His Life and Genius 135 



eagerly attended the performances of the players 

 at Stratford as a boy, he had not been stirred by 

 any rhyming impulses before he was twenty-one 

 years old. Think, in this relation, on the case of 

 Burns, whose clever verses, satirical and amorous, 

 gained for him local celebrity as a village poet of 

 notable merit some time before he grew to be the 

 public idol which, unfortunately for him, he became 

 for a time. So far from incontinently rejecting 

 the stories of Shakspeare's early poetical exercises 

 as unworthy calumny, a wiser reflection, ponder- 

 ing his inborn aptitudes and the mean conditions 

 of his boyhood, might perceive in them evidence 

 of his poetical drift and their truth. 



Between the date of his leaving Stratford, in 

 1585 or 1586, and the publication of Venus and 

 Adonis in 1593 (" the first heir of his invention "), 

 dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, he rose 

 steadily to a position of growing influence and 

 authority in the theatre as actor and dramatist. 

 Besides his work as player of small parts on the 

 stage, he was occupied in revising, recasting and 

 adapting old plays, in examining new plays sub- 

 mitted for representation, and in writing his own 

 plays. That he made the largest use for his 

 purposes of the old plays in store at the play- 

 house, adopting plots, characters and even whole 

 passages freely wherever he found suitable spoil, 

 is certain. Therein he was literally many-minded, 

 since he deliberately absorbed the works of many 

 minds. But he so assimilated what he took from 



