Many of the Elizabethan writers are too true to be good. They have given us so faithful a picture of the men and manners of the day that their value as artists is distinctly second to their value as social documents. For the detail that enables us to recreate the Elizabethan scene we go to a dozen other writers rather than Shakespeare. The student who consults such books as Professor Dover Wilson's Life in Shakespeare's England, or the present writer's Elizabethan Life in Town and Country, finds at once that for the purposes of illustrative quotation Shakespeare figures hardly at all, in comparison to the minor writer. Where the ordinary Elizabethan writer is topical in the situation, characterisation and dialogue of an entire scene, Shakespeare is topical only out of his superfluity–in an aside, a simile, an image, a nourish, a jest. Whereas the contemporaneous is of the very body of the work of such a writer as Ben Jonson it is with Shakespeare largely a matter of separable accident. From Jonson we can extract compact little character sketches of the stock figures of the age, or scenes that are as precise in their Elizabethanism as a document.