To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle was vouchsafed to the race of man in London in the course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to consider that men and managers and theaters in the age of Elizabeth were very much the same sort of creatures and places that we find them now; that, among the habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange for the entre of the green-room; and that managers in those days as in these, were always on the alert for novelties, and drew their material--in the crude, if necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they were so fortunate--from wherever they could find it; if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings who frequented Master William Shakespeare's side doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, {038}at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, moreover, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the giants of his day--to say nothing of the theater-managers--did not and could not dream)--if, we say, we consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, but expect only the ordinary course of human events. If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, like Homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be different. For, just as Homer's writings are so magnificent as to justify ascribing to him--so far as mere power to produce them goes--any other contemporary literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to William Shakespeare are splendid enough to safely credit him with the compositions of any body else; of even so great a man as Bacon, for example. But William Shakespeare is no unknown quantity--except that we lose sight of him for the few years between his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor of the largest London play-house) accepting Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in His Humour"--we know pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred biographies extant--new ones being written every day--and any one of them may be consulted as to the manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The breakneck marriage bond, which waived all formalities, the consent of any body's parents, justification of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he could only be fast married; the beer-bouts, youthful and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to justify instructing a War{039}wick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all these are matter of record, amply photographing for-us William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus--and this same lad