If certain noblemen of the court proposed amusing themselves at joint anonymous authorship, they were certainly right in concluding that the name of a living {284}man, in their own pay, was a safer disguise than a pseudonym which would challenge curiosity and speculation. At least--so say the New Theorists--such has turned out to be the actual fact. It is the New Theory that, while in employment in the theater, William Shakespeare was approached by certain gentlemen of the court. Perhaps their names were Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery, and possibly among them was a needy and ambitious scholar named Bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, maintained their society by secret recourse to the Jews or to any thing that would put gold for the day in his purse. Possibly they desired to be unknown, for the reasons given by Miss Bacon. In what they asked of him, and what he did for them, he found, at any rate, his profit. The story goes that the amount of profit he realized from one of these gentlemen alone was no less a sum than a thousand pounds. If so--considering the buying power of pounds in those days--it is not so wonderful that, at this rate, William Shakespeare retired with a fortune. Even at its most and its best, it is an infinitely small percentum of the world's wealth that finds its way into the poet's pocket; poetasters are sometimes luckier than poets. That William Shakespeare's fortune came faster than the fortune of his fellows we do know. This was at once the most secure and the most lucrative use he could have made of his name. For, as we have seen, owing to the condition of the common law, while he could hardly have protected himself against any piracy of his name by injunction, he might have loaned it for value to the printers, or to any one desirous of employing it, the {285}risk of piracy to be the borrower's. If these noble gentlemen desired to write political philosophy--as Miss Bacon believed, or belles lettres for their own pleasure--they had their opportunity now; and the new theory is not inconsistent, either with the Delia Bacon theory or with the Baconian theory proper, as elaborated by Judge Holmes, who recognizes Bacon's pen so constantly throughout the dramas. The same difficulties which those theories meet would still confront us if, as Mr. Boucicault and others have suggested, the plays were offered from lesser sources, and rewritten entirely by William Shakespeare; for we should still be obliged to ask, How did he dare to retain in the plays the material which, unintelligible to him, he must have believed to be unintelligible to his audiences, as calculated to drive them away, rather than to attract them?