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for searching only. Shakspere from his house in Stratford to some charnel house itself, which is unlocated. Rather a pretty taste in embroidery has Gildon. And this is what has come of the really sober and sexton-like story which William Castle told to William Hall about the motives of William Shakspere in writing that curse. Castle's is at least a proper sexton's guess. It is not likely to be anything more----unless perhaps it represents the aged sexton's own reactions toward the grimly gaping expectation of that same charnel house. Most likely, Gildon's variations on the story recorded by Hall are his own decoration. He may have gone to Stratford himself, for he gets many details concerning the monument reasonably accurate-for him. It may have been by William Castle that "I have been told" these things. A sex-ton above eighty ought to have made a rather effective mouthpiece for a charnel-house story-it must have seemed so imminently pertinent. At least, Hall and Gildon were both impressed.
But if Gildon had himself gone to Stratford, he was hardly the man to suppress the fact, and his information may trace through Hall. For Hall
took his B.A. from Queen's, 1694, [M.A.,1697,j and became rector of Acton, Middlesex, and prebendary of St. Paul's,9b
the latter on March 19, 1708. If Hall was in the London region by 1698, Gildon may have had his story directly or indirectly from him.
It is just possible that Gildon also knew Castle's story of run-away Shakspere in some form, for before going on to describe Shakspere's tomb, Gildon turns aside to reject lack-Latin Shakspere, from which Castle's story was descended. It is more likely, however, that the order of remarks here is due solely to Gildon's parallel to Langbaine. Langbaine had begun by getting Shakspere born. Gildon, trapped by an alliterative phrase, gets him born and buried at once, and the burying brings with it the charnel-house story. Then Gildon rephrases Langbaine's prologue as follows,
He was both Player and Poet; but the greatest Poet that ever trod the Stage, I am of Opinion, in spight of Mr. 7ohnson, and others from him, that though perhaps he might not be that Critic in Latin and Greek as Ben; yet that he understood the former, so well as perfectly to be Master of their Histories, for in all his Roman Characters he has nicely followed History, and you find his Brutus, his Cassius, his Anthony, and his Caesar, his Coriolanus, &e., just as the Historians of those times describe 'em.98
Chambers, Shakespeare, Vol. II, p. 26o. 96 Munro, Sh. 4'11. Bk., Vol. II, p. 417.
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