The Bacon- Shakespeare Folly 373 



hearsay that Eomano had made statues ? In the 

 name of common sense, are there no sources of 

 knowledge save books? Or, since it was no un- 

 usual thing for Italian painters in the sixteenth 

 century to excel in sculpture and architecture, why 

 should not Shakespeare have assumed without veri- 

 fication that it was so in Romano's case ? It was 

 a tolerably safe assumption to make, especially in 

 an age utterly careless of historical accuracy, and 

 in a comedy which provides Bohemia with a sea- 

 coast, and mixes up times and customs with as 

 scant heed of probability as a fairy tale. 



In arguing about what Shakespeare " must have " 

 or " could not have " known, we must not forget 

 that at no time or place since history began has 

 human thought fermented more briskly than in 

 London while he was living there. The age of 

 Drake and Raleigh was an age of efflorescence in 

 dramatic poetry, such as had not been seen in the 

 twenty centuries since Euripides died. Among 

 Shakespeare's fellow craftsmen were writers of 

 such great and varied endowments as Chapman, 

 Marlowe, Greene, Nash, Peele, Marston, Dekker, 

 Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. During his earlier 

 years in London, Richard Hooker was master of 

 the Middle Temple, and there a little later Ford 

 and Beaumont were studying. The erudite Cam- 



