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friends who wrote them. Pointing to the excellency of the characters, he holds that William Shakespeare who left Stratford suddenly from equivocal, immoral motives, who then rose in London as manager of a theater to considerable wealth, in a relatively short time, who afterwards returned to his birth-place and invested his money profitably there, now and then took the law of a debtor, remaining behind in payment, and left his second best bed to his wife by his will, impossibly can be the author of Hamlet, Lear, and Julius Caesar; and he supports it in such an able manner, that even Gustav Körting(Encyklopädie und Methodologie der Romanischen Philologie, II, S. 376, Heilbronn 1884) says: „If afterall Shakespeare really is the author of the works that go by his name, which according to Morgan's investi- gations appears to be very questionable...“ On the other hand, an opponent to the Bacon hypothesis, in a book that cannot be called a clever one(George Wilkes, Shakespeare from an American stand-point of view) from the very same characters of the plays found him out to be a catholic, monarchist, aristocrat, despiser of the poor, and a man of very moderate accomplishments, who very well may be the author of those plays.

What greatly different interpretations have not many of Shakespeare's characters undergone! What different qualities have not been discovered in Hamlet's! He was feeble and irresolute, and the contrary:„The opinion that Hamlet is by no means wanting in courage, energy and manliness— which opinion, as far as I know, I first maintained, in opposition to Goethe and Schlegel, is now shared by Rötscher, Gehrt, von Friesen, Rossmann, Hebler, Rümelin, K. Köstlin, Tschisch- witz, Genée, and others“(Ulrici). He was„latently resolute“ (Werder), noble and mean, clever, even acute, and stark mad; so William Leighton(Philadelphia 1882):„Mad? So only can we reconcile him with himself and give him a con- sistent, understandable character. Mad? So only has the play a continuity of purpose... Mad? So only is Prince Hamlet noble“. Eduard P. Vining(The Mystery of Hamlet,