Conditions of the problem; Position of Mark Twain; Argument from legal allusions in Shakespeare; Litigation and legalism in Elizabethan England; Alleged classical scholarship of the plays; Coincidences of phrase in Shakespeare and Bacon; Argument from coincidences of phrase; Prose style in Shakespeare and Bacon; Vocabularies of Shakespeare and Bacon; Intellectual interests of Shakespeare and Bacon; External and circumstantial evidence, lives and personalities; Conclusion.