This sort of joint authorship would not only explain {178}away the antagonism which grew up between the evidence of the man Shakespeare and the evidence of the Shakespearean plays, but account for the difficulties of accepting any anti-Shakespearean theory. This would explain the parallel passages in Bacon's writings and in the plays which Judge Holmes has so painstakingly sorted out; the little inaccuracies of law and of grammar, of geography and of history, in the plays themselves; Mr. Greene's "sea-coast of Bohemia," or the introduction of gunpowder at the seige of Troy--absurdities which it is morally impossible to suppose of the portrayer of antiquity who wrote "Julius Cæsar," or the knowledge that framed the historical plays. If, however, we consider them as the interpolations of a stage-wright * aiming at stage effect, they are easily enough accounted for. * It is nothing less than marvelous that this simple explanation should not have occurred to the wise men who have been knocking their heads against "the sea-coast of Bohemia" for the last hundred years. That this error is a part of the "business" and not of the play, is very evident from a casual reading of Act III., Scene III. The stage direction for that scene is simply, "Scene--a desert country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage direction of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be sure that this was the proper stage setting of the piece. And to fit it, Antigonus, the first speaker, says to the mariner: "Art thou perfect, then? Our ship hath touched the deserts of Bohemia." Bobert Green makes the same mistake in his "Dorastus and Faunia." It was, if any thing, a vulgar error of the time. There is no further allusion to the troublesome geography in the play. So, too, the gunpowder used at the seige of Troy is a part of the "business," and should be assigned where it belongs--to the playwright and not to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put it in, but he took it out of Green's "Dorastus and Faunia."