There is not a tittle of evidence adduced to show that a knowledge of Shakspere’s putative authorship of poems and plays was current at Stratford when the first folio edition of his reputed works was published in 1623. The records attest that Shakspere’s fame reputatively as writer is posterior to this event. How strange it must seem to those who claim for Shakspere an established reputation as poet and dramatist of repute anterior to the first folio edition in 1623, that Dr. Hall, himself an author and most advantaged of all the heirs by Shakspere’s death, should fail to mention his father-in-law in his “cure-book” or observations! The earliest dated cure is 1617, the year following Shakspere’s death, but there are undated ones. In “Obs. XIX.” Hall mentions without date an illness of his wife, Mrs. Hall; and we find him making a note long afterwards in reference to his only daughter, Elizabeth, who was saved by her father’s skill and patience. “Thus was she delivered from death and deadly diseases and was well for many years.” The illness of Drayton is recorded without date in “Obs. XXII.,” with its wee bit of a literary biography, and he is referred to as “Mr. Drayton, an excellent poet.” Had Shakspere received a like mention as a poet or writer by one who knew him so intimately, what a delicious morsel it would have been to all those who have followed the literary antiquarian through the dreary barren waste of Shakespearean research. We have found nothing but husks, and these, eulogists of Shakespeare—Hallam, Stevens and Emerson—refused to crunch! For nearly three centuries the Stratford archives have contained all matters concerning Shakspere’s life and character, and have given us full knowledge of the man; nothing has been lost; but of his alleged literary life, there is not a crumb, no family traditions, no books, no manuscripts, no letters, no commendatory verses, plays, masques or anthology. The biographers of Shakespeare have none of the material out of which poets and dramatists are made, but only those facts which are congruous with money lenders, land speculators, play-brokers and actors; also, a good assortment of apocryphal stores and gossipy yarns which have become traditional currency. According to Mark Twain there is something more. He says, “When we find a vague file of chipmunk tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village we know that Hercules has been along.” Again he proceeds, “The bust, too, there in the Stratford church, the precious bust, the calm bust with a dandy mustache, and the putty face unseamed with care—that face which has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years, and will look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.”