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BILL NYE'S CHESTNUTS OLD AND NEW

With New Illustrations From Original Sketches, Photographs, Memoranda,
and Authentic Sources, by Williams, Opper, and Hopkins.

NEW YORK

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY

1888


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CHESTNUTS OLD AND NEW.




<b>CHESTNUT-BURR</b>. I.--THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON PUZZLE WRESTLED WITH
CONSCIENTIOUSLY.

_Why Bill favors the Claims of Bill Shakespeare--His Handwriting
skillfully touched upon--Its Likeness to Horace Greeley's--Difference
between Shakespeare and Bacon--A kind Lift for the Yeomanry._

|Trusting that it will not in any way impair the sale of Mr. Donnelly's
book, I desire to offer here a few words in favor of the theory that
William Shakespeare wrote his own works and thought his own thinks. The
time has fully arrived when we humorists ought to stand by each other.

I do not undertake to stand up for the personal character of
Shakespeare, but I say that he wrote good pieces, and I don't care who
knows it. It is doubtless true that at the age of eighteen he married a
woman eight years his senior, and that children began to cluster about
their hearthstone in a way that would have made a man in a New York flat
commit suicide. Three little children within fourteen months, including
twins, came to the humble home of the great Bard, and he began to go
out and climb upon the haymow to do his writing. Sometimes he would stay
away from home for two or three weeks at a time, fearing that when he
entered the house some one would tell him that he was again a parent.

Yet William Shakespeare knew all the time that he was a great man, and
that some day he would write pieces to speak. He left Stratford at the
age of twenty-one and went to London, where he attracted very little
attention, for he belonged to the Yeomanry, being a kind of dramatic
Horace Greeley, both in the matter of clothes and penmanship. Thus it
would seem that while Sir Francis Bacon was attending a business college
and getting himself familiar with the whole-arm movement, so as to be
able to write a free, cryptogamous hand, poor W. Shakespeare was slowly
thinking the hair off his head, while ever and anon he would bring out
his writing materials and his bright ready tongue, and write a sonnet on
an empty stomach.

Prior to leaving Stratford he is said to have dabbled in the poaching
business in a humble way on the estates of Sir Thomas Lucy, since
deceased, and that he wrote the following encomium or odelet in a free,
running hand, and pinned it on the knight's gate:=

````O, deer Thomas Lucy,

````Your venison's juicy,

````Juicy is your venison;

````Hence I append my benison.=

```The rose is red; the violet's blue;

```The keeper is a chump and so are you,

```Which is why I remark and my language is plain,

```Yours truly,

````High Low Jack

`````And the Game.=

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Let me now once more refer to the matter of the signature. Much has
been said of Mr. Shakespeare's coarse, irregular and vulgar penmanship,
which, it is claimed, shows the ignorance of its owner, and hence his
inability to write the immortal plays. Let us compare the signature
of Shakespeare with that of Mr. Greeley, and we notice a wonderful
similarity. There is the same weird effort in both cases to
out-cryptogam Old Cryptogamous himself, and enshrine immortal thought
and heaven-born genius in a burglar-proof panoply of worm fences, and
a chirography that reminds the careful student of the general direction
taken in returning to Round Knob, N. C., by a correspondent who visited
the home of a moonshiner, with a view toward ascertaining the general
tendency of homebrewed whisky to fly to the head.

If we judge Shakespeare by his signature, not one of us will be safe.
Death will wipe out our fame with a wet sponge. John Hancock in one
hundred years from now will be regarded as the author of the Declaration
of Independence, and Compendium Gaskell as