Another Candidate for Shakespeare

March 2.—Clerk walked home with me from the Court. I was scarce able to keep up with him; could once have done it well enough. Funny thing at the Theatre. Among the discourse in "High Life below Stairs," one of the ladies' ladies asks who wrote Shakespeare. One says, "Ben Jonson," another, "Finis." "No," said Will Murray, "it is Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting the other day."

The controversy over who truly wrote Shakespeare’s works was apparently solved 185 years ago, as Scott’s journal entry of March 2^nd, 1827 indicates.  Scott enjoyed another playwright’s work that night; James Townley.  The farce “High Life Below Stairs” by this friend of David Garrick first played at Drury Lane, in 1759.