ted how Shakespeare taught him the theatrical
interpretation of the character of Henry the Eighth, in that play of
the name which came from the joint pens of Shakespeare and Fletcher.

Both Taylor's and Lowin's reminiscences were passed on to Thomas
Betterton, the greatest actor of the Restoration, and the most
influential figure in the theatrical life of his day. Through him they
were permanently incorporated in the verbal stage-lore of the country.
No doubt is possible of the validity of this piece of oral tradition,
which reveals Shakespeare in the act of personally supervising the
production of his own plays, and springs from the mouths of those who
personally benefited by the dramatist's activity.

Taylor and Lowin were probably the last actors to speak of Shakespeare
from personal knowledge. But hardly less deserving of attention are
scraps of gossip about Shakespeare which survive in writing on the
authority of some of Taylor's and Lowin's actor-contemporaries. These
men were never themselves in personal relations with Shakespeare, but
knew many formerly in direct relation with him. Probably the
seventeenth century actor with the most richly stored memory of the
oral Shakespearean tradition was William Beeston, to whose house in
Hog Lane, Shoreditch, the curious often resorted in Charles the
Second's time to listen to his reminiscences of Shakespeare and of
the poets of Shakespeare's epoch.

Beeston died after a busy theatrical life, at eighty or upwards, in
1682. He belonged to a family of distinguished actors or
actor-managers. His father, brothers, and son were all, like himself,
prominent in the profession, and some of them were almost as
long-lived as himself. His own career combined with that of his father
covered more than a century, and both sedulously and with pride
cultivated intimacy with contemporary dramatic authors.

It was probably William Beeston's grandfather, also William Beeston,
to whom the satirical Elizabethan, Thomas Nash, dedicated in 1593,
with good-humoured irony, one of his insolent libels on Gabriel
Harvey, a scholar who had defamed the memory of a dead friend. Nash
laughed at his patron's struggles with syntax in his efforts to write
poetry, and at his indulgence in drink, which betrayed itself in his
red nose. But, in spite of Nash's characteristic frankness, he greeted
the first William Beeston as a boon companion who was generous in his
entertainment of threadbare scholars. Chr