The fourth century of Shakspere will be remembered either as the century of Shaksperean skepticism or as the one in which the play-actor was stripped of Bacon’s clothes and reduced to his proper condition of play-actor. That we can so much as entertain this latter thought proves that the skepticism has made considerable progress. We do not believe that Bacon wrote the Shaksperean plays; but we are obliged to pay to those who do believe it such respect as is paid to Strauss with his theory that Jesus is a mythical person. Another Shaksperean year is completed on the 23d of April, and its most significant event is an increase of skeptics. We are doubtless to have a thorough sifting of the facts and a large debate. No lover of the great dramas need regret the discussion. It will provoke the study of them and enlarge their fame. They are the great dramas of the world. No others equal them in breadth and fervor. Whatever stimulates the study of them must be useful to the higher forms of literature. One way of looking at the subject of the authorship of these plays is to regard the question as of no absolute importance. The plays are what they are, whoever wrote them; just as the Homeric poetry does not lose a line through the Homeric skepticism. It is an audacious thing to attack Shakspere as a wearer of another man’s clothes, after three centuries of his renown. He lived in the public eye. All London knew him. Some envied and sneered, but none doubted him until some three hundred years after his birth; if there were doubts they were so feeble that nothing came of them. Is it the function of the press and the reporter—making great and small seem alike—which has made Shaksperean skepticism almost respectable, if not entirely so? Whatever be the cause, “the news” spreads that Bacon wrote our Shaksperean works, and the debate is growing into bulk, if not into a serious concernment. We are not a bit touched with the skepticism; it seems to us unreasonable, beyond ordinary measure in unreason; and yet we must recognize the growth of the new theory of the authorship of our glorious drama.