Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BACON-SHAKESPEAKE CRAZE. Would to heaven there were unquestionable evidence that Bacon did write the plays contained in the famous folio volume published at London in 1623! Would that, as there is now a consensus of critical opinion that the lady of the last century who decided that it was Ben Jonson who " wrote Shikspur " was wrong (although even that, it would seem, is not sure beyond a doubt), it might be made as clear as the sun in the heavens that her rival female critics of our own day are right in proclaiming Francis Bacon the man ! True, this decision, like the other, affects in no way the value or the interest of the plays. It neither lessens nor enlarges their significance as regards the material, the mental, or the moral condition of the English people at the time when they were produced. For the statesman-philosopher and the player-poet were strictly contemporaries, and lived at the same time in the same city. The question (if it were a question) is not at all akin to that, for example, which has been so long discussed, and which is not yet decided, as to the authorship of the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey." For that is not a mere effort of curiosity to find out whether those poems were produced by a blind ballad-singer who spelled his name H o m e r, or by an open-eyed epic poet of some other name, but a question as to the period of the production of the poems, as to their purpose, as to the condition of the society in which they were produced, as to the intellectual record embodied in their language, and as to the historical value of the incidents which they profess to record. It is a question which touches the origin, the character, and the development of the most remarkable people and the brightest, richest, and most influential civilization of antiquity. But ...