ABSTRACT
The evaluation of Shakespeare made by his contemporaries was generous but not searching If we read the three hundred pages of The Shakespeare Allusion-Book 1 devoted to references prior to the publication of the First Folio edition of his plays in 1623 we will find him praised for his industry, his eloquence, or his pleasant personal qualities. Henry Chettle, writing in 1592 an apology for the attack on Shakespeare made by Greene in his death-bed pamphlet Green's Groats-Worth of Wit (r592), regretted having helped publish Greene's work because he himself had seen Shakespeare's `demeanor no lesse civili than he exelent in the qualities he professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approoves his Art' (Sh. A.B.,I, 4). In 1612 Webster praised ‘the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare’,Dekker and Heywood (I, 233), and ‘copious Shakespeare’ was the formulation of Francis Kirkman in 1652 (II, 24). In the testimony of his fellow-actors and sharers, Heminge and Condell, who collected his plays together for the First Folio, Shakespeare's fluency became almost legendary:
Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. (I, 316)
