Mr. Crouch-Batchelor is too innocent.  He sees the sixteenth century in the colours of the twentieth.  We know nothing, except a few dates of birth, death, entrance at school, College, the Inns of Court, and so forth, concerning several of Shakespeare’s illustrious contemporaries and successors in the art of dramatic poetry.  The Baconians do not quite understand, or, at least, keep steadily before their minds, one immense difference between the Elizabethan age and later times.  In 1590-1630, there was no public excitement about the characters, personalities, and anecdotage of merely literary men, poets, and playwrights, who held no position in public affairs, as Spenser did; or in Court, Society, and War, as Sidney did; who did not write about their own feuds and friendships, like Greene and Nash; who did not expand into prefaces and reminiscences, and satires, like Ben Jonson; who never killed anybody, as Ben did; nor were killed, like Marlowe; nor were involved, like him, in charges of atheism, and so forth; nor imprisoned with every chance of having their ears and noses slit, like Marston.  Consequently, silence and night obscure the lives and personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker, Webster, and several others, as night and silence hide Shakespeare from our view.

He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated separately in cheap and very perishable quartos.  No collected edition of his plays appeared during his life; without that he could not be studied, and recognised in his greatness.  He withdrew to the country and died.  There was no enthusiastic curiosity about him; nobody Boswellised any playwright of his time.  The Folio of 1623 gave the first opportunity of studying him as alone he can be studied.  The Civil Wars and the Reign of the Saints distracted men’s minds and depressed or destroyed the Stage.

Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see the actor at his father’s inn at Oxford, was interested in him, and cherished the embers of the drama, which were fading before the theatres were closed.  Davenant collected what he could in the way of information from old people of the stage; he told Shakespearean anecdotes in conversation; a few reached the late day when uncritical inquiries began, say 1680-90 at earliest.  The memories of ancient 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.