ABSTRACT
At various places, and particularly in the preceding chapter, I have made it clear that it is no part of the purpose of this study to provide positive proof that Shakspere, the Stratford actor, wrote the Shakespearean plays. As a matter of fact, though there are good grounds for such a belief, there is no positive proof that he did so. All we know positively is that the plays have come down to us bearing his name, that he was generally accepted as their author in his own day, and that he has been generally accepted as such ever since. In this respect, however, he differs in no way from many of his contemporaries and predecessors. The authorship of the works that bear their names rests on precisely the same foundation as his, and if theirs had been as pre-eminent as his no doubt the same sort of controversy would have raged around them; indeed it does to some extent, for we have seen that the more extreme Baconians claim the works of many other Elizabethan writers for their candidate exactly as they do those of Shakspere.
