Note 26 — INTRODUCTORY
Reading edition
With reference to the “Baconian” theory I must here quote words recently written by one who bears a highly distinguished name in the ranks of literature. Mr. George Moore, writing in reply to a criticism by Mr. Gosse, published in the Sunday Times, thus expresses his opinion upon that question: “Some of Shakespeare’s finest plays were not only revised, but remoulded; ‘Hamlet’ is one of these, and it is not an exaggeration to say that its revisions were spread over at least twenty years; and I thought when I wrote the little booklet, ‘Fragments from Héloïse and Abélard,’ that the text of ‘Othello’ in the Folio contained 160 lines that are not to be found in the quarto, and I think so still; 160 lines were added between the publication of the quarto [in 1622] and the folio [1623], and these lines cannot be attributed to any other hand but the author’s; they are among the best in the play, and among them will be found lines dear to all who hold the belief that Bacon and not the mummer was the author of the plays:
Like the Pontic Sea Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Helespont.”
See the Sunday Times, August 28, 1921. With reference to the 160 new lines added in the folio version of Othello and which “cannot be attributed to any other hand but the author’s,” it will be remembered that William Shakspere of Stratford died some six years before the publication of the quarto of 1622. (See Is there a Shakespeare Problem? p. 443 et seq.)