t more substantial than might be expected. His chief
source of information was the great actor Betterton, a Shakespeare
enthusiast, who had himself taken pains to accumulate facts concerning
his hero. Much of Betterton's material came to him through John Lowin
and Joseph Taylor, two actors who had been colleagues of Shakespeare's
and who lived into the Restoration period. According to John Downes, a
theatrical prompter in the end of the seventeenth century, these
veterans brought to the new generation the actual instruction they had
received from the dramatist himself on the playing of the parts
respectively of Henry VIII and Hamlet. Theatrical and other traditions
reached Rowe also through Sir William D'Avenant, the leading figure in
the revival of the stage after 1660. D'Avenant's father was host of the
Crown Inn at Oxford, where, according to the statements of Aubrey and of
Anthony Wood in 1692, Shakespeare was accustomed to put up on his
journeys between London and Stratford. Wood reports that the elder
D'Avenant was a "man of grave and saturnine disposition, yet an admirer
of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare," and that Mrs.
D'Avenant was "a very beautiful woman, of a good wit and conversation."
William D'Avenant was generally reputed to be Shakespeare's godson, and
Aubrey, whose gossip must be accepted with great hesitation, says that
he was not averse to being taken as his son. In spite of the fact of
this scandal's appearance in various seventeenth century anecdotes, the
more careful account of the D'Avenants by Wood points to its rejection.
The story is usually linked with another recorded by the lawyer
Manningham in his Diary, March 13, 1602, that Burbage, who had been
playing Richard III, was overheard by Shakespeare making an appointment
with a lady in the audience. When the tragedian arrived at the
rendez-vous, he found Shakespeare in possession; and on knocking was
answered that "William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."

To return to the D'Avenants, the elder son, Robert, used to tell that
when he was a child Shakespeare had given him "a hundred kisses." Sir
William was Rowe's authority for the statement that the Earl of
Southampton once gave the poet L1000 "to enable him to go through with a
purchase which he heard he had a mind to"; but no purchase of this
magnitude by Shakespeare is recorded. D'Avenant himself was said to own
a complimentary letter written to Shakespeare by James