It has been quite too common to speak of Shakespeare as a miracle of spontaneous genius, who did his best things by force of instinct, not of art; and that, consequently, he was nowise indebted to time and experience for the reach and power which his dramas display.  This is an “old fond paradox” which seems to have originated with those who could not conceive how any man could acquire intellectual skill without scholastic advantages; forgetting, apparently, that several things, if not more, may be learned in the school of Nature, provided one have an eye to read her “open secrets” without “the spectacles of books.”  This notion has vitiated a good deal of Shakespearian criticism.  Rowe had something of it.  “Art,” says he, “had so little, and Nature so large a share in what Shakespeare did, that, for aught I know, the performances of his youth were the best.”  I think decidedly otherwise; and have grounds for doing so which Rowe had not, in what has since been done towards ascertaining the chronology of the Poet’s plays.

It would seem from Chettle’s apology, that Shakespeare was already beginning to attract liberal notice from that circle of brave and accomplished gentlemen which adorned the state of Queen Elisabeth.  Among the “divers of worship,” first and foremost stood, no doubt, the high-souled, the generous Southampton, then in his twentieth year.  Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, was but eight years old when his father died:  the Southampton estates were large; during the young Earl’s minority his interests were in good hands, and the revenues accumulated; so that on coming of age he had means answerable to his dispositions.  Moreover, he was a young man of good parts, of studious habits, of cultivated tastes, and withal of a highly chivalrous and romantic spirit:  to all which he added the honour of being the early and munificent patron of Shakespeare.  In 1593, the Poet published his Venus and Adonis, with a modest and manly dedication to this nobleman, very different from the usual high-flown style of literary adulation then in vogue; telling him, “If your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour.”  In the dedication, he calls the poem “the first heir of my invention.”  Whether he dated its birth from the writing or the publishing, does not appear:  probably it had been written some time; possibly before he left Stratford.  This was followed, the next year, by his Lucrece, dedicated to the same nobleman in a strain of more open and assured friendship:  “The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance.  What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours.”