The proven facts of William Shakspere’s life are facts unassociated with authorcraft—facts that prove the isolation and divorcement of player and poet. The proven facts of Ben Jonson’s life are facts interlacing man and poet. Almost every incident in his life reveals his personal affection, or bitter dislike, for his fellow craftsmen, always ready for a quarrel, arrogant, vain, boastful and vulgar. There is much truth in Dekker’s charge, “’Tis thy fashion to flirt ink in every man’s face and then crawl into his bosom.” He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and wrote his “Poetaster” on him. He was federated in a comedy “(Eastward Ho)” with Chapman, and was sent to prison for libeling the Scottish nobility. Ben Jonson’s personality and literary work are inseparable. Drunk or sober, few have served learning with so much pertinacity, and fewer still, have so successfully challenged admiration even from literary rivals, with whom at times he was most bitterly hostile, and at other times, indisputably open-handed and jovial. Ben Jonson had a literary environment always for there is perfect interlacement of man and craft. He became one of the most prolific writers of his age occupying among the men of his day a position of literary supremacy. “In the forty years of his literary career he collected a library so extensive that Gifford doubted whether any library in England was so rich in scarce and valuable books.” From the pages of Isaac De Israeli we read, “No poet has left behind him so many testimonials of personal fondness by inscriptions and addresses in the copies of his works which he presented to his friends.” But of all these, as strange as it must seem to the votaries of Shakspere, not a single copy of Jonson’s works is brought forward to bear witness of his personal regard and admiration for Shakspere, and we may add that there is no testimonial by Shakspere of his regard and personal fondness for Ben Jonson, although many of the literary antiquaries have unearthed in their researches facts or new discoveries, which they have brought forward as new particulars of the life of William Shakspere. These, if not incompatible with authorship, are surely divorcing Shakspere, the actor, from Shakespeare, the author poet. They but deepen the mystery that surrounds the personality of the author of the immortal plays—“The shadow of a mighty name.” At the same time they disclose the true character of Shakspere the actor, money-lender, land-owner and litigant, which is affirmative of John Bright’s opinion that “any man who believes that William Shakspere of Stratford wrote ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear’ is a fool.”