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. But 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

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

so subject to the same laws of moral and intellectual development that, however that development may be modified by circumstances, and though we are politically two nations with sometimes clashing interests, we are not, and indeed cannot be, other than one people; -—and that, with all our mutual emulation, inevitable as it is from the community of our origin, our mental constitution, and the similarity of our pursuits, we owe each other, if not mutual regard, at least a mutual consideration, respect, and confidence heartier than that which befits the merely formal intercourse of two nations which are called friendly because they are not at open enmity. Our common inheritance is one which each of us may enjoy to the full without diminishing the other's share, or impugning the other's title, and which we should share without envy, certainly without malice or uncharitableness. These truths are trite; but the day will be a sad one, should it ever come, when they finally lose their vital binding force for those who read in a common mother tongue the words of William Shakespeare.

R. G. W.

NEW YORK, May 23d, 1865.