The principal modern monument to the poet's memory in Stratford is the Shakespeare Memorial, a semi-Gothic building of brick, stone and timber, erected in 1877 to contain a theatre, picture gallery and library.
The only positive piece of evidence produced is the passage from Thomas Nash's "Epistle to the Gentlemen of the Two Universities," prefixed to Greene's Arcadia, 1859, in which he upbraids somebody (not known to be Shakespeare) with having left the "trade of Noverint" and busied himself with "whole Hamlets" and "handfuls of tragical speeches."
Many of these were not pure Shakespeare; and he is credited with the addition of a dying speech to the text of Macbeth.
The breaking of such a promissory oath was called " perjury " (as in classical Latin and in Shakespeare), contrary to modern usage which confines the word to false evidence before a court of justice.
Few English writers have known so adroitly as Tennyson how to bend the study of Shakespeare to the enrichment of their personal style.
