standards of wages, etc.; (3) the organisation in different parts of the country of local or State Labour Parties, which include in their platforms such policies as State insurance against disability, old age and unemployment, the Government ownership of public utilities, the progressive taxation of wealth, and the extension and democratisation of education; (4) a well-defined movement to secure for labour a greater part in the control and earnings of industry. Without entering into a discussion of these developments, it may be remarked that the position of organised labour in America has been greatly strengthened during the war. Always more conservative than British labour, it has come by many to be regarded as the best defence against socialism and the more radical I.W.W.

Of the many other problems of a special character confronting the people of the United States the two which are perhaps most distinctly American are the control of immigration and the effort to 'Americanise' the alien. It seems probable that immigration will be greatly restricted, perhaps altogether prohibited for a period, and that thereafter the conditions of admission to the country will be much more severe. 'Americanisation,' or the process of education by which it is hoped that the aliens may be better assimilated, is rapidly taking on the proportions of a campaign, the success of which is vital to the welfare of the nation. It is clear that the American experiment' is not yet concluded; to many it seems that it has only now reached its most critical stage; but the true American is optimistic by nature and faces the future with a confidence not greatly disturbed either by the shrieks of radical partisans or by the vehement protests of those who look only backward WALDO G. LELAND.

Vol. 232.-No. 460.

Art. 12.-MORE DOUBTS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE.

1. The Genealogist (new series), Vol. VII, pp. 205-8; Vol. VIII, pp. 8-15, and pp. 137-146; three papers by James Greenstreet, entitled, A Hitherto unknown writer of Elizabethan Comedies'; 'Further Notices of William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, K.G.; and 'Testimonies against the accepted authorship of Shakespeare's Plays.' Bell, 1891, 1892.

2. Sous le Masque de William Shakespeare'; William Stanley VI Comte de Derby. By Abel Lefranc. Two vols. Paris: Payot, 1918-19.

THERE survive among the Domestic State Papers at the Public Record Office three news-letters, all in the handwriting of a London shipping merchant named George Fenner and bearing the same date, June 30, 1599. All were addressed by the writer to his foreign agents, of whom one lived at Antwerp and two at Venice. Each of the three missives professedly supplies a substantially identical budget of miscellaneous political and social gossip with some slight internal variations of detail. The presence of the letters among the State Papers shows that, although they appear to read quite innocuously, they were intercepted by the English Government on a suspicion of unseasonable communicativeness or duplicity of meaning.

Into his letter to his Antwerp correspondent Fenner slipped, amid a crop of political and social rumours, this isolated statement: Therle of Darby is busyed only in penning comedies for the commoun players.' The writer sent the same piece of abrupt irrelevance to one of his Venetian correspondents, merely substituting our Earle of Darby' for 'therle of Darby' and omitting the adverb 'only.' The sentence found no place in Fenner's third letter, which he addressed to his second Venetian agent on the same day.

In 1891 James Greenstreet, an industrious archivist and record-agent, first published in the 'Genealogist' (in the earliest paper cited above) Fenner's twice retailed report that the Earl of Derby was in 1599 busy playwriting for the 'common' or public stage. No reference was given to Fenner's third news-letter which ignored

the matter, nor did Mr Greenstreet mention that Fenner specifically declines to vouch for much of his epistolary gossip, which comes, he warns his correspondents, 'from private talk in Court and city' and often amounts, he admits, to mere 'fable' about affairs of which 'nothing is certainly known.' Such cautious reservations discourage indiscriminating reliance on Fenner's chatter, which may, after all, be intended to convey intelligence other than that lying on the surface of the words.

Mr Greenstreet sought in vain any substantive corroboration of Fenner's statement about the Earl of Derby's playwriting activity. The Earl in question was William Stanley, sixth holder of the title, who, born in 1562, succeeded his brother Ferdinando on April 16, 1594, and lived inconspicuously till Sept. 29, 1642. There is evidence that he modestly shared the cultured tastes of his family and of his class. He occasionally patronised literature, the drama and music. An unimportant piece of dance-music-'a pavin made for the Orpharion'-was printed with his permission (in 1624) under his own name in a music-book composed by Francis Pilkington, a 'chaunter' of Chester Cathedral. The Earl's 'pavin is the sole concrete surviving sign of his artistic accomplishment.

Compared with the records of a score of contemporary peers and of other members of the Stanley family, whose names and work are familiar to students of the literary or artistic life of the period, the sixth Earl's accredited literary and artistic pretensions are indefinite and insignificant. Certainly no play in print or manuscript bears his name as author. Neither theatrical nor literary records of contemporary or of subsequent date enrol the Earl among playwrights. Nevertheless, out of the solitary slender thread of Fenner's irresponsible and ambiguous gossip, and in spite of all the negations of probability offered by the ascertained facts of the Earl's public and private career, Mr Greenstreet spun a confused and barely coherent web of mystifying conjectures and fanciful coincidences, which led him not merely to the conclusion that the Earl of Derby was a voluminous playwright but also to the stranger inference that the Earl's dramatic labours included all the plays hitherto associated with the name of William Shakespeare. It

is charitable to assume that Mr Greenstreet sought in a rash moment rather commendation of wit in being able to hold argument than of judgment in discerning what is true.'

Mr Greenstreet died on Nov. 4, 1891, just after completing a third paper in support of his wild fantasy. So far as I can learn, his so-called discovery attracted no attention at the time of its publication. After his death all the notes and memoranda which preserve his 'evidences were presented by his widow to a personal friend, the late Garter King, Sir Alfred Scott Gatty. Ten years ago Sir Alfred invited my reluctant acceptance of Mr Greenstreet's manuscripts as a curiosity of research. The bundle of papers is, in my view, a mass of shallow critical fopperies; it remains in my possession.

Twenty-eight years have passed since Mr Greenstreet delivered his unheeded message. A few months ago M. Abel Lefranc, professor at the Collége de France, who has won a general reputation as writer and lecturer on the literature of the French Renaissance, entered the Shakespearean arena as a champion of the dead archivist's neglected revelation. The professor claims by means of une réunion extraordinaire de concordances, d'inductions et de faits positifs' finally to establish Mr Greenstreet's attribution of the Shakespearean drama to the Earl of Derby's pen.

M. Lefranc's literary credentials give him a far better title to a hearing than that enjoyed by Mr Greenstreet. Yet it is as Mr Greenstreet's disciple that M. Lefranc avowedly joins battle. He not only allows Mr Greenstreet the full honours of discovery, but draws from his published pronouncements the arguments and proofs which he deems to be most relevant to his purpose. M. Lefranc enmeshes himself inextricably in the snares of his English master. Le point du départ de nos recherches' is (M. Lefranc admits) the gossiping sentence in Fenner's news-letters of 1599, which Mr Greenstreet brought to light in 1891. It is true that M. Lefranc works on a wider canvas and in a broader literary light than his predecessor's attainments allowed. He expands Mr Greenstreet's sketch of the Earl and of his family connexions, but he produces no witness to the Earl's

indulgence in playwriting apart from the news-letter of 1599. He only succeeds in picturing a nobleman who, after a long foreign tour around which much unverifiable legend has grown, settled down to the normal life of a grand seigneur. We learn how the Earl, who divided his time between his vast landed property in Lancashire and the Court in London, was long harassed by a family lawsuit, which presents features of legal and historical interest. But neither of literary proclivities, nor of distinctive traits of character has M. Lefranc more positive information to convey than Mr Greenstreet had already brought to our notice.

The Earl's handwriting-in the Italian script-was graceful and flowing. A far larger number of surviving specimens than M. Lefranc knows is described in Mr Greenstreet's unpublished papers. No less than sixty-four of the Earl's autographs bearing date between April 2, 1594, and July 10, 1640, are extant in public or private archives. But all these documents belong to the dry and formal category of official or business routine. None shows any trace of literary style or of distinctive personality. M. Lefranc's case seeks support in vain from the Earl's extant correspondence.

In point of fact M. Lefranc bases his argument on something very different from documentary testimony. He relies on an assemblage of vague and ill-digested coincidences between scenes and characters in a fewa few only-of Shakespeare's plays, and scenes and characters with which M. Lefranc (treading in Mr Greenstreet's footsteps) thinks the sixth Earl of Derby to have been familiar. Although M. Lefranc, in his search for analogies, strains his vision to the uttermost, he ignores a great mass of Shakespeare's work because he can detect in it no affinity with the actual or possible experiences of Lord Derby. The character of his critical method may be inferred from his enunciation at the outset of this question-begging postulate :

'Presque tout le théâtre Shakespearien, à une ou deux exceptions près, se déroule dans les cours des rois ou chez les grands de la terre. Jamais les milieux princiers et aristocratiques, leurs idées, leurs sentiments, n'ont été compris ni décrits avec une pénétration plus intime, plus nuancée. . . .