Chapter 19

“I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakespeare) had turned his genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became one of their body.”

That Shakespeare never “turned his genius to stage-writing,” as Theobald most _Theobaldice_ phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority as the precious story that he left Stratford for deer-stealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen’s horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against _Titus Andronicus_ being Shakespeare’s, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in _Jeronymo_, Shakespeare wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest of his compositions.