Shakespeare the Man; An Essay

New York: McClure Phillips and Company, 1901. Reprint. Originally published in 1853. Stiff boards. Fair. 72 pages. Occasional footnotes. Bookplate of previous owner (Allene Gregory) inside front cover. Pieces of spine gone. Corners bumped. Rear board weak. Book has wear and soiling. Some corners creased. This was published in commemoration of the Twenty-third General Meeting of The American Library Association at Waukesha, Wisconsin July 3 anno domini MCMI. The American Library Association was indebted to The Travelers Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut for permission to republish this essay. Walter Bagehot (3 February 1826 - 24 March 1877) was a British journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, and literature. Bagehot never fully recovered from a bout of pneumonia he suffered in 1867, and he died in 1877 from complications of what was said to be a cold.[9] Collections of Bagehot's literary, political, and economic essays were published after his death. Their subjects ranged from Shakespeare and Disraeli to the price of silver. In honour of his contributions, The Economist's weekly commentary on current affairs in the UK is entitled "Bagehot". Every year, the British Political Studies Association awards the Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration. Shakespeare the Man. by Walter Bagehot. The greatest of English poets, it is often said, is but a name. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary, have been extracted by antiquaries from the piles of rubbish which they have sifted. Yet of no person is there a clearer picture in the popular fancy. You seem to have known Shakespeare to have seen Shakespeare to have been friends with Shakespeare. We would attempt a slight delineation of the popular idea which has been formed, not from loose tradition or remote research, not from what some one says some one else said that the poet said, but from data which are at least undoubted, from the sure testimony of his certain works. Some extreme sceptics, we know, doubt whether it is possible to deduce anything as to an authors character from his works. Yet surely people do not keep a tame steam-engine to write their books; and if those books were really written by a man, he must have been a man who could write them; he must have had the thoughts which they express, have acquired the knowledge they contain, have possessed the style in which we read them. The difficulty is a defect of the critics. A person who knows nothing of an author he has read, will not know much of an author whom he has seen. First of all, it may be said that Shakespeare's works could only be produced by a first-rate imagination working on a first-rate experience. It is often difficult to make out whether the author of a poetic creation is drawing from fancy, or drawing from experience.