"
It is Aubrey who has recorded most of such sparse fragments of
Beeston's talk as survive--how Edmund "Spenser was a little man, wore
short hair, little bands, and short cuffs," and how Sir John Suckling
came to invent the game of cribbage. Naturally, of Shakespeare Beeston
has much to relate. In the shrewd old gossip's language, he "did act
exceedingly well," far better than Jonson; "he understood Latin pretty
well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the
country;" "he was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and
of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit;" he and Ben Jonson gathered
"humours of men daily wherever they came." The ample testimony to the
excellent influence which Beeston exercised over "the poets and actors
of these times" leaves little doubt that Sir William D'Avenant,
Beeston's successor as manager at Drury Lane, and Thomas Shadwell, the
fashionable writer of comedies, largely echoed their old mentor's
words when, in conversation with Aubrey, they credited Shakespeare
with "a most prodigious wit," and declared that they "did admire his
natural parts beyond all other dramatical writers."[13]
[Footnote 13: Aubrey's _Lives_, being reports of his miscellaneous
gossip, were first fully printed from his manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library by the Clarendon Press in 1898.
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