About him you can find out
_nothing_. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the
trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even remotely
indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly common-place
person--a manager,[15] an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a
small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence,
and had forgotten him before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go
to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned
_race-horse_ of modern times--but not Shakespeare's! There are many
reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and
conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the
rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by
itself--_he hadn't any history to record_. There is no way of getting
around that deadly fact. And no sane way has yet been discovered of
getting round its formidable significance. Its quite plain significance
--to any but those thugs (I do not use the term unkindly) is, that
Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none until he had been
dead two or three generations.
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