Isn’t it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all the
celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear
back to the first Tudors—a list containing five hundred names, shall we
say?—and you can go to the histories, biographies, and cyclopedias and
learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them. Every one of
them except one—the most famous, the most renowned—by far the most
illustrious of them all—Shakespeare! You can get the details of the
lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the
celebrated tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,
lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,
prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and
sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists, claimants,
impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college
presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors,
politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots, demagogues,
clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists,
physicians, surgeons—you can get the life-histories of all of them but
_one_. Just _one_—the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of
them all—Shakespeare!
You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by
the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find
out the life-histories of all those people, too. You will then have
listed fifteen hundred celebrities, and you can trace the authentic
life-histories of the whole of them. Save one—far and away the most
colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation—Shakespeare! About him you
can find out _nothing_. Nothing of even the slightest importance.
Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that
even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a
distinctly commonplace person—a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a
small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of
any consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly
cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the
life-history of every renowned _race-horse_ of modern times—but not
Shakespeare’s! There are many reasons why, and they have been furnished
in cart-loads (of guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there
is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is
abundantly sufficient all by itself—_he hadn’t any history to record_.
There is no way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way has
yet been discovered of getting around its formidable significance.
Its quite plain significance—to any but those thugs (I do not use the
term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived,
and none until he had been dead two or three generations. The Plays
enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them it seems a
pity the world did not find it out. He ought to have explained that he
was the author, and not merely a _nom de plume_ for another man to hide
behind. If he had been less intemperately solicitous about his bones,
and more solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his
good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important. They
will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure
until the last sun goes down.