contemporary, Ben Jonson. Besides the splendid eulogy
prefixed to the First Folio, Jonson talked of Shakespeare's lack of art
to Drummond of Hawthornden, and expressed himself with affection and
discrimination in the famous passage in _Timber_.

After all allowances have been made for the inaccuracies of oral
tradition, we may safely gather from those concerning Shakespeare some
inferences which help to clothe the naked skeleton of the documented
facts. It is clear that, within a generation after Shakespeare's death,
common opinion both in Stratford and London recognized that in the actor
and dramatist a great man had passed away, that he had been in a worldly
sense highly successful, though starting from unpropitious beginnings,
that he wrote with great swiftness and ease, and that in his personal
relations he was gentle, kindly, genial, and witty. That the bailiff's
son who returned to his native town as a prosperous gentleman, is to be
identified with the actor and shareholder of the London theaters, and
with the author of the plays and poems, it is difficult to see how there
can remain any reasonable doubt; and, though the facts which prove this
identity contain little to illuminate the vast intellect and soaring
imagination which created Hamlet and Lear, they contain nothing
irreconcilable with the personality, which these creations imply rather
than reveal.

[Page Heading: Evidence of the Sonnets]

One further source of information about Shakespeare's personality has
figured largely in some biographies. The _Sonnets_ were published in
1609, evidently without Shakespeare's cooeperation or consent, with a
dedication by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, to a Mr. W. H., "the onlie
begetter of these insuing sonnets." All attempts to identify this Mr. W.
H. have failed. He may have been merely the person who procured the
manuscript for Thorpe, though the language of the dedication seems to
imply that he was the young gentleman who is the subject of a
considerable number of the poems. Of this young gentleman and of a dark
lady who seems to have been the occasion of other of the sonnets, much
has been written, but no facts of Shakespeare's life have been
established beyond those which are obvious to every reader: that
Shakespeare wrote admiring and flattering sonnets to a young man who is
urged to marry (and who may have been the Earl of Southampton, or an
unknown Mr. W. H., or another); and that he treats of an intrigue wi