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“It’s easy enough to make a figure pathetic, who is strangled by a nigger,” answered Hall. “Now if Desdemona had been a negress Shakespeare would have started fair.”

“If only Shakespeare had lived later,” sighed Willmott, “and understood the condition of the modern stage, he would have written quite differently.”

“If Shakespeare had lived now he would have written novels,” said Faubourg.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Baldwin, “I feel sure you are right there.”

“If Shakespeare had lived now,” said Sciarra to Mrs. Bergmann, “we shouldn’t notice his existence; he would be just un monsieur comme tout le monde–like that monsieur sitting next to Faubourg,” he added in a low voice.

“The problem about Shakespeare,” broke in Hall, “is not how he wrote his plays. I could teach a poodle to do that in half an hour. But the problem is–What made him leave off writing just when he was beginning to know how to do it? It is as if I had left off writing plays ten years ago.”

“Perhaps,” said the stranger, hesitatingly and modestly, “he had made enough money by writing plays to retire on his earnings and live in the country.”

Nobody took any notice of this remark.

“If Bacon was really the playwright,” said Lockton, “the problem is a very different one.”

“If Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays,” said Silvester, “they wouldn’t have been so bad.”

“There seems to me to be only one argument,” said Professor Morgan, “in favour of the Bacon theory, and that is that the range of mind displayed in Shakespeare’s plays is so great that it would have been child’s play for the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays to have written the works of Bacon.”

“Yes,” said Hall, “but because it would be child’s play for the man who wrote my plays to have written your works and those of Professor Newcastle–which it would–it doesn’t prove that you wrote my plays.”

“Bacon was a philosopher,” said Willmott, “and Shakespeare was a poet–a dramatic poet; but Shakespeare was also an actor, an actor-manager, and only an actor-manager could have written the plays.”

“What do you think of the Bacon theory?” asked Faubourg of the stranger.

“I think,” said the stranger, “that we shall soon have to say eggs and Shakespeare instead of eggs and Bacon.”

This remark caused a slight shudder to pass through all the guests, and Mrs. Bergmann felt sorry that she had not taken decisive measures to prevent the stranger’s intrusion.

“Shakespeare wrote his own plays,” said Sciarra, “and I don’t know if he knew law, but he knew le coeur de la femme. Cleopatra bids her slave find out the colour of Octavia’s hair; that is just what my wife, my Angelica, would do if I were to marry some one in London while she was at Rome.”

“Mr. Gladstone used to say,” broke in Lockton, “that Dante was inferior to Shakespeare, because he was too great an optimist.”

“Dante was not an optimist,” said Sciarra, “about the future life of politicians. But I think they were both of them pessimists about man and both optimists about God.”

“Shakespeare,” began Blenheim; but he was interrupted by Mrs. Duncan who cried out:–

“I wish he were alive now and would write me a part, a real woman’s part. The women have so little to do in Shakespeare’s plays. There’s Juliet; but one can’t play Juliet till one’s forty, and then one’s too old to look fourteen. There’s Lady Macbeth; but she’s got nothing to do except walk in her sleep and say, ‘Out, damned spot!’ There were not actresses in his days, and of course it was no use writing a woman’s part for a boy.”

“You should have been born in France,” said Faubourg, “Racine’s women are created for you to play.”

“Ah! you’ve got Sarah,” said Mrs. Duncan, “you don’t want anyone else.”

“I think Racine’s boring,” said Mrs. Lockton, “he’s so artificial.”

“Oh! don’t say that,” said Giles, “Racine is the most exquisite of poets, so sensitive, so acute, and so harmonious.”