the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get drunk;
therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout
with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio
treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves. For though
it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or
not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he
made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an
unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of
the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has
had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespear. Mr
Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in
convincing us that Shakespear was a man of normal constitution
sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of
all the freaks of nature: the freak which transposes the normal aim
of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and the
condemnation has been general throughout the present generation,
though it only needed Mr Harris's fearless handling of the matter to
sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern
fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against
eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of
beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was