SHAKESPEARE: AN OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE, WITH REFERENCES TO HIS FAMILY, HIS FRIENDS, AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES; ALSO, HIS BIOGRAPHERS. Ir may be safely asserted that the prince of British biographers could not, under any circumstances, have written a life of Shakespeare that would have been comparable with that wonderful achievement of personal history which stands unique in our language, the life of Johnson. Gentle, modest, and retiring, "the great heir of fame" would have been no hero after its eccentric writer's heart. But the man who could have worthily played the Boswell to Shakespeare, might have placed himself for ever amongst our principal literary creditors, and performed a work "which the world would not willingly let die." We are, however, so far from possessing such a treasure that we know, directly from his contemporaries, nothing of Shakespeare's biography. Strange, indeed, that in an age of great men, "when learning triumphed o'er her barbarous foes," no one seems to have troubled himself to place on record any account of the man whose immortality they foresaw, and whose genius they confessed "To be such And the strange circumstance is the more deeply to be regretted as we ponder on the treasury of wit and wisdom which might then have made us rich indeed. 66 that Without supposing that Shakespeare was in his day distinguished as a mighty conversationalist, or given to display, in or out of the social circle, it is easy to believe that maxims of religion, politics, philosophy, and worldly prudence came mended from his tongue; the grandly serene "star of poets" must have been in his serious hours the most sagacious of mentors, and in his lighter moments the most charming of companions. Old John Aubrey, who gave the first brief memoir of him, says, "He was a handsome well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready and smooth wit;" and afterwards adds that he heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell ("who is accounted the best comedian we have now") say Shakespeare "had a most prodigious wit." Amongst his family and guests at New Place, in the circle of his professional corps at the Globe, or taking his ease in his inn- 'At Bread Street's Mermaid," or elsewhere, it may be readily imagined— "Aged ears played truant at his tales, And younger hearings were quite ravished, So sweet and voluble his discourse." But the records of his life are so meagre, that of what he was or did we know little, and of what he thought (apart from his composition) or said, nothing. The literary men of the time would appear prima facie to have been guilty in this matter of most culpable negligence, and himself strangely reckless, touching the name, which things "standing thus unknown should live behind him," Campbell says, "The Genius of Biography neglected him in his own day. She gave records of men comparatively uninteresting and said nothing about the paragon of nature. She embalmed the dwarfs of our literature and left its colossus to be buried in oblivion. Perhaps our baulked curiosity can fix on no individual more strangely responsible for this than Shakespeare himself;" and Dr. Johnson 66 MEMOIR OF SHAKESPEARE, 3 asserts that "no author ever gave up his works to fortune and to time with so little care." "So careless," the same author remarks, was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired to ease and plenty, while he was little declined into the vale of years, before he could be disgusted with fatigue or disabled by infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue those which had been already published from the depravations that obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny by giving them to the world in their genuine state." "Of all trusters to futurity," writes Dr. Warburton, "commend me to the author of the following poems (Shakespeare), who not only left it to time to do him justice as it would, but to find him out as it could." Now, if he left time to find him out as it could, may it not be that time is doing him great injustice in this matter. That he wrote some thirty-seven wondrous plays we know; and that he carried on business and correspondence we feel also assured; but the mystery that transcends all others, and one of the most unaccountable facts in the whole history of literature, is that not a single scrap of this vast mass of manuscripts has ever been discovered. The whole has vanished and left not " a rack" behind. "All," says Mr. Hallam in his "Literary History," "that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakespeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversations, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary has been produced." How, then, knowing this extraordinary disappearance of all Shakespeare's papers-all the MSS. of the plays he wrote, all the letters he received (with one exception)-how can we reasonably charge him with total carelessness of his reputation with posterity? May he not have kept a commonplace book? or written an autobiography? Some of his many admirers may have written his life, and that manuscript being lost, was for anything we know destroyed by |