Excerpt from Spoils Studies in ShakespeareThere have been, admittedly, mountains of rubbish written about Shakespeare. He has (according to Mr. Saintsbury, his latest critic and expositor) been the subject of commentatorial folly to an extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject. One especial form of folly has been to treat Shakespeare as, if not exactly an inspired idiot, at any rate a mainly tentative if not purely unconscious artist, much of whose work is only not bad as art, while most, if not all, of it was originally produced with a minimum of artistic conscious ness and designl - and, I may add, with a minimum of literary preparation, and a tag-rag equipment of knowledge, comparable only to the motley of a juggler or a court fool. The business of the critic, therefore, is much more to shovel away the rubbish of his predecessors than to attempt any accummula tion of his own. In the meantime certain writers have boldly put forward the theory that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare at all. The newest form of folly, in fact, is to deny that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems so long attributed to him - and not only to deny that Shakespeare wrote them, but to, assert that his great co-temporary, Francis Bacon, did. This hypothesis - strange and startling as it may seem - is, if not proved, at least supported by many curious and ingenious arguments. Many people have been convinced of its validity, and declare that for them it has thrown fresh beauty, grandeur, and meaning on the plays, and cleared up many doubts and difficulties of criticism, which have so far defied s'olution.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.