of Shakespeare's works in his hand. Even
more important is Dryden's testimony that he was himself "first
taught" by D'Avenant "to admire" Shakespeare.

One of the most precise and valuable pieces of oral tradition which
directly owed currency to D'Avenant was the detailed story of the
generous gift of L1000, which Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of
Southampton, made the poet, "to enable him to go through with a
purchase which he heard he had a mind to." Rowe, Shakespeare's first
biographer, recorded this particular on the specific authority of
D'Avenant, who, he pointed out, "was probably very well acquainted
with the dramatist's affairs." At the same time it was often repeated
that D'Avenant was owner of a complimentary letter which James the
First had written to Shakespeare with his own hand. A literary
politician, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of
Buckinghamshire, who survived D'Avenant nearly half a century, said
that he had examined the epistle while it was in D'Avenant's keeping.
The publisher Lintot first printed the Duke's statement in the preface
to a new edition of Shakespeare's Poems in 1709.

D'Avenant's devotion did much for Shakespeare's memory; but it
stimulated others to do even more for the after-generations who wished
to know the whole truth about Shakespeare's life. The great actor of
the Restoration, Thomas Betterton, was D'Avenant's close associate in
his last years. D'Avenant coached him in the parts both of Hamlet and
of Henry the Eighth, in the light of the instruction which he had
derived through the medium of Taylor and Lowin from Shakespeare's own
lips. But more to the immediate purpose is it to note that D'Avenant's
ardour as a seeker after knowledge of Shakespeare fired Betterton
into making a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to glean oral traditions
of the dramatist's life there. Many other of Shakespeare's admirers
had previously made Stratford Church, where stood his tomb, a place of
pilgrimage, and Aubrey had acknowledged in hap-hazard fashion the
value of Stratford gossip. But it was Betterton's visit that laid the
train for the systematic union of the oral traditions of London and
Stratford respectively.

It was not until the London and Warwickshire streams of tradition
mingled in equal strength that a regular biography of Shakespeare was
possible. Betterton was the efficient cause of this conjunction. All
that Stratford-on-Avon revealed to him he put at the disposal of
Ni