A Life of William Shakespeare, by Sidney Lee

Transcribed from the 1899 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by Les Bowler.

A LIFE
of
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by
SIDNEY LEE.

WITH PORTRAITS AND FACSIMILES

FOURTH EDITION

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1899

[All rights reserved]

Printed November 1898 (First Edition).

Reprinted December 1898 (Second Edition);  December 1898
(Third Edition);  February 1899 (Fourth Edition).

PREFACE

This work is based on the article on Shakespeare which I contributed last year to the fifty-first volume of the ‘Dictionary of National Biography.’  But the changes and additions which the article has undergone during my revision of it for separate publication are so numerous as to give the book a title to be regarded as an independent venture.  In its general aims, however, the present life of Shakespeare endeavours loyally to adhere to the principles that are inherent in the scheme of the ‘Dictionary of National Biography.’  I have endeavoured to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative of the great dramatist’s personal history as concisely as the needs of clearness and completeness would permit.  I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their master’s career.  I have avoided merely æsthetic criticism.  My estimates of the value of Shakespeare’s plays and poems are intended solely to fulfil the obligation that lies on the biographer of indicating

succinctly the character of the successive labours which were woven into the texture of his hero’s life.  Æsthetic studies of Shakespeare abound, and to increase their number is a work of supererogation.  But Shakespearean literature, as far as it is known to me, still lacks a book that shall supply within a brief compass an exhaustive and well-arranged statement of the facts of Shakespeare’s career, achievement, and reputation, that shall reduce conjecture to the smallest dimensions consistent with coherence, and shall give verifiable references to all the original sources of information.  After studying Elizabethan literature, history, and bibliography for more than eighteen years, I believed that I might, without exposing myself to a charge of presumption, attempt something in the way of filling this gap, and that I might be able to supply, at least tentatively, a guide-book to Shakespeare’s life and work that should be, within its limits, complete and trustworthy.  How far my belief was justified the readers of this volume will decide.

I cannot promise my readers any startling revelations.  But my researches have enabled me to remove some ambiguities which puzzled my predecessors, and to throw light on one or two topics that have hitherto obscured the course of Shakespeare’s career.  Particulars that have not been before incorporated in Shakespeare’s biography will be found in my treatment of the following subjects: the conditions under which ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and the