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Updated: May 5, 2025
In the British Museum there is a copy of the Essays of Montaigne, in Florio's translation, with Shakspere's name, it is alleged, written in it by his own hand, and with notes which possibly may in part have been jotted down by him. Sir Frederick Madden, one of the greatest authorities in autographs, has recognised Shakspere's autograph as genuine.
Probably it was this apparent similarity of Shakspere's work and Molière's to the uninspired efforts of their competitors which prevented their contemporaries from discovering their preëminence the preëminence which is so obvious to us now that the plays of their fellow-craftsmen have fallen out of memory.
If the endeavour is a useless and unprofitable one, let it be forgotten I am content; but I hope to be able to show that an investigation of the subject does furnish us with a key which, in a manner, unlocks the secrets of Shakspere's heart, and brings us closer to the real living man to the very soul of him who, with hardly any history in the accepted sense of the word, has left us in his works a biography of far deeper and more precious meaning, if we will but understand it.
This was Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot.
"In speaking of Stratford-upon-Avon, the admiral told me that the Lucy family, one of whose ancestors drove Shakspere from his grounds, and who is caricatured in Justice Shallow, still resides on the same spot as in Shakspere's time. He says no family ever retained their characteristics more decidedly. "Some years ago one of this family was invited to a Shakspere dinner.
And the last Nick Attwood saw of Gaston Carew was his wistful eyes hunting down the stairway after him, and his hand, with its torn fine laces, waving at him through the bars. And when he came to the Mermaid Inn Master Shakspere's comedy was done, and Master Ben Jonson was telling a merry tale that made the tapster sick with laughing.
I consider that my seeing the man those years glimps'd for me, beyond all else, that inner spirit and form the unquestionable charm and vivacity, but intrinsic sophistication and artificiality crystallizing rapidly upon the English stage and literature at and after Shakspere's time, and coming on accumulatively through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the beginning, fifty or forty years ago, of those disintegrating, decomposing processes now authoritatively going on.
This has already been done to a great extent in the preceding pages, where the various actions of Puck and Ariel have been shown to differ in no essential respect from those of the devils of the time; but before commencing to study this phase of supernaturalism in Shakspere's works as a whole, and as indicative, to a certain extent, of the development of his thought upon the relation of man to the invisible world about and above him, it is necessary that this identity should be admitted without a shadow of a doubt.
He was left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival in London Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three Bacon was a member of the House of Commons, and his judgement and eloquence at once brought him to the front.
These are the facts in the records of Shakspere's life. They, however, are not the important facts. The main fact in his life is his work, the matchless collection of literary masterpieces that bear the imprint of his genius. It is also well to keep in mind that our paucity of definite documentary records is not characteristic of Shakspere alone.
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