lUl-il! V
J v>i v^r-iiuiii vyi\.i < i^
THE GIFT OF
MAY TREAT MORRISON
IN MEMORY OF
ALEXANDER F MORRISON
y
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
PLAYER, PLAYMAKER, AND POET
■ ' ' y ' 1 3 ,
' 5 1 J 3 1 ,
THE
SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED
By G. G. Greenwood, M.P.
In re SHAKESPEARE.
BEECHING V. GREENWOOD
A rejoinder on behalf of the defendant
By G. G. Greenwood. MP.
• • • • ' . «
• «
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
PLAYER, PLAYMAKER, AND POET
A REPLY TO MR. GEORGE GREENWOOD, M.P.
BY
H. C. BEECHING, D.Litt.
• )
CANON OF WESTMINSTER
PREACHER TO THE HONOURABLE SOCIETY OF LINCOLN'S INN
WITH FACSIMILES OF THE FIVE AUTHENTIC
SIGNATURES OF THE POET
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMIX
r • >
Cri
CU
To
CECIL HENRY RUSSELL, ESQUIRE,
Treasurer of tJie Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn.
tt My dear Treasurer, — One reason for asking
^ your patronage of this little book is that I may have
the pleasure of recording my thanks for many acts
z of kindness, both from yourself and from other
^ members of your worshipful bench, since I was
admitted to serve the Society in the first month of
the new century ; not the least of them being my
recent election for a second term of office as Preacher.
But a further reason more closely concerns the
pamphlet itself; which is an attempt to meet the
latest statement by a lawyer, Mr. George Green-
wood, M.P., of the Middle Temple, of a curious
paradox which seems to have a special fascination
for legal minds ; I mean, the opinion originated by a
Miss Delia Bacon in America, and since imported
into this country, that *' Shakespeare's " works were
written by the great Lord Chancellor, her name-
sake.
434573
VI SHAKESPEARE
When, as Chaplain of the Inn, I was honoured
with a seat at the barristers' mess, this topic came up
frequently for discussion ; and I should admit that
as a recreation at dinner, and as a trial of wits, the
theme was excellent, for it is always a good exercise
to discover and test the grounds of a traditional
belief. But the heresy, if I may call it so, which at
the outset numbered but a few fanatical adherents,
has of late made many converts among members of
your profession ; and one or two distinguished Judges,
both in England and America, have written books
upon it. To their surprise and chagrin, as I am told,
very little notice was taken of them ; the reason, of
course, being that most persons who have enough
capacity to discuss the question at all, judge it as a
question, not of evidence, but of the literary palate. If
anyone can believe that the same vineyard produced
" King Lear" and " The Advancement of Learning,"
he must believe it ; there is nothing more to be said.
But the latest defender of the paradox has restricted
himself to a denial of the Shakespearian authorship,
without asserting the Baconian — that is to say, he
has changed the venue of the matter from the court
of literature to that of history. In five hundred large
octavo pages he has set out " some of the evidence
and the arguments" which in his judgment "make
in favour of the negative proposition."
Now while the negative proposition seems to me,
on the merits, an equally impossible contention with
the other, it is nevertheless an arguable one ; and as
SHAKESPEARE Vll
I found that certain opinions of mine were quoted
by Mr. Greenwood with a measure of approval, I
determined to argue it ; not, I confess, in the expec-
tation of converting Mr. Greenwood, for he safe-
guards himself by saying that the "evidence and
arguments " for his case " might be extended almost
ad infinitum " — and indeed the Baconian faith peeps
out in not a few places from under his cloak of
agnosticism — but for the sake of those members of
the Bar who have an interest in the question without
being committed to an answer, and who can see
when evidence is not to the point, and when an
argument has been fairly met. Having, therefore,
an invitation to give a lecture before the Royal
Society of Literature, I devoted it to an examination
of Mr. Greenwood's case, so far as it is contained in
his book, with what result will appear in the follow-
ing pages. But in order to show more clearly what
positive evidence there is for the traditional view,
I have revised and reprinted two lectures given at
the Royal Institution, which endeavour to set out the
facts of the Player's life as simply as possible, and
to show the congruity of what is recorded of his
character with the impression made upon our minds
by the dramas themselves.
I remember that Ben Jonson dedicated one of his
plays to the Inns of Court as being the noblest
nurseries of " humanity " in the Kingdom, and the
best judge of humane studies. They are not less so
to-day, and therefore it is that I take the liberty of
viii SHAKESPEARE
appealing to them, through you, for a judgment on
this issue.
I have the honour to be, my dear Treasurer, your
most obliged and humble servant,
H. C. BEECHING.
Lincoln's Inn : November 1908.
Note.
In the|[first lecture, for the sake of brevity, I have had
to put the section headings, which express Mr. Greenwood's
contentions, into my own words. They can be verified
from the remarkably full index to his volume. I am
indebted to my friend Mr. Sidney Lee for permission to
use the facsimiles of signatures made for his Life of
Shakespeare,
LIST OF FACSIMILE SIGNATURES
SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE APPENDED TO
THE PURCHASE-DEED OF A HOUSE IN BLACK-
FRIARS ON MARCH ID, 1613 .... facing p. 20
Reproduced from the original document now
preserved in the Guildtiall Library, London.
SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE APPENDED
TO A DEED MORTGAGING HIS HOUSE IN ELACK-
FRIARS ON MARCH II, 1613 .... ,, 20
Reproduced /rom tJte original document now
preserved in the British Museum.
THREE AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES SEVERALLY WRITTEN
BY SHAKESPEARE ON THE THREE SHEETS OF HIS
WILL ON MARCH 25, 1616 .... >j 75
Reproduced from the original document noio at
Somerset House London,
3 « X a
Mr. GREENWOOD'S CASE EXAMINED
I HAVE met so many people, especially members of
the Bar, who have told me that Mr. Greenwood's
re-statement of what he calls "the Shakespeare
problem " deserves and awaits an answer, that, having
the opportunity of addressing this Society on a
literary question, I thought it might be profitable to
see what exactly the problem is of which Mr. Green-
wood speaks, and whether it is to be solved as Mr.
Greenwood solves it. The problem is, in Mr. Green-
wood's words, this : " Was Shakspere the player
identical with Shakespeare the poet?" (p. xxii),
Mr. Greenwood is careful to guard himself against
being supposed to ask whether Francis Bacon wrote
the Shakespearian plays and poems, for that is a
literary question on which men of letters would be
entitled to the last word. If, for example, a claim
were made that Bacon was the writer of the prose
passages in the plays of Shakespeare, it would be
no difficult task to examine the development of the
prose style in the one case and in the other, and see
whether they corresponded, for I do not think it
could be argued that the same writer could develop
B
2 SHAKESPEARE
two distinct prose styles in two different ways. But
Mr. Greenwood, as I said, leaving aside literary con-
siderations, confines himself to the question upon which
he ought to be as competent to form an opinion as any
man, and more competent than many, because of his
legal training — the question whether there is evidence
that the player of Stratford and the poet of Parnassus
were the same person. I must admit that Mr.
Greenwood employs in his task some professional
talents which are more appropriate to the advocate
than the judge. Indeed, his book appears to be
addressed to those twelve men in the box, the
Palladium of our liberties, whose conspicuous merit
it is that they bring to the decision of the questions
of fact submitted to them a completely open mind ;
for we have, in these five hundred pages, finished
examples of most of the arts, from browbeating to
persiflage, from innuendo to declamation, which make
up much of the equipment of the successful prac-
titioner at the Old Bailey. Anyone who has heard
the cross-examination of medical experts in a murder
case will have an exact analogue of the way in which
Mr. Greenwood handles, for example, Mr. Sidney
Lee or the late Professor Churton Collins. By any
and every means they must be made to seem
ridiculous. If they agree, it is a conspiracy of fools ;
if they differ upon any point, however unimportant
to the question at issue ; — " You see for yourselves,
gentlemen of the jury, the value of expert evidence"!
I propose to leave on one side this very large portion
SHAKESPEARE 3
of Mr. Greenwood's book which, he would admit,
cannot be called evidence ; and to devote this paper
to disengaging, so far as I can, and answering, as
briefly as possible, the actual arguments which he
puts forward.
There are, however, two forensic artifices, as I
must call them, of which particular notice must be
taken, because they are likely to mislead. The first
is the suggestion of hidden meanings in quite simple
expressions and commonplace uses ; an effective
practice, of which the classical instances are the
" chops and tomata sauce " and " warming-pan " of
Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz. I will give an example of
considerable importance for the Baconian case, if not
for Mr. Greenwood's.
Ben Jonson was present at the celebration of
Bacon's sixtieth birthday, and wrote an Ode, which
opens thus : —
" Hail, happy genius of this ancient pile !
How comes it all things so about thee smile,
The fire, the wine, the men ; and in the midst
Thou standst as though some mystery thou didst ? "
Mystery, says Mr. Greenwood ! " What was the
mystery which was being performed ? The Baconians
assert that here is an allusion to the secret Shake-
spearian authorship — a secret known to Jonson, and
which he hoped might soon be published to the
world. The Stratfordians, of course, reject this
interpretation with scorn, but they are unable to give
any plausible explanation of Jonson's meaning, and
B2
4 SHAKESPEARE
the mystery remains a mystery still " (paj^e 490).
Well, why should " Stratfordians " invent explanations
for what Jonson himself explains in the next line?
•* Pardon, / read it in thy face, the day
For whose returns, and many, all these pray :
And so do I. This is the sixtieth year," &c.
Jonson is addressing not Bacon but the Genius of
the house, whom he sees celebrating the " mystery " of
Bacon's sixtieth birthday ; and to the happy rite he
joins his own prayers. That is all. As a classical
scholar, Mr. Greenwood is not ignorant that " to do
a mystery" (mysteria facere) means only to perform
religious rites, and conveys no hint of any " mystery "
in the vulgar sense of the word.
The other artifice which Mr. Greenwood him-
self allows me to call forensic (p. i) is "bluff"; and
it is curious to discover that the very kej'stone of Mr.
Greenwood's elaborate piece of architecture is nothing
better — I mean his assumption that the difference
between two spellings of Shakespeare's name is
significant. Throughout his book he distinguishes
" Shakspere " the player from " Shake-speare " the
poet ; as though this assignment of the two spel-
lings were not, as it is, a mere fancy of his own,
but clear on the face of the documents, and indis-
putable. There is, in fact, not a tittle of evidence
to support it. To begin with, the presumption is
wholly against it, because the spelling of surnames
in the seventeenth century was even more incon-
sistent than that of ordinary words. Sir Walter
SHAKESPEARE $
Ralegh, for example, is known to have spelt his
signature in five different ways — Rauley, Rawleyghe,
Rauleigh, Raleghe, Ralegh.^ And the actual evidence
that in Shakespeare's case the variation in spelling
is equally meaningless can be given very shortly, and
is conclusive. It falls into two parts — evidence of the
inconsistent use of both spellings, and evidence of
the use of the spelling Shakespeare in reference to
the Stratford player.
1. The inconsistency. There are two drafts of the
grant of coat-armour (1596, 1599); the spelling in
the former is Shakespeare, in the latter Shakespere.
In the proceedings of the Stratford Courts of Record
the spelling is interchangeably Shackspeare and
Shackspere, and in the litigation about the Asbies
estate, Shackespere and Shakespeare. Of printed
books bearing the author's name, while the first two
publications — the poems (1593-4) — use the form
Shakespeare, the third, a quarto of " Love's Labour's
Lost" (1598), uses Shakespere', and two reprinted
quartos of the same year the form Shakespeare,
2. The use of the form " Shakespeare " in reference to
the Stratjord player. This spelling is found in the
list of actors attached to Ben Jonson's *' Every Man
in his Humour" in the folio of 1616 [in " Sejanus "
it is Shake-speare] ; and also in that prefixed to
Shakespeare's own Folio. The same spelling is used
in the reference to the player in the accounts of the
Treasurer of the chamber in 1594 (see page 59).
' Stebbing's Life, p. 31.
6 SHAKESPEARE
It is used in the documents connected with the
purchase both of the Blackfriars estate, and New
Place. ^
3. Mr. Greenwood lays great stress on the hyphen
which appears occasional!)- between the two syllables
of the name Shakespeare as strong corroborative
evidence that that form of the spelling was appro-
priated by some poet unknown as a "■ nom de plume!'
I have pointed out above that the full spelling, with
the hyphen, is used of the actor in " Sejanus." But
that no importance can be attached to the hyphen is
decisively shown by a comparison between the title-
pages of the two quartos of " Hamlet." The hyphen
is found on the title-page of the pirated " Hamlet "
of 1603, and disappears from the title-page of the
authentic quarto of the year following. Moreover, it
is used in one of the commendatory poems prefixed
to the First Folio, but not by Ben Jonson, who (on
Mr. Greenwood's hypothesis) would have understood
its significance.
The evidence, therefore, of any definite inten-
tion behind the inconsistent spellings of the name
Shakspere or Shakespeare^ or Shakespeare, is altogether
absent ; and the elaborate pains that Mr. Greenwood
takes all through his book to distinguish " Shakspere "
' A word may Ijc added as to the player's own use. In the extant
signatures he does not use an e in the first syllable ; in the two of 161 3
the last .syllable is contracted by the exigencies of space ; but on the
will the final signature is unmistakably " speare," and I have Dr. E. J. L.
Scott's authority for saying that the second also has the a ; the first is
too much faded for certainty. See facsimiles, pp. 20, 75.
SHAKESPEARE 7
the player from " Shakespeare " the poet, is, to use
his own term, nothing but " a form of bluff." I have
dwelt on this point at length because, as will be seen,
Mr. Greenwood calls this suggestion of a pseudonym
to his aid as a deus ex'>nachina when sober reasoning
fails.
To come now to the arguments employed to show
that the Stratford player could not have written
the Shakespearian plays and poems. I will take
them one by one, and treat them as briefly as pos-
sible.
I. The town of Stratford was insanitary. It is
difficult to believe that this objection is meant to be
taken seriously. " We are accustomed," says Mr.
Greenwood, " to think of Stratford as a delightful
haunt of rural peace, ' meet nurse for a poetic child ' ;
and fancy pictures have been drawn of a dreamy
romantic boy wandering by the pellucid stream of
the Avon, and communing with nature in a populous
solitude of bees and birds. Far different was the
real historical Stratford. A dirty squalid place," &c.
(p. 4). It would be a fair reply to this, that if there
were no drains in Stratford, the Avon was the more
likely to be " pellucid " ; and as Stratford was a small
town, and William Shakespeare had legs, he may
have been able occasionally to escape from the smell
of muck-heaps, supposing them to be prejudicial to
the development of literary power. But Mr. Green-
wood assumes that point : and until he proves it, no
more need be said about Stratford.
8 SHAKESPEARE
2. William Shakespeare's father could not write his
name. Here there is a conflict of evidence. Mr. Lee
prints in the illustrated edition of his " Life " a fac-
simile of John Shakespeare's autograph. But, as-
suming Mr. Greenwood to be right, I would point
out that there is no evidence that Marlowe's father
could write his name ; and yet Mr. Greenwood does
not follow Mrs. Gallup in disputing the authenticity
of his plays. No argument can run from John
Shakespeare's illiteracy to his son's. He was a self-
made man, who served in turn every office in his
municipality ; and no men are so conscious of their
defects in education, or so anxious to secure for
their children the advantages they have not them-
selves enjoyed.
3. There is no evidence that William Shakespeare
ever went to the Stratford Grammar School. True,
there is no recorded list of scholars. But as the
school was free to all burgesses, why of all the boys
in the town should the eldest son of the chief
alderman have been withheld from the privilege of
attending it .•* It must be accepted that he went to
school, unless a presumption can be shown against
it. There is such a presumption, replies Mr. Green-
wood. " He never in all his (supposed) writings makes
mention of the Stratford school or of its master "
(p. 47).' I remember no reference to their schools
' I have looked in vain for any reference of the sort in Mr. Green-
wood's pages. To defend my own identity, may I say how much I
owe of my love of Shakespeare to Dr. Abbott's lessons at the City of
London School.
SHAKESPEARE 9
or schoolmasters in the works of any contemporar}-
dramatists except Jonson and Drayton. Of Drayton
I shall have a word to say presently. Jonson wrote
an ode to Camden, his master at Westminster ; and
the sufficient explanation of such an unusual cele-
bration is that he was Camden. Spenser, Kyd, and
Lodge were at Merchant Taylors' School, but they
are silent, even about Mulcaster. Even Herrick,
who with his innumerable odes to everybody might
have been expected to remember his pedagogue, has
not done so, with the result that all the ancient
schools in London can claim him as a pupil. It
cannot be allowed, then, that there is any such pre-
sumption against Shakespeare's schooling as Mr.
Greenwood contends for.
4. Supposing Shakespeare went to the Stratford
schooly why should we assume that the school taught
the ordinary grammar - school curriculum ? The
answer is, that it must be presumed unless evidence
can be shown against it. And all the evidence is in
its favour. We know that Latin was taught in the
school a few years before, from letters preserved from
Abraham Sturley to Richard Ouiney, both Stratford
burgesses. In these letters, says Malone, "are inter-
mixed long Latin paragraphs " : and he prints one
wholly in Latin, besides another, also in Latin, to
Quiney from his son while in the school.^ Latin there-
fore was taught at Stratford. That being so, the
Latin books read could hardly have been other than
' Malone, ii. 105-6,
lO SHAKESPEARE
the usual text books, of which the Shakespearian plays
give evidence (p. 42). We find a hstof themin a descrip-
tion of his education given by another Wa rwickshire
"butcher's son" (as Aubrey calls him) who became
a poet, Michael Drayton. In a delightful passage of
Drayton's letter " to my most dearly-loved friend
Henry Reynolds, esquire," he writes as follows : —
" For from my cradle you must know that I
Was still inclined to noble poesy ;
And when that once Pueriles I had read,
And newly had my Cato construed,
In my small self I greatly wondered then,
Amongst all other, what strange kind of men
These poets were, and pleased with the name
l^o my mild Tutor merrily I came,
(For I was then a proper goodly page
Much like a pigmy, scarce ten years of age)
Clasping my slender arms about his thigh, —
' O my dear master, cannot you,' quoth I,
' Make me a poet ? Do it, if you can,
And you shall see, I'll quickly be a man.'
Who me thus answer'd smiling : ' Nay,' quoth he,
' If you'll not play the wag, but I may see
You ply your learning, I will shortly read
Some poets to you.' Phoebus be my speed,
To 't hard went I ; when shortly he began,
And first read to me honest Mantuan
Then Virgil s Egloe^ues. Being entered thus
Methought I straight had mounted Pegasus,
And in his full career could make him stop,
And bound upon Parnassus' bi-clift top."
If Drayton worked hard at his Latin poetry,
and his unknown master encouraged and helped
him, why is it straining probability to suppose that
it was so with Shakespeare ?
SHAKESPEARE II
5. But Shakespeare did not stay long enough at
school to acquire as much Latin as the writer of the
plays shows evidence of possessing. It is Rowe, in his
" Life," who preserves the tradition, which came
through Betterton from Stratford, that " the narrow-
ness of his father's circumstances, and the want of
his assistance at home, forced him to withdraw his
son from school." The father's fortunes had begun
to fail when William was thirteen ; but as there
were no school fees to pay, we need not assume that
he was withdrawn as early as this. Still, even if he
were, a clever boy — as tradition affirms that Shake-
speare was,^ who had spent four years in learning
Latin, and nothing but Latin, and who had been taken
through the poets usually read in grammar schools,
Mantuanus, Ovid, Plautus, and parts of Virgil —
would have acquired a good stock of Latin reading,
which, if he had inclination, he could afterwards
improve. And tradition, coming through Aubrey from
' Mr. Greenwood is very sarcastic with the " Stratfordians," as he
calls the greater part of the civilised world, for accepting or rejecting
the traditions about Shakespeare "at their own sweet fancy." I
suppose everybody weighs each tradition separately according to its
source, if this is known ; if not, according to its congruity with ascer-
tained facts. In regard to the traditions recorded by Aubrey, for
example, peculiar importance attaches to those which would have come
to him from Beeston the actor. There is one of Aubrey's traditions
(which I do not remember to have seen quoted in Mr. Greenwood's
pages) to the effect that William Shakespeare was a remarkably clever
boy. " There was at that time another butcher's son in this town, that
was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance
and coetanean, but died young." The traditions are best studied in
Halliwell-Phillipps's Life of Shakespeare, ii. 69-76, where they are
collected.
12 SHAKESPEARE
Beeston the actor, says of Shakespeare, that " though,
as Ben Jonson says of him, he had but ' small
Latin and less Greek,' ' he understood Latin pretty
well."
What, then, is the knowledge of Latin required by
the Shakespearian plays and poems? Ovid's " Fasti "
was used for the " Rape of Lucrece " ; Plautus's
" MenjEchmi " and " Amphitruo " for " The Comedy
of Errors" ; and Ovid's " Metamorphoses," along with
Golding's translation, for "The Tempest." (In the
case of Plautus there was a translation available in
manuscript and probably an old play to work upon.
Lee^ p. 54.) Besides these general debts there are
one or two other passages, such as Portia's speech
on Mercy, which come immediately, or through some
other author, from the classics. Professor Churton
Collins, I know, went further than this, and en-
deavoured to show that Shakespeare had read the
" Ajax " of Sophocles and other Greek plays and
poems. But Mr. Collins was a man of vast memory,
and parallel passages were his foible. At the same
time, he pointed out that there was no Greek classic,
of which he seemed to trace a recollection in Shake-
' In weighing Jonson's dictum, we must remember Jonson's standard
of scholarship. In illustration of this, I may quote a passage from
Selden's TilUs of Honour : " I went for this purpose [to consult the
scholiasts on Euripides' Orestes'\ to see it in the well-furnished library
of my beloved friend, that singular poet Master Ben Jonsoii, whose
special worth in literature, accurate judgment and performance, known
only to that few which are truly able to know him, hath had from me,
ever since I begun to learn, an increasing admiration." {S)monds'
Lije oJJoHion, p. '164.)
SHAKESPEARE I3
speare's writings, which was not accessible in a Latin
version : so that if some of the parallels he adduced
should be considered too close for coincidence, there
is no reason to regard them as beyond the scope of
William Shakespeare of Stratford, educated as we
know him to have been educated.
6. But, allowing that an industrious boy could get
a knowledge of Latin at Stratford, he would learn
nothing else. " All unprejudiced men," says Mr.
Greenwood, " must recognise that the idea of
Shakspere coming a raw provincial from Stratford
to London, adopting the player's profession after
many shifts and vicissitudes, and thereupon writing
such a drama as ' Love's Labour's Lost,' and such
a poem as ' Venus and Adonis,' is, to say the least
of it, wildly improbable" (p. 109). When speaking
of " Love's Labour's Lost " we must not forget that
we have not before us the first draft of that play.
Shakespeare came to London, probably, in 1585,
"Venus and Adonis" was published in 1593, and
the quarto of " Love's Labour's Lost," corrected and
augmented, appeared in 1598. We have, by a happy
accident, a good measure of the extent of these
" corrections," for the first draft of the final speech
of Rosalind to Biron, in v. 2, 851, has by the printer's
carelessness been left in the play earlier in the scene
(lines 827-832) ; and a comparison between the two
versions enables us to guess how very much of what
we think the peculiar beauty of the play was due
to its revision.
14 SHAKESPEARE
This is the earlier version : —
Biron. And what to me, my love ? and what to me ?
Ros. You must be purged too, your sins are rack'd,
You are attaint with faults and perjury :
Therefore if you my favour mean to get,
A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest,
But seek llie weary beds of people sick.
" Corrected and augmented " this becomes : —
Biron. Studies my lady ? Mistress, look on me;
Behold the window of mine heart, mine eye,
What humble suit attends thy answer there :
Impose some service on me for thy love.
Ros. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,
Before I saw you; and the world's large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit.
To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain
And therewithal to win me, if you please,
Without the which I am not to be won,
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick and still converse
With groaning wretches ; and your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.
More interesting still is it to observe that the best
part of Biron's speech in iv. 3, 290 is an insertion,
lines 302-5 occurring again fifty lines lower down.
Let us, then, state the problem, in regard to these
earlier plays, a little less rhetorically than Mr. Green-
wood does, and with a closer eye to dates. Shake-
speare is last heard of at Stratford in 1585, and
reappears in company with Burbage and Kemp, nine
years later, as playing before the Queen. Actors
SHAKESPEARE 1 5
tradition, coming through Beeston from Augustine
Phillips, who was in Shakespeare's own company,
tells us that Shakespeare acted " exceedingly well."
Now it is the distinguishing character of a good
actor that he has a keen eye for manners. Nothing
of this sort, that he sees, escapes him ; and what he
sees he can imitate. If Shakespeare, then, had this
actor's quality, is it " wildly improbable, to say the
least of it," that in six or seven years he had im-
proved what chances he had of observing manners
in London so as to be able to represent them on the
stage .'' I submit, then, that the urbanity of Shake-
speare's first comedies does not need a miracle to
account for it. For the wit I cannot suppose we are
asked to account. That is native, and, I suggest,
is not so urbane as if Shakespeare had been " a
gentleman born."
To pass, then, to " Venus and Adonis," that other
" miracle," as Mr. Greenwood would have us regard
it. " What are the probabilities," asks Mr. Greenwood,
" of a butcher's or draper's assistant at Stratford-on-
Avon at the present time, born in illiterate surround-
ings, and brought up as Shakespeare was brought up,
writing (say), at the age of twenty-one, a polished,
cultured, elaborate, and scholarly poem, such as
' Venus and Adonis,' and of the same high degree
of excellence ? Should we not look upon it as an
almost miraculous performance ? In Shakespeare's
time, and for a youth of Shakespeare's environment,
it would have been a miracle of ten-fold marvel "
l6 SHAKESPEARE
(p. 64). Ah, no ; there speaks the clever advocate
addressing the common sense of the gentlemen in
the box. The miracle is to be explained mainly by
the fact that it was not in the twentieth, but at the
end of the sixteenth century, when the Spirit of
Literature was abroad in England, and when the
education of the grammar schools was still in the
Latin classics. Would Bottom and his troupe to-day
play " Pyramus and Thisbe " ? And there are two other
things to be borne in mind. First, the poet had a
model ; the " Venus and Adonis " is closely modelled
upon Lodge's " Glaucus and Scilla." Secondly, the
poet was no longer in his first youth. He was twenty-
nine when he printed his poem (1593), and twenty-
six when Lodge's poem appeared. By 1593 he had
already been eight years in London, in touch for the
last part of the time with such culture, at any rate,
as was possessed by the young courtiers and lawyers
who haunted the public stage ; and it is noticeable
that the men of his early plays are much better drawn
than his great ladies. To conclude this question of
Shakespeare's learning, is it not significant that it
struck no contemporary writer as " miraculous " that
his poems and plays should be the work of a Strat-
ford player ?
7. There is no contemporary evidence identifying the
player with the author of the plays and poems. Let me
test this negative in a few particular instances :
(1) Richard Field, who published the " Venus and
Adonis" was a native of Stratford. Mr. Greenwood
SHAKESPEARE 1 7
acknowledges this, and yet he says " there is
absolutely nothing to show that Field had any
acquaintance with, or any knowledge of, Shakspere "
(of Stratford). Now Richard Field, who was of
Shakespeare's own age, did not leave Stratford till he
was fifteen ; and their fathers were acquainted, for
John Shakespeare, when Henry Field died, attested
the inventory of his goods and chattels. To most
people this will be strong corroborative evidence that
the poet of "Venus and Adonis" and the Stratford
youth were the same person.
(2) The poet, player^ and playmaker are identified in
the "' Return from Parnassus^ In this play, acted at
Cambridge in 1601, one of the dramatis personce,
Ingenioso, gives a catalogue of poets to his friend
Judicio, amongst them William Shakespeare and
Benjamin Johnson. Judicio characterises them one
by one ; on William Shakespeare he says : " Who
loves not Adon's love or Lucrece rape " (i. 2). Later
in the play the actors Burbage and Kemp are intro-
duced discussing the difference between the University
playwrights and those attached to the playing com-
panies ; and Kemp says, " Few of the university pen
plays well ; they smell too much of that writer Ovid
and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much
of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow
Shakespeare puts them all down, ay, and Ben Jonson
too" (iv. 3). I ask, then, if an author in the same
play speaks of a poet and a player-playwright both
as Shakespeare, and (which Mr. Greenwood thinks
C
1 8 SHAKESPEARE
important) spells the name the same way in each
case, is this not evidence that they were the same
person? If not, Mr. Greenwood must say that the
poet " Benjamin Johnson," who is mentioned along
with the poet " William Shakespeare " in the first
act, is a different person from the playwright " Ben
Jonson " who is mentioned along with the player and
play-writer "Shakespeare" in the fifth act. And,
indeed, he ought to say so, for the names are
differently spelt ! But what, as matter of fact, does
Mr. Greenwood say to the evidence of the " Return
from Parnassus " ? He has nothing to say, and so he
introduces his deus ex machina. These are his words :
it has " little or no evidentiary value as regards the
question at issue," for it is " quite consistent with the
theory that Shake-speare was in reality a pseudonym "
(p. 330). But we have already seen that the only
evidence offered in support of that extraordinary
" theory " breaks down as soon as it is examined.
(3) The player and playzvright are identified in an
epigram of John Davies of Hereford. Mr. Greenwood
goes through the contemporary allusions to Shake-
speare, like Diogenes with his lantern, looking for an
honest identification of the player with the poet and
playwright ; and he comes upon an epigram,' inscribed
" To our English Terence Mr. Will. Shake-speare."
The hyphen looks attractive, and Terence was
certainly a play-maker, not an actor, so Mr.
Greenwood proceeds to read the epigram ; but he
' For another epigram by the same writer see p. 76.
SHAKESPEARE 1 9
finds that it speaks of Shake-speare as "playing
kingly parts." Here, then, is the identification of
playwright with player of which he was in search.
No ; a philosopher is not so easily satisfied. I tran-
scribe Mr. Greenwood's words, adding a few italics for
emphasis : " John Davies seems to have the player
in his mind rather than the poet. Did he perchance
mentally separate the two ? " As philosophy this
is excellent, for we cannot identify what we do not
" mentally separate," but I should like to have the
opinion of Mr. Greenwood's benchers upon its merit
as an appreciation of evidence in regard to the point
in question.
(4) The Earl of Southampton. Mr. Greenwood
denies that there is a " scrap of evidence " that the
Stratford player was patronised by the Earl of
Southampton to whom the poet of the same name
dedicated his verses. One could not be surprised if
Mr. Greenwood were right, for the only evidence in
the case of the poet is the dedicatory letter prefixed
to his verses, and an actor cannot dedicate his
gestures. However, there is a tradition recorded
by Rowe that " my Lord Southampton at one time
gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go
through with a purchase which he heard he had a
mind to." Now this tradition came to Rowe on the
authority of Sir William Davenant, who was the
godson of the Stratford player, so that it is " a scrap
of evidence" as to the relation of the player with
Southampton. Both Halliwell-Phillipps and Mr. Lee
c 2
20 SHAKESPEARE
think the tradition probable, even if the sum be
exaggerated. The story has no parallel that I know
of, and is not a likely one to have been invented.
8. " // is hardly possible to conceive that the poems and
plays were written in William Shakespeare s illegible
illiterate scraivl" (p. 14). The answer is that all we
have, so far as we know,' of Shakespeare's hand-
writing consists of five signatures, three of them
written on his will a month before his death. These
are beyond criticism by any humane person. In
regard to the other two, I join issue with Mr. Green-
wood and deny that they are either illegible or
illiterate. The appeal can only be to the eyesight
and judgment of persons accustomed to read our
older hands. But it is possible to call attention to
certain details which may escape the casual observer.
(1) The two signatures are in two different scripts ;
no illiterate person would write two hands, but play-
wrights did so habitually to distinguish the text from
the stage directions — a fact that anyone may verify
who will consult the manuscript plays in the British
Museum. (2) The signatures are those of a man
accustomed to much writing, for they avoid the
least superfluity in the formation and connection of
letters. Perhaps Mr. Greenwood was misled into
calling the signatures "illiterate" by the fact that
' I .say " so far as we know," because unless an autograph signed
manuscript turns up, we have not a large enough specimen of Shake-
speare's handwriting to judge by. Some have thought that the
abstract of Holinshed (Sloane 1090) may be Shakespeare's.
Plate I.
^
Shakespeare's autograph signature appended to the purchase-
deed OF a house in blackfriars on march id, 1613.
Reproduced from the original document now preserved in the Guildhall Library, London.
'•■■-'-• ''■ [S^
Shakespeare's autograph signature appended to a deed mortgaging
HIS HOUSE IN BLACKFRIARS ON MARCH II, 1613.
Reproduced from the original document now preserved in the British Museum.
SHAKESPEARE 21
they are written in the Old English hand, about
which he is contemptuous, for he goes on to contrast
them with " Ben Jonson's clear and excellent Italian
handwriting." Jonson's writing is certainly "clear
and excellent," being modelled on his master
Camden's ; but the only manuscript we possess of
a play of his— "The Masque of Queens"— is
written not in the Italian, but in the Old English
hand, the Italian being used only for purposes of
emphasis and distinction. Our one play of Massinger's
is written and distinguished in the same manner.
9. " There is not a letter, not a note, not a scrap of
writing from the pen of Shakspere which has come
down to us except five signatures " (p. 17). Where are
the manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays ? They have
gone to the same place as the manuscripts of Marlowe,
and Beaumont and Fletcher, and Greene and Peele,
and Dekker and Drayton, and Chapman and Ford.
There survives, I believe, of all that treasure, which
in our autograph-hunting age would be worth a
king's ransom, one masque of Jonson, one play of
Massinger, one of Heywood. But where are Shake-
speare's letters among his private friends? When
Mr. Greenwood has collected a dozen letters other
than begging letters among all Shakespeare's con-
temporary dramatists it will be time enough to make
a mystery of the absence of a Shakespearian corre-
spondence. Still undoubtedly there may have been
something complexional in Shakespeare's silence.
Every man has his humour, and all men are not
22 SHAKESPEARE
given to letter-writing. An evidence of this idiosyn-
crasy may be found in the absence of the commen-
datory lines on other poets of which the Elizabethan
age had its share, though the fashion set in later.
Mr. Greenwood thinks this silence of the dramatist
very suspicious. But he overdoes his case when he
treats Ben Jonson as the standard in this matter.
lO. Jonson zvrote hundreds of occasional poems, lines
to friends and patrons, elegies, epitaphs, epithalanmims.
Where are Shakespeare's similar effusions ? " Why
should William Shakspere of Stratford have played
the part of William the Silent?" (p. 200). It
is difficult to take this sort of criticism seriously.
Where are the hundreds of epigrams of Lyly and
Marlowe, of Ford and Webster? Where are the
epithalamiums of Kyd ? the elegies of Marston ?
And Echo, as Mr. Greenwood is fond of saying,
" answers Where ? " But how thoughtless is this con-
stant comparison of Shakespeare with Jonson ! Jonson
was a strenuous and not very popular playwright,
but he was a master of occasional verse. He was
"the Horace" of the times, as Sir Edward Herbert
called him ; and, indeed, he called himself so in the
"Poetaster." Shakespeare was the most successful
playwriter of his generation, with a lyrical gift quite
un-Horatian. W'hy then should he be expected to
write odes and epodes, simply because Jonson did ?
Mr. Greenwood docs not seem to have grasped the
elementary fact about Jonson, that in most things he
did, he was exceptional in his age. Alone of all the
SHAKESPEARE 23
Elizabethan dramatists he collected his plays ; alone
of them all a man of learning, he consorted with
men of learning ; poet-laureate and popular with
the king, he became popular with the courtiers.
Now the epithet Jonson applies to Shakespeare is
" gentle," which must imply a temperament in
marked contrast with the self-assertive temperament
of Jonson himself. Probably Shakespeare was shy —
a malady that even to-day afflicts an occasional man
of letters. In every literary age there have been men
who, without being parasites, have been content to
form a part of the furniture of great houses ; and
there have been others who, like Shakespeare and
Cowley, have preferred their own fireside. But Mr.
Greenwood carries on his invidious comparison to
the very grave.
1 1 . Jonson' s death " was greeted with a chorus of
elegiac and panegyrical verses ^poured forth by the best
poets of the moment. How different was the case of
Shakespeare !" (p. 201). Yes and how different was
the case of Beaumont in the same year ; though,
being a Beaumont, he found a grave along with his
brother in Westminster Abbey. It was not Jonson
the dramatist who was applauded, but Jonson the
dictator of letters in London ; the wits who con-
tributed their elegies to Jonsonus Virbius were tech-
nically " his sons " ; men of the younger generation,
like Falkland and Waller and Jasper Mayne.
Jonson had set the fashion of the new age, and he
was its most venerated tradition ; just as his great
24 SHAKESPEARE
namesake, Samuel Johnson, had become at his death
the embodiment of the literary tradition of the mid-
eighteenth century. When Shakespeare died in 1616,
his star was already paling before the new light of
Fletcher ; and the silence of the poets round the grave
of the Stratford player is not so conspicuous, consider-
ing the fashion of the day, as their silence at the publi-
cation of the great Folio of the London dramatist.'
1 2. Ben Jonson's mysterious relations ivitJi the Folio
of Shakespeare's plays. On this point Mr. Greenwood
is far from lucid. He spends much time in defend-
ing Malone's opinion that Jonson wrote or revised the
preface *' to the great variety of readers " signed by
the players Hemmingeand Condell, in which I should
agree with him (though I should not agree that he
wrote the Dedication) ; and I would add that one of
the strongest arguments for Jonson's authorship is
the passage he puts into the players' mouth : " What
he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we
' On this point Mr. Lee's investigation into the history of the pre-
liminary leaves of the Folio is illuminaiing. After showing frum the
signatures the probable intention of the printers, he continues : " Sub-
sequently Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson forwarded not merely the
fine poem ' To the memory of my beloved, the Author,' which was
set up on both sides of the unallotted blank leaf, but the lines on the
portrait, which were allotted to an inserted fly-leaf, appropriately
facing the title. Hugh Holland, a friend of Jonson's, fired by his
example, afterwards sent a commendatory sonnet, which was set up
on one side of a second interpolated leaf; and on a later day Leonard
Digges and James Mabbe, two admirers of Shakespeare, who were in
personal relations with the publisher Blount, paid Blount and Shake-
speare jointly the compliment of sending two further sets of com-
mendatory verse, which were brought together on the front side of yet
a third detached leaf." (Introduction to Oxford Facsimile.)
SHAKESPEARE 2$
have scarce received from him a blot in his papers " ;
for he tells us in his " Discoveries " that he had often
had from the players this testimony to their fellow's
facility. But when from this simple premiss Mr,
Greenwood goes on to hint that, as Jonson was in this
year (1623) working for Bacon, his connexion with the
Folio may bring with it that of his patron, the answer
is complete and can be given out of Mr. Greenwood's
own mouth. He points out, as any critic must, that
the Folio text of "Richard II." and "Midsummer
Night's Dream " is inferior in some respects to that
already before the public in certain Quartos ; and
also that " Titus Andronicus," which the Folio in-
cludes, was probably not by Shakespeare at all. The
irresistible conclusion is that the author of the plays
was either dead, or uninterested in their publication.
If he were dead, he could not have been Bacon ;
and if he were uninterested, why did he publish ? ^
1 3. Jonson' s commendatory poem. In dealing with this
Mr. Greenwood gives us one of the finest exhibitions
of what he calls " bluff" that I have ever witnessed.
" We must remember," he says " that Jonson's verses
are of the highest importance to the Stratfordians.
Had it not been for the poem prefixed to the Folio of
1623, ... I verily believe that the Stratfordian
' Incidentally Mr. Greenwood makes the suggestion that as the
Folio text of Richard III. preserves the misprints of the Quarto of
1622, and yet contains additional matter, it must have been
retouched after the actor's death (1616) ; but a sufficient and more
plausible explanation is that the editors of the Folio took a 1622 text
as the basis of their " copy " for press.
26 SHAKESPEARE
hypothesis would lonp^ ago have been given up as an
exploded myth, or, rather, would never have obtained
foothold at all" (p. io6). However this may be, the
poem is there, and signed by Ben Jonson. What
has Mr. Greenwood to say about it ? Does not Jonson
in this introductory poem call the author of the
plays " sweet swan of Avon," thereby implying
his connexion with Stratford ? " To all outward
appearance he does," assents Mr. Greenwood, and
there leaves it. But if that is his case, must he not
at this point bring evidence that Jonson was a
notorious liar? In regard to the whole poem, he
says that it is " a riddle," and that " by the Strat-
fordians it has to be ingeniously, if not ingenuously,
explained away." This is pretty good, from the
author of the comment on the " Swan of Avon."
What Mr. Greenwood has in mind is the discrepancy
between what Jonson said about his friend's " art "
in his formal eulogy, and what he said in a private
conversation as reported by Drummond of Hawthorn-
den. In the poem he had said : —
" Nature herself was proud of his designs
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines !
■ ••••••
Yet must I not give Nature all : thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poets' 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 ; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame
SHAKESPEARE 2/
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet 's made as well as bom ;
And such wert thou."
Of his conversation with Drummond, that poet
notes : —
"His censure of the English poets was this. . . . That
Shakspeer wanted art. Shakspeer in a play brought in a
number of men saying they had suffered ship-wrack in
Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some loo miles." '
Well, at the risk of seeming more ingenious than
ingenuous, I must confess that what discrepancy
there is between these judgments seems to me very
human and natural : and I for one love the rugged
old man all the better for it. It must be remembered
that Jonson had failed as a playwright where
Shakespeare had succeeded, and this in spite of the
fact, as he believed, that he was the better artist of
the two. In private talk the soreness came out ;
but on an occasion which called for public eulogy he
suppressed it. Still, if we look closely at the lines
about Art, we cannot fail to observe that they are
built on the model of the precept laudando precipere.
This part of the poem is rather an address to
would-be poets than a eulogy of Shakespeare.
' Would it be unkind to ask Mr. Greenwood why, if Jonson was in
touch with the author of The Winter's Tale, as it was going through
the press, he did not get him to correct the blunder ? And if the
blunder struck Jonson as so silly that he could not help talking about
it, was Mr. Greenwood's imaginary poet — the man of learning and
culture — likely to be less well-informed about the continent of Europe,
so as to be at the mercy of Greene's novel, on which the play is based,
where the mistake is first made ?
28 SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare's lines were " living," therefore he must
have had "art" as well as genius. And, of course,
when Jonson said to Drummond that " Shakespeare
wanted art," he meant that he took too little pains
about his work, not that he took none ; as the
example he gave shows. That this is the true inter-
pretation of the not very difficult " riddle " is shown
by the fuller discussion of the topic which Jonson
included in his " Discoveries " : —
"Z>(? Shakespeare 7iostrai\i\ — Augustus in Hat\erium\
I remember the players have often mentioned it as an
honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he
penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath
been, Would he had blotted out a thousand. Which they
thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this,
but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to
commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted ; and to
justify mine own candour : for I loved t/ie tnan, and do
honour his tnemory, on this side idolatry as much as any.
He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature ;
had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
expressions ; wherein he flowed with that facility that some-
times it was necessary he should be stopped : ' SufTlamin-
andus erat,' as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in
his own power, would the rule of it had been so too. Many
times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter :
as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to
him, * Caesar, thou dost me wrong.' He replied, ' Caesar
did never wrong but with just cause,' and such like ; which
were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his
virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised tlian to
be pardoned."
I have quoted this passage from the " Discoveries "
SHAKESPEARE 29
at full length, not only for the sake of showing that
its judgment of Shakespeare is perfectly reconcilable
with that of the great encomium prefixed to the Folio,
making allowance for the difference between prose
and verse, but also because, taken by itself, if Jonson
be a witness of credit, it serves as a refutation of Mr.
Greenwood's theory of the two Shakespeares. Indeed,
it makes Mr. Greenwood very unhappy, for he sees
that the players' brag at the beginning implies that
Shakespeare belonged to them ; that he was player
as well as playwright ; and his solution of the
difficulty seems to be only tentative. If I under-
stand him — and I am not sure that I do, for the
argument of Chapter XV. is not easy to disentangle — ■
it would run as follows : This passage in the " Dis-
coveries " must be understood as referring only to
the player ; the reference to Haterius confirms this,
for we must translate sujfflaminandus erat " he had to
be shut up " ; evidently he used to " gag " ; and as
we know that the text of the First Folio, for which the
players make the same boast of receiving unblotted
papers, was not set up from author's manuscripts at
all, the players were liars, and cannot be credited here.
But to this attack, which is not wanting in boldness,
the following considerations are fatal : —
(i) The reference to Haterius cannot refer to actor's
gag. The heading " Augustus in Hat " governs the
whole paragraph, and the sense of the paragraph is
fixed by the first clause, which refers not to speech
but to writing. Thus Jonson himself comes in as
30 SHAKESPEARE
a witness to the identity of the two Shakespeares,
not the players only.
(2) But, in respect to the credibility of the players.
They do not say in the preface to the Folio that
they had received the author's " copy " without blot.
They say, or Jonson says for them, as a general
praise of their author's merit : " Who, as he was
a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle
expresser of it. His mind and hand went together :
And what he thought he uttered with that easiness
that we have scarce received fro>ii him a blot in his
papers. But it is not our province, who only gather
his works, to praise him." The best explanation of
this passage is that it is an advertisement of the
inspiration of the plays, not of the state of the text ;
for the players could scarcely mean that they had
procured copy for press from an author who had
been dead seven years.
(3) Accepting, therefore, the prima facie inter-
pretation of this passage as the only possible one —
namely, that Jonson does here identify, as Mr
Greenwood says, " player Shakspcre " with " author
Shakespeare " (p. 479) — we are precluded from sup-
posing that he was writing " with his tongue in his
cheek," by the fact that he is writing, as he says, for
"posterity." If anyone can bring himself to think
that Jonson, knowing that his friend Shakespeare,
the player, was not the author of the plays that went
by his name, and hoping (as Mr. Greenwood tells
us he was hoping) that the secret of the true
authorship would soon come out, nevertheless wrote
SHAKESPEARE 3 1
down this serious judgment for '* posterity," which,
when posterity came to know the truth, would
prove him either a fool or a liar — all I can say is
he must keep his opinion, which I cannot share.
One word more about Jonson's " Discoveries."
They contain a character of Bacon as well as ot
Shakespeare, a significant fact to anyone who believes
in Jonson's honesty. But it has often been remarked
that in speaking of Bacon's learning and eloquence
Jonson uses an expression, " insolent Greece and
haughty Rome," which he uses also when speaking
of Shakespeare's dramas in the folio poem. Repeti-
tion of a good phrase is a weakness which most
authors yield to ; but such repetition is less remark-
able when the phrase is not original. In writing his
description of Bacon's oratory, Jonson had before
him Seneca's praise of Cicero, whose eloquence he
celebrated above that of " insolent Greece." In trans-
ferring this praise to Bacon, Jonson added " haughty
Rome." It looks, from the passage itself, as if Bacon
were still living when it was penned ; and if so, its
date may well be contemporary with the eulogy of
Shakespeare. However, what strikes one most in
the two characters is that while Shakespeare is
blamed for his careless facility, which needed the
clog, Bacon is praised for his terseness of speech,
which made it impossible to miss a word without
loss to the sense.
14. The silence of Philip Henslowe. The argu-
ment indicated by this heading takes Mr. Greenwood
twenty-five pages to develop. It can be stated and
32 SHAKESPEARE
answered in very few lines. Henslowe was owner of
the Rose Theatre on the Bankside, and his Diary,
which is preserved at Dulwich, contains elaborate
accounts of all sorts ; amongst them his share in the
takings at the Rose Theatre, and his dealings with
playwrights in connexion with the Lord Admiral's
company, of which he was manager. Now, Shake-
speare's company — Lord Strange's, and on his death the
Lord Chamberlain's — acted at the Rose Theatre only
between the following dates : February 19 to June 27,
1592; December 29, 1592, to February i, 1593;
June 3 to 15, 1594; and with their internal affairs
Henslowe had no concern at all. Hence the only
references to Shakespeare that we could expect must
come in the few months that his company was acting
at the Rose in 1592-3 or the few days in 1594.
And, as a fact, we have a reference to takings at
sixteen performances of " harey the VI." — i'.e,
"I Henry VL" ' — between March 3, 1592, and
January 31, 1593, though no author's name is
mentioned to that or any other play in the account.
Where, then, is the problem in Henslowc's silence ?
To show that I am not doing Mr. Greenwood an
injustice, I must give an extract from his argument : —
" Now here is another most remarkable pheno-
menon. Here is a manuscript book, dating from
1 59 1 to 1609, which embraces the period of Shake-
speare's greatest activity ; and in it we find mention
of practically all the dramatic writers of that day
with any claims to distinction — men whom Henslowe
' See p. 62.
SHAKESPEARE 33
had employed to write plays for his theatre ; yet
nowhere is the name of Shakespeare to be found
among- them, or, indeed, at all. Yet if Shakespeare
the player had been a dramatist, surely Henslowe
would have employed him also, like the others, for
reward in that behalf ! It is strange indeed, on the
hypothesis of his being a successful playwright, as
well as an actor, that the old manager should not so
niuch as mention his name in all this large manu-
script volume!" (p. 353). The argument here is,
because the playwright of the Chamberlain's com-
pany was a man of genius, it is " strange indeed "
that he should not be mentioned among the writers
for the Admiral's company, who were so much
inferior. One might as well argue that if a poet
who lives in Berkshire is really a successful poet,
it is " strange " that his name should not once appear
in all the hundreds of pages of the London Directory.
There are one or two other points raised by Mr.
Greenwood which I ought to examine, but this paper
is already too long. I have said nothing about that
slough of the Poetomachia in which Baconians love
to wallow, because Shakespeare cannot be shown to
have taken any part in it. When in the interpreta-
tion of the " Poetaster," for example, one side pro-
poses to identify Shakespeare with " Virgil " and
the other side with " Crispinus," ^ that play is best left
' Mr. Greenwood's attempt at a parallel between Shakespeare's
coat- of- arms and that of Crispinus is not very happy. " A bloody
toe between three thorns pungent " is nearer to Marston's " a fesse
D
34 SHAKESPEARE
out of the controversy. The only serious omission
of which I am conscious is the doubt raised by
Shakespeare's use of law terms ; and that would
require a treatise by itself, for it must involve a
consideration of the way in which law terms are
used in all contemporary literature, and also an
investigation into how much of Shakespeare's legal
phraseology can be traced to the innumerable law
papers belonging to the family suits. Perhaps
Mr. Lee will give us the former by and by ;
Mrs. Stopes is, I believe, already engaged upon
the latter. Meanwhile it is satisfactory to observe
that if distinguished lawyers of our own generation
can be quoted for the opinion that Shakespeare's
knowledge of law implies a professional training, other
lawyers, no less distinguished, can be quoted on the
other side. The most cogent fact, to my own mind,
that has so far been elicited in the discussion is this
— that the Elizabethan dramatist who makes least
use of law for metaphor and illustration is the only
one who practised as a barrister, John Ford, of the
Middle Temple.^
dancetti ermine between three fleurs-de-lis argent " than to Shake-
speare's " Or, on a bend sable, a spear of the first." " A bloody toe,"
as Mr. Fleay says, is Jonson's joke on Marston's name, quasi
Mars' toen. The only likeness is in the mottoes, «*not without
mustard " and " non sans droit"; but "not without " was the
commonest form of motto. Moreover, if Jonson made jokes about
Cri-spinas (in reference to the " thorns ") it is idle to say that what he
meant was Crisp-inas (in reference to Shake speare) (pp. 37,461).
The " Poet-ape " of Jonson's epigram is probably also Marston. In
Poetaster [y. l) Crispinus is called " p ictaster and plagiary."
1 "Webster and the Law : a parallel by L. J. Sturge," Shakespeare
lakrbuck, 1906.
SHAKESPEARE 35
II
THE STORY OF THE LIFE
" Others abide our question : thou art free.
We ask and ask."
—Arnold.
It is strange to remember, in these days of
multiplied biographies, most of them stretching
to two volumes, how little curious our ancestors
were about the private lives of the men whom
they delighted to honour. Shakespeare died in
1616. His first biography was given to the
world nearly a century later (1709), by Nicholas
Rowe, and of the ten facts which it contains,
eight, according to Edmund Malone, who wrote
just a century later still, are incorrect. Malone,
who was the most learned, and also the sanest,
of Shakespearian commentators, was also the first
person to take the scientific view of a biography.
He begins his account by drawing up a list of
all the people in the seventeenth century who
might have written Shakespeare's life and failed
to take advantage of their opportunity, persons
like Dugdale and Fuller, who were content with
D 2
36 SHAKESPEARE
a perfunctory half-dozen lines, when all the time
Shakespeare's own daughter Judith was alive and
waiting to be questioned. She survived until
1662. Then he gives a list of all the persons
whom Rowe might have consulted and failed to
consult, persons in the second line of tradition,
but still trustworthy evidence. And then he
passes to what he himself had been able to
gather, no longer, alas, from the living voice, but
by researches among official papers in Warwick-
shire and Worcester, the Public Record Office,
and other places. I am proposing on this occa-
sion to review what facts of any importance
have been thus gleaned from the rubbish-heap
of time, whether by Malone himself or his inde-
fatigable successor, Halliwell-Phillipps, or more
recently by Mr. Sidney Lee, partly for their own
interest, as showing what were the outward con-
ditions under which so rare a genius was bred
and flourished, but still more for any light they
may throw upon the character of the great poet
himself
Let me begin by a word upon his name. It
has parallels in Shakelaunce, and Shakeshaft, and
one or two more ; and we may learn that to
shake a spear meant simply to "wield" it, from
such a passage as this in Spenser's " Faerie
Queene" (ii. 8, 14) :
" Gold all is not that doth golden seem,
Ne all good knights that shake well spear and shield."
SHAKESPEARE 37
We may take it, then, that Shakespeare's remote
ancestor was a warrior, though not of course a
knight ; for in the thirteenth century, when such
surnames first came into use, and for some cen-
turies after, the name of Shakespeare was ex-
ceedingly common, so common, indeed, that an
Oxford student who had inherited the name
before it became famous, changed it to Saunders,
quod vile reputattim.
The ancestors of William Shakespeare are be-
lieved to have been substantial yeomen for some
generations, but they come but dimly into the
light of records till the poet's father migrated to
Stratford from the neighbouring village of Snitter-
field, where his father Richard had land, and then
at once we learn something about him. He is
summoned on April 29, 1552, with two other
residents in Henley Street, Adrian Quiney and
Humphry Reynolds, " for making a heap of
refuse in the street, against the order of the
court," and is fined \2d. Four years later he
has gained enough substance to buy two houses
(one, the present Museum in Henley Street), and
then he marries a local heiress, and at once
becomes a person of importance in the common-
wealth ; passing through all the grades of civic
office, burgess, constable, affeeror, chamberlain,
alderman, at this point becoming Master Shake-
speare, till, in 1568, he attains the supreme
honours of the borough by being elected high-
434572
38 SHAKESPEARE
bailiff. The lad}- he had married was the
daughter of a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote, who
was the owner of his father's farriT at Snittcrfield ;
she bore the pleasant name of Mary Arden, and
was (or was said to be) of some kin with those
great Warwickshire people — Roman Catholics and
Recusants— the Ardens of Park Hall, and she
brought her husband, besides ready money, a
house and sixty acres of land called Asbies, ' and
same other property at Snitterfield.
After losing two children, John and Mary
Shakespeare had a boy born to them at the end
of April 1564, whom they christened William,
and he, having escaped the plague that year,
which carried off a sixth of the population of
Stratford, no7i sine dis animosus i?ifans, would have
been four years old when his father was chief
magistrate, and so grew into boyhood as the son
of one of the most considerable men in the
borough. The question has been much can-
vassed as to his father's business ; and as the
discussion about it is characteristic of the pro-
cess by which the facts of Shakespeare's life have
' We hear a good deal, by and by, about this estate of Asbies.
John Shakespeare mortgaged it in 1578 to his brother-in-law, Edmund
Lambert, and ten years later, when lie parted with the Snittcrfield
property to raise money for its recovery, he was told he must not
only repay the loan but clear all other debts ; and this he was not
able to do. Nine years later, when William Shakespeare had become
prosperous, a suit was instituted for its recovery ; but there is no
record of any decree, and the property did not come back to the
Shakespeares.
SHAKESPEARE 39
been ascertained, I may be allowed to illustrate
that process by this one instance.
Aubrey, the gossiping antiquary, writing in
1680, had mentioned the tradition that Shake-
speare's father was a butcher, and that the son,
as a boy, exercised his father's trade ; adding that
*' when he killed a calf he would do it in a high
style and make a speech." Rowe in his " Life,"
which was based on the traditions gleaned by
Betterton, states that John Shakespeare was " a
considerable dealer in wool," and all sensitive people
in the eighteenth century were immensely relieved
at finding that Shakespeare's father, and presumably
Shakespeare himself, had dealt with the outside
rather than the inside of the sheep's carcase. Then
Malone set out on his researches and discovered
from the Stratford records that John Shakespeare is
referred to as a glover, and he pointed a polite finger
both at Aubrey and at Rowe. Finally Mr. Halli-
well-Phillipps comes along, and produces from a Strat-
ford manuscript particulars of two glovers who
used other trades ; one of them, a certain George
Perry, who, " besides his glover's trade, useth
buying and selling of wool." So we have the
woolman and the glover reconciled ; and very
reasonably, for the gloves most in use at Stratford
would have been thick sheepskin gloves. But no
instance has been discovered of the same man
being both glover and butcher : and as glovers
were frequently tanners, and tanners by statute
40 SHAKESPEARE
were prohibited from being butchers, it is almost
certain that the tradition that Shakespeare's father
was a butcher must be discredited, especially as
he is officially described as a glover on two
occasions thirty years apart. He is sometimes
described simply as a yeoman, and we know from
the Stratford records that he trafficked in the
produce of his farms, selling at one time timber,
at another corn, at another wool.
But whatever may have been John Shake-
speare's business or businesses, the important fact
for us is that, whereas for twenty years and more
he succeeded, by and by he failed. The late
Professor Baynes, who wrote the Life of Shake-
speare in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," dis-
covered in him the sign of " a sanguine unheedful
temper " in his neglect to remove that heap of
refuse in Henley Street. But such unheedfulness
was the rule in Stratford. Six years later John
Shakespeare is fined for " not keeping his gutter
clean," along with four other residents, one of
them Master Bailiff himself; and there is good
evidence that it was William Shakespeare's in-
difference in such matters to which he owed the
fever from which he died. Mr. Baynes is, per-
haps, more plausible in his conjecture that John
Shakespeare was of a social and pleasure-loving
nature (and so inclined to be lavish of his means),
from the fact that it was during his year as bailiff,
and presumably by his invitation, that for the
SHAKESPEARE 4I
first time Stratford was visited by companies of
players. I mention these details about the father
because it is important for us to realise in what
sort of social surroundings the son grew to man-
hood. To call Shakespeare, as is sometimes done,
" the son of a Warwickshire peasant," gives no idea
of the true facts about his breeding. To begin
with, he would never have known, as too many
peasants at all times have known, the demoralising
pinch of hunger ; at his worst straits for money
his father was never driven to sell his house
property in Stratford ; he would never have
known either the still more demoralising cringing
before his so-called betters, which is so often in
the blood of the peasant class, the heirs of the
old serfs : for traders, in the provinces as much as
in London, were accustomed to hold their heads
high, because they managed their own affairs.
Then again, although it is probable that neither
of Shakespeare's parents could write, it does not
follow that they could not read ; at any rate they
would see the best society there was in the little
market-town. And, if we remember that the
poet's mother prided herself on being a gentle-
woman by family, although brought up as a
yeoman's daughter (and no persons are so careful
of gentle traditions as those who are a little better
born than those among whom their lot is cast),
we may guess that Shakespeare's home was not an
ill nursery for one who was presently to stand
42 SHAKESPEARE
before kings, and — what is of more consequence
— was to hold up to the English people the
highest ideal of womanhood ever presented to
them by any of their great writers.
At seven years old' or thereabout William would
have been sent to the Grammar School of Stratford,
where the curriculum was probably that of the other
schools of the period : Lily's Latin Grammar and
a book of Latin dialogues to start with ; then the
Distichs of Dionysius Cato, and ^sop's Fables;
then in the fourth year some easy passages of
Cicero, and parts of Ovid's " Metamorphoses,"
and, not least, the very popular eclogues of a
Renaissance scholar, John Baptist Mantuanus. If
he remained longer at school he would proceed to
Virgil, Horace, Terence, or Plautus.
It is evident from Shakespeare's plays that
their writer had gone through a Grammar School
course. "The Merry Wives of Windsor" shews
us the first-form boy being catechised in his
Accidence ; and for an example of the colloquial
Latin which the Grammar School taught, it is
enough to refer to the conversation of Holofernes
and Sir Nathaniel in " Love's Labour's Lost,"
where the schoolmaster interlards his remarks with
scrappy sentences out of the phrase book, like
Satis quod suffidt ; Novi hoininem tanquavi te :
while the parson not being in such good
' Cf. I Parnassus v. 663, " interpreting pjieriUs confabulat tones
to a company of .f^f^/z-year-old apes."
SHAKESPEARE 43
practice, and endeavouring to emulate him, trips
and falls. Holofernes also quotes the first line
from Mantuanus's eclogues : " Fauste, precor
gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra Ruminat,"
and exclaims : " Ah, good old Mantuan, I may
speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice :
Old Mantuan, Old Mantuan ! who understandeth
thee not, loves thee not."
I need not stay to point out the many refer-
ences in Shakespeare's plays to the writings of
Ovid — but when persons wish to reduce the
" small Latin " that Ben Jonson allowed his
friend Shakespeare to nothing at all, it is worth
while to remember that the motto from Ovid
which Shakespeare prefixed to the "Venus and
Adonis" was from a poem — the Amoves — of which
at the time there was no published translation in
English. It is interesting also to remember that
one of the few books which contain what may be
a genuine autograph of Shakespeare is an Aldinc
copy of Ovid's " Metamorphoses." It is in the
Bodleian Library, and passed 'the eye of Mr.
Coxe, who was perhaps the most acute detector
of forgeries who ever presided over a library.
On the other hand (and in view of recent con-
troversies this may be the more important con-
sideration), that Shakespeare's classical knowledge
was not that of a first-rate scholar like Ben
Jonson or Francis Bacon, any one may see for
himself who will take up the Roman plays ; the
44 SHAKESTEARE
marvellous success of those plays in reproducing
the ancient Roman spirit is clue entirely to the
vigour of the poet's imagination, working upon
the material supplied in Plutarch's Lives, which
he read in Sir Thomas North's translation. But
where North blunders, Shalcespearc blunders ;
he made no attempt to go behind his crib, and
he blunders where North does not blunder,
through ignorance of Roman constitutional history,
confusing the functions of tribune and prtnetor.'
If any one is tempted to think that it is classical
knowledge, and not imagination, that is respon-
sible for the success of Shakespeare's Roman
plays, let him turn to Ben Jonson's " Sejanus "
and " Catiline," every line, almost, of which is
supported by references to authorities, and then
consult the verdict of the playgoers of the period ;
here is one by an Oxford scholar, Leonard Digges :
" So have I scene wlien Cii^sar woukl appeare —
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius — oh how the audience
Were ra\'ish'd ! with what wonder they went thence ;
When some new day they would not brooke a line
Of tedious (though well labour'd) Catiline ;
Sejanus too was irksome."
' Plutarch says that a Roman general standing for the consulship
used to appear in ihe Forum with his toga only, without the tunic
beneath it, so as to display his scars more readily. Amyot used the
phrase " une robe simple." North, who translated from Amyot, mis-
took the sense of "simple," and rendered the phrase by "a poor
gown." Shakespeare paraphrased this into the "napless vesture of
humility."
SHAKESPEARE 45
Of Shakespeare's education outside the walls
of the Stratford Grammar School, every one's
imagination will furnish him with a better ac-
count than I can pretend to give. But we must not
Wget that on his holidays the boy would have
opportunities of making acquaintance (from the
outside) with what (from the inside) he was to come
to know as his own profession. Every Corpus
Christi at Coventry (only thirteen miles from
Stratford) there was performed a cycle of miracle
plays; and when Hamlet speaks of "outdoing
Termagant," and "out-Heroding Herod," and when
Bottom speaks of acting in a " Cain-coloured " beard,
and Celia calls Orlando's hair " something browner
than Judas's," we know that the playwright is re-
minding the audience of what he and they re-
membered in their young days of the actors in such
pageants. But the year 1569, when Shakespeare
was only five years old, saw the introduction into
Stratford of actors of another type, a professional
company, the Queen's own players from London,
who had come by leave of Mr. Bailiff Shakespeare,
and opened their visit by a free performance before
the council.
What, one wonders, were the plays which on
this first occasion they brought with them ? We
know that in this very year a small boy at
Gloucester, named Willis, of the same age as
Shakespeare, had witnessed, as he stood between
his father's knees, a morality called the " Cradle
46 SHAKESPEARE
of Security," which he describes ; ^ did the five-
year-old Shakespeare in the same way peep
through his father's knees at the players ; and,
if so, what was the play ? Was it a morality of
the same old-fashioned type — or was it, perhaps,
the fire-new drama written by the Master of
Trinity Hall, Thomas Preston, then being acted
in town, " The Lamentable Tragedy, mixed full of
pleasant mirth, conteyning the Life of Cambises,
King of Persia " ? Falstaff, at any rate, knew
what it meant to " speak in passion, in King
Cambyses' vein " ; or was it again " The Tragical
Comedy of Apius and Virginia," written by one
R. B., parts of which seem to have suggested
" that tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and
his love Thisbe — very tragical mirth," which
Peter Quince and his fellows presented before
the Duke of Athens. Was this the sort of thing
young Shakespeare heard ? —
" {Enter JUDGE APIUS.)
" The Furies fell of Limbo lake
My princely days do short ;
All drowned in deadly ways I live,
That once did joy in sport.
O Gods above that rule the skies,
Ve babes that brag in bliss.
Ye goddesses, ye graces, you,
What burning brunt is this ?
Bend down your ire, destroy me quick,
Or else to grant me grace.
No more but that my burning breast
Virginia may embrace."
' Halliwell-Phillipps, Life of Shakespeare, i. 41.
SHAKESPEARE 47
We can imagine the learned Judge continuing in
the very words of Pyramus : —
" But stay ;— O spite !
But mark ; — Poor knight,
What dreadful dole is here ?
Eyes, do you see ?
How can it be ?
O dainty duck ! O dear !
" Thy mantle good,
What, stain'd with blood ?
Approach, ye furies fell I
O fates ! come, come ;
Cut thread and thrum ;
Quail, crush, conclude, and quell ! "
Shakespeare in after days could afford to laugh
good-naturedly at Cambyses and Judge Apius,
no less than at Termagant and Herod ; but we
cannot exaggerate the probable influence on his
imagination of his first introduction to the Re-
naissance drama, whether it came then or a few
years later. Here was a new world of thought
and passion, brought vividly before his eyes by
these players ; one had but to sit still, and the
whole cycle of the world's inner history, its joys
and sorrows, wrongs and revenges, could pass
before his eyes, as in Friar Bacon's magic glass.
If youth can still be stage-struck, when the stage
is a commonplace of our civilisation, we need not
doubt that the visits of these first travelling com-
panies, when acting was a new art, brought to
the imaginative soul of the youthful Shakespeare
48 SHAKESrEARE
dreams and hopes that by and by moulded his
life.
Just one thing more about this topic of Shake-
speare's education. What did he read at home?
One of those wiseacres who think that Shake-
speare's plays were written by James I.'s philo-
sophical Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, has
pointed out to us that Shakespeare in his will
says nothing about his library— a remark that,
it may be useful to remember, applies no less to
the "judicious Hooker," who probably possessed
some books all the same.' Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
takes a gloomy view of the amount of literature
to be found within the houses at Stratford. " Ex-
clusive of Bibles, Church Services, Psalters and
Education manuals," he writes, "there were cer-
tainly not more than two or three dozen books,
if so many, in the whole town." Even so one
may hazard a guess that what books there were
found their way to Henley Street. We may be sure
that Tottell's " Book of Songs and Sonnets," first
published in 1557, of which eight editions were issued
in thirty years, was known in the district ; for did
not Master Slender of Gloucestershire possess a
copy ? And why should not new books have come
down occasionally from London ? When Shake-
speare was fifteen, his school friend Richard Field,
' There is no mention of books in the will of Richard Barnefield,
or of John Marston, or of Samuel Daniel. Too few contemporary
poets had any occasion to make a will.
SHAKESPEARE 49
who by and by published the " Venus and Adonis,"
left Stratford and his father's tanyard, to be bound
apprentice to a London printer, and Field's brother
and two other Stratford boys were apprenticed to
London printers a few years later or earlier,' which
of itself proves that the art of printing was recog-
nised in the little community of Stratford ; and
I for one choose to believe that young Richard
Field would have sent down to his friend at
Stratford any books he could get hold of, and
certainly a book which at the end of that same
year made a great stir — the " Shepheard's Calendar,"
by Edmund Spenser.
We learn from Rowe, who had the information
from Betterton the actor, who is supposed to have
gone to Stratford in 1708 to collect intelligence,
that "the narrowness of his father's circumstances,
and the want of his assistance at home, forced him
to withdraw his son from school." He does not
say when ; and he adds that " upon his leaving
school he seems to have given entirely into that
way of living which his father proposed to him,"
which is what might be expected in a good son,
but does not help us to determine his calling.
Aubrey tells us that he exercised his father's trade,
which may have been so, especially as his marriage
at eighteen would seem to prove that he was not
apprenticed to a very strict master ; for apprentices
' See introduction to Venus and Adonis fac-simile by Sidney Le
P- 39-
E
50 SHAKESPEARE
who married before they were out of their articles
lost their freedom. There is a further tradition
which Aubrey received from Beeston the actor,
who would have had it in a direct line, not from
gossiping townsfolk, but from the poet himself;
and I give it in Aubrey's own words : " Though
as Ben Jonson says of him that he had but little
Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty
well, for he had been in his younger years a
schoolmaster in the country." A youth of proved
abilities, with a known taste for letters, might well
have been employed as usher at the Grammar
School when his father's business failed.
We must pass now to speak of that very critical
event in the life of the poet, his marriage, and
his subsequent departure from Stratford. I will
give as shortly as possible the ascertained facts.
In the Registry of the diocese of Worcester there
is a bond dated November 28, 1582, for the issue
of a licence for the marriage of William Shake-
speare and Ann Hathwey,^ with once asking of
' The late Mr. C. J. Elton's attempt to prove that this Anne was
not the daughter of Richard Hathaway of Shotlcry fills me with
amazement. On the one side are the facts (i) that the persons who
applied for Anne's marriage licence also attested Richard's will, (2)
that Richard's shepherd lent Mrs. Shakespeare money. " These,"
says Mr. Elton, "are only subsidary details." All he has to urge
on the other side is that in Richard Ilathaway's will his daughter is
called Agnes, and that "as early as the thirty-third of Henry VI.
it was decided that Anne and Agnes arc distinct baptismal names
and not convertible." To which the layman cannot but reply that
there would have been no need to decide the point if the names
had not been convertible by ordinary custom. Mr. Halliwell-PhilUpps
SHAKESPEARE $1
the banns, such a bond (to indemnify the bishop
from any action arising out of the granting of the
licence) being the usual way of assuring the
authorities that there was no canonical impedi-
ment to the marriage and that the necessary con-
sents had been obtained. On the previous day
a licence was issued to a William Shakespeare to
marry Ann Whately, of Temple Grafton. There
seems here, at first sight, the outline of a romance.
Imagination conjures up the figure of young
William galloping off to Worcester " post-haste
for a licence," as Mr. Jingle says, to marry one
lady, and the friends of another, with whom
presumably there was a pre-contract, pursuing
him, and binding him down to marry with only
one week's grace. But the romance will not
bear investigation. The licence and the bond
must refer to the same marriage, or else you
have a bond without a licence, and a licence
without a bond, and that the bond in the one
case should be lost and the licence not be entered
in the other is exceedingly improbable.^ More-
over, there is no power even in a bishop's licence
to compel a freeborn Englishman to marry against
has collected instances (ii. 185). Thus : " Thomas Greene and Agnes
his wife," in a birth register of 1602, are referred to three years later as
" Thomas Greene and Anne his wife."
' See " Shakespeare's Marriage," by J. W. Gray. Mr. Gray has been
at the pains to go through the Bishop's Registers at Worcester, and
has found other cases of blunder between the surname on the licence
and that on the bond.
E 2
52 SHAKESPEARE
his will ; particularly when he is a minor, and an
apprentice. The need to obtain a licence at all
arose from the fact that only by licence could
marriages be solemnised at certain seasons of the
year ; one such close time extended from Advent
to the octave of Epiphany. When therefore a
licence was applied for on November 27, three
days before Advent, it looks as if something had
happened which would make it impossible to wait
until January 13 ; and this might be the fact
that Shakespeare had to leave Stratford in haste ;
and a recent writer on the subject, Mr. J. W.
Gray, finds the need for haste in the traditional
act of poaching which inflamed against him the
wrath of Sir Thomas Lucy,
The objection to that theory is that if we send
Shakespeare away from Stratford in November
1582, we must bring him back again, because,
although his eldest daughter Susanna was born
at the end of May following, the twins Hamnet
and Judith were not born until February 1585 ;
and if Shakespeare was safe in returning home,
it is hard to see v/hy there was need for so
precipitate a flight. Of course, we may con-
sider that the threatened storm blew over, that
it was a first offence, and that Sir Thomas Lucy
proved tractable. Another suggestion recently
made' is that Anne Hathaway's father, whose will
' See letter from Mr. T. Le Marchanl Douse, in 7>W^ (supplement),
April 21, 1905.
SHAKESPEARE 53
was proved in July of this year, having bequeathed
his daughter the sum of £,6y 3s. 4d. to be paid her
on the day of her viarriage, the prospect of such a
marriage portion induced the happy pair to pre-
cipitate matters with the consent of the bride's
friends as soon as the money was forthcoming.
For it is significant that the two sureties to the
marriage bond are two farmers of Shottery, Fulk
Sandells and John Richardson, one of whom was
a witness to Richard Hathaway's will, and the
other its "supervisor." This, I confess, appears
to me to be the only plausible explanation yet
offered for the hasty wedding. I do not think
that the regularising of the union into which
Shakespeare had entered with Anne Hathaway
furnishes a sufficient motive for the extreme haste
of the proceeding.
That the departure for London, whenever it
did occur, was caused by the action of Sir Thomas
Lucy, admits of little doubt.^ We have the tradition
of it which Betterton found at Stratford, and we
have an earlier reference to the tradition in the
account of a Gloucestershire archdeacon of the
' Malone doubted the poaching tradition on the ground that there
is no evidence of a statutable park at Charlecote in Elizabeth's reign.
Halliwell-Phillipps nevertheless produced evidence that the Sir Thomas
Lucy of 1602 presented a buck to Lord Keeper Egerton, so that there
were deer to steal ; and if none were presented to the Stratford people,
as Malone noted, it may have been because they helped themselves too
freely. It does not follow because Sir Thomas, not having the Queen's
licence, could not indict under the statute (^ Eliz.), that he had not
power to make himself unpleasant.
54 SHAKESPEARE
seventeenth century named Davies, who describes
Shakespeare as "much given to all unluckiness
in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from
Sir-Lucy, who had him whipt, and at last made
him fly his native country to his great advance-
ment. But his revenge," continues the archdeacon,
"was so great that he is his Justice Clodpate [he
means Shallow], and calls him a great man, and
that (in allusion to his name) bore three louses
rampant for his arms."
I need but recall to your recollection the famous
scene at the opening of " The Merry Wives of
Windsor," where Justice Shallow enters in a
great fury of indignation against Falstaff for
breaking his park and stealing the deer, thereby
abusing in his person a very ancient family whose
members for three hundred years had signed
themselves " armigero," and " borne the dozen
white luces in their coat." Upon which the
kindly Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans, misunder-
standing the kind of luces referred to — for a luce
was the fish generally called a pike — and also
mistaking the nature of the " coat " on which they
figured, remarks :
" The dozen white louses do become an old coat well."
Now the pun in itself is so poor that it is
inconceivable Shakespeare introduced it for its
own sake ; and when we remember that this charge
of the luce had been associated with the Lucy family
SHAKESPEARE 55
ever since heraldry was a science/ and inevitably
suggested their name, it is put beyond reasonable
doubt that Shakespeare intended a personal affront ;
while by substituting twelve luces for three, which
was the number on the Lucy coat, he kept on the
windy side of the Star Chamber. We cannot
pretend to judge Shakespeare in this matter, because
we do not know the extent of the provocation he
had received. Tradition says he was " whipt."
Speaking for myself, I cannot be sorry that his
resentment took this shape, because it has supplied
me, times without number, with an unanswerable
question to put to those persons who tell one that
Shakespeare's plays were written by Bacon : viz.
How Bacon, who was a friend and correspondent
of Sir Thomas Lucy's, can be conceived making
this unprovoked and very ungentlemanlike jest
upon another gentleman's coat of arms? Shake-
speare at the date of " The Merry Wives of Windsor "
was not yet " a gentleman born." I need not
spend time in endeavouring to show that this
boyish escapade among Sir Thomas Lucy's deer
did not permanently ruin Shakespeare's character.
It would be a poor compliment to Shakespeare to
condone a breach of the eighth commandment.
But simple justice requires me to explain that at
' See notes in Malone, viii. 1 1. Under the names oi ged and pike this
fish was borne, also in " canting heraldry," by the families of Geddes,
Pickering, &c. The only other family that bore the hue was Way in
the west country ; but with them it was sometimes blazoned simply as
" fish," and they were not well-known people like the Lucys.
$6 SHAKESrEARE
this period deer-stealing was looked upon among
respectable people with even greater tolerance than
smuggling two centuries later. It was not in the
least blackguardly, as poaching is to-day. It was
a very favourite pastime, for instance, with Oxford
undergraduates, who then as now might stand as
the pattern of good form. We find it chronicled
without special comment along with fencing,
dancing, and hunting the hare, among the youthful
sports of a certain Bishop of Worcester.' And
there was a proverb of the day, that "venison
is nothing so sweet as when it is stolen." As to
the date of the incident we have no information.
A probable date seems to be offered about
February 1585 when the twins were christened,
for Shakespeare had no more children ; and it
may be significant that in March of that year
Sir Thomas Lucy was in charge of a Bill in the
House of Commons for the preservation of game.^
If Shakespeare did not find employment at a
London theatre in 1585, he must have waited till
1587, for in 1586 the theatres were closed on
account of the Plague.
Here, then, Shakespeare's youth ends. For
seven years after 1585 he disappears from sight,
lost in London ; when he emerges it is as a
leading actor and playwright. How he spent
the interval is mere matter of conjecture ; but
' Dr. J. Thornborough (born 1552). See Malone, ii. 13
^ Malone, ii. 131.
SHAKESPEARE 57
tradition asserts that he joined the theatre in
the very lowest rank, that of "servitor," and so
worked his way up. One tradition says that he
began outside the theatre by holding the horses
of the gallants who rode to the play, before he
even worked his way in. However that may
be, and the tradition implies the knowledge of
a very short-lived practice, that of riding to the
play,^ it was not improbably to the long ap-
prenticeship which Shakespeare served to the
actor's profession, making him conversant with
the stage in all its arrangements, that he owed
no small part of the mastery which he was
by and by to display as a dramatist. In the
first place, he gained that skill in stage-craft —
the arrangement of exits and entrances and so
forth — which only experience can give ; and
which makes such plays as " The Comedy of
Errors," or such scenes as the forest scene in
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," although they
are most confusing to read, quite simple and
straightforward on the stage. In the second
place, he learned how to develop a plot in a
thoroughly dramatic fashion, and with the least
possible waste of time and energy. It must
have struck everybody, for example, how well
Shakespeare's plays open ; how attention is at
once caught and held ; and the main action
begins without delay. Thirdly, he gained the
» Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 80.
58 SHAKESPEARE
eye of a stage-manager for effective " business,"
Take, for an example, the play of " Macbeth."
Shakespeare the poet could have given us the
wonderful speeches in which he turns the old
chronicle into traged}', but it was the eye of
the trained actor and stage-manager which gave
us the witch scenes, the air-drawn dagger, the
blood-stained hands that seemed to pluck at
Macbeth's eyes, the knocking at the gate, the
sleep-walking — points which still tell upon the
audience, as they did when it was first put upon
the stage. And not only did these seven years
advance Shakespeare in the knowledge of his
profession, they advanced him also in general
culture. We know that " a poet is born and
not made " ; but Ben Jonson reminds us that
" a good poet's made as well as born " ; and he
is made by study of the world past and present,
by men and books. Mr. Sidney Lee has just
told us that Shakespeare had read some of the
Italian poets of the Renaissance, before he wrote
his "Venus and Adonis"; and if he was at the
pains to master Italian, we may be sure that he
read whatever he found worth reading in his
own tongue. Of still greater consequence was
his commerce in the world of London with men
of all sorts and conditions. And so when a
certain class of our friends, to whom I have
already referred, ask us how we think it possible
that a young man from the Midlands on coming
SHAKESPEARE 59
up to town could produce, perhaps as his very
first play, a piece so free from everything pro-
vincial, and so full of character and wit and
courtly manners, as " Love's Labour's Lost," we
may at least reply, without raising the difficult
point of genius, that seven years in London at
the impressionable age of twenty-one can work
great changes in a man's experience of life even
to-day. (On " Love's Labour's Lost" see p. 13.)
When we first meet Shakespeare's name as a
player — in any formal fashion — it is in a very
important document, the accounts of the Queen's
Treasurer of the Chamber, and in the best
company. It runs thus in modern spelling: —
" To William Kempe, William Shakespeare, and Richard
Burbage, servants to the Ld. Chamberlain, upon the
councils warrant, dated at Whitehall 15 March 1594, for
2 several comedies or interludes shewed by them before
her majesty in Christmas time last past, viz. upon St.
Stephens day and Innocents day — ^13 6 8 and by way
of her majesty's reward ^^6 13 4 in all ^2q.^^
Now see what this means : Kemp was the
greatest comedian, and Burbage the greatest
tragedian, of his time ; and here is Shakespeare
standing between them, like Garrick between
Tragedy and Comedy in Sir Joshua Reynolds'
celebrated picture, a third with the two heads
of his profession. After that indisputable evi-
dence to the rank he held in his company there
is hardly need to go in search of other testimony
60 SHAKESPEARE
that he was a competent actor ; but as it might
perhaps be held that Shakespeare's position in
the company was due chiefly to the fact that he
was its playwright, it may be well to note that,
two years before this, Chettle the dramatist refers
to Shakespeare in a pamphlet as ''excellent in the
quality he professes," ' and Aubrey preserves the
opinion of an old actor, William Beeston, who
was the son of an apprentice of Augustine Phillips
one of Shakespeare's own friends and colleagues,
that he acted " exceedingly well," and contrasts
him on that point with Ben Jonson, who, accord-
ing to the same authority, " was never a good
actor, but an excellent instructor." It is noticeable,
too, that we find Shakespeare's name standing
first on the list of actors who performed Ben
Jonson's " Every Man in his Humour," a play
which his good nature is said to have saved from
refusal by his company. By the side of such
testimony we need not attach importance to the
exact form of the tradition preserved by Rowe
that "the top of his performance was the Ghost
in his own Hamlet," though he may very well
have played the part, as Garrick did after him.
The only other stage tradition we have is that he
was accustomed to play " kingly parts."
If Shakespeare then became an actor and
reached the top of his " quality " after working
his way through the stages of call-boy and super-
' See additional note, p. 78.
SHAKESPEARE 6 1
numerary, we know for a certainty that when he
became a dramatist, he reached the top of that
profession, from beginnings as little dignified.
When he came to London the leading dramatists
were a set of young men, most of them from the
universities, who were in the act of revolutionising
the stage — it would be as true to say, creating it.
The eldest was John Lyly, who wrote comedies
chiefly in prose ; then there was Thomas Kyd —
"sporting Kyd," as Ben Jonson calls him with an
ironic play upon his name — who wrote tragedies
of a bloodthirsty type, among them a tragedy
of " Hamlet," which Shakespeare was afterwards
to re-write ; George Peele, who wrote tragedies,
comedies, and historical plays ; Robert Greene,
who also wrote everything, but notably one very
charming comedy of country life with the queer
title of " Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," and,
above all, there was Christopher Marlowe. Now
if we turn to that invaluable document the Diary
of Henslowe, proprietor of the Rose Theatre, for the
year 1592, we find in his cash account such entries
as the following : ^
t
f s.
d.
19 Feb.
159^ Reed.
at fryer bacune
17
3
[Greene's play.
20 „
f 1
mulomurco
{i.e. Muley
Mulocco]
29
0
[Peek's "Battle
Alcazar."
of
21 ,,
If
Orlando
16
6
[An early play
Greene's.
of
See W. W. Greg's edition, p. 13.
62
2
SHAKESPEARE
£
s.
d.
23 Feb.
159^
Reed, at spanes como-
dye donne
oracoe
13
6 [A fore piece to
Kyd's "Spanish
Tragedy."
25 .,
,, Jeweofmalltuse
50
0 [Marlowe's play.
29 ..
niulamulloco
34
0
3 March , , harey the 6th 3168
What is the meaning of this sudden rise in the
takings at the theatre? An explanation is to be
found in a remark of the pamphleteer Thomas
Nash, who in a piece called " Pierce Penniless,"
licensed in August of that year, writes :
" How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of
the French) to think that after he had lain 200 years in
his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have
his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand
spectators at least (at several times) who, in the tragedian
that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh
bleeding."
Now, whoever wrote the original draft of the
"First Part of King Henry VI.," certainly the
Talbot scenes were added or re-written by Shake-
speare, and it was these scenes that, according
to Nash, made the success of the piece. A second
and third part of " Henry VI." in the course of
the same year, were, in the same way, but to a
far greater extent, re-written by this young actor,
and their success we can gauge, not this time
from a shout of praise, but from a scream of
rage sent up by the poor dramatist whose work
had thus been worked over. (It has always to
be borne in mind in discussing the Elizabethan
SHAKESPEARE 63
drama that plays were sold out and out by the
dramatists to one or other company of actors ;
so that it was in the power of the company, and
a very usual custom, to have the plays, when they
got a little worn by use, freshened, either by the
author, or by a new hand.)^ In this autumn of
1592 the dramatist Greene lay a-dying, and from
his deathbed he made a solemn address to his
fellows, Marlowe, Peele, and others, to forsake
their vicious courses — they were all notoriously
wild — and to live repentant lives before it was
too late. And he concludes his appeal with a
rather vague sentence, the general sense of which
seems to be, that if they find themselves in want
they must not look to the players for help. The
players, it must be understood, occupied some-
thing of the same position in regard to the
dramatist as a modern publisher does to his
author. The publisher is more likely to be a
capitalist than the author. Alleyn, the founder
of Dulwich College, Burbage, Heminge, Cundell,
Shakespeare himself, made fortunes on the stage,
while Greene, and Marlowe, and Drayton, and many
other dramatists were put to shifts to make
a bare living.
" Base-minded men, all-three of you [says Greene], if by
my misery ye be not warned; for unto none of you, like
' The MS. play Sir Tkofiias More in the British Museum
(Harl. 7368) exhibits these phenomena of freshening. There are
several handwritings ; passages are crossed through and others added ;
and new drafts are pasted over old ones.
64 SHAKESPEARE
me, sought those burs to cleave ; those puppets, I mean,
that speak from our mouths, those anticks garnished in our
colours. . . . Trust them not, for there is an xipstart croiv
beautified with our feathers, that with his ' tiger's heart
wrapt in a player's hide,' supposes he is as well able to
bombast out a blank verse \i.e. to stuff it out with epithets]
as the best of you \ and being an absolute Johannes
Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene
in a country."
The line parodied by Greene and applied to its
author comes in the Third Part oi Hemy VI. (i. iv. 137),
the original draft of which play may well have been in
part composed by Greene himself. Halliwell-Phillipps
suggests that the line had been rendered specially
popular through effective delivery. What Greene
meant by 'bombasting out' a blank verse may be
understood by a quotation :
" O tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide ;
How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child,
To bid the father wipe his eyes withal.
And yet be seen to bear a woman's face ?
Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible :
Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless."
Now if we can suppose Sir Charles VVyndham
and Mr. Tree taking suddenly to writing plays, and
successful plays, or Mr. Murray and Mr. Methuen
to writing successful novels, we shall form some
idea of the horror that possessed poor Greene's
imagination. If players turned playwright, the
playwright's occupation was gone ; and if, in
addition, we remember the contempt in which
SHAKESPEARE 65
the players were held by these poor gentlemen
— " puppets that speak from our mouths," " anticks
garnished in our colours," " burs that cleave "
to us, we shall realise the consternation that
Shakespeare had inspired in this poor indignant
spirit.
We come upon evidence of the same sort of
feeling in a university play written somewhat
later, where a character, Studioso, complains of
the actors that,
" With mouthing words that better wits have framed
They purchase lands and now esquires are named," ^
and in a scene where Kempe and Burbage are
represented as interviewing Cambridge scholars as
likely recruits for their company — who at need
would write a part as well as act one — Kempe
is made to say : " Few of the university pen plays
well ; they smell too much of that writer Ovid
and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too
much of Pro«;erpina and Jupiter. Why, here's
our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down."
" Our fellow Shakespeare," that is, " our partner."
The late Judge Webb, in a book called " The
Mystery of William Shakespeare," asserted that
no literary man of the day could be " adduced
as attesting the responsibility of the player for
the works which are associated with his name."
Well, here is such a statement. If I may say a
• Return jrotn Parnassus 2, V. i. 1966.
66 SHAKESPEARE
final word about that remarkable heresy : the two
arguments that seem to me conclusive that the
Shakespearian plays were not written by a gentle-
man amateur like Francis Bacon are (i) that the
dramas display, as I have already pointed out, such
wonderful constructive skill, and such knowledge
of what is effective on the stage — arts, which can
only be learned by long habituation to the theatre
— and (2) that so many of the Shakespearian
plays are old plays re -written, e.g. " Henry IV.,"
"Henry V.," "King John," "Richard HI," "Mer-
chant of Venice," " Hamlet " ; and to re-write an old
play is a task no gentleman would have undertaken
for his own pleasure, or indeed would have been at
liberty to undertake, because the plays were the
absolute property of the acting companies.
Shakespeare's growing prosperity is marked in
1596 by an application to Heralds' College for
a grant of arms to his father, which, though un-
successful at the time, succeeded three years
later; and in 1597 by the purchase of the Great
House at Stratford called " New Place." But his
relish of these signs of social advancement must
have been sadly dashed by the loss in the former
year of his only son, the twelve-year-old Hamnet.
Can we at all figure to ourselves Shakespeare's
life now that he was rising into fame?
It is difficult to determine how much of the
year he spent in Stratford after the purchase ot
New Place. In 1597 he appears in a list as the
SHAKESPEARE 67
third largest owner of corn in his ward, which
might suggest that he had already made his home
there. On the other hand, there is a curious
memorandum made by his cousin, Thomas Greene,
dated September 9, 1609, about the delay in re-
pairing a house in Stratford, which he was content
to permit " the rather because I perceyved I might
stay another yere at New Place," which looks as
though Shakespeare could not have been in con-
stant residence. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps points out
also that the precepts in an action brought by
Shakespeare for the recovery of a debt, on
August 17, December 21, 1609, and February 15,
March 15, and June 7, 1610, were issued to
Greene. So that Shakespeare was apparently away
from Stratford on those dates, which cover most
of the year. Biographers, therefore, have come to
the conclusion that it was not until 161 r, when
he ceased writing for the stage, that Shakespeare
came permanently to reside at Stratford. Never-
theless I like to think that his visits there were
neither short nor infrequent. I see no reason to
assume that when Shakespeare became the recog-
nised playwright of his company, he would have
been expected to appear on the boards with the
regularity of those members who were actors
only. Indeed it is inconceivable that he should
have been expected to produce two plays a year ^
' This tradition is recorded by the vicar of Stratford, John Ward, in
1662. " I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare . . . frequented the
F 2
68 SHAKESPEARE
in the intervals left over from the regular practice
of an exacting profession. It may be remembered
that Hamlet declared that his adaptation of the
play which touched the king's conscience ought
to get him a share in a theatrical company. And
it is a fair inference that Shakespeare's shares
depended upon his plays rather than his acting.
As to his residence in London, we must bear in
mind that during his period upon the stage the
theatre was the height of fashion ; so that, besides
making his fortune, an actor and dramatist of
recognised genius would have opportunities of
making acquaintance with that section of the
fashionable world that cared for art and letters.
At that epoch we know that the great nobles
were even eager to befriend men of genius. The
familiar tone of the dedication of " Lucrece " to
Lord Southampton has often been remarked upon.
It lends likelihood to the tradition, handed down
by Sir William Davenant, that Southampton at
one time gave the poet a large sum of money
" to enable him to go through with a purchase
which he heard he had a mind to." The refer-
ence to Essex in one of the choruses of " Kins
Henry V.," which is dragged in by the head and
ears, would imply that that nobleman, no less
plays all his younger lime, but in his elder days lived at Stratford,
and supplied the stage with two plays every year." If the "every
year " is to he pressed we must suppose that some manuscripts perished
in the fire at the Globe Theatre in 1613.
SHAKESPEARE 69
than his friend Southampton, had admitted the
poet to his friendship ; and the obvious meaning
of the " Sonnets " is that an affectionate intimacy
had grown up between Shakespeare and some
scion of a noble house whose identity cannot
now be determined.' And then besides these great
people, great in one sense, we know Shakespeare
to have been intimate with those who were great
in another sense — the men of letters of the day.
Fuller, in his " Worthies," has recorded a tradition
of the wit combats at the Mermaid tavern between
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, comparing the latter
to a "Spanish great galleon," solid but slow; the
former to an English man-of-war, " lesser in bulk,
but lighter in sailing." Michael Drayton, a War-
wickshire man, is said to have been one of his
familiars up to the last. But though tradition links
no other literary names than these with Shake-
speare's, there can be no doubt that the Mermaid
meetings, which owed their beginnings to Sir Walter
Ralegh, included all that was distinguished at the
time in poetry and the drama.
But while the courtiers were affable in the way
that great people always are affable to the men of
genius who amuse them, and while Bohemia was
friendly, all that was respectable and religious in
the City of London was bitterly hostile. All
through Elizabeth's reign a battle was waged
' I have written at length on this subject in vol. x. of the Stratford
Head Shakespeare and in my edition of the Sonnets (Ginn).
70 SHAKESPEARE
between the Court and the City as to the toleration
of theatres and players at all. If anyone supposes
that an actor's profession in Shakespeare's day
was respected because it was profitable, he should
read ' the petition of a gentleman called Henry
Clifton to the Queen against the Master of the
Children of her Chapel for kidnapping his son
Thomas, a boy of thirteen. The choirs of the
Chapels Royal were recruited in those days, as
the navy long continued to be, by impressment.
Any boys with good voices from any other choir
were liable to be pressed into the service. But
when the stage became popular and the various
choirs at St. Paul's, Westminster, and the Chapels
Royal added acting to their ecclesiastical employ-
ment, then, it seems, boys were impressed for the
stage who had no singing voices. This little
Tom Clifton was seized upon one morning on his
way to Christ's Hospital, and taken to the play-
house at Blackfriars, there, in his father's words,
"to compell him to exercise the base trade of a
mercenary interlude player, to his utter loss of
time, ruin, and disparagement." The words base
and vile occur again and again in this interesting
document, as epithets of the actor's profession ;
and, coming from a gentleman, they form an apt
commentary on certain passages in the " Sonnets,"
in which Shakespeare contrasts his fortune with
that of his young and gentle friend :
' Fleay, History of the Stage , ii. 127.
SHAKESPEARE 71
" O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, /
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand :
Pity me, then, and wish I were renew'd.''
The bravest of men might be forgiven for wincing
now and then when he caught sight of his own
trade through the eyes of the public opinion of
the day. Whether his fellow-townsmen at Strat-
ford were as contemptuous there is no evidence.
It is the fashion to say so, but I hesitate to believe
it. The player had made money at any rate, and
that the Stratford people were always short of.
But it may be guessed that they were proud of
him, too ; and his father had been somebody
among them. Of course the rising tide of
Puritanism visited Stratford as other places. The
vicar there was a noted Puritan, and so was
Dr. Hall, Shakespeare's son-in-law. The town
council in 1602, and again in 161 2, prohibited
players from acting in the borough, and in 16 16
gave the King's own company a gratuity for
going away quietly. But I am far from being
convinced that the dramatist himself would resent
this action of the council. He knew better than
they did the scandals that haunted the player's
profession, and in the " Sonnets " he speaks of
them with intense feeling. Of course, he was not
72 SHAKESPEARE
a Puritan, but he would sympathise with the better
side of Puritanism, as he saw it in his own daughter
and her husband ; and when we find from the
Chamberlain's accounts of Stratford that a preacher
in 1614 was entertained at New Place "with a
quart of sack and a quart of claret wine," it is
gratuitous to assume with Dr. Brandes that Shake-
speare must have been away in London at the time.
As to the details of Shakespeare's life at Strat-
ford we have very few facts, but much has been
made of them. In the attempt to throw light
upon Shakespeare's character much has been made
of his suing his neighbours for small sums. But
such litigation, to judge by the records, seems to
have been the normal method of carrying on
business at Stratford ; and, at any rate, as these
suits were made in the way of business by Shake-
speare's attorney on the spot, they cannot be held
to shed much light on his personal character. Much,
too, has been made of his action in regard to the
proposed enclosure of the open fields at VVelcombe
by William Combe ; but on this point the two most
recent biographers take precisely opposite views.
Mr. Sidney Lee says : " Having secured hini.sclf against
all possible loss, Shakespeare threw his influence into
Combe's scale ; " on the other hand, Dr. Brandes
asserts that Shakespeare " defended the rights of his
fellow-citizens against the country gentry." The
evidence, happily, can be put very shortly, and every-
one can form his own opinion upon it. The old
SHAKESPEARE 73
system of agriculture being one of common fields in
which strips were held by various owners side by
side, it was necessary, in order to enclose, that one
proprietor should buy out the rest. William Combe,
the squire of Welcombe, had for neighbour a Mr.
Mannering, steward to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere,
who was lord of the manor ; and as, according to
Mr. Elton, the Chancellor had that year decreed
that enclosure was for the common advantage, Combe
had a strong case and strong backing. The corpora-
tion of Stratford resisted the proposal. The question
for us is, which side did Shakespeare take ? All our
evidence is derived from a MS. book belonging to
Shakespeare's cousin, Thomas Greene, who was clerk
to the corporation. The following are the pertinent
passages, in modern spelling :
"17 Nov. — My cousin Shakespeare coming yesterday to
town, I went to see him how he did. He told me that
they assured him they meant to enclose no further than to
Gospel Bush. . . . and that they mean in April to survey
the land, and then to give satisfaction, and not before ;
and he and Mr. Hall say they think there will be nothing
done at all.
" 23 Dec. — A hall \i.e. council meeting]. Letters written,
one to Mr. Manering, another to Mr. Shakespeare, with
almost all the Company's hands to either. I also writ of
myself to my cousin Shakespeare the copies of all our acts,
and then also a note of the inconveniences would happen
by the enclosure.
" gjan. — Mr. Replyngham's [/.e. Combe's agent] 28 Oct.,
article with Mr. Shakespeare [i.e. deed of indemnity against
loss], and then I was put in by T. Lucas.
74 SHAKESPEARE
'^^ w Jan. 1614. — Mr. Manering and his agreement for
me with my cousin Shakespeare.
" Sept. — VV. Shakespeare telling J. Greene that I was not
able to bear the enclosing of Welconibe."
Now what these entries tell us is (i) that Shake-
speare did not think Combe meant to press the
matter, in face of the opposition of the Stratford
people ; (2) that in case Combe should do so,
he secured himself from loss through the depre-
ciation of the tithes, of which he had purchased
the moiety of a lease ten years previously ; (3) tha^
he secured his cousin also, who had a share in the
tithes. But so far there is absolutely no ground
for saying either that he " threw his influence into
Combe's scale," or " defended the rights of his fellow-
citizens." The view we shall take of his general
attitude will turn upon our interpretation of the last
entry quoted above. As it stands it looks a little
pointless. Why should Shakespeare tell Thomas
Greene's own brother a fact he must have known
better than Shakespeare did, and why should Thomas
Greene make a solemn entry of Shakespeare's testi-
mony ? Here Dr. Ingleby, who facsimiled the MS.,
comes to our help. He points out that Greene had
a trick of writing " I " for " he," sometimes correcting
the slip, and sometimes not. On a previous page he
had written, " I willed him to learn what / could,
and I told him so would I," where the second /is an
obvious slip for he. There can be no reasonable
doubt, then, that this cryptic entry informs us of
X
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SHAKESPEARE 75
Shakespeare's own dislike to the enclosure, and dis-
poses of the statement that he threw his weight into
Combe's scale, though it does not justify us in saying
that " he defended the rights of his fellow-citizens."
He may have done so, but it is dangerous to go
beyond the evidence.
The words quoted by Thomas Greene are the last
recorded words of the poet. In the April of the year
following he died of a fever in his house at Stratford,
after signing a very elaborate will disposing of all
his property. There is an interesting clause leaving
memorial rings to four friends in Stratford, and three
members of his old company, Burbage, Hemings,
and Cundell ; the last two of whom, seven years
later, collected and published his plays. But the
clause which has aroused most comment is an inter-
lineation, the only reference to his wife in the
document : —
" Item. I give unto my wife my second best bed with
the furniture."
Unkind people have thought that Shakespeare
meant to be unkind ; but Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
collected instances of many similar bequests from
contemporary wills, one to a wife of " the second
best feather bed with a whole furniture there be-
longing," so that no more ought to be heard of any
suggested insult. The reason why Shakespeare
chose to make his daughter legatee, rather than his
wife, was probably the very simple one that his wife
was seven years his senior, and perhaps in poor
76 SHAKESPEARE
health ; and the reason why he interHned this special
gift is probably because she asked for it specially.
In conclusion, I would ask, can we get any clear
light on Shakespeare's character from the facts that
have been ascertained as to his career ? We have
not many formal expressions of opinion by con-
temporaries about the man himself apart from his
works, but we have one or two, and they lay stress
on two characteristics, his friendliness and his sense
of honour. The very first character we have of him
by a contemporary speaks of his " uprightness of
dealing, which argues his honesty," and also of his
" civil demeanour " ; and the very last, that of Ben
Jonson, says the same : " He was indeed honest and
of an open and free nature ' ; and again in the lines
on his portrait : " It was for ge?itle Shakespeare cut."
With this agrees the character that is set down in
two epigrams by John Davies of Hereford. In 1603,
in an epigram on players, he made his compliments
especially to Shakespeare and Burbage, as being
gentlevten in character. It is worth quoting :
" Players, I love ye and your quality,
As ye are men — that pastime not abused ; —
W. S., R. B. And some I love for painting, poesy ; '
And say fell Fortune cannot be excused
That hath for belter uses you refused.
Wit, courage, good shape, good parts, and all good
(As long as all these goods are no worse used) ;
And though the stage doth stain pure gentle blood,
Yet generous ye are in mind and mood."
' Burbage is the painter, Shakespeare the poet : thus the epigram
identifies the poet and player.
SHAKESPEARE 7/
And on the word generous in the last line he makes
the note : " Roscius was said for his excellency in
his quality to be only worthy to come on the stage,
and for his honesty to be more worthy than to come
thereon." To complete the portrait we may add the
traits that Aubrey had from Beeston the actor : " He
was a handsome, well-shapt man, very good company,
and of a very ready and pleasant wit."
Honour, then, in public life, gentleness and com-
panionableness in his private relations — these are the
characteristics which men noted in Shakespeare, and
they are confirmed by the facts of his career. His
"honesty," to use that word in its broad Elizabethan
sense, is brought out by two facts which distinguish
Shakespeare from many of the contemporary drama-
tists. The first is that, much as commentators have
laboured to find caricatures of his fellow-playwrights
among his drajuatis persoficB, they have altogether
failed ; and while other dramatists seem to have
made these attacks a prominent feature of interest in
their plays, the only reference made by Shakespeare
to any quarrel is the admirably just criticism of
Hamlet on the competition between the men and boy
actors, that those who encourage it are making the
boys fight " against their own succession." The
second fact is that Shakespeare chose the life of hard
work and thrift instead of the life of dissipation,
keeping as a lodestar before him the determination
to restore the fortunes of his father and his family.
For this he has been sneered at by Pope, of all
78 SHAKESPEARE
people, who, in a familiar couplet, accuses him of
winging his flight " for gain." It would be as fair to
say that Warren Hastings established our Indian
Empire "for gain," because he also kept always before
hirn the resolution to win back the family estate.
I do not understand how any accusation can be
brought against any man of genius for taking the
money value of his work, unless it can be shown that,
while careful of his own interests, he is indifferent
to those of others. Of this there is no evidence in
Shakespeare's case ; but, on the contrary, Ben Jonson,
who knew him well, and had a shrewd tongue, assures
us that he was of " an open and free nature." I
submit therefore that the facts of Shakespeare's life
show him to us as a good friend and a man of
honour.
Additional Note.
Mr. Greenwood {The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 318) has
ch.irged the biographers of Shakespeare with dishonesty for their
interpretation of the famlHar passage of Kind-hart^s Dream, in which
Chettle apologises for the rudeness of Greene in his Groalsxvorth of
Wit. Mr. Henry Davey, the latest biographer, is said to be " more
honest than most " ; so that we may hope the tide of immorahty is
turning. Still, when we find " Malone, Steevens, Dycc, Collier,
Halliwell, Knight," and in this last generation, " Mr. Sidney Lee,
Messrs. (Jarnett and Gosse, Mr. Churton Collins, Mr. W. L. Courtney,
and Mons. Jusscrand " all agreeing that Chettle in this passage refers
to Shakespeare, and only Mr. Fkay and Mr. E. K. Castle, K.C.,
denying it, it seems somewhat lacking in humour to assert that all
tho.se critics who on so many points difler profoundly from each
other Steevens fri»m Malone, Dyce from Collier, to go no further —
have, in this matter of Chettle, no honest grounds for their opinion,
but have caught "the pestilent perversion," as Mr. Greenwood
phrases it, from each other. I am not at all surprised that Mr.
Greenwood takes the view he does of Chellle's reference, because I
SHAKESPEARE 79
once took the same view myself for five minutes. It is the obvious
view for everyone to take when he first reads the document. But a
second reading proves it to be untenable, as I hope to show. Mr.
Fleay's interpretation of the passage is so obviously hasty and super-
ficial that even Mr. Greenwood has to throw him over when he passes
from saying who is not referred to, to saying who is (p. 315).
The passage in dispute runs as follows :
"About three months since, died Mr. Robert Greene, leaving many
papers in sundry booksellers' hands, among others his Groats-worth
of Wit, in which a letter written to divers play-makers, is offensively
by one or two of them taken ; and because on the dead they cannot
be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceits a living author, and
after tossing it to and fro, no remedy but it must light on me. How
I have all the time of my conversing in printing hindred the bitter
inveighing against scholars, it hath been very well known ; and how
in that I dealt I can sufficiently prove. With neither of them that
take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I
never be. The other whom, at that time, I did not so much spare
as since I wish I had, for that, as I have moderated the heat of living
writers, and might have used mine own discretion — especially in such
a case, the author being dead — that I did not I am as sorry as if
the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his
demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes ;
besides divers of zvorship have reported his uprightness of dealing
which argues his honesty, and his facetious grcue in writing that
approves his art. For the first whose learning I reverence, and at
the perusing of Greene's book, struck out what then in conscience
I thought he in some displeasure writ ; or, had it been true, yet to
publish it was intolerable ; and him I would wish to use me no worse
than I deserve."
The three friends to whom Greene addressed his epistle were
Marlowe and two others, usually supposed to be Nash and Peele, or
Lodge and Peele. Marlowe is "the first" of the play-makers; it
is his acquaintance that Chettle does not wish to make, though he
reverences his learning ; and he admits that he had softened the
passage addressed to him before he printed it. On this identification
all the Shakespearian critics are agreed (with the single exception
of Mr. Fleay), and Mr. Greenwood assents. The problem is, Wlio
was the other play-maker who complained, and to whom Chettle
apologises, wishing he had excised the offensive matter ? The passages
following the address to Marlowe (which need not be transcribed) are
as follows :
" With thee I join young Juvenal, that biting satirist, that lastly
So SHAKESPEARE
with me together writ a comedy. Sweet boy, mii;ht I advise thee,
be advised, and get not many enemies with Vjitter words ; inveigh
against vain men, for thou canst do it, no man better, no man so
well ; thou hast a liberty to reprove all, and name none ; for one
being spoken to, all are offended ; none being blamed, no man is
injured. Stop shallow water still running, it will rage ; tread on a
worm, and it will turn ; then blame not scholars vexed with sharp
lines, if they reprove thy too much liberty of reproof."
Clearly there is nothing here to hurt the most susceptible man
of letters, and nothing to account for Chettle's regret that he had
not edited with more vigour. Then follows the last of the three
addresses :
"And thou, no less deserving than the other two, in some things
rarer, in nothing inferior ; driven (as myself) to extreme shifts ; a
little have I to say to thee ; and were it not an idolatrous oath, I
would swear by sweet St. George [Peek's name was George] thou
art unworthy better hap, sith thou dependest on so mean a stay."
And then follows a general passage, addressed to all three — the
attack ou the actors (quoted on p. 63). Now it is idle to pretend
that a piece of brotherly advice to avoid relying on the players for a
livelihood could have been " ottensively taken " by any play-maker.
Greene's tone could not be kinder. It follows that we must look
elsewhere for the offended person ; and we can only find him, where
critics from the first have found him, in the player-play-maker
abused as " Shake-scene." We must admit that Chetile should have
distinguished more clearly the play makers Greene was writing to^
from the play-maker he was writing about ; but because he wrote
muddled prose in the illogical Tudor way, we need not deprive what
he wrote of all meaning. Further, this identification fits the actual
expressions used.
(I) Chettle distinguishes "the facetious grace" of his offended play-
maker's writing, his "art," from some " quality he professes." Now
in those days there was no "quality" or profession of authorship.
The scholar was a " gentleman " ; his university degree was his
patent. And so Greene addresses his letter "to those f;entlemen,
his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays,"
and contrasts them with the players, "apes" and "buckram gentle-
men," who soothe their betters "with terms of Mastership," while
they prey upon them. The ofl'ended play-maker, then, has a
"quality" as well as his art; and this fits the identification with
Shakespeare; the actor's "quality" being a term in common use.
"Will they pursue the ijiiality no hmger than they can sing?" asks
Hamlet about the boy players (H. ii. 363).
SHAKESPEARE 8 1
(2) Moreover, Chettle's apology exactly fits Greene's attack. Greene
had accused "Shake-scene" of thinking he could "bombast out a
blank verse"; to which Chettle replies that "divers of worship had
reported his facetious grace in writing." He had called him, " in his
own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country," which, whatever
it exactly means, was not intended for a compliment on his acting.
Chettle replies that he had seen him "excellent in the quality he
professes." Finally (though perhaps I am taking here an unreal
distinction), Greene had accused him of arraying himself in borrowed
plumage ; not only as an actor, who is necessarily " a puppet speaking
from our mouths," an antick "garnished in our colours"; but
as a playwright, "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers"
to which he has no right. To this Chettle replies, "divers of
worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his
honesty." There could be no point in quoting these testimonials from
men of worship unless corresponding charges had been made ; and it
is against " Shake-scene," that is Shakespeare, they were made, and
not against Nash, Lodge, or Peele.
G
82 SHAKESPEARE
III.
THE CHARACTER OF THE DRAMATIST
The problem to which we are now to address our-
selves is the question whether it is possible from
an examination of Shakespeare's writings to arrive
at any conclusion as to his personal character and
view of life. Let us begin at the bottom with
some questions as to his personal tastes and habits.
And first, as to drinking. Readers have been struck
with one or two passages — one in " Hamlet," ' one
in " Othello," ^ and one in " As You Like It " 3—
censuring the English habit of drinking to excess ;
passages which have no relevancy to the plot of
the play, and seem spoken over the footlights
directly to the audience.
" This heavy-headed revel, east and west,
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations."
Now the interest of these passages is considerable
taken by themselves, but they become more interest-
ing still in the light of certain local traditions that
Shakespeare's convivial habits occasionally led him
into intemperance. So that what on the surface
' i. 4, 17- ' "• 3. 78. * ii. 3. 48.
SHAKESPEARE 83
looks merely like the voice of Shakespeare's con-
tempt for a silly custom may be interpreted, and
by some critics is interpreted, as the voice of the
dramatist's self-accusation. Which is it ?
Let me say, unhesitatingly, that I have no faith
in the traditions. One is connected with a local
crab-tree ; we know how a tradition of that sort
never dies ; it passes from generation to genera-
tion not only of men but of trees, and is attached
in each age to the most prominent memory, being
probably in origin as old as Thor. The other tradi-
tion is recorded by a vicar of Stratford under the
Commonwealth, and is to the effect that Shakespeare
died of a fever caught of drinking too much wine at
a merrymaking with Ben Jonson and Drayton.^
But doctors tell us to-day that a fever is more easily
contracted from bad water than from good wine ;
and Stratford was notoriously insanitary.
This question of Shakespeare's intemperate habits
seems to me a point on which the evidence of his
whole successful life may claim to be taken into
account. No one can say that his work has suffered
from any cheap vice of this sort ; and I prefer
therefore to hear in the passages I have referred to,
the warnings of a man of common sense trying to
stem the tide of a foolish fashion. That exclama-
tion of Portia's :
" I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I be married to a sponge," -
' Shakespeare died April 23rd 1616 ; having made the first draft
of his will in January, the second in March.
G 2
84 SHAKESPEARE
has to my ear a ring of real disgust ; and all the
criticisms in that scene we may well take to be
roughly Shakespeare's own.
More interesting, perhaps, and less easy of solu-
tion, is another question of personal habit. " Did
Shakespeare smoke?" or, as the phrase then was,
" Did he drink tobacco?"
It will be remembered that Shakespeare is one
of the very few Elizabethan dramatists who have
no reference to that wonderful narcotic which came
into England almost at the same moment as his own
great genius. The meaning of this silence of his
might be argued without end. On the one side,
smokers might ask how Shakespeare could possibly
introduce tobacco-smoking into romantic or classical
drama, the scene of which was laid in mediaeval Italy
or ancient Rome ; or, again, into the Falstaff
comedies of Plantagenet days. Or they might urge
that if the poet disliked tobacco, it would have been
as possible to let the doctor in " Macbeth " compli-
ment King James on his recent "Counterblast" to
the pernicious drug, as to let him compliment his
Majesty on touching for the King's evil. On the
other side the anti-tobacconists might point out
that Shakespeare had a good chance to introduce
smoking as a gentlemanlike accomplisiiment in the
Induction to " The Taming of the Shrew," where
some fun might have been made of Christopher Sly's
attempt to play the gentleman in that particular ;
but he abstains, and they might add that Shake-
SHAKESPEARE 8$
speare was probably so sickened of tobacco smoke
by the custom of smoking on the stage, that he was
little likely to practise it on his own account. The
question cannot be determined.
On a higher plane we may ask, had Shakespeare
a taste for music ? One of the few points on which
all the biographers are agreed is that the dramatist
was a passionate lover of this art ; and they may be
right. In an age when music formed part of a
liberal education, it is not improbable that he shared
in the general appreciation ; though his technical
knowledge is occasionally at fault. But if we look
at the references to music in the plays, we find that
they are so much the outcome of the temperament
of the dramatis personce, or of the needs of the
dramatic situation, that they must be used with
caution as evidence of the dramatist's own taste.
The famous speech with which " Twelfth Night "
opens is in character with the love-sick, sentimental
Duke ; the no less famous speech of Lorenzo in the
last act of " The Merchant of Venice " suits his high-
pitched romantic nature, and is moreover in harmony
with a scene
" Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one."
The piece of evidence that would incline us to
give Shakespeare the benefit of any doubt is the
8th Sonnet, and again the 128th, addressed to a
lady playing on the virginals.
86 SHAKESPEARE
From art let us go to politics. Here we can have
little doubt as to Shakespeare's general view. An
Elizabethan of genius who had gone through the
stress of the Armada year when he was twenty-four
years old could not but have felt the new thrill of
national life and the new sense of England's great-
ness, and again and again in his plays Shakespeare
says a great word that has still power to stir our
blood :
" O England, model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart ! "
or,
" This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror
But when it first did help to wound itself,"
or, best of all, John of Gaunt's touching lament in
"Richard II." But Shakespeare has been accused
of supporting the Stuart ideas of monarchy, es-
pecially by his references to the sanctity of kingship.
An actor attached to the Lord Chamberlain's com-
pany, which with James's accession became the
King's, was courtier enough to introduce a respectful
compliment now and again to his prince ; but those
who charge Shakespeare with abetting the Stuart
notions of divine right must surely forget the lessons
on the nature of true kingship which are embalmed
in the trilogy of "Richard II.," "Henry IV.," and
*' Henry V." Again it is objected against Shake-
speare that he disliked crowds. But who likes
them ? Mankind does not show well in crowds.
SHAKESPEARE 8/
even at political meetings in the twentieth century.
And Shakespeare lived before the persons and
manners of the commonalty had been polished by
school-boards. Certainly Shakespeare made his
crowds foolish enough, always at the mercy of
demagogues ; and he made them cruel enough ;
but take his mechanicals, not in crowds, but singly,
and he is far from denying them human virtues.
The Citizens in " Coriolanus " have much the best
of the argument with Menenius Agrippa, when he
is expounding the fable of the belly and its
members ; they have much the best of the argument
with Coriolanus himself when he is suing for the
consulship. And can one say that Shakespeare
lacked appreciation of Bottom and Peter Quince
and the rest of that admirable dramatic troupe?
But leaving these particular tastes and opinions,
let us ask whether we can gain any light from the
plays on Shakespeare's personal character. How
may we set about the investigation ? A very
brilliant attempt was made in a series of papers
contributed a few years ago by Mr. Frank Harris to
the Saturday Review^ and since collected, to deduce
the dramatist's own disposition from a certain pre-
dominant type alleged to be found in the plays.
Mr. Harris contended that if Shakespeare's many
creations were placed side by side, it would be
observed that one special type came over and over
again, and this type, which the poet found most
interesting and has therefore made the most perfect, ,
88 SHAKESPEARE
must, he argues, have been drawn from himself.
Just as Rembrandt painted his own portrait at all
the critical periods of his life, so, it is alleged, did
Shakespeare. He painted it first as a youth given
over to love's dominion, in Romeo ; a little later, as
a melancholy onlooker at life's pageant, in Jaques ;
then in middle age, as an " cxsthcte-philosopher " of
kindliest nature in Hamlet and Macbeth ; after that
as the Duke, incapable of severity, in " Measure for
Measure " ; and finally, idealised out of all likeness
to humanity, in the master-magician Duke Prospero.
As a result of an examination of these several
portraits Mr. Harris pronounces Shakespeare to have
been, in personal disposition, of a contemplative,
philosophical nature, of great intellectual fairness and
great kindness of heart ; but, on the other hand,
incapable of severity and almost of action, of a
feminine, sensual temperament, melancholy, soft-
fibred, neuropathic. It is a portrait which has been
much praised ; and as a tour deforce it would be diffi-
cult to praise it too highly ; but the point of interest
to us is not whether it is a clever picture, but
whether it is a true likeness. I do not think
much subtlety will be required to show that it
is not. We must first ask what it is, which all these
characters have in common, that makes our critic so
sure that they are all portraits of the same person.
The answer is that they are all persons given to
reflection, to self-revelation, to pouring out their
dissatisfaction with life, and unpacking their hearts
SHAKESPEARE 89
in words, and moreover all persons who do so in
incomparable lyric poetry, so that we are sure the
voice must be the authentic voice of Shakespeare.
It will be worth while to look for a moment at one
or two of these pictures which are thus presented to
us as the portraits of the artist himself. On Romeo
we need not stay, he is young and a lover, and
Shakespeare had undoubtedly been both ; moreover
Romeo has imagination, like Shakespeare ; but when
we have added that he was brave and somewhat im-
pulsive, we have noted all his salient characteristics ;
for " Romeo and Juliet" is not in its chief interest a
play of character ; the tragic element does not come
out of the characters of either hero or heroine ; they
are but the " most precious among many precious
things " which have to be made a sacrifice of, in
order that the bloody feud between the Montagues
and Capulets may be healed. But when from
Romeo we pass to " the melancholy " Jaques, we
may fairly protest against the identification of
Shakespeare with him and his view of life. Jaques
is a sentimental egotist, and a rhetorical rhapsodiser,
who enjoys and parades a philosophic melancholy.
We know that Shakespeare did not mean us to
admire Jaques's melancholy, because he makes all
the healthy- minded people in the play, one after
another, laugh at it. And what do the philosophical
reflections amount to ? There is the satirical speech
upon society suggested by the wounded deer, and
the Duke tells Jaques frankly that satire is an
90 SHAKESPEARE
unhealthy form of employment ; and there is the
speech, which every child learns, about the seven
ages of man, a beautifully written commonplace, but
not in Shakespeare's vein. Never does Shakespeare
when he speaks in his own person in the Sonnets,
and never does he (as I believe) through the
lips of the characters with whom he sympathises,
pity or despise human life as such ; never does
he speak of it as merely a stage play ; there are
plenty of things in life which disgust and weary
him ; but he does not say " All the world's a
stage." Jaques says that. If Shakespeare, as
one tradition asserts, himself played the part of
Adam, he would enter on Orlando's shoulders after
the delivery of this speech, no doubt amid the roar
of the theatre which had greeted it, and not, I think,
without a smile at such uncritical applause. The
next portrait is Hamlet, and in finding in Hamlet's
mouth hints of the poet's own view of things, our
critic is only following a commonly received and
justifiable opinion. The Sonnets afford not a few
parallels. But the very fact that Hamlet is made
the hero of a tragedy implies that the dramatist is
viewing his character with not entirely approving
eyes. In no tragedy after "Romeo and Juliet" is
the hero merely the victim of circumstances, there
is always something in his own character which
involves him in catastrophe, and without going into
detail it is sufficiently clear that the root of trouble
in Hamlet's case is just this brooding melancholy
SHAKESPEARE 9I
which renders him incapable of action except upon
sudden impulse. I would urge, therefore, that if we
find Shakespeare holding up one kind of reflective
melancholy to ridicule in " As You Like It," and
showing the fatal consequences of another kind in
" Hamlet," the most we could infer would be that
he felt in himself the temptation to that infirmity.
But all that we know of his outward life gives the
opposite impression. At this point, then, I shall
take leave to consider that the method of discover-
ing Shakespeare's character by identifying him with
this and that of his dramatis personcs has broken
down, without going on to discuss his likeness to
Macbeth or the Duke in " Measure for Measure,"
about whom I wish to say a word presently in
another connection, or to Prospero, who has no
very clearly defined characteristic but that of
benignity.
If we are to reach any results, we must frame
our interrogation in a somewhat different form, and
ask what light we can get from the plays not
directly upon Shakespeare's character, but on his
view of life, and his opinions on men and things.
And one answer at once suggests itself from what
has been already said. We can observe the senti-
ments put into the mouths of those characters with
whom we are plainly meant to sympathise, and
contrast them with those that are put into the
mouths of other characters with whom we are
meant not to sympathise. This is a consideration
92 SHAKESPEARE
sufficiently obvious, but it is too often neglected,
although it is of the utmost importance to the
interpretation of the dramas. There are many little
books made to sell for presents which collect what
are called the beauties of Shakespeare ; but very
rarely in such books do we find any discrimination
as to the character of the person who makes the
speech that is scheduled as a beauty. I have already
commented on Jaques's opinion that " all the world's
a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
Take for another example the saying of Hamlet
which is sometimes a little thoughtlessly quoted :
" There's a divinity doth shape our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."
Could any one quote this as the opinion of Shake-
speare himself who remembered that it is Hamlet
who says it, by way of excuse for his own malady of
alternate laissez-faire and sudden impulse ? On the
other hand, the sentiments that have passed, and
rightly passed, into the spiritual currency of the
English people will always be found put into the
mouth of characters with whom, in the action,
the poet is in sympathy ; and if we collect a few of
these, such as the passage beginning " Sweet are the
uses of adversity," or
" There is some soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distil it out,"
or
" If our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not,"
SHAKESPEARE 93
they suggest to us an outlook upon the world bright,
hopeful, and stirring ; not that of a dreamy, melan-
choly, sentimental neuropath ; they present a view
which is consistent with the picture we obtain from
the story of Shakespeare's life, of a man who worked
hard in his calling, and of whom his professional
comrades could speak with respect and affection : " I
loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this
side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest,
and of an open and free nature."
But we can get back to something in the dramas
more fundamental and more self- revealing than any
isolated sentiments. We can observe the way in
which Shakespeare viewed his world of men as a
whole ; what interested him in it ; the general idea
he had formed of human nature and its possibilities ;
his opinion of where human success lay and what
constituted failure. We can put the question, what
sort of place did the world seem to Shakespeare to
be ? It is quite clear that there was a great deal in
the world that filled him with disgust ; the Sonnets
tell us that : — " Tired of all these, from these would
I be gone " ; but they tell us also how much there was
in the world that he admired and loved ; and the
more serious plays show us unmistakably that Shake-
speare held it to be man's business not to yield to
the evil, but to fight it with wisdom and endurance.
One point that most strikes us is that Shakespeare
looked upon the world as a moral order. Men and
women, as Shakespeare saw and drew them, are
94 SHAKESPEARE
always creatures exercising freedom of will. In the
writings of some other dramatists, the persons of their
dramas are sometimes represented as the sport of the
higher powers ; but in the world that Shakespeare's
art mirrors for us, there is no such thing as a man
driven upon evil courses by fate ; the spring of
each man's action is seen to lie in his own desires ;
he may do or leave undone. He may apparently
be helped or hindered by principalities and powers
of worlds invisible ; but he cannot be moved by
them to action against his will. The " weird sisters "
who appear to Macbeth cannot bear the blame of his
crime, or share it, because they appeared also to his
fellow-captain Banquo, who shook off their sugges-
tion ; and Hamlet's ghost, who visits his son, is
powerless to touch the springs of his will. And
Shakespeare's world is a moral world in the further
sense that its men and women are people with
consciences ; who recognise the Tightness or wrong-
ness of actions, and the law of duty. The only one
of Shakespeare's writings which takes a merely
sensual view of human nature is the poem of " Venus
and Adonis " ; which is extraordinarily interesting,
from our present point of view, as the first visible
effect upon Shakespeare's mind of the Renaissance
culture with which he came in contact in London,
a culture partly euphuistic, partly classical, and
wholly unmoral. The effect unmistakably, for
the time, was a complete surrender to the doctrine
of what a later age has known as that of " art for
SHAKESPEARE 95
art's sake " ; which means that any passion of
which human nature is capable is suitable for
representation, if only it is " as lively painted
as the deed was done " ; with a preference in
practice for the lower nature over the higher.
Happily Shakespeare found a valuable corrective
to this view of art in his work as a dramatist ; and
the second poem he produced, a year after the
first, though equally upon a classical theme, was
on a less animal plane of interest, and admitted
such human conceptions as honour and virtue.
And ever after it was this higher nature of men
that remained to Shakespeare the point of chief
interest. We see this most plainly in the tragedies.
The purpose and meaning of Shakespeare's tragic
art has been much discussed of late, and it is not
a question on which I wish to dogmatise ; but at
least this seems true to say, that while it magnifies
the dignity and interest of human action by giving
it the most painstaking study, it yet aims at show-
ing how the greatest among men might be brought
to ruin, if only the circumstances of life were so
contrived as to give opportunity and scope to
their errors and defects. In his tragedies Shake-
speare contrives for his heroes just the circum-
stances which shall press upon their weak places,
and test them to the uttermost. The tragedy of
Hamlet, or Brutus, or Macbeth, or Othello, or
Antony, if it is not the tragedy of a noble and a
spiritual nature, is nothing at all. There is no reason
96 SHAKESPEARE
why the play should have been written. And if wc
are justified in drawing conclusions as to the char-
acter of a man from a survey of his interests, the
light that the Shakespearian tragedies throw back
upon the character of their writer is singularly bright
and clear. Take, for example, the tragedy of Ham-
let. A philosophical young prince, of a melancholy
habit, finds an obligation laid upon him to avenge
his father's murder. In any world, except the par-
ticular world that the poet has contrived for him, he
might have lived a quiet life among his books; doing
little active good perhaps, cither speculatively or
practically ; but certainly doing no harm. But he
has a task set him by an authority to which he
cannot but own allegiance, that of purging the realm
of a monster ; and the dramatist has shown us in a
crucial instance the tragedy of a brooding intellect
divorced from will, of the habit of thinking about
duties until we think them away. Or take Brutus
in "Julius Caesar." Here again there is question of
a student called to action. But the defect of Brutus
is not in will, but in practical judgment. In the
sacred name of liberty Brutus assassinates the real
saviour of society, and lets loose upon his country the
horrors of civil war. In moral purpose his stature is
heroic ; he means the best ; and yet so far is this
from atoning for his want ot msight mto men s real
dispositions and the needs of the time, that at point
after point his moral prestige but renders his want of
wisdom the more fatal. Here then are two pictures of
SHAKESPEARE 97
great and lovable men, with weaknesses of character
such as in everyday life we are perfectly familiar with,
and readily excuse ; and Shakespeare teaches us that
these defects need only their fit occasion and full
development, to overwhelm in ruin the nature that
owns them and all who are drawn within the circle of
their influence. I venture to think, then, that we are
justified in drawing a very definite conclusion as to
the disposition of the man who penned these two
plays. They show us his high esteem for nobility of
character — Hamlet and Brutus are men of a high
nobility whom we are taught to love — and they show
us also his strong sense of the claim the world has
upon the highest powers of the men who are born
into it.
But from our present point of view, the tragedy
of " Macbeth " is an even better example of Shake-
speare's tragic stage, because it directly repudiates
an accusation that might perhaps be made against
the dramatist, of taking a merely aesthetic view
of human life ; contemplating it from some lofty
tower of his palace of art. .For in Macbeth we
have a man in whom this aesthetic appreciation of
human life is developed to an extraordinary degree.
Macbeth is a poet. He has a fine and keen and
true appreciation of all the situations in which he
finds himself, except from the one point of view
which under his temptations would have been worth
all the rest to him, and which his unimaginative
fellow Banquo has : the point of view from which
H
98 SHAKESPEARE
actions are judged as simply right or wrong. As we
read the soHloquy in which he debates the suggested
murder of Duncan, we notice that the considerations
which make him hesitate are, in the main, aesthetic
considerations ; that it is unbecoming in a man's
kinsman, or host or subject, to kill him ; there is
no question of any sin in murder. And of every
succeeding event in his life he is, from the aesthetic
point of view, equally appreciative ; just as he enjoys
popularity and on that score is almost willing to
refrain from murder, so he understands that the old
age to which a usurper can look forward cannot be
surrounded " with honour, love, obedience, troops of
friends " ; and when, just before the last, he learns
his wife's death, he speaks with the same just
appraisement the epitaph of the life they have
lived together since their great sin, the epitaph of
the non-moral life, seeing in it a mere succession of
days with no goal but death, and therefore no real
meaning.
" To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time ;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow ; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
And then is heard no more ; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing."
Could there be a better commentary on the
dramatist's own view of life, than this passionate
SHAKESPEARE 99
judgment of the futility of the life Macbeth had
elected to live ?
Let us turn for a moment to the comedies, and
see if we can glean any light from them upon what
Shakespeare liked or disliked in men and women.
It seems to me not a little significant that two at
least of the defective types of character which he
handles in the tragedies, he handles over again in
the comedies, only in the comedy he treats them as
they are found not in heroic natures, but in ordinary
specimens of humanity, and in circumstances that
lead to a much milder form of catastrophe. I have
already suggested a comparison between Jaques and
Hamlet, each of whom makes the unwarrantable
claim to moralise upon life from the outside with-
out taking part in it. In the nobler nature the
claim is handled tragically, in the shallower it is
rebuked by Rosalind's fine wit. But there is also
some sort of a parallel with Marcus Brutus. The
self-satisfaction of Malvolio in " Twelfth Night,"
looked at by itself, is very much the same quality as
the self-satisfaction of Brutus : the lives of both pass
in a dream, neither is in touch with the real world ;
and — it is a curious point —both are snared to their
ruin by the same trick of a forged letter so contrived
as to fall in with their dreams. But the interest of
the comedies, for our present investigation, lies in
this, that they present us not only with criticism, but
with a positive ideal ; and this Shakespeare gives us
in his women. The creator of Portia, and Rosalind,
100 SHAKESrEARE
and Beatrice, had, we are convinced, a very clear
ideal in his own mind of the sort of life that men
and women should pursue, a life of sound sense as
opposed to folly, and goodness as opposed to vice.
There is one other point I should like to draw
attention to in Shakespeare's comedies because I
think it is characteristic of the man ; of his justice
and tolerance. While he keeps his ideal perfectly
clear, and we are never, I believe, for a moment
in doubt as to his own judgment upon his characters,
he is not afraid of allowing traits of real goodness to
persons who on other accounts are exposed to our
censure. Take Sir Toby for example. There is no
denying that he is a terrible toper, and Shakespeare
does not make us in love with his drunkenness ; but
Shakespeare does let us see that in the drunkard the
gentleman is not quite extinct. It will be remem-
bered that the disguised Viola, being mistaken for
her brother Sebastian, is charged by Antonio with
denying her benefactor his own purse. This so
horrifies Sir Toby that he draws his friends aside,
and will have nothing more to do with the youth,
"A very dishonest, paltry boy," he calls him. It is
this perfectly firm but perfectly equitable and all-
round judgment on points of character that is so
wonderful in the plays, and it is a mere caricature to
assert, as some critics have asserted, that Shake-
speare was merely easy-going on points of morals.
Indeed, in one famous case, it might be better
pleaded that he was too severe a moralist. I
SHAKESPEARE 101'
imagine everyone feels a shock when'at'-tHe end -cJf'
" Henry IV." he comes upon the new king's sermon
to his old boon-companion Falstaff. " I know thee
not, old man ; fall to thy prayers." It may have
been, as has been eloquently maintained,' that Shake-
speare had made Prince Hal, from the first, a bit of
a prig, and knew he would preach when the chance
came. Nevertheless Falstaff's misfortune may also
be due to the fact that he comes into a historical
play instead of a pure comedy. In " The Merry
Wives of Windsor," Falstaff, notwithstanding his
enormities — and Shakespeare needs all the excuse
of a Royal Command for the way he has degraded
him— meets no further punishment than the jeers of
his would-be victims ; it is sufficient in comedy that
faults should be judged by laughter. Nobody wants
Sir Toby put on the black list as a tippler, or
Autolycus sent to gaol for filching linen from the
hedges. But when the world of comedy touches
the real world, as in " Henry IV." and " Henry V.,"
social offences have to meet social punishment, and
so we have not only Falstaff exiled from court
and dying of a broken heart, but poor Nym and
Bardolph hanged for stealing in the wars.
The question of Shakespeare's religion is too large
and difficult to be discussed at the end of an essay,^
' By Mr. A. C. Bradley, author of " Shakespearean Tragedy,"
my tutor at college, qiiein honoris causa noinino.
-' I have done my best to settle the question as between Papist and
Protestant in the Stratford Head Shakespea/'e, vol. x.
> > >
102 SHAKESPEARE
hu'>: I sKoald like lo say a word about his supposed
hatred and abuse of Puritans. This is one of the
fixed ideas of the very meritorious Hfe of Shake-
speare by Dr. Brandes. "From 'Twelfth Night'
onwards," he says, "an unremitting war against
Puritanism, conceived as hypocrisy, is carried on
through ' Hamlet,' through the revised version ol
' All's Well that Ends Well,' and through ' Measure
for Measure,' in which his wrath rises to a tem-
pestuous pitch " (p. 240). We turn to " Twelfth
Night " and find this : Maria says of Malvolio—
" Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan " ;
to which Sir Andrew replies, " O, if I thought that,
I'd beat him like a dog."
" Sir Joby. What, for being a Puritan ! thy exquisite
reason, good knighl ?
"5/> Andrew. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I
have reason good enough.
" Maria. The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything
constantly but a timc-pleaser."
Now, surely, that passage might have been intro-
duced in defence of Puritans rather than in scorn of
them. Sir Andrew takes the tone of courtier-like
contempt, and Sir Toby asks him to explain ; and
he cannot. Then Maria retracts the name, and says
Malvolio can't be a Puritan because he isn't con-
scientious. The reference in " Hamlet " turns out to
be Hamlet's saying " A great man's memory may
outlive half his life, but by'r lady he must build
SHAKESPEARE IO3
churches then," but the oath hy'r lady is proof enough
that no one in the audience would take a reference
to the Puritans. In " All's Well," that most dis-
agreeable of all Shakespeare's plays, I believe one of
the earliest he wrote, which even his revision in the
Hamlet period could not cure, the Clown indeed
makes some unsavoury jests, but he blunts their edge
by dividing them equally between Papist and
Puritan ; and I should say that to find in " Measure
for Measure " an attack on Puritanism is entirely to
misconceive that play. The heroine of the play
is Isabella, and if Isabella is not a Puritan after
Milton's strong type, what is she ? Dr. Brandes
does not indeed assert that Shakespeare wrote the
play in the interest of Pompey and Mistress Over-
done ; but that he wrote it in the interest of King
James, who was already coming to blows with
Puritanism, wishing to defend his indifference to
immorality. When questions are raised as to the
general ideas underlying a play, the appeal must be
to the general impression it makes on the indifferent
spectator ; but apart from that, as conclusive against
Dr. Brandes' view, it seems sufficient to point to the
scene in the first act where the Duke confesses to
Friar Thomas that he had been too remiss, and
again to such a speech as this at the end of the
play :
" My business in this state
Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,
Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble
Till it o'errun the stew."
I04 SHAKESPEARE
If Shakespeare had strong opinions about the
Hamlets of the world not bestirring themselves
to do their duty in it, \vc may e^uess that his
view extended to reigning princes, though as to
them he had to express himself with some re-
serve.
In one word then, if I am asked how we can
get behind Shakespeare's writing to the man him-
self, I should sa)', we must ask ourselves what
is the impression left on our mind after a care-
ful reading of any play ; because that will be
Shakespeare's mind speaking to ours. And I can-
not think the general impression we thus gather
from the great volume of the poet's work is at
all a vague one.
He could paint passion, whether in a Cleopatra or
a Lear, as no other dramatist has painted it, but he
does not impress us as himself passionate by nature.
Rather, we are conscious all through the plays of
the allied graces of gentleness and manliness. There
is in them a clear outlook upon life, both on its
good and its evil ; a strong sense that, however
the evil came about (and there were times when
it seemed overwhelming), yet that the good must
fight it ; and at the same time there is a gentleness
that is prepared to acknowledge good in unexpected
places, and is read)' to forgive.
Ur\lVhKSllY Ut CALlfUKINlA LlbKAKY
Los Angeles
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t^UN 5 1953
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