William Leavitt Stoddard

The Life of William Shakespeare Expurgated William Leavitt Stoddard

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE EXPURGATED - By WILLIAM LEAVITT STODDARD - CONCERNING OTHER LIVES OF SHAKESPEARE - Like most men of my generation, I have never been able from any one volume to obtain a clear idea of Shakespeare with the works bearing that name I could and did become reasonably familiar and greatly pleased, but of the man who wrote them I was for a long time ignorant. Naturally, I turned for information to the biographies of the poet-actor. But I was doomed to a disappointment. For there, in the welter of quoted, copied, and sometimes photographed documents, among allusions that alluded to Shakespeare and allusions that did not allude to him at all, in the confusion of skilfully deployed adverbs implying various degrees of uncertainty in the mind of the biographer as, doubtless, probably, credibly, and their kind, in the tangle of arguments supporting now one theory of authorship and now another, I felt myself strangely lost, like a person who searches in vain through Throughout this book I have adopted the lazy expedient of spelling Shakespeare in this fashion. I am aware that William Shakespeare of Stratford is not known to have employed this orthography, and I am aware that many of the plays and poems appeared with the hyphenated signature, which, as far as I can discover, William Shakespeare of Stratford never employed. It seemed best, all in all, to adhere to a simple convention.............