If I were going to have an opinion on this subject, I should want at least two years to devote, without interruption, to a study of this cipher literature, and to the lives of Bacon and Shakespeare, and a comparison of their literary styles. Lacking this leisure in the present crisis of man’s fate, I content myself with saying that here is one of the most fascinating mysteries in the world, and that I am not one of those comfortable people who know a thing to be impossible, merely because it is new and strange. Having said this much, I proceed upon the orthodox assumption that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were written by the actor of that name. He was born in 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, his father being a merchant who early fell into misfortune. There are legends that the son was wild, and ran away to London to escape prosecution for deer-stealing. He became a hanger-on of theatrical companies, held horses at the doors of theaters, became connected with the Duke of Leicester’s company, acted in various plays, was called upon to revise and patch up manuscripts, and finally wrote plays of his own which were popular successes. He made money, bought several pieces of property at Stratford, won the friendship of some of the powerful and great, and finally returned to his home town, to die at the age of fifty-two. That is all we know about the greatest poet of all time. How he managed to escape attention, how above all he failed to see to it that the world got authentic copies of his plays, is a mystery only partly explained by the fact that playwriting and acting were disreputable occupations. Actors had been strolling vagabonds, liable to be thrown into jail by any constable, like a workingman out of a job in the United States. Only by getting the protection of some noble earl could they be safe from persecution; and if you had become a friend of noble earls, and a gentleman of property in your home-town, you did not boast of plays you had written, any more than if you lived on Fifth Avenue today you would boast of a saloon you had once kept. Shakespeare’s first plays are romantic comedies in the style of the time. It was the tradition of the pastoral, fostered by elegant ladies and gentlemen who know nature as a place for picnics. It is a world of beauty, wit and “charm”; everybody is young, everybody’s occupation is falling in love with some other pretty body, and problems exist only to be solved in the last act.