"witty" in Stratford. But what could Stratford know? Milton and
Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of
the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not know, how should
they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the
plays and poems. The secret, perhaps, so widely spread among "the
friends of the Muses" in 1616, was singularly well kept by a set of
men rather given to blab as a general rule.

I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which
pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions
about his monument and his grave, and asks if he "died with a curse
upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might MOVE HIS
BONES? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!" {188a} And the authority
for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon
his lips?

About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost
after Shakespeare's death, W. Hall, a Queen's man, Oxford (the W.
Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare's
signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford,
and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow
of Queen's. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author
of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was a great ossuary
or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up were piled,
"they would load a great number of waggons." Not desiring this
promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to
clerks and sextons, "for the most part a very ignorant sort of
people."

If Shakespeare DID, that accommodation of himself to his audience was