What do we know of Shakespeare, the author poet, “The Man in a Mask?” We know nothing, absolutely nothing. No reputed play by Shakespeare was published before 1597, and none bore the name Shakespeare on the title page till 1598. Lodge, in his prose satire “Wits Misery,” dated 1596, enumerates the wits of the time. Shakspere is not mentioned. Dr. Peter Heylys was born in 1600, and died in 1662, thus being sixteen years old when Shakspere, the player died. In reckoning up the famous dramatic poets of England he omits Shakspere. Ben Jonson, in the catalogue of writers, also omits Shakspere, and at a later date, writing on the instruction of youth and the best authors, he forgets all about Shakspere. Philip Henslow, the old play-broker, also in writing his notebook during the twelve years beginning in February, 1591, does not even mention Shakspere. Milton’s poem on Shakespeare (1630) was not published in his works in 1645. This epitaph was prefixed to the folio edition of Shakespeare (1632), but without Milton’s name. It is the first of his reputed poems that was published. Its pedigree was not at all satisfactory. Milton, having been misled by Ben Jonson’s lines on Shakespeare, “And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” writes of “Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warbles his native woodnotes wild.” Milton’s acquaintance with Shakespeare verse must have been very meager, for had he read “Venus and Adonis,” so classic and formal, he would agree with Walter Savage Lander that “No poet was ever less a warbler of woodnotes wild.” It was never said in the original authorities that a Shakespeare play, or one by Shakspere, was played between 1594 and 1614. There were published in quarto twenty-three plays in Shakespeare’s name—twelve of which are not now accepted—and nine without his name. The folio (1623) is the sole original authority for seventeen plays, but five writers—four of them very inferior men—refer to Shakespeare, antecedent to the folio of 1623. Search as we may, we fail to find the play-actor in affiliation with poets or scholars. How unlike the literary men of that age; for instance, George Chapman, who had been called the “blank of his age,” and not without reason for, in all that pertains to the poet’s personal history, absolutely nothing is known in regard to his family, and very little of his own private life. Much, however, is known concerning Chapman’s personal authorship of poems and plays for the list of passages extracted from his poems in “England’s Parnassus” or the “Choicest Flowers of Our Modern Poets” contains no less than eighty-one. At the time of this publication (1600), he had published but two plays and three poems. “The proud full sail of his great verse” (Chapman’s Homer) had not at this time been unfurled.