This fancy, comparatively
harmless as it is, requires no ground of proof to go upon, no prop of
likelihood to support it; without so much help as may be borrowed from
the faintest and most fitful of traditions, it spins its own evidence
spider-like out of its own inner conscience or conceit, and proffers it
with confident complacency for men's acceptance. Here again I cannot but
see a mere waste of fruitless learning and bootless ingenuity. That
Shakespeare began by retouching and recasting the work of elder and
lesser men we all know; that he may afterwards have set his hand to the
task of adding or altering a line or a passage here and there in some few
of the plays brought out under his direction as manager or proprietor of
a theatre is of course possible, but can neither be affirmed nor denied
with any profit in default of the least fragment of historic or
traditional evidence. Any attempt to verify the imaginary touch of his
hand in plays of whose history we know no more than that they were acted
on the boards of his theatre can be but a diversion for the restless
leisure of ingenious and ambitious scholars; it will give no clue by
which the student who simply seeks to know what can be known with
certainty of the poet and his work may hope to be guided towards any safe
issue or trustworthy result.
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