The dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the same unremembering condition: if they knew of any incident connected with that period of his life they didn't tell about it.

Would they if they had been asked?
It is most likely.

Were they asked?
It is pretty apparent that they were not.

Why weren't they?
It is a very plausible guess that nobody there or elsewhere was interested to know.
For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been interested in him.

Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and put it in the front of the book.