characters, personalities, and anecdotage of merely literary men,
poets, and playwrights, who held no position in public affairs, as
Spenser did; or in Court, Society, and War, as Sidney did; who did
not write about their own feuds and friendships, like Greene and
Nash; who did not expand into prefaces and reminiscences, and
satires, like Ben Jonson; who never killed anybody, as Ben did; nor
were killed, like Marlowe; nor were involved, like him, in charges of
atheism, and so forth; nor imprisoned with every chance of having
their ears and noses slit, like Marston. Consequently, silence and
night obscure the lives and personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont,
Fletcher, Dekker, Webster, and several others, as night and silence
hide Shakespeare from our view.

He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated
separately in cheap and very perishable quartos. No collected
edition of his plays appeared during his life; without that he could
not be studied, and recognised in his greatness. He withdrew to the
country and died. There was no enthusiastic curiosity about him;
nobody Boswellised any playwright of his time. The Folio of 1623
gave the first opportunity of studying him as alone he can be
studied. The Civil Wars and the Reign of the Saints distracted men's
minds and depressed or destroyed the Stage.

Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see the
actor at his father's inn at Oxford, was interested in him, and
cherished the embers of the drama, which were fading before the
theatres were closed. Davenant collected what he could in the way of
information from old people of the stage; he told Shakespearean
anecdotes in conversation; a few reached the late day when uncritical
inquiries began, say 1680-90 at earliest. The memories of ancient