George Stronach

“ Collins abuses Baconians for believing that "the man of Stratford" did not possess that knowledge. That the author of the plays knew Latin, French and Italian is proved by the fact that the plots and characters of several of his plays are drawn from works in these languages of which also no English translations were then available. But possibly Mr. Lee agrees with the Shakespearean critic Dennis, who wrote, "He who allows Shakespeare had learning, and a learning with the ancients, ought to be looked upon as a detractor from the glory of Great Britain." ”

“ Lee's pre-conceived idea a single jot, although Oliver Wendell Holmes declared: "The wonderful parallelisms [in Shakespeare and Bacon] must and will be wrought out and followed out to such fair conclusions as they shall be found to force honest minds to adopt. ... Our Shakespeare scholars hereabouts are very impatient whenever the question of the authorship of the Plays and Poems is even alluded to. ”

“ Lee how he accounts for the fact that two such diverse men in Elizabethan literature used the same expressions, aired the same ideas, the one the counterpart in prose of the other in verse—"the one an aristocrat, the other a plebeian; the one the first subject of the realm, the other an actor; the one highly educated, the other uneducated; the one the son of scholarly parents, the other the son of illiterates, who could not write their names"? ”

“ Guesses and fictions he substitutes for what he calls "facts." One of his most extraordinary "facts" is that Mr. Donnelly "pretended to have discovered among Bacon's papers a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters appearing at certain intervals in the pages of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays." This precious criticism contains only three mis-statements! Mr. Lee can never have seen The Great Cryptogram, and I challenge him to prove his dicta in the passage I have quoted. ”

“ Asquith had in his eye when he said:—"Few things are more interesting to watch than the attempts of scholars and critics to reconstruct the life of a man at once so illustrious and so obscure as the greatest of our poets," and that the work of a Shakespeare biographer is "not so much an essay in biography as in the more or less scientific use of the biographic imagination." The "less" applies admirably to Mr. Sidney Lee's so-called Life of William Shakespeare.
George Stronach. ↑ "With Shakespeare marriage is a divine institution; with Bacon it is a business matter. ”

“ The positions and circumstances of Shakspere and Bacon were as wide apart as the poles, and yet their thoughts, their expressions, their mistakes are identical. "There is an understanding," says Carlyle, "manifested in the construction of Shakespeare's plays equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum." "The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare," says Hazlitt, "was equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum.'" Well might Lowell speak of "the apparition known to moderns as Shakespeare;" and Coleridge write: "What! are we to have miracles in sport? ”

“ Shakespeare married young and for love."—Rolfe. [Even the marriage is doubtful, as "no record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare's marriage survives" (p. 191) although Mrs. Stopes maintains:—" But they were married somehow, and William probably brought home his fatherless bride to his father's house."] Bacon's marriage was, at any rate, respectable, and as to the "business" part of it, his wife brought him £220 per annum, to which Bacon added £500 a year, which is more than the "love-mated " but wife-deserting and money-grabbing Shakspere did. ”

“ John, the son who administered Richard's estate, was in all likelihood the poet's father." In his article on Shakespeare in the Dictionary of National Biography Mr. Lee says: "The son Henry remained at Snitterfield all his life, and died a prosperous farmer in December, 1596. John, the younger son of Richard, was the poet's father." How a man could die "in embarrassed circumstances," and at the same time "a prosperous farmer," is left for Mr. Lee to explain.
Piratical publishers stole the plays and poems, and Mr. ”

“ He endeavoured to obtain by means of false statements a coat-of-arms (p 188) . (8) He "barred his wife's dower," and cut her off with his "second-best bed" (pp. 273-4.) [3] (9) He left unpaid a debt contracted by his wife to her father's shepherd, who in 1601 "directed his executors to recover the sum from the poet and distribute it among the poor of Stratford " (p. 187) . (10) He neglected his daughter Judith's education so that she had to sign her name by a mark or "sign manual," as Mr. Lee euphemistically styles it (p. 226) . ”

“ He is equally dangerous when committing himself unreservedly to statements which require qualification or explanation." And of other Lee "facts" Mr. Greg maintains: "Here I am afraid Mr. Lee has been drawing upon his imagination; it is at best pretty fiction." And Mr. Greg proves his case, with regard to Mr. Lee's statements regarding the First Folio.
I find also that Mr. Lee has no better acquaintance with the Quartos. On page 299 he says:—"At the time of his death in 1616 there had been printed in quarto seven editions of his 'Venus and Adonis,' and five editions of his 'Lucrece.'" Mr. ”