Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very
different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily get
at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare
at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be a
poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford says
something about the humorist, and tradition, IN SIMILAR
CIRCUMSTANCES, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the
lapse of seventy years.
Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am
obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school
at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man,
flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and
Quiney. Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen,
he could not break so lightly as Burns did,--some outlying deer he
could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he
assailed other deer, and was in troubles many. Unlike Burns, he had
a keen eye for the main chance. Everything was going to ruin with
his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow
tradition), was not satisfactory. His opinion of dominies, if he
wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in
fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.
Something must be done! Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny
that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have
seen and talked with them, and been attracted.
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