OWARDS the end of last century Steevens1 gave the

Tow substance of a biography of Shakespeare in the follow

ing words: "All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is-that he was born at Stratfordupon-Avon-married and had children there-went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." In fact, a hundred years ago the biographer of Shakespeare was much in the same predicament as the young theologian who found that Frederick the Great, when about to select a preacher, had caused a blank sheet of paper to be placed in the pulpit as the text from which he was to preach his sermon. Shakespeare's life is, indeed, anything but a blank leaf, but the writing has for the most part become illegible, and all the philosophical and critical tests that have been applied, have not, as yet, succeeded in accomplishing much more than in bringing to view a number of-for the most part unimportant, nay, trifling facts and scattered fragments, and these can be formed into one structure only by means of various combinations and conjectures. In the same 1 In a note to Sonnet 93.

2 Even Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps (Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 6th edition, i. p. xix), who professes merely "to furnish the reader with an authentic collection of all the known facts," has nevertheless to admit that he has given his "own interpretation of various testimonies," nor can he get on without hypotheses, and it is these very hypotheses more especially that want a proper foundation, as, for instance, his supposition that Shake speare's wife was afflicted in mind (i. 240).

B

way, as Lord Bacon once remarked, that large obstacles may be seen through narrow crevices, we here obtain through small openings a view over large sections and important influences in the poet's life; and Charles Knight is perfectly justified in prefixing to his biography of Shakespeare the words that "every life of him must to a certain extent be conjectural." And indeed this incontrovertible fact is made to hide a number of very questionable statements, in Knight more especially. Goethe's remark, that everything that has been said of Shakespeare is inadequate, does not apply only to the aesthetical domain, but to the hermeneutical and biographical domains as well.

When we look around and inquire into the causes which have led to the obscurity that envelops Shakespeare's life, we find, in the first place, that it is wrong to say that his contempories did not value him sufficiently, or-as Hermann Kurz1 does-to consider it an irretrievable disgrace on their part not to have handed down any detailed account of his life. For, apart from the fact that Shakespeare may have been active and energetic as a youth, his life in maturer years-like that of almost every poetical nature-was very probably richer in inward than in outward experiences; in this respect, therefore, he would have but little excited the curiosity or the interest of his contemporaries. Besides, biographical literature, the literature of narrating the story of specially remarkable lives, had not yet become the fashion; the age of Boswell, with its minute details of the domestic life of great writers, had not yet come. Nor were there as yet any journals that entertained their readers with communications concerning the private life and habits of eminent persons. The efforts of all men, in those days, were directed mainly in furthering their own peculiar interests in political, military, naval, or literary affairs, not in describing or narrating the lives of other men, and least of all of writers who had not yet attained a position of their own, or the eminent position they occupy in our day. What do we know of the lives of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Chapman, of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont, or of Fletcher? Next to nothing. And of Milton, likewise, we should not know anything, had he not taken part in the political life of his day." Still, we might have possessed 1 Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, vi. 342.

2 With regard to Dryden, Dr. Johnson-in his Lives of the Poets—