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printed as a POPULAR book as late as 1713. Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, "reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . " He bestowed the manners of mediaeval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards. Look at his notion of "the very manners" of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning "the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings" the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith's bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of "matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!"
Mon Dieu! do historians NOT treat of "matters of curious research" and of statutes and of treaties? As for "old romances," they were current and popular. The "occult" sources of King Lear are a popular tale attached to legendary "history" and a story in Sidney's Arcadia. Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as "a letterless peasant lad," or the Author, whoever he was, is not "invested with all the love" (sic, v.1. "lore"), "which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten."
"Our friend's style has flowery components," Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, "and yet Shakespeare who did all this," et caetera. But Shakespeare did NOT do "all this"! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which "Delphos" is the insular seat of an oracle of Ap