But can we be at all certain that Antonio's view of life in this respect
was Shakespeare's? It may be that Shakespeare pretended to this
generosity in order to loosen the purse-strings of his lordly patrons.
Even if his motive for writing in this strain were a worthy motive, who
is to assure us that he practised the generosity he preached? When I
come to his life I think I shall be able to prove that Shakespeare was
excessively careless of money; extravagant, indeed, and generous to a
fault. Shakespeare did not win to eminence as a dramatist without
exciting the envy and jealousy of many of his colleagues and
contemporaries, and if these sharp-eyed critics had found him in drama
after drama advocating lavish free-handedness while showing meanness or
even ordinary prudence in his own expenditure, we should probably have
heard of it as we heard from Greene how he took plays from other
playwrights. But the silence of his contemporaries goes to confirm the
positive testimony of Ben Jonson, that he was of "an open and free
nature,"--openhanded always, and liberal, we may be sure, to a fault.
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