private lives and personal traits of these and several other
Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, in the modern manner. Of
Shakespeare (pardon, I mean Shakspere), the actor, there is one
contemporary anecdote, in my poor opinion a baseless waggery. Of
Beaumont there is none. Of a hand-maid of Fletcher, who drank sack
in a tumbler, one anecdote appears at the end of the seventeenth
century,--nothing better. Meanwhile of Shakspere the "traditions"
must be sought either at Stratford or in connection with the London
Stage; and in both cases the traditions began to be in demand very
late.

As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any
traditions that survived cannot conceivably have been literary. That
is absolutely certain. Natives at Stratford had, by your own
hypothesis, scant interest in literary anecdote. Fifty years after
Shakespeare's death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any
sprouts of wit (though it was remembered in 1649, that he was
"witty"), or any "wood-notes wild," which he may have displayed or
chirped at an early age.

Such things were of no interest to Stratford. If he made a speech
when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the
circumstance might descend from one gaffer to another; he might even
be remembered as "the best of his family,"--the least inefficient.
Given your non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect
nothing more, and nothing better, than we receive.

Let me illustrate by a modern example. In 1866 I was an
undergraduate of a year's standing at Balliol College, Oxford,
certainly not an unlettered academy. In that year, the early and the