OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BY SIDNEY LEE WITH PORTRAITS AND FACSIMILES NEW AND REVISED EDITION WITH A NEW PREFACE New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY All rights reserved PREFACE TO THE NEW AND REVISED EDITION SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED REFERENCES TO SHAKESPEARE MORE than ten years have now elapsed since this work was published for the first time in this country. In the present reissue errors have been corrected, the bibliographies have been brought up to date, and some additions of importance have been made to the bibliographical information. I hope that, with the additions and corrections that are now incorporated into the text or notes, the volume embodies the results of all recent researches into Shakespeare's life, or into the biographical or bibliographical aspects of his work, about which the student of the poet's biography is entitled to expect information from the poet's biographer. A few references to Shakespeare have lately come to light for the first time in contemporary manuscripts. I have not found it practicable to note these discoveries in detail in the body of the revised book without disturbing the balance of the chapters. I have therefore contented myself with a cursory mention of the discoveries in the text, and devote this V preface to a fuller account of these fruits of recent research. None of the 'new' references to Shakespeare are of the first importance. But every early documentary mention of Shakespeare justly claims the biographical student's respectful attention. I place these new notices before my readers in the chronological order which they naturally take among the previously recorded events of Shakespeare's life.1 I Although heredity, as far as the results of present investigation go, fails to account for the birth of supreme poetic genius, the biographer of Shakespeare has often deplored the absence of any reference to the personal character of Shakespeare's father. A glimmer of light has now been shed on this theme. The Rev. Andrew Clark, rector of Great Leighs, Chelmsford, who has won a deserved reputation by his researches into the history of Oxford University, examined some five years since a seventeenth-century collection of books and papers which were bequeathed to the town of Maldon, in Essex, by a patriotic native, Thomas Plume. The testator was for nearly fifty years Vicar of Greenwich, and was also Archdeacon of Rochester. He is now only remembered as founder 1 The account given here of the new references is partly reprinted from an article contributed by the author to The Nineteenth Century and After (May 1906) under the title 'The Future of Shakespearean Research |