people of the theatre and clerks and sextons at Stratford were
ransacked, to very little purpose.

As these things were so, how can we expect biographical materials
about Shakespeare? As to the man, as to how his character impressed
contemporaries, we have but the current epithets: "friendly,"
"gentle," and "sweet," the praise of his worth by two of the actors
in his company (published in 1623), and the brief prose note of Ben
Jonson,--this is more than we have for the then so widely admired
Beaumont, Ben Jonson's friend, or Chapman, or the adored Fletcher.
"Into the dark go one and all," Shakespeare and the others. To be
puzzled by and found theories on the silence about Shakespeare is to
show an innocence very odd in learned disputants.

The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of their own
misappreciation of the literary and social conditions of
Shakespeare's time. That world could not possibly appreciate his
works as we do; the world, till 1623, possessed only a portion of his
plays in cheap pamphlets, in several of these his text was mangled
and in places unintelligible. And in not a single instance were
anecdotes and biographical traits of playwrights recorded, except
when the men published matter about themselves, or when they became
notorious in some way unconnected with their literary works.
Drummond, in Scotland, made brief notes of Ben Jonson's talk;
Shakespeare he never met.

That age was not widely and enthusiastically appreciative of literary
merit in playwrights who were merely dramatists, and in no other way
notorious or eminent. Mr. Greenwood justly says "the contemporary
eulogies of the poet afford proof that there were some cultured