le doubt that Sir William D'Avenant,
Beeston's successor as manager at Drury Lane, and Thomas Shadwell, the
fashionable writer of comedies, largely echoed their old mentor's
words when, in conversation with Aubrey, they credited Shakespeare
with "a most prodigious wit," and declared that they "did admire his
natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers."[13]

[Footnote 13: Aubrey's _Lives_, being reports of his miscellaneous
gossip, were first fully printed from his manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library by the Clarendon Press in 1898. They were most carefully
edited by the Rev. Andrew Clark.]

John Lacy, another actor of Beeston's generation, who made an immense
reputation on the stage and was also a successful writer of farces,
was one of Beeston's closest friends, and, having been personally
acquainted with Ben Jonson, could lend to many of Beeston's stories
useful corroborative testimony. With Lacy, too, the gossip Aubrey
conversed of Shakespeare's career.

At the same time, the popularity of Shakespeare's grand-nephew,
Charles Hart, who was called the Burbage of his day, whetted among
actors the appetite for Shakespearean tradition, especially of the
theatrical kind. Hart had no direct acquaintance with his great
kinsman, who died fully ten years before he was born, while his
father, who was sixteen at Shakespeare's death, died in his son's
boyhood. But Hart's grandmother, the poet's sister, lived till he was
twenty-one, and Richard Robinson, the fellow-member of Shakespeare's
company who first taught Hart to act, survived his pupil's
adolescence. That Hart did what he could to satisfy the curiosity of
his companions there is a precise oral tradition to confirm. According
to the story, first put on record in the eighteenth century by the
painstaking antiquary, William Oldys, it was through Hart that some
actors made, near the date of the Restoration, the exciting discovery
that Gilbert, one of Shakespeare's brothers, who was the dramatist's
junior by only two years, was still living at a patriarchal age. Oldys
describes the concern with which Hart's professional acquaintances
questioned the old man about his brother, and their disappointment
when his failing memory only enabled him to recall William's
performance of the part of Adam in his comedy of _As You Like It_.

It should be added that Oldys obtained his information of the episode,
which deserves more attention than it has received, from an actor of
a