THE PRAISE OF SHAKESPEARE AN ENGLISH ANTHOLOGY COMPILED BY C. E. HUGHES WITH A PREFACE BY SIDNEY LEE METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON graduate Library PR 2959 489 Death makes no conquest of this conqueror; Who is it that says most? which can say more Which should example where your equal grew. That to his subject lends not some small glory; But he that writes of you, if he can tell That you are you, so dignifies his story; Let him but copy what in you is writ, Not making worse what nature made so clear, And such a counterpart shall fame his wit, Making his style admired everywhere. SONNET LXXXIV. Library tr. to Storage 6.16.83 I PREFACE BELIEVE this volume serves a useful purpose. It is the fruit of a suggestion which I made to its compiler, Mr. Hughes, in the following circumstances. At the beginning of last year I engaged in controversy in the Times newspaper with certain persons who laboured under the delusion that the evidence of Shakespeare's authorship of those plays and poems, which for three centuries have been published as his, was inconclusive. In defiance of the fact that the acknowledged work of Bacon, the prose writer and philosopher, proves him to be incapable of writing verse of genuine merit, some of my opponents held Bacon and no other to be responsible for those manifestations of supreme poetic genius which are associated with Shakespeare's name. Other sceptics, of less raw judgment, hesitated to commit themselves to this extravagance,they confined themselves to the slightly more plausible contention that the facts recorded of Shakespeare by contemporaries were scanty, and that his career was clothed in a mystery, which justified wild attempts at a solution. The whole of the sceptical argument ignored alike the results of recent Shakespearean research and the elementary truths of Elizabethan literary history. But confirmed sceptics are not easily convinced of defects of knowledge. |