Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship

He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence, and I did mine with the reserve and moderation of a subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot house that is perched forty feet above the water.

He was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare, and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the pretensions of the Baconians.

So was I, at first.

And at first he was glad that that was my attitude.

Experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

Rightly viewed, calf butchering accounts for Titus Andronicus, the only play, ain't it, that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote.

And yet it is the only one everybody tries to chouse him out of, the Baconians included.

The historians find themselves justified in believing that the young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and got held before that magistrate for it.

Incidentally, these pages may serve to expose some of the Baconian heresies.

If there be many whose judgment is overborne by the tub-thumping of the Baconians, let them turn to some of the extravagances of Donnelly and others mentioned here, and then note the many local allusions which Shakespeare and none other could have written.

The Bacon controversy, which since 1857 has offered considerable employment for speculative minds and is still in progress, is now responsible for some six hundred books and pamphlets, monuments of perverted ingenuity and industrious research misapplied, of evidence misunderstood, and of judgment biased by a clearly proclaimed intention to place Bacon where Shakespeare stands.

These exceedingly well-read gentlemen, profited in strange concealments, have produced a deal of skimble-scamble stuff that galls our good humors.

Shaxpeare, S-H-A-X-P-E-A-R-E, is the commonest form.

The marriage bond for William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway spells his name Shagspeare, S-H-A-G-S-P-E-A-R-E.

And the dramatist himself spells it in two different ways in the three signatures on his will, which forms to the Baconians conclusive proof of the two following contradictory propositions.

One, that he did not know how to spell his name.