It will surely be much better all around if the privilege
of regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order
shall eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but
me. Then there will be no more quarreling, no
more bandying of disrespectful epithets, no more heartburnings.
There will then be nothing sacred involved in this
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred
to me. That will simplify the whole matter,
and trouble will cease. There will be irreverence
no longer, because I will not allow it. The
first time those criminals charge me with irreverence
for calling their Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-
Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan
will be the last. Taught by the methods found
effective in extinguishing earlier offenders by the
Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet
them.
Isn’t it odd, when you think of it, that you
may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen,
and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first
Tudors—a list containing five hundred names,
shall we say?—and you can go to the histories,
biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the particulars
of the lives of every one of them. Every one
of them except one—the most famous, the
most renowned—by far the most illustrious
of them all—Shakespeare! You can
get the details of the lives of all the celebrated
ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians,
comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers,
poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals,
discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators,
horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers,
explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers,
astronomers, naturalists, claimants, impostors, chemists,
biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents
and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors,
politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots,
demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars,
highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons—you
can get the life-histories of all of them but one.
Just one—the most extraordinary and
the most celebrated of them all—Shakespeare!
You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons
furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four
centuries, and you can find out the life-histories
of all those people, too. You will then have listed
fifteen hundred celebrities, and you can trace the
authentic life-histories of the whole of them.
Save one—far and away the most colossal
prodigy of the entire accumulation—Shakespeare!
About him you can find out nothing. Nothing
of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth
the trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing
that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything
more than a distinctly commonplace person—a
