hey were mingled with far more extended and discriminating
tributes. Two of the compilers designated Shakespeare "the glory of
the English stage"; a third wrote, "I esteem his plays beyond any that
have ever been published in our language"; while the fourth quoted
with approval Dryden's fine phrase: "Shakespeare was the Man who of
all Modern and perhaps Ancient Poets had the largest and most
comprehensive Soul." But the avowed principles of these tantalising
volumes justify no expectation of finding in them solid information.
The biographical cataloguers of the seventeenth century did little
more than proclaim Shakespeare and the other great poets of the
country to be fit subjects for formal biography as soon as the type
should be matured. That was the message of greatest virtue which these
halting chroniclers delivered.

In Shakespeare's case their message was not long neglected. In 1709
Nicholas Rowe, afterwards George the First's poet laureate, published
the first professed biography of the poet. The eminence of the
subject justified such alacrity, and it had no precise parallel. More
or less definite lives of a few of Shakespeare's great literary
contemporaries followed his biography at long intervals. But the whole
field has never been occupied by the professed biographer. In some
cases the delay has meant loss of opportunity for ever. Very many
distinguished Elizabethan and Jacobean authors have shared the fate of
John Webster, next to Shakespeare the most eminent tragic dramatist of
the era, of whom no biography was ever attempted, and no positive
biographic fact survives.

But this is an imperfect statement of the advantages which
Shakespeare's career enjoyed above that of his fellows from the
commemorative point of view. Although formal biography did not lay
hand on his name for nearly a century after his death, the authentic
tradition of his life and work began steadily to crystallise in the
minds and mouths of men almost as soon as he drew his last breath.
Fuller's characteristically shadowy hint of "wit-combats betwixt
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson" and of the contrasted characters of the
two combatants, suggests pretty convincingly that Shakespeare's name
presented to the seventeenth-century imagination and tongue a better
defined personality and experience than the embryonic biographer knew
how to disclose. The commemorative instinct never seeks satisfaction
in biographic effort exclusively, even when the a