Not finding “Shakespeare” in the anthology of his day, the most natural inference would be that all those who wrote under the name “Shakespeare” wrote incognito. We know that Marlowe, Beaumont, Greene, Drayton and many writers of that age wrote anonymously for the Elizabethan stage. Many of the anonymous writings have been retrieved; much, doubtless, remains still to be reclaimed from the siftings of what are named Early Comedy, Early History, and Pre-Shakespearean Group of plays. Mr. Spedding had the good fortune to be the first to demonstrate the theory of a divided authorship of “Henry VIII.,” to reclaim for Fletcher “Wolsey’s Farewell to all his Greatness.” Thirteen out of the seventeen scenes of “Henry the Eighth” are attributed by Mr. Lee (P. 212) to Fletcher. A majority of the best critics now agree with Miss Jane Lee, in the assignment of the second and third part of Henry VI. to Marlowe, Greene and Peele. The difficulty of identifying Shakespeare, the author poet, with the young man who came up from Stratford, has induced Shakespearean scholars to question the unity of authorship. Mr. Swinburne tells us that no scholar believes in the single authorship of “Andronicus.” Mr. Lee admits that Shakespeare drew largely on the “Hamlet,” which he has attributed to Kyd (P. 182). “It is scarcely possible,” says Mr. Marshall in the “Irving Shakespeare,” “to maintain that the play ‘(Hamlet)’ referred to as well known in 1589, could have been by Shakspere—that is—by the young actor from Stratford. Surely not. We see the question of the unity of the author and authorship involves the question of his identity.” It is evident that the author poet, whoever he was, had, in his time of initiation, “purloyned plumes” from Marlowe, Kyd and Greene, and, when nearing the close of his literary career, according to Prof. A. H. Thorndike, he was a close imitator of John Fletcher—not so much an innovator as an adapter.