cholas Rowe, who was the first to attempt a formal memoir. Of
Betterton's assistance Rowe made generous acknowledgment in these
terms:--

I must own a particular Obligation to him [_i.e._,
Betterton] for the most considerable part of the Passages
relating to his [_i.e._, Shakespeare's] Life, which I have
here transmitted to the Publick; his veneration for the
Memory of Shakespear having engag'd him to make a Journey
into Warwickshire, on purpose to gather up what Remains he
could of a Name for which he had so great a Value.

VI

The contemporary epitaph on Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford-on-Avon
Church, which acclaimed Shakespeare a writer of supreme genius, gave
the inhabitants of the little town no opportunity of ignoring at any
period the fact that the greatest poet of his era had been their
fellow-townsman. Stratford was indeed openly identified with
Shakespeare's career from the earliest possible day, and Sir William
Dugdale, the first topographer of Warwickshire, writing about 1650,
noted that the place was memorable for having given "birth and
sepulture to our late famous poet Will Shakespeare." But the obscure
little town produced in the years that followed Shakespeare's death
none who left behind records of their experience, and such fragments
of oral tradition of Shakespeare at Stratford as are extant survive
accidentally, with one notable exception, in the manuscript notes of
visitors, who, like Betterton, were drawn thither by a veneration
acquired elsewhere.

The one notable exception is John Ward, a seventeenth-century vicar of
Stratford, who settled there in 1662, at the age of thirty-three,
forty-six years after Shakespeare's death. Ward remained at Stratford
till his death in 1681. He is the only resident of the century who
wrote down any of the local story. Ward was a man of good sentiment.
He judged that it became a vicar of Stratford to know his Shakespeare
well, and one of his private reminders for his own conduct
runs--"Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, and bee much versed in
them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter."

Ward was a voluminous diarist and a faithful chronicler as far as he
cared to go. Shakespeare's last surviving daughter, Judith Quiney, was
dying when he arrived in Stratford; but sons of Shakespeare's sister,
Mistress Joan Hart, were still living in the poet's birthplace in
Henley Street. Ward seems, too, to have known Lady B