Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal
law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic
genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the
originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and
embodiment of his own.
We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the
Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final
detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from
Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession
of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled,
and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing
interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no
chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose
in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy
Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater door,
whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best
bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
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