Gentleman
of Stratford-upon-Avon." At this period he had also produced more than
one-third of his known literary work, and was acknowledged as the
leading dramatist of the time. All of this he had attained working in
the same environment in which other men of about his own age, but of
greater education and larger opportunities, had found penury, disgrace,
and death. Marlowe, his confrere, at the age of thirty, in 1593, was
killed in a tavern brawl. A year earlier, Greene, also a university man,
would have died a beggar on the street but for the charity of a
cobbler's wife who housed him in his dying hours. Spenser, breathing a
purer atmosphere, but lacking the business aptitude of Shakespeare, died
broken-hearted in poverty in 1599. George Peele, another university man,
at about the same date, and at the age of thirty-four, we are told by
Meres, died from the results of an irregular life. And those of his
literary contemporaries who lived as long as, or outlived, Shakespeare,
what were their ends, and where are their memories? Unknown and in most
cases forgotten except where they live in his reflected light. Matthew
Roydon lived long and died in poverty, no one knows when or where.
George Chapman outlived his great rival many years, and died as he had
lived, a friendless misanthropist.

Though Shakespeare won to fame and fortune over the temptations and
vicissitudes of the same life and environments to which so many of his
fellows succumbed, we have proof that this was not due to any inherent
asceticism or native coldness of blood.

No man in Shakespeare's circumstances could have attained and
accomplished what he did during those early years living at haphazard or
without a controlling purpose in life. Whatever may have been the
immediate accident of fate that turned his face Londonwards, we may rest
assured that he went there with the purpose of retrieving his good name
in his own community and rehabilitating the fortunes of his family.

Shakespeare's literary history does not show in him any evidence of
remarkable precocity. Keats was famous and already gathered to the
immortals at an age at which Shakespeare was still in the chrysalid
stage of the actual buskin and sock. It may reasonably be doubted that
Shakespeare produced any of his known poems or plays previous to the
years 1590-91. Though his genius blossomed late his common sense and
business capacity developed early, forced into being, no doubt, by a
real