The preface to Webster’s tragedy, “The White Devil,” which contains a slight mention of Shakespeare, was printed in 1612, after all the immortal plays were written and their reputed author had returned to Stratford, probably in 1611, in his forty-seventh year, where he lived idly for five years before his death. John Webster possessed a critical faculty and an independent judgment, but the way he makes mention of Shakespeare shows that he knew nothing about the individual man, or the work, called Shakespeare.

The generous reference to “The laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson” gives a clear idea of the main characteristics of the work of Jonson, who, not having reached the fruition of his renown in 1611, but in the after time, came into Dryden’s view as “The greatest man of the last age, the most learned and judicious writer any theatre ever had.” John Webster writes of “the no less worthy composures of Beaumont and Fletcher” then in the morning of life. They present an admirable model for purity of vocabulary and simplicity of expression and were of “loudest fame.” “Two of Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s plays were acted to one of Shakespeare’s, or Ben Jonson’s,” in Dryden’s time.

There is strong presumptive proof that printers and publishers in Elizabethan and Jacobin times were in the habit of selecting names or titles that would best sell their books. The most popular books or best sellers they printed were books of songs, love-tales, comedies and sonnets of the amorous, scented kind, and it mattered not to publishers if the name printed on the title-page was a personal name, or one impersonal. Title-pages were not even presumptive proof of authorship in the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. The printers chose to market their publications under the most favorable conditions, and some writers chose the incognizable name “Shakespeare” which had been attached to the voluptuous poem “Venus and Adonis.” This was published by Richard Field, in whose name it had been entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1593. There was no name of an author on the title-page, but the dedication was to the Earl of Southampton and was signed “William Shakespeare.” This was the first appearance of the name “Shakespeare” in literature, being the non-de-plume, doubtless, of the writer who gave this erotic poem to the world—“The first heir of my invention.”

Not finding “Shakespeare” in the anthology of his day, the most natural inference would be that all those who wrote under the name “Shakespeare” wrote incognito. We know that Marlowe, Beaumont, Greene, Drayton and many writers of that age wrote anonymously for the Elizabethan stage. Many of the anonymous writings have been retrieved; much, doubtless, remains still to be reclaimed from the siftings of what are named Early Comedy, Early History, and Pre-Shakespearean Group of plays. Mr. Spedding had the good fortune to be the first to demonstrate the theory of a divided authorship of “Henry VIII.,” to reclaim for Fletcher “Wolsey’s Farewell to all his Greatness.” Thirteen out of the seventeen scenes of “Henry the Eighth” are attributed by Mr. Lee (P. 212) to Fletcher. A majority of the best critics now agree with Miss Jane Lee, in the assignment of the second and third part of Henry VI. to Marlowe, Greene and Peele.

The difficulty of identifying Shakespeare, the author poet, with the young man who came up from Stratford, has induced Shakespearean scholars to question the unity of authorship. Mr. Swinburne tells us that no scholar believes in the single authorship of “Andronicus.” Mr. Lee admits that Shakespeare drew largely on the “Hamlet,” which he has attributed to Kyd (P. 182). “It is scarcely possible,” says Mr. Marshall in the “Irving Shakespeare,” “to maintain that the play ‘(Hamlet)’ referred to as well known in 1589, could have been by Shakspere—that is—by the young actor from Stratford. Surely not. We see the question of the unity of the author and authorship involves the question of his identity.” It is evident that the author poet, whoever he was, had, in his time of initiation, “purloyned plumes” from Marlowe, Kyd and Greene, and, when nearing the close of his literary career, according to Prof. A. H. Thorndike, he was a close imitator of John Fletcher—not so much an innovator as an adapter.

What do we know of Shakespeare, the author poet, “The Man in a Mask?” We know nothing, absolutely nothing. No reputed play by Shakespeare was published before 1597, and none bore the name Shakespeare on the title page till 1598. Lodge, in his prose satire “Wits Misery,” dated 1596, enumerates the wits of the time. Shakspere is not mentioned. Dr. Peter Heylys was born in 1600, and died in 1662, thus being sixteen years old when Shakspere, the player died. In reckoning up the famous dramatic poets of England he omits Shakspere. Ben Jonson, in the catalogue of writers, also omits Shakspere, and at a later date, writing on the instruction of youth and the best authors, he forgets all about Shakspere. Philip Henslow, the old play-broker, also in writing his notebook during the twelve years beginning in February, 1591, does not even mention Shakspere. Milton’s poem on Shakespeare (1630) was not published in his works in 1645. This epitaph was prefixed to the folio edition of Shakespeare (1632), but without Milton’s name. It is the first of his reputed poems that was published. Its pedigree was not at all satisfactory. Milton, having been misled by Ben Jonson’s lines on Shakespeare, “And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” writes of

Milton’s acquaintance with Shakespeare verse must have been very meager, for had he read “Venus and Adonis,” so classic and formal, he would agree with Walter Savage Lander that “No poet was ever less a warbler of woodnotes wild.” It was never said in the original authorities that a Shakespeare play, or one by Shakspere, was played between 1594 and 1614. There were published in quarto twenty-three plays in Shakespeare’s name—twelve of which are not now accepted—and nine without his name. The folio (1623) is the sole original authority for seventeen plays, but five writers—four of them very inferior men—refer to Shakespeare, antecedent to the folio of 1623.

Search as we may, we fail to find the play-actor in affiliation with poets or scholars. How unlike the literary men of that age; for instance, George Chapman, who had been called the “blank of his age,” and not without reason for, in all that pertains to the poet’s personal history, absolutely nothing is known in regard to his family, and very little of his own private life. Much, however, is known concerning Chapman’s personal authorship of poems and plays for the list of passages extracted from his poems in “England’s Parnassus” or the “Choicest Flowers of Our Modern Poets” contains no less than eighty-one. At the time of this publication (1600), he had published but two plays and three poems. “The proud full sail of his great verse” (Chapman’s Homer) had not at this time been unfurled.

At the time, this first English anthology was compiled and published, thirteen of the Shakespeare plays and two poems had been issued. Nevertheless Shakespeare does not figure in the anthology of his day. Why? The play-actor, William Shakspere, in his life time was not publicly credited with the personal authorship of the plays and poems called Shakespeare’s, except possibly by three or four poeticules, Bomfield, Freeman, Meres, and Weaver, who followed each other in the iteration and reiteration of the same insipid and affected compliments, not one of them implying a personal acquaintance with the author. Some few persons may have believed that the player and play-wright were one and the same person, and were deceived into so believing. This much we do know, that the player Shakspere never openly sanctioned the identification, although he may have been accessory to the deception. It should be borne in mind also that no poet was remembered in Shakspere’s will, as were the actors.

Many writers of that age were communistic in the use of the name “Shakespeare” as a descriptive title, very much like the Italians’ pantomime called “Silverspear,” standing for the collocuted works of not one, but several play-makers. Sir Thomas Brown complained that his name was being used to float books that he never wrote. In the list before us there are forty-nine plays which were published with Shakespeare’s name. Doubtless there were many others: not one in fifty of the dramas of this period, according to Hallowell-Philips, having descended to modern times. Many writers of that age wrote anonymously and pseudonymously. Edmund Spencer, author of “The Shepherd’s Calendar” remained incognito for seven years. Eight years after this work appeared George Whitstone ascribed it to Philip Sidney and a cotemporary writer, mistaking Spencer’s masking name for the author of the works. Spencer committed “The Faerie Queen” to the press after nine years. Only four of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were published in Fletcher’s lifetime and none of them bore Beaumont’s name. Fletcher survived his partner nine years. Robert Burton, author of “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” maintained his incognito for a time, he avers, because it gave him greater freedom. Jean Baptiste Poquelin preferred to be known as Molière. Francais-Marie Aronet won enduring fame as Voltaire. Sir Walter Scott maintained his incognito as the great unknown for years like “Junius,” “whose secret was intrusted to no one and was never to be revealed.” Sir Walter Scott preserved his secret until driven to the brink of financial destruction. Drayton also had written under the pseudonym of Rowland. Who can doubt that the author of “Hamlet,” “Lear” and “Macbeth,” chose to sheath his private life and personality as a man of letters in an impenetrable incognito—“the nothingness of a name.”

Of the thirty-seven plays assigned by the folio of 1623, not one had received the acknowledgment of their reputed author (Shakespeare). Not a single line in verse or prose assented to for comparison and identification, and in the absence of credible evidence of his authorship of certain poems, there can be no authoritative sanction of the assignment.

No person writing on the subject of Shakespeare can write a literary life of the individual man, for player Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon does not offer a single point of correspondence to the activities of a literary man or scholar. The fantastical critics profess to read the story of the author’s life in his works. This is an absurdity, for dramatic art is mainly character creation and cannot be made to disclose a knowledge of his private life. The artist is an observer and paints the thing seen. He, himself, is not the thing which he depicts but he gives the character as it is. In the opinion of the present writer it is a waste of time to attempt to identify Shakspere, the play-actor, with any one of the dramatic personages contained in the plays called Shakespeare’s.

Forty-six years after the death of William Shakspere of Stratford, Thomas Fuller in his “Worthies,” published posthumously in 1662, wrote:

“Many were the wit-combats between him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war.”

Fuller being born in 1608, was only eight years old when player-Shakspere died, and but two when he quitted London. If this precocious youngster beheld the “wit-combats” of the two, he could only have beheld them as he lay “mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms.”