1898.] on the Early Life and Work of Shakespeare. 751 



of 1592, in regard to which he appears to be intelligible and devoid 

 of all mystery, save only as to the immensity of his genius. They 

 appertain to the Shakespeare of this earth — schoolboy ; possible 

 attorney's clerk ; certain huntsman, courser, falconer and horseman ; 

 needy adventurer ; and theatrical factotum. But what of the Shake- 

 speare of heaven ? 



The unity of Shakespeare has not yet been questioned. No one 

 has doubted the personal identity of Greene's Johannes factotum 

 with the supreme artist, many years afterwards addressed by one of 

 the greatest of his contemporaries as " the wonder of the stage." 

 This, wrote Hallam, is " an improvement in critical acuteness doubt- 

 less reserved for a distant posterity." 



Had Hallam written some twenty years later, his forecast might 

 have been difierent. A generation in which the existence of Shake- 

 speare has been denied, might fairly be expected to question his 

 unity. By " Shakespeare," I mean the author of the plays and poems ; 

 and his existence as a separate entity is surely denied by those who 

 regard him as merely a phase or casual development of another man, 

 and the authorship of the greatest of all literary productions as an 

 unconsidered incident in a life-work of an entirely different kind. 



When an irrational idea is entertained by men who are in other 

 respects rational, we can generally find, if we search carefully, some 

 reason for its existence ; not, perhaps, an exquisite reason, but a 

 reason good enough, in the absence of a better. Eational men who 

 believed in the Tichborne claimant would tell you that the mother 

 of Tichborne believed in him, and that she ought to know her own 

 son : a reason good in itself, but overborne by the weight of adverse 

 testimony. When Mr. John Bright said that " any man who believes 

 that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote ' Hamlet ' or ' Lear ' is a 

 fool," he gave a reason for the faith, or want of faith which was in 

 him, and voluminous writers have done little more than expand and 

 illustrate this concise statement. But he overlooked the fact that 

 * Hamlet' and 'Lear' were not written by William Shakespeare of 

 Stratford. They were the work of one who was linked to the 

 man of Stratford no doubt by the tie of personal identity, but sepa- 

 rated from him in a much more real sense by some twenty years of 

 thought, work, study, observation of men and manners, and (for 

 aught we know) of sin, suffering and remorse, in this city. Why, 

 between the man of Stratford and the Shakespeare of 1592 there lay 

 six years of work in London : a time more than sufficient to convert 

 an unfledged schoolboy into a learned professor. 



What are the characteristics of the author of ' Hamlet ' and ' Lear ' 

 which have been noted as irreconcilable with what we know of the 

 man of Stratford ? They are these : the encyclopaBdic range of his 

 knowledge, so vast that specialists in several branches of learning 

 have claimed him as their own ; his intimate acquaintance with 

 human nature, as it manifests itself in all times and under all cir- 

 cumstances, at home and abroad, in courts and palaces, as well as 



