The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-12-02
AT IT AGAIN.


 Win the world ever know who was tho author of the plays of Shakespeare? We put the question this way in defer encs to the assumption that Shakes peare himself was not the author, as m.eny continue to insist. The late Ig- Katins DonnelIy spent a vast deal of time and labor in the effort to prove that Francis Bacon was the real author, and his Great Cryptogram' is work of wonderful ingenuity, research and labor. He claimed that he had found q hidden cypher running all through the Shalxespearian plays, clearly indicat- ing that Bacon wrote them. His book made a brief sensation, but little is said oe it now. Many readers will also re- member that Miss Della Bacon, an American authoress. published . book about fifty years ago in which she, also, attempted to prove that Francis Bacon was the real Shakespeare, but her work, too, is practically forgotten.
 Now we are told that a new discov- erer, German, has written book to prove. that the famous and oft disputed plays were written by an Eari of Rut- land. His book hal. not yet been trans lated and circulated in England, and when it Is we may reasonably expect a heated Shakespeare Rutland controyer- sy to break out which win hold the public attention for q time and then it Will die out as the others have done.
 One of the arguments which has al- ways been depended on to prove that Shakespeare could not have written the plays attributed to him is that he was an. unedueated man, or, at least, that his education was little more than ru- dimentary, and thaS consequently 1t was impossible for him to have writ ter plays which show such wonderful research, such wide diversity of inform ation and such remarkable displays of genius as the plays do. The new Ger man author refers to him as the Low comedian, William Shakespeare, who regularly got drunk at the Mermaid Tavern and asserts that he could not possibly have written the plays. This author apparently fOrgets that won- derful genius may largely replace aca- demic education, and especially in shakespeare's day. And there is an- other thing many critics overlook, and that is the fact that in these plays may be found serious geographical and historical blunders which could never have been committed by a learned scholar unless he would do it for the ,fr1.. 1.4z CTS.
 The Brooklyn Eagle thinks that fl Shakespeare works were studied chiefly in the theater. for which the plays were written, and not in the M- brary, to which they nave been con- signed chiefly by lack of opportunity to study them on the stage. controver- sies like this would not get far. Tn. internal evidence that the plays were written by a stage manager, and a good one, is a thousand times stronger than any argument to be drawn from the limited schooling of the poet. The be- lated study of the ElIsabethan theater is making this point clearer, the farther 1t goes. The sources of Shakespeare's plays were first of all in the theater, where he found an earlier version of Hamlet" as well as of the histories. The spirit of those plays is incontest- ably English whatever the country in which he laid the scene, or whatever life by Plutarch or Italian novel he seized upon for his stories. His foreign learning in fact, was much like the learning of the modern journalist. who alIudes familiarity to places that he never saw and to books that he never read, being driven by the eXigencies of his calling to know something of thousand things which he has no time to know thoroughly The genius for character erization, the poetry and the stage craft of Shakespeare were his