lord Cromwell was published in 1613, "written by W. S.;" Locrine was published in 1595 as "newly set forth, overseene and corrected by W. S.;" The Life of Sir John Oldcastle was published 1600 with the initials "W. S." on the title-leaf. Speaking of Arden of Feversham, Swinburne says:

Either this play is the young Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece, or there was a writer unknown to us then alive, and at work for the stage, who excelled him as a tragic dramatist not less, to say the very least, than he was excelled by Marlowe as a tragic poet.

He adds that Goethe is said to have believed that Shakespeare wrote this play.'

Here, then, is a whole body of literature, Shakespearean in its characteristics, and yet discarded by Heminge and Condell from the first complete edition of Shakespeare's works, printed from the "true original copies." And, if I had the space for the inquiry, I could show that these plays are full of Baconianisms, if I may coin a word. For instance, Bacon had returned from the higher civilization of France, (nearer geographically to the surviving Roman culture), full of all the arts-music, poetry and painting. We see many references to the art of painting in the Shakespeare Plays; it was still a foreign art; and Swinburne says, speaking of Arden of Feversham:

I cannot remember, in the whole radiant range of the Elizabethan drama, more than one parallel tribute paid in this play by an English poet to the yet foreign art of painting.2

And it is a curious fact that the words,—

Come, make him stand upon this mole-hill here
That raught at mountains with outstretched arms,
Yet parted but the shadow with his hand,—

which we find in The Third Part of King Henry VI., are taken bodily from The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, a play not published as Shakespeare's.

And Swinburne finds still another play, The Spanish Tragedy, which he believes to be the work of Shakespeare. He says:

I still adhere to Coleridge's verdict, . . that those magnificent passages, well-nigh overcharged at every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and

A Study of Shakespeare, p. 135.

A Study of Shakespeare, p. 141.

instinct of pathetic truth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Johnson's.1

In short, the genius we call Shakespeare's is found dissociated from the man Shakspere, and covering a vast array of matter which the play-actor had nothing to do with: for Fair Em appeared in 1587, while Shakspere was holding horses at the door f the playhouse; and some others of the piays, above named, now believed. to have been written by the Shakespeare pen, were never associated with Shakspere's name during his lifetime, nor long afterwards. And all this is compatible with the theory that a scholar of vast intellectual precocity, like Bacon, and of immense fecundity, flooded the stages of London with plays to make money-for years before Shakspere left Stratford; but it is utterly incompatible with the belief that the man who left nothing behind him to show any mental activity (except, of course, his alleged plays), and who dwelt during the last years of his life at Stratford in utter torpidity of mind, could have produced this array of unclaimed dramas. And the reader will note that most of these plays were printed, for the first time, between 1607 and 1613, just at the time Bacon was drawing to the close of his poetical productiveness. It was as if he was trying to preserve to posterity the history of the growth of his own mind. from its first crude, youthful beginnings to its perfect culmination; from Stuckley and Fair Em to Othello and Lear.

Besides these earlier plays there were a number which, it is claimed, Shakespeare used and enlarged, and which are supposed by the critics to have been written by other men, but which were in reality Bacon's first essays upon those subjects. For it is not probable that any dramatic writer would re-cast and improve and glorify another man's work. We can conceive of Charles Dickens, for instance, taking up an immature sketch of his youth, and enlarging it. into David Copperfield or Bleak House; but we cannot imagine him taking a story written by Thackeray and re-writing it and publishing it under his own name. There, for instance, is the Contention between the Houses of York and Lancaster, the early King John, the Famous Victories, and that Hamlet which it is claimed was first played in 1585. And here is another instance of the same kind. Swinburne says:

1A Study of Shakespeare, p. 144.