to reflect that, though my chief
preoccupations apart from my profession have been literary, I have
never visited the sacred place before. For an Englishman who cares for
literature not to have been to Stratford-on-Avon is as gross a neglect
as for an Englishman who has any sense of patriotism not to have
visited Westminster Abbey.

And now that I have been there and returned, and have leisure to think
it all over, I feel that I have been standing on the threshold of a
mystery. Who, when all is said and done, was this extraordinary man?
What were his thoughts, his aims, his views of himself and of the
world? If Shakespeare was Shakespeare, he seems, to speak frankly, to
have had a humanity distinct and apart from his genius. Here we have
the son of a busy, quarrelsome, enterprising tradesman--who eventually
indeed came to grief in trade--of a yeoman stock, and bearing a common
name. His mother could not write her own signature. Of his youth we
hear little that is not disreputable. He married under unpleasant
circumstances, after an entanglement which took place at a very early
age; he was addicted to poaching, or, at all events, to the illegal
pursuit of other people's game. Then he drifts up to London and joins a
theatrical company--then a rascally kind of trade--deserting his wife
and family. His life in London is full of secrets. He is a man of
mysterious passions and dangerous friendships. He writes plays of
incomparable depth and breadth, touching every chord of humour, tragedy
and pathos; certain rather elaborate poems of a precieux type, and
strange sonnets, revealing a singular poignancy of unconventional
feelings. But here, again, it is difficult to conceive that the writer
of the Sonnets, who touched life so intensely at one feverish point,
should have had the amazing detachment and complexity of mind and soul
that the plays reveal. The notices of his talk and character are few
and unenlightening, and testify to a certain easy brilliance of wit,
but no more. Before he is thirty he is spoken of as both "upright" and
"facetious"--a singular combination.

Then he suddenly appears in another aspect; at the age of thirty-two he
is a successful, well-to-do man. And then his ambition, if he had any,
seems to shift its centre, and he appears to be only bent upon
restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal
position. He buys the biggest house in his native place; from the
proceeds of his writ