"That almost a century should have elapsed from the time of his [William Shakespeare's] death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on the history of his life or literary career,... are circumstances which can not be contemplated without astonishment. *... Sir William Dugdale, born in 1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, 'The Antiquities of Warwickshire,' appeared in 1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, we might have expected to give some curious memorials of his illustrious countryman. But he has not given us a single particular of his private life, contenting himself with a very slight mention of him in his account of the church and tombs of Stratford-upon-Avon.

* Malone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," London, 1821, vol.
ii, p. 4.
* Ibid., p. 5.

The next biographical printed notice that I have found is in Fuller's 'Worthies,' folio, 1662; in 'Warwickshire,' page 116—where there is a short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning him. And again, neither Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo, 1687; Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 1699—add anything to the meager accounts of Bug-dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was himself a native of Oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the death of our author, should not have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. Though Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' that diligent antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for such an insertion."

The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching among the poets for one by the name of William Shakespeare, when there was no such name among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. He might with as much propriety have searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets' Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the Worshipful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakespeare, any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of John Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans would have us accept—would have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut—namely, the spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were certain master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty—without making any impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had never been; and—except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church, finds his name on a stone—passed beyond the memory of a man in less than the years of a babe! The blind old Homer at least was known as a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his song—though he might have begged his bread in their streets—at least did not take him for a tinker! It is not that the Shakespearean dramas were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer that is the miracle; neither were the songs of Homer. Perhaps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the world of London and of England nobody knew that there was any Shakespeare, in the very days when the Drama we hold so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and printed—as we shall come to consider further on—for the benefit of non-theater-goers!

But, it is said, the great fire of London intervened and burned up all the records—that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal Shakespeare. Then, again, there is the lapse of time—the ordinary wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center of the world. But how about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about Chaucer? Did the great fire of London affect his chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had more than a great fire of London to contend with. But they have survived the ruin of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence! If it all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not a riddle. It is the simplest of facts—the simple fact that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this nineteenth century.

But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not deterred by his failure to find a poet of the name of Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds—and he has the credit of being the first to undertake the task—to construct an immortal bard. And a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!—one that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. Malone searched for the Stratford "shaughraun," who ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other, for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who revisited his native haunts—on the lookout, not for king's and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes—but for clowns and drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed under his adapting pen; * had he searched for the Stratford' butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand.

* It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue
and choruses of the "Henry V." and "Henry VIII." are
apologies for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly
of the multitude they catered to. As to the internal
testimony of the authorship of these compositions, any
reader can judge for himself. We have expressed our own
opinion as being that William Shakespeare might be credited
with the characters of Nym and Bar-dolph; especially of the
Corporal, whose part consists of the phrase, "There's the
humor of it," intruded at each convenient interval; and it
is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the matter in
hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the
moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this
expression did happen to be a favorite at about that time;
and that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the
changes on it as a season to stage material. Witness the
following:
Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as
another, sir!
Cash. Thy rheum, Cob? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak'st.
Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that
humor? Some rare thing, I warrant.
Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike
monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by
affectation, and fed by folly.
Cob. How must it be fed?
Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou
never hear that? It's a common phrase, "Feed thy humor."
Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4.
Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable Chiefly to such
as had the happiness Daily to see how the poor innocent word
Was racked and tortured.
Every Man Out of his Humor.
"Humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and abused
word of these times; just as for example "awful" might be
said to be an over-used and abused word during our own
times.

But he was searching, not for a butcher's son, but for a poet—for a courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mold of form,