The Facts About Shakespeare

The Facts About Shakespeare, by

William Allan Nielson and Ashley Horace Thorndike This eBook is for
the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Facts About Shakespeare
Author: William Allan Nielson Ashley Horace Thorndike
Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22281]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
FACTS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Illustration: The Shakespeare Monument in the Parish Church,
Stratford-on-Avon.]

THE FACTS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

BY
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON, PH.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
AND
ASHLEY HORACE THORNDIKE, PH.D., L.H.D. PROFESSOR OF
ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
[Illustration]
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1927
All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1913. Reprinted April,
1914; July, 1915; May, November, 1916; January, 1918; February,
September, 1920; September, 1921; March, 1922; February, December,
1923; October, 1924; June, 1926; January, December, 1927.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE
BERWICK & SMITH CO.

Transcriber's Notes:
Unique page headings have been retained, marked as [Page Heading:],
and positioned at the first available paragraph break of the page or the
preceding page.
Many spelling inconsistencies exist due to the historical period of the
quoted sources. These, in addition to the original punctuation, have

been retained.
Obvious typesetting errors have been corrected and noted in the
Transcriber's Endnotes at the end of the text.
Some index entries have been re-sequenced to allow for clarity of
sub-entries. These changes are recorded in the Transcriber's Endnotes
along with a copy of the original text.
The following non-standard characters have been represented as
follows:
[oe] oe ligature [OE] OE ligature [~e] tilde over e. A contraction of en.

Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND AND LONDON 1
II. BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS AND TRADITIONS 17
III. SHAKESPEARE'S READING 50
IV. CHRONOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT 67
V. THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 89
VI. THE ELIZABETHAN THEATER 117
VII. THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE 131
VIII. QUESTIONS OF AUTHENTICITY 156
IX. SHAKESPEARE SINCE 1616 167
X. CONCLUSION 188

APPENDIX A. BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTS AND
AUTHORITIES 203
APPENDIX B. INDEX OF THE CHARACTERS IN
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 226
APPENDIX C. INDEX OF THE SONGS 241
APPENDIX D. BIBLIOGRAPHY 243
INDEX 265

THE FACTS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

The Facts about Shakespeare
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND AND LONDON
Shakespeare lived in a period of change. In religion, politics, literature,
and commerce, in the habits of daily living, in the world of ideas, his
lifetime witnessed continual change and movement. When Elizabeth
came to the throne, six years before he was born, England was still
largely Catholic, as it had been for nine centuries; when she died
England was Protestant, and by the date of Shakespeare's death it was
well on the way to becoming Puritan. The Protestant Reformation had
worked nearly its full course of revolution in ideas, habits, and beliefs.
The authority of the church had been replaced by that of the Bible, of
the English Bible, superbly translated by Shakespeare's contemporaries.
Within his lifetime, again, England had attained a national unity and an
international importance heretofore unknown. The Spanish Armada had
been defeated, the kingdoms of England and Scotland united, and the

first colony established in America. Even more revolutionary had been
the assertion of national greatness in literature and thought. The Italian
Renaissance, following the rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature,
had extended its influence to England early in the century, but only
after the accession of Elizabeth did it bring full harvest. The names that
crowd the next fifty years represent fine native endowments, boundless
aspiration, and also novelty,--as Spenser in poetry, Bacon in philosophy,
Hooker in theology. In commerce as well as in letters there was this
same activity and innovation. It was a time of commercial prosperity,
of increase in comfort and luxury, of the growth of a powerful
commercial class, of large fortunes and large benefactions. Whatever
your status, your birth, trade, profession, residence, religion, education,
or property, in the year 1564 you had a better chance to change these
than any of your ancestors had; and there was more chance than there
had ever been that your son would improve his inheritance. The
individual man had long been boxed up in guild, church, or the feudal
system; now the covers were opened, and the new opportunity bred
daring, initiative, and ambition. The exploits of the Elizabethan sea
rovers still stir us with the thrill of adventure; but adventure and
vicissitude were hardly less the share of merchant, priest, poet, or
politician.