I have said, and I am firmly convinced, that in his Plays Shakespeare never consciously delineated the individual features or characteristics of any contemporary. Shallow is the composite portrait of many Shallows known to him. I am equally convinced that, excepting places in or near London and Windsor, which were as familiar to his audiences as to himself, he is never at any pains to picture the actual localities in which his scenes are laid. When Edgar describes Dover cliffs he is really out of hearing of the sea and standing on even ground. Shakespeare's stage had no scenery to explain to the audience that the scene of the Merchant was laid in Venice, and he gives no description of its water-ways to help them to realise that Venice was other in appearance than Ephesus or an un-named city in Illyria. So far let Stratford take comfort. If Shakespeare had chosen to lay any of his scenes in Stratford, he would have left his audience to entertain their unaided conjecture of its streets and buildings. But somehow he would have created the atmosphere of a small provincial town, as in his Venice he has created the atmosphere of merchant life and civic dignity. Somehow names of localities in the neighbourhood would have crept into his story, and he would have worked in details of his own observation of life in a petty town—small tradesmen and their wives, prentices and municipal dignitaries, such people as delighted Heywood and Middleton.