Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious persons to construct a theory—­and support it with some show of reason—­that the plays which pass under his name were really written by Bacon or some one else.  There is no danger of this paradox ever making serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote Shakspere’s plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient.  But it is startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and fifty years after the event.  That the single authorship of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric.  But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of his death the first English colony in America was already nine years old.  The important known facts of his life can be told almost in a sentence.  He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he was eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor, play writer, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars and the Globe theaters.  He seemingly prospered, and retired about 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that he had bought some years before, and where he died in 1616.  His Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593, his Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and his Sonnets in 1609.  So far as is known, only eighteen of the thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakspere were printed during his life-time.  These were printed singly, in quarto shape, and were little more than stage books, or librettos.  The first collected edition of his works was the so-called “First Folio” of 1623, published by his fellow-actors, Heming and Condell.  No contemporary of Shakspere thought it worth while to write a life of the stage-player.  There is a number of references to him in the literature of the time; some generous, as in Ben Jonson’s well-known verses; others singularly unappreciative, like Webster’s mention of “the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakspere.”  But all these together do not begin to amount to the sum of what was said about Spenser, or Sidney, or Raleigh, or Ben Jonson.  There is, indeed, nothing to show that his contemporaries understood what a man they had among them in the person of “Our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare.”  The age, for the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to review writing and literary biography.  Nor is there enough of self-revelation in Shakspere’s plays to aid the reader in forming a notion of the man.  He lost his identity completely in the characters of his plays, as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do.  His sonnets have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence as to his character and life, but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than convincing.