tropolis.

For the purposes of this little book many authorities have been
consulted, and the writer is specially indebted to the researches of Dr.
Sidney Lee, the leading authority of our time on Shakespeare, and the
late Professor Churton Collins.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

CHAPTER I

STRATFORD-ON-AVON

To read the works of a great master of letters, or to study the art of a
great painter, without some first-hand knowledge of the country in which
each lived and from which each gathered his earliest inspiration, is to
court an incomplete impression. It is in the light of a life story and
its setting, however slight our knowledge, that creative work tends to
assume proper proportions. It is in the surroundings of the author that
we find the key to the creation. For, as Gray has pointed out in his
"Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," there are many in the dust and
silence whose hands "the rod of Empire might have swayed, or waked to
ecstasy the living lyre."

We know that it is not enough to have the creative force dormant in the
mind; environment must be favourable to its development, or it will
sleep too long. We see in the briefest survey of the lives of the poet,
the statesman, the soldier and the artist, that there are many great
ones who would have been greater still were it not that then, as now,
"man is one and the fates are three."

To study the life history of a man and to consider its setting is to
understand why he succeeded and how he came to fail, and our wonder at
his success will not be lessened when we find that some simple event,
favourable or untoward, was the deciding factor in a great life. The
hour brings the man, but circumstances mould him and chance leads him to
the fore, unless it be true that "there's a Divinity that shapes our
ends, rough hew them how we will." In our own time we have seen how the
greatest empire-builder of Victorian history, Cecil John Rhodes, came
into prominence because he was sent to South Africa for the cure of weak
lungs. And, looking back to the life and times of William Shakespeare,
who has summed up for so many of his fellow-countrymen, and still more
strangers, the whole philosophy of life, we shall see that he became
articulate through what he may have reasonably regarded as mischance.

Out in the autumn fields, the pigeon and the squirrel, to say nothing of
other birds and beasts, hunt for acorns to eat or store. On the road to
roost or storeho