They "lose money on Shakespeare," and unless "carpentry and French"--unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, are {262}draped down to desolate houses and financial ruin. "Shakespeare" is "over the heads" of -------- in these days of compulsory education. And yet we are calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that in and about the year 1600, in London, these grave, intellectual, and stately dialogues are taking by storm the rabble of the Bankside, and entrancing the tradesmen and burghers of the days when to read was quite as rare an accomplishment as serpent-charming is today--when, if sovereigns wrote their own names, it was all they could do--and when the government could not afford to hang a man who could actually write his name. * "And yet," to quote Mr. Smith again, "it was from the profit arising from this wretched place of amusement that Shakespeare realized the far from inconsiderable fortune with which in a few years he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon." If not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of that day must have been the superiors in literary perception of some very eminent gentlemen who were to come after them, like, for example, Fuller, Evelyn, Pepys, Dryden, Dennis, Kymer, Hume, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Jonson, whose comments on our immortal drama we have set forth in the First Part of this work. ** Only we happen to know they were not. * Benefit of clergy was only abolished in England by acts 7 and 8, George IV., c. 28, sec. 3, In 1827, fifty-three years ago; in the United States it had been disposed of (though it had never been availed of) by act of Congress, April 30, 1790. ** Ante, pp. 20-29. {263} As an alternative to believing that these pearls, over which this nineteenth century gloats, were cast before the swine of the sixteenth; the theory we are now considering offers, as less violent an attack upon common sense, the supposition that what we now possess under the name of "Shakespeare's plays" were _not_ produced upon the stage of any play-house in those days, but were _printed_ instead, the name of William Shakespeare having been attached to them as surety for a certain circulation. The well-attested fact that William Shakespeare was a play-writer is not ignored by this supposition; for the new theorists believe that, although no fragment of the Shakespeare work now survives, its character can be readily determined. From what knowledge we possess of the tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is not difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the plays.