AllMovie

During William Shakespeare's tercentennial, a number of his plays were made into motion pictures. This isn't one of them; it's a rather fluffy piece of fiction which uses him as a supporting character. A young woman (Florence LaBadie) is having a fierce argument with her fiancée, Lieutenant Stanton (Robert Vaughn). She says that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, and he violently disagrees. This dispute breaks the couple up, and he asks to be transferred to a post near the Mexican border. There he gets into a fight with some bandits and is wounded. News of this reaches his former sweetheart, and she is shocked into a delirium. While in this state, she has a dream; it is Elizabethan times, and she is at a wayside inn where two men have a fight over her. The man defending her is her real-life sweetheart, Stanton. Shakespeare (Lawrence Swinburne) appears as a strolling player and saves Stanton. Later, at the performance of one of the Bard's plays, Francis Bacon (Robert Whittier) bribes a scholar into saying that the play was stolen from him. Stanton discloses the plot and winds up in duel with Bacon, who shoots him. The girl is throwing herself on her lover's body just as she wakes up to real life. Stanton, who was not seriously injured in the Mexican battle, is there to greet her. She gives up her theories about Bacon and reunites with him.