are to understand him.  He lived in a play-loving age; he studied the crowds, gave them what they wanted, and simply reflected their own thoughts and feelings.  In reflecting the English crowd about him he unconsciously reflected all crowds, which are alike in all ages; hence his continued popularity.  And in being guided by public sentiment he was not singular, but followed the plain path that every good dramatist has always followed to success.

Probably the truth of the matter is to be found somewhere between these two extremes.  Of his great genius there can be no question; but there are other things to consider.  As we have already noticed, Shakespeare was trained, like his fellow workmen, first as an actor, second as a reviser of old plays, and last as an independent dramatist.  He worked with other playwrights and learned their secret.  Like them, he studied and followed the public taste, and his work indicates at least three stages, from his first somewhat crude experiments to his finished masterpieces.  So it would seem that in Shakespeare we have the result of hard work and of orderly human development, quite as much as of transcendent genius.

LIFE (1564-1616).  Two outward influences were powerful in developing the genius of Shakespeare,—­the little village of Stratford, center of the most beautiful and romantic district in rural England, and the great city of London, the center of the world’s political activity.  In one he learned to know the natural man in his natural environment; in the other, the social, the artificial man in the most unnatural of surroundings.

From the register of the little parish church at Stratford-on-Avon we learn that William Shakespeare was baptized there on the twenty-sixth of April, 1564 (old style).  As it was customary to baptize children on the third day after birth, the twenty-third of April (May 3, according to our present calendar) is generally accepted as the poet’s birthday.

His father, John Shakespeare, was a farmer’s son from the neighboring village of Snitterfield, who came to Stratford about 1551, and began to prosper as a trader in corn, meat, leather, and other agricultural products.  His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer, descended from an old Warwickshire family of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Norman blood.  In 1559 this married couple sold a piece of land, and the document is signed, “The marke + of John Shacksper.  The marke + of Mary Shacksper”; and from this it has been generally inferred that, like the vast majority of their countrymen, neither of the poet’s parents could read or write.  This was probably true of his mother; but the evidence from Stratford documents now indicates that his father could write, and that he also audited the town accounts; though in attesting documents he sometimes made a mark, leaving his name to be filled in by the one who drew up the document.