User:The Dancing Badger/Shakespeare's personality

Shakespeare's personality and working methods
Very little is known about Shakespeare's personality although the term 'gentle' recurs more than once in descriptions of him. Our knowledge of his working methods derives primarily from Ben Jonson whose evidence is contradictory. Other information can only be inferred from his poems and plays.

The first description of Shakespeare is by the playwright Robert Greene's posthumously (and possibly ghost-written Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592). Greene describes an actor, commonly identified with Shakespeare: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. Shakespeare, a middle class provincial with a grammar school education is described as an "upstart" by the university-educated Greene, who seems offended at  a mere player having the temerity to write plays, and as a jack-of-all-trades (again, presumably being both actor and playwright).

Shakespeare appears to have complained at this, since Henry Chettle, a fellow playwright who had published Greene's pamphlet, apologised in a publication shortly afterward, Kind-Heart's Dream, praising Shakespeare: ...my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported, his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooues his Art. Shakespeare is depicted as civil, honest, and his writing 'facetious' (which meant 'witty' then, as opposed to satirical).

Ben Jonson seems to have been friendly with Shakespeare, saying "I loved the man". He admired both his honesty and his literary genius: "he was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions".

Jonson describes Shakespeare as one who wrote easily, but regards this is his biggest fault: "he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped". He goes on, "the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand."

However, in his commendatory poem to the First Folio, he also describes Shakespeare labouring over and revising his poems: For though the poet’s matter Nature be,

His Art doth give the fashion; and that he

Who casts to write a living line must sweat

(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat

Upon the Muses’ anvil...