In 1593, Bacon was chiefly occupied,
we shall see, with the affairs of a young and beautiful Earl--the
Earl of Essex, not of Southampton: to Essex he did not dedicate his
two poems (if Venus and Lucrece were his). He "did nothing but
ruminate" (he tells the world) on Essex. How Mr. Greenwood's Unknown
was occupied in 1593-4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.
I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much
schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in
London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by
1592, be the rising player-author alluded to as "Shakescene." There
remains a difficulty. By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of
THIRTEEN plays, or even of six. But I have not credited him with the
authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely,
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus,
Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, King John, the three plays of
Henry VI, and The Taming of the Shrew. Mr. Greenwood {112a} cites
Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end of
1592 "some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written," and for
Dr. Furnivall's opinion that eleven had been composed.
If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we
have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I
should be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed,
in these five years, by Will.
Pages:
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117