Baconian Essays

Baconian Essays

BY E. W. SMITHSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND TWO ESSAYS BY SIR GEORGE GREENWOOD LONDON CECIL PALMER OAKLEY HOUSE, 14-18 BLOOMSBURY ST., W.C. 1 {2} F i r s t Edition C o p y-r i g h t 1 9 2 2 {3} Page 17 line 12 for hat read that. 19 line 13 from bottom for Spain read Spa in. 38 line 7 for Magwell read Mugwell. 169 line 13 for swet read sweet. 193 line 10 from bottom for tilt-hard read tilt-yard. {7}{6} Henry James, in a letter to Miss Violet Hunt, thus delivers himself with regard to the authorship of the plays and poems of Shakespeare[1]:I am a sort of haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. Now I do not for a moment suppose that in so writing the late Mr. Henry James had any intention of affixing the stigma of personal fraud upon William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Doubtless he used the term fraud in a semi-jocular vein as we so often hear it made use of in the colloquial language of the present day, and his meaning is nothing more, and nothing less, than this, viz., that the belief that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were, in truth and in fact, the work of the man from Stratford, (as he subsequently, in the same letter, styles the divine William) is one of the greatest of all the many delusions which have,{8} from time to time, afflicted a credulous and a patient world. He believed that when, in the year 1593, the dedication of Venus and Adonis to the Young Earl of Southampton was signed William Shakespeare, that signature did not, in truth and in fact, stand for the Stratford player who never so signed himself, but for a very different person, in quite another sphere of life, who desired to preserve his anonymity. He believed that when plays were published in the name of Shake-speare that name did not, in truth and in fact, stand for the man from Stratford, but again for that same personor it might be, and in certain cases certainly was, for some otherwho desired to publish plays under the mask of a convenient pen-name. And if the authorship of these poems and plays came, in course of time, to be attributed to William Shakspere, the player from Stratford-upon-Avon, who himself never uttered a word, or wrote a syllable, or took any steps whatever to claim the authorship of those poems and plays for himself, but was content merely to play the part of William the Silent from first to last, there is, surely, no reason to brand him as a cheat and a fraud upon that account, and we may be quite sure that that highly-gifted and distinguished man of literature, Henry Jamesone of the intellectuals of our dayhad no intention of so branding him. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 56774
Author: Smithson, E. W. (Edward Walter)
Release Date: Mar 18, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English