a mass of fresh information derived by Edmund Malone [q. v.] from systematic researches among official papers at Stratford, at Dulwich (the Alleyn MSS.), or in the Public Record Office, and the available knowledge of Elizabethan stage history, as well as of Shakespeare's biography, was thus greatly extended. Francis Douce in his Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807), and Joseph Hunter [q. v.] in New Illustrations of Shakespeare (1845), occasionally supplemented Malone's researches. John Payne Collier [q. v.], in his History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831), in his ‘New Facts’ about Shakespeare (1835), his ‘New Particulars’ (1836), and his ‘Further Particulars’ (1839), and in his editions of Henslowe's Diary and the Alleyn Papers for the Shakespeare Society, while throwing some light on obscure places, foisted on Shakespeare's biography a series of ingeniously forged documents which have greatly perplexed succeeding biographers. Dyce specified the chief of Collier's forgeries in the second issue of his edition of Shakespeare (cf. G. F. Warner's Cat. of Dulwich MSS.) James Orchard Halliwell (afterwards Halliwell-Phillipps) [q. v.] printed separately, between 1850 and 1884, in various privately issued publications, all the Stratford archives and extant legal documents bearing on Shakespeare's career, many of them for the first time, and in 1887 he published massive materials for a full biography in his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (4th edit.). Mr. F. G. Fleay, in his Shakespeare Manual (1876), in his Life of Shakespeare (1886), in his History of the Stage (1890), and his Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama (1891), adds some useful information respecting Shakespeare's relations with his fellow-dramatists, mainly derived from a study of the original editions of the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries; but many of his statements and conjectures are unauthenticated. A full epitome of the information accessible at date of publication is supplied in Karl Elze's Life of Shakespeare (Halle, 1876; English translation, 1888), with which Elze's Essays from the publications of the German Shakespeare Society (English translation, 1874) are worth studying. Prof. Dowden's Shakespeare Primer (1877) and his Introduction to Shakespeare (1893), and Dr. Furnivall's Introduction to the Leopold Shakespeare, are all useful. The present writer in 1898 brought out ‘A Life of William Shakespeare,’ often reprinted in England and America, and translated into German 1901. Shakespeare's Library (ed. J. P. Collier and W. C. Hazlitt), Shakespeare's Plutarch (ed. Skeat), and Shakespeare's Holinshed (ed. W. G. Boswell-Stone, 1896), trace the sources of Shakespeare's plots. Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare-Lexicon, 1874 (ed. Sarrazin, 1902), and Abbott's Shakespearean Grammar, 1869 (new edit. 1897), are valuable aids to a study of the text. Useful concordances to the Plays have been prepared by Mrs. Cowden Clarke (1845), to the Poems by Mrs. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1852), and to Plays and Poems, in one volume, with references to numbered lines, by John Bartlett (London and New York, 1895). An unprinted glossary prepared by Richard Warner between 1750 and 1770 is in British Museum (Addit. MSS. 10472–10542). Extensive bibliographies are given in Lowndes's Libr. Manual (ed. Bohn), in Franz Thimm's Shakespeariana (1864 and 1871), in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edit. (skilfully classified by Mr. H. R. Tedder), and in the Brit. Mus. Cat. (the 3,680 Shakespearean titles are separately published); see also the present writer's introductions to the Oxford facsimile of the First Folio (1902) and the Poems and Pericles (1905). For notices of Stratford, see R. B. Wheler's History and Antiquities (1806), John R. Wise's Shakespere, his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood (1861), Shakespeare's Marriage, by J. W. Gray (1905), and the present writer's Stratford-on-Avon to the death of Shakespeare (1890, new edit. 1906). Wise appends a ‘glossary of words still used in Warwickshire to be found in Shakspere.’ Nathan Drake's Shakespeare and his Times (1817) and G. W. Thornbury's Shakespeare's England (1856) describe Shakespeare's social environment. The valuable publications of the Shakespeare Society, the New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, are noticed in the text. To these books may be added the essays on Shakespeare's Heroines respectively by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin in 1885; Dr. Ward's English Dramatic Literature (1875); Richard G. Moulton's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885); Shakespeare Studies, by Thomas Spencer Baynes, 1893; F. S. Boas's Shakspere and his Predecessors, 1895, and Georg Brandes' William Shakespeare, in Danish (Copenhagen, 1895), and in English (1898, 8vo).]
The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy.—The apparent contrast between the homeliness of Shakespeare's Stratford career and the breadth of observation and knowledge displayed in his literary work has evoked the fantastic theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the literature that passes under his name, and perverse attempts have been made to assign his works to his contemporary, Bacon. It is argued that Shakespeare's plays embody a general omniscience (especially a knowledge of law) which was possessed by no contemporary except Bacon; that there are many close parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare's and passages in Bacon's works, and that Bacon makes enigmatic references in his correspondence to secret ‘recreations’ and ‘alphabets’ which his alleged employment as a concealed dramatist can alone explain. Toby Matthew [q. v.] wrote to Bacon (as Viscount St. Albans) at an uncertain date after January 1621: ‘The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another’ (cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392). This unpretending sentence is distorted into conclusive evidence that Bacon wrote works of
