Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/159

140 and with this we can very safely credit him. Shakespeare was in no way a literary critic. His taste in books does not seem to have been good, if we may judge by some of the poor works he chooses to dramatize and by the many great ones he ignores. Compared with his most worthy contemporaries, Shakespeare rather lacked the literary conscience. Compared, that is, with Lyly, Marlowe, or Jonson, he was not more, but less careful in choosing and developing his plot, in shaping his sentences, and in winding up his conclusions.

Had Shakespeare been the sort of man that he is thought to have been by those who identify him with Francis or with Anthony Bacon, or with Ralegh, or with Marlowe, or with Rutland or Southampton, or with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or with William Stanley, Earl of Derby—that is, had he been well-bred and college-trained, all this, we may feel sure, would have been different. He would have been more precocious and more clever. In all human probability he would have been much less wise. He would have been more fastidious about accuracy of detail in sentence structure, in plot construction, and in plausibility of incident and local color. He would have sought the appearance of originality more and attained the substance less.

One great strength of Shakespeare’s dramatic art lies in the fact that circumstances made him a great connoisseur of life and a very careless student of literature. He was first an actor, second a practical adapter of old plays, third a company manager. Only fourth and last was he a dramatist proper. No other Eliza-