The life of Shakespeare has been threefold: first, the external life of good and evil fortune which he lived as a youth in Stratford, as a player and playwright in London, and again as an honoured inhabitant of his native town; secondly, the inner life of his spirit, the wide-orbing movement of his intellect and imagination of which we can read something in his marvellous series of poetical creations, and can conjecture more; and last, the life which he has lived during three hundred years in the history of the national mind of England, or rather we should say the mind of humanity, the life of posthumous influence which he has exercised, and exercises at the present day, on the generations of mankind. Of each of these it will be our endeavour to speak.

“All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare is –that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon–married and had children there– went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays– returned to Stratford, made his will, died and was buried.” So wrote Steevens a century ago, and De Quincey at a much more recent date is even briefer in his summing-up of the facts: “That he lived, and that he died, and that he was ‘a little lower than the angels’–these make up pretty nearly the amount of our undisputed report.”