Excerpt from Five Lectures on Shakespeare Shakespeare myth has been spoken of; but whoever uses this expression to-day has an entirely different thing in his mind from what was meant by it thirty or forty years ago. When that worthy German Shakespeare scholar, my honored teacher, Nicolas Delius, issued a publication in 185! Under the title The Myth of Shakespeare, the thought of ventilating the problem which shall engage us today was far from his mind. His object was simply to examine the mass of reports and stories which had found their way into the traditional biographies of Shakespeare, with regard to the testimony brought to bear upon them and their inner worth; to separate the true from the false, the established from the doubtful, in order to obtain a reliable, if meager, sketch of Shakespeare's life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.