Shakespear himself." Lowin, or
Lowen, joined Shakespeare's Company in 1604, being then a man of
twenty-eight. Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet and Henry VIII;
but it is not unusual for actors to have "understudies."
The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.
When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the additions
to his notes made about 1690-1708, we are concerned with evidence
much too remote, and, in your own classical style, "all this is just
a little mixed." {201b} With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr.
William Hall (1694) heard from a clerk or sexton, or other illiterate
dotard at Stratford, I have already dealt. I do not habitually
believe in what I hear from "the oldest aunt telling the saddest
tale,"--no, not even if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about
the presentation by Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the
Laird,--the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty
in the bloom of girlhood. Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on
Betterton's information), in 1709, about Shakespeare's schooling; nor
for what Dr. Furnivall said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody
said that Sir John Mennes (Menzies?) said. But I do care for what
Ben Jonson and Shakespeare's fellow-actors said; and for what his
literary contemporaries have left on record. But this evidence you
explain away by aetiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I
conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more
valuable as history than other explanatory myths.
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