Let those who will, disparage the boy and man William Shakespeare, who married and made an honest woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery; left home to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the slender household store; used his first wealth to make a gentleman of his father; and who, with what followed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's {062}banks, where--"procul negotiis"--in the evening of life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. But that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof who can. {063} PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. [Illustration: 0069] UT, having taken the liberty of doubting whether--as matter of record--one William Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, sometime part-proprietor of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in London, could have very well been himself and the author of what are known popularly to-day as "the plays of Shakespeare," although there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might have cast them into something of the acting form they possess as preserved to us; and having come to the conclusion that--once this presumption is lifted--all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of the actual William Shakespeare is actually evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record: let us proceed to inquire whether--on review--a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted by those certain considerations and matters, by way of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface whenever these waters are troubled--which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas can so infallibly anticipate. Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in the nature of copyrights; granted that the story of the deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely {064}rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be unworthy of the image they set up; granted that the fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the "Menæchmi" of Plautus; that Iago's speech in "Othello" and the stanza of Berni's _Orlando Innamorato_ were mere coincidences; or, better yet, admit that there was an English version of the Italian poem in Shakespeare's day *--admit, if required--that the "Hamlet" of Saxo, had been translated; that the law in "The * When Iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little variation, this stanza of the _Orlando Innamorato_ of which poem, to this day, there is no English version. "Chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello E simil cose, ha qualcha discrezione, E patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello; Ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione E de l'altrai patiehe si fa bello, Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone;