n the
memory of his contemporaries; it is the very grandeur of his genius
which precludes us from discovering any personal trait in his works. His
supposed self-revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a few
outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he
is all his characters, and his characters range over all mankind. There
is not one, or the act or word of one, that we can identify personally
with the poet himself.

[Sidenote: His actor's life.]

He was born in 1564, the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years
after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Bacon.
Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere: Greene probably a few years
older. His father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, was
forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman as his son reached
boyhood; and stress of poverty may have been the cause which drove
William Shakspere, who was already married at eighteen to a wife older
than himself, to London and the stage. His life in the capital can
hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, the memorable
year which followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the
Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine."
If we take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal
feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the
bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better
for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he
writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view"
of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it,"
he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is
subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more
than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic
rivals at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the newcomer
seems to have won him a general love among his fellows. In 1592, while
still a mere actor and fitter of old plays for the stage, a
fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered Greene's attack on him in words of
honest affection: "Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he
excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship have
reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
facetious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner Burbage
spoke of h