tratford-on-Avon from 1662 to 1668, in a diary and memorandum-book
written between 1661 and 1663 (ed. C. A. Severn, 1839); by the Rev.
William Fulman, whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford
(with valuable interpolations made before 1708 by the Rev. Richard
Davies, vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire); by John Dowdall, who
recorded his experiences of travel through Warwickshire in 1693 (London,
1838); and by William Hall, who described a visit to Stratford in 1694
(London, 1884, from Hall's letter among the Bodleian MSS.) Phillips in
his 'Theatrum Poetarum' (1675), and Langbaine in his 'English Dramatick
Poets' (1691), confined themselves to elementary criticism. In 1709
Nicholas Rowe prefixed to his edition of the plays a more ambitious
memoir than had yet been attempted, and embodied some hitherto unrecorded
Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas Betterton
supplied him. A little fresh gossip was collected by William Oldys, and
was printed from his manuscript 'Adversaria' (now in the British Museum)
as an appendix to Yeowell's 'Memoir of Oldys,' 1862. Pope, Johnson, and
Steevens, in the biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated
the narratives of their predecessor, Rowe.

Biographers of the nineteenth century. Stratford topography.

In the Prolegomena to the Variorum editions of 1803, 1813, and especially
in that of 1821, there was embodied a mass of fresh information derived
by Edmund Malone from systematic researches among the parochial records
of Stratford, the manuscripts accumulated by the actor Alleyn at Dulwich,
and official papers of state preserved in the public offices in London
(now collected in the Public Record Office). The available knowledge of
Elizabethan stage history, as well as of Shakespeare's biography, was
thus greatly extended. John Payne Collier, in his 'History of English
Dramatic Poetry' (1831), in his 'New Facts' about Shakespeare (1835), his
'New Particulars' (1836), and his 'Further Particulars' (1839), and in
his editions of Henslowe's 'Diary' and the 'Alleyn Papers' for the
Shakespeare Society, while occasionally throwing some further light on
obscure places, foisted on Shakespeare's biography a series of
ingeniously forged documents which have greatly perplexed succeeding
biographers. {362} Joseph Hunter in 'New Illustrations of Shakespeare'
(1845) and George Russell French's 'Shakespeareana Genealogica' (1869)
occasionally sup