That

which was then in very deed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, but which events have shown to be well founded. Just men may have misunderstood you, but your only enemies have been the enemies of right and of your country. At the hands of some of these, you have lately suffered in common with the good President whom we yet mourn. your life was sought with his was an additional testimony to your faithfulness and your ability. Men seek to kill only whom they fear and hate. That you escaped this murderous attempt made by assassins who struck at your country through you, was an occasion of rejoicing to true men throughout the land. This book, although purely literary in its character, may be fitly dedicated to a statesman in whom the cause of education has ever found an advocate equally zealous and discreet, and whose pen has gained him an enviable place in the world of letters. That you may live long in the service of your country, and that, while the undying interest of the subject of this volume wins it readers, this page may do a little toward preserving in the minds of your countrymen a memory of how much they and freedom owe you, are the hearty wishes of

Your grateful fellow-citizen,

R. G. W.

PREFACE.

HIS volume is the result of an endeavor

THIS

to present in a narrative form what is known and may be reasonably inferred concerning Shakespeare's life, with an appreciation of his genius, and such a history of our early drama as would conduce to that appreciation and be suited to the perusal of the generality of his intelligent readers. During the last hundred and fifty years much has been written upon these subjects by men of various fitness for the task, and of widely differing degrees of ability. unless my knowledge of this literature is imperfect, the present book, in its scope, its purpose, and its method, is without a rival among its predecessors. It is not intended for lovers of desultory gossip on the one hand, or for antiquaries and Shakespearian scholars on the other. I have undertaken to examine and to estimate the

But

mass of material which has been accumulated by the painstaking researches of previous investigators of the facts connected with Shakespeare's life and of the earlier records of the English drama, — much of it having the slightest possible connection, and more no connection at all, with the subject, to arrange with compactness and coherence that which seemed to me to be distinguished from the remainder by truth and significance, and so to tell the story that it might have a continuous interest for readers not especially devoted to dramatic studies.

Having given my authority in most cases for statement or hypothesis, it is not necessary that I should here repeat my acknowledgment of obligations in this regard. Little has been added, and nothing of moment, to the results either of the searches made in the last two centuries by Betterton, Malone, and Chalmers for tradition and record concerning Shakespeare, or of their investigations of the social and professional conditions under which his life must have been passed. The last two writers seemed also to have exhausted the field of research in regard to the history of the English drama and the English stage. But Mr.

Collier's later work upon those subjects, by its fulness and its systematic arrangement, supersedes all others, either for the use of the dramatic student, or as a book of reference for the occasional inquirer. Yet the account of the English drama given in the following pages will be found to be something more, as well as something less, than an abridgment of Mr. Collier's three octavo vol

umes.

These remarks apply only to the first and last divisions of this volume. The second, the Essay toward an Expression of Shakespeare's Genius, is the endeavor of one who, having read the poet much and his critics little, has thought his own thoughts and trusted his own judgment upon this subject, until, with a mingling of confidence and diffidence which it would be difficult to explain, he now ventures to offer his conclusions as hints and aids to others; conscious the while that those who can judge them best are those who need them least.

Thus the purpose of this book is to enable its reader to form as nearly as possible a full and just appreciation of Shakespeare as a man, a poet, and a dramatist. No other thought entered

my mind when I laid out my work. But I will own that, as I wrote the following pages, I conceived the hope that those who read them might be led to remember, and not only to remember but to take to heart, the pregnant and all-important truth, that with the intellectual wealth and glory of Shakespeare and Milton and their contemporaries and antecessors, we have inherited, not in any indirect and collateral way, but as coheirs and equals with our blood brethren in Great Britain, however sharp our political severance from them, those principles of liberty, that intelligent respect for law, and that capacity of self-government, which belong to and distinguish the English race, which some call Anglo-Saxon;

that if we have attained a national prosperity and power, a diffusion of mental culture and moral sensibility, and a union of stability and progressive force hitherto unheard of among any people, it is only because we have transplanted here, and developed by a normal and unconstrained growth, the same political principles and the same laws of social development from which spring the real power and the true glory of the British nation; – that we in our Englishhood, as they in theirs, are