He was fortunate, too, in his “fellows.” He had found no doors open to him but those of James Burbage and his theatre. Play-acting was repugnant alike to his taste and his pride: we can learn that from the Sonnets.

But having been received into the company, having been trained in the “quality,” he did his best to conquer. He was singularly fitted for the stage, as John Davies says, “Wit, courage, good shape, good parts, and all good.” From a performer he went on to be a writer of plays. His company always stood as the best in the metropolis, the members were attached to each other, trusting each other through life, leaving each other legacies at death. How much did he owe to the expression and inspiration of his fellows, especially of Richard Burbage?

It is not too much to believe that without Richard to translate him, he would not have thought of putting on paper his great tragic characters, Othello, Hamlet, Richard III.

He was fortunate, too, in his theatres. The best of their time, they were worth writing for. Unhampered by much stage mechanism, and with no scene shifting, he made his audience co-operate with him through their imagination, and create for themselves the scenery from his suggestions. No interruptions, no intervals for irrelevant conversation drifted men away from the developments of the central and side plots which animated the stage continuously. The progress of a play necessitated one continued process of attention; and through educating his hearers to his level, he came to reign supreme, playing upon their heart strings, and moving them to mirth, woe, sympathy, wonder, repulsion, or admiration as he pleased, in a way that we do not understand to-day.

In another, laudable but more prosaic, aspect, Shakespeare was fortunate, in making money. Trained by the pinch of early poverty, by the humiliations of his father’s debts, by the constant demands of a young family, to estimate its value as a means to any end, he seems to have lost no chance of earning money, and by a self-denying life, to have economized his gains. Thereby he was able to rehabilitate his parents in their old position, to secure them a grant of arms, to place his own family out of the reach of the deprivations he must have suffered himself, and to have lived and died in dignity and honour.

Fortunate in the decline of his life, when his warfare was over and his conquest won, he came back to dwell in the place of his birth, beside the wife of his youth, his daughters, and his wide circle of friends. And when the end came, it was fortunate too. He had been allowed to finish his task, and yet he had not overlived his powers. He did not live too long, as Bacon did. His fellow townsmen did not approve of plays any more than did the Corporation of London, but they saw the playwriter reverently laid to rest in the chancel of their parish church as owner of their tithes. The inartistic monument, and the artistic epitaph were raised by loving hearts to “Shakespeare, with whome Quick nature dide.”

Need more be said as to Shakespeare’s fortunes? It is not given to all great men to fit the time and to find the chance to prove what is in them, and to win success. It is not the fortune of every genius even, however associated with great deeds, to reveal the spirit of his country, and to be the voice of his age, which he helped to make what it was. Yet that was Shakespeare’s fortune and our inheritance, and for this the whole world honours him to-day.

Impromptu speech at the dinner of the “Shakespeare Commemoration League,” 23rd April, 1908.

II
SHAKESPEARE’S AUNTS AND THE SNITTERFIELD PROPERTY

Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps did much for the general reading public in bringing to their attention so many of the estate records which help to clear the position and the relations of the Arden and Shakespeare families. Having done so much, it were well that he had done more. Though he devoted his life and means to collecting information, he published many of his discoveries in little books of limited issue, accessible only to few, and he did not always carry them over to his “Life of Shakespeare,” or to his much more exhaustive “Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare.” Even in the last edition of that great work we suffer somewhat from the method of arrangement, from a very imperfect and unsatisfactory Index, from an absence of definite references, and even, it must be confessed, from occasional carelessness and incompleteness in his research among, and analyses of, the documents. He had the great good fortune to have early access to the Stratford records. Some of these were then in loose bundles, others bound in books, without any attention to order or date. He made a Calendar of these, but only in the order he found them, and did not provide an index of any kind, beyond, as I found later, a separate private booklet, limited to “ten copies,” so that any student who wishes to know what has been preserved must read through the whole bulky folio volume. Probably on account of these difficulties, or through blind faith in his work, none of his successors—not even the industrious G. R. French—has followed him to his originals or checked his inferences by facts.