Of the thirty-seven plays assigned by the folio of 1623, not one had received the acknowledgment of their reputed author (Shakespeare). Not a single line in verse or prose assented to for comparison and identification, and in the absence of credible evidence of his authorship of certain poems, there can be no authoritative sanction of the assignment. No person writing on the subject of Shakespeare can write a literary life of the individual man, for player Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon does not offer a single point of correspondence to the activities of a literary man or scholar. The fantastical critics profess to read the story of the author’s life in his works. This is an absurdity, for dramatic art is mainly character creation and cannot be made to disclose a knowledge of his private life. The artist is an observer and paints the thing seen. He, himself, is not the thing which he depicts but he gives the character as it is. In the opinion of the present writer it is a waste of time to attempt to identify Shakspere, the play-actor, with any one of the dramatic personages contained in the plays called Shakespeare’s. Forty-six years after the death of William Shakspere of Stratford, Thomas Fuller in his “Worthies,” published posthumously in 1662, wrote: “Many were the wit-combats between him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war.” Fuller being born in 1608, was only eight years old when player-Shakspere died, and but two when he quitted London. If this precocious youngster beheld the “wit-combats” of the two, he could only have beheld them as he lay “mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms.” VI.