nter in the Shakespeare-Bacon
problem. He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from
Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published,
'The Shakespeare Problem Restated', by George Greenwood, and another one
in press, 'Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon', by William
Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon,
and Bacon only, had written the Shakespeare dramas. I was ardently
opposed to this idea. The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had
come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater,
and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was
something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock
testimony--Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays
themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept
any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that
Shakespeare had written one of them.

"Is there any evidence that he didn't?" I asked.

"There's evidence that he couldn't," he said. "It required a man with
the fullest legal equipment to have written them. When you have read
Greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for
Shakespeare's authorship."

I was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise.

"Perhaps," I said, "Shakespeare was the Belasoo of that day--the
managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme
gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. In that case it
is not unlikely that the plays would be known as Shakespeare's. Even in
this day John Luther Long's 'Madam Butterfly' is sometimes called
Belasco's play; though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of
it."

He considered this view, but not very favorably. The Booth book was at
this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it; but he
had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction:

"I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to
believe he did not touch the text in any way."

"How can you be so positive?" I asked.

He replied:

"I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned."

I now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting a
spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest.

"It is the great discovery of the age," he said, quite seriously. "The
world will soon ring with it. I wish I could