Shakspere, Personal Recollections | Page 2

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have
greatness thrust upon them."
The poet finds in Shakspere a blooming garden of perennial roses, the
painter finds colors of heavenly hues, the musician finds seraphic songs
and celestial aspirations, the sculptor finds models of beauty and truth,
the doctor finds pills and powders of Providence, the lawyer finds suits

and briefs of right and reason, the preacher finds prophecies superior to
Isaiah or Jeremiah, the historian finds lofty romance more interesting
than facts and the actor "struts and frets" in the Shaksperian
looking-glass of to-day, in the mad whirl of the mimic stage, with all
the pomp and glory of departed warriors, statesmen, fools, princes and
kings.
Shakspere was grand master of history, poetry and
philosophy--tripartite principles of memory, imagination and reason.
He is credited with composing thirty-seven plays, comedies, tragedies
and histories, as well as Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The
Lovers' Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim and one hundred and
fifty-four classical sonnets, all poems of unrivaled elegance.
What a royal troop of various and universal characters leaped from the
portals of his burning brain, to stalk forever down the center of the
stage of life, exemplifying every human passion!
Shakspere never composed a play or poem without a purpose, to
satirize an evil, correct a wrong or elevate the human soul into the lofty
atmosphere of the good and great. His villains and heroes are of royal
mold, and while he lashes with whips of scorn the sin of cupidity,
hypocrisy and ingratitude, he never forgets to glorify love, truth and
patriotism.
Virtue and vice are exhibited in daily, homespun dress, and stalking
abroad through the centuries, the generous and brave nobility of King
Lear, Cæsar, Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to
Shylock, Brutus, Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and
wits were philosophers, while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords
and ladies were sneaks, frauds and murderers.
Vice in velvet, gold and diamonds, suffered under the X-rays of his
divine phrases, while virtue was winged with celestial plumes, soaring
away into the heaven of peace and bliss. He was the matchless
champion of stern morality, and the interpreter of universal reason.
Shakspere was a multifarious man, and every glinting passion of his

soul found rapid and eloquent expression in words that beam and burn
with eternal light. The stream of time washes away the fabrics of other
poets, but leaves the adamantine structure of Shakspere erect and
uninjured.
Being surcharged, for three hundred and forty years, with the spirit and
imagination of Shakspere, I shall tell the world about his personal and
literary life, and although some curious and unreasonable people may
not entirely believe everything I relate in this volume, I can only excuse
and pity their judgment, for they must know that the Ideal is the Real!
The intellectual pyramids of his thought still rise out of the desert
wastes of literary scavengers and loom above the horizon of all the
great writers and philosophers that preceded his advent on the globe.
The blunt, licentious Saxon words and sentences in the first text of
Shakspere, have been ruthlessly expurgated by his editorial
commentators, adding, no doubt, to the beauty and decency of the plays,
but sadly detracting from their original strength.
Pope, Jonson, Steevens and even Malone have made so many minute,
technical changes in the Folio Plays of 1623, printed seven years after
the death of Shakspere, that their presumptive elucidation often drivels
into obscurity.
Editorial critics, with the best intention, have frequently edited the
blood, bone and sinews of the original thought out of the works of the
greatest authors. While attempting to simplify the text for common,
rough readers, they mystify the matter by their egotistical explanation,
and while showing their superior research and classical learning, they
eliminate the chunk logic force of the real author.
For thirty years Shakspere studied the variegated book of London life,
with all the human oddities, and when spring and summer covered the
earth with primroses, flowers and hawthorn blossoms, he rambled over
domestic and foreign lands, through fields, forests, mountains and
stormy seas.

With the fun of Falstaff, the firmness of Cæsar, the generosity of King
Lear and the imagination of Hamlet, Shakspere also possessed the
love-lit delicacy of Ophelia, Portia and Juliet, reveling familiarly with
the spirits of water, earth and air, in his kingdom of living ghosts. He
borrowed words and ideas from all the ancient philosophers, poets and
story tellers, and shoveling them, pell-mell, into the furnace fires of his
mammoth brain, fused their crude ore, by the forced draught of his
fancy, into the laminated steel of enduring form and household utility.
The rough and uncouth corn of others passed through the hoppers of
Shakspere's