The Shakespearean myth - 1886 Author:Appleton Morgan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: compelling an entry of stageright in the Stationers' Books, and no public office at which anything analogous to—(what nowadays becomes of such large pecuniary va... more »lue)—a right to represent and perform dramatic productions—could be entered and secured. In reading the late autobiographies of Anthony Trollope and Sergeant Ballantyne, I was impressed with the conviction that—down to the first quarter of the present century—nothing thorough (except flogging) was considered essential to the education of the British youth, in country schools. I was led by this to examine carefully into what must have been the course of instruction in Stratford school, when young Shakespeare is supposed to have been a student there. To make my examinations as valuable as possible, I cited the testimony of Roger Asham, John Milton, and others nearly contemporary, and went to the pains of compiling a considerable glossary of the Warwickshire Dialect. The result was too bulky, of course, for adding to this work, and has been published elsewhere in a volume by itself. While I have never yielded my assent to the Baconian theory, I have been so widely accused of bringing it aid and comfort that I would like to say a final word or two in regard to it: It seems to me quite as impossible that Francis Ba- con should have written certain portions of the Plays and Poems as that William Shakespeare should havewritten those other portions which the general consent of the New Shakespeare Society, Mr. Fleay, Mr. W. J. Rolfe, and others have rejected. But yet Francis, afterward Lord, Bacon, was one of the most versatile men who ever lived. It is not safe to judge of his poetical powers by his Paraphrase of the Psalms, which was written—just as John Milton's paraphrase was written—in what is to us, to-day, the pures...« less