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 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 AND HIS FELLOWS
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 AN ATTEMPT TO DECIPHER 
 THE MAN AND HIS NATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 THE RIGHT HON. D. H. MADDEN, 
 
 M.A., HON. LL.D., HON. LITT.D. 
 
 VICE-CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'THE DIARY OF MASTER WILLIAM SILENCE A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 
 AND OF ELIZABETHAN SPORT " 
 
 
 
 NEW 
 
 YORK 
 
 E. 
 
 p. 
 
 DUTTON 
 
 AND COMPANY 
 
 
 
 681 FIFTH 
 
 AVENUE 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 16 
 
 
 > \ 
 1 * -. 
 
 \_AU rights 
 
 • 
 • 
 
 reserved.']
 
 Prinlt • in Gtcat Britain
 
 2<i// 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 12 
 
 54 
 
 9i 
 114 
 
 137 
 
 170 
 
 237 
 
 1
 
 • * 1 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 ' All that we know of Shakespeare is that he 
 was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married, and 
 had children there ; went to London, where he 
 commenced actor, and wrote plays and poems ; 
 returned to Stratford, made his will, and died.' 
 These words, written by Steevens, served for 
 more than a century as a fair summary of the 
 events in the life of Shakespeare, so far as they 
 were then known. But the pious labours of 
 succeeding generations have added so much to 
 our stock of knowledge that a presentment of the 
 life of Shakespeare is now possible, not, indeed, 
 complete in all respects, but far in advance 
 of earlier efforts. ' An investigation extending 
 over two centuries has brought together a mass 
 of detail which far exceeds that accessible in the 
 case of any other contemporary professional 
 writer.' It is not probable that any important 
 addition will be made in the future to our know-
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 ledge of the facts of the life of Shakespeare, or 
 that they will be piet-ciued with better effect 
 than by Sir Sidue) Lee in the great work from 
 which these words are taken.* 
 
 Shakespeare's life was the uneventful life of a 
 successful player and dramatist. His greatness, 
 unlike that of a commander or statesman, did 
 not depend on the happening of great events. 
 But great events are not those from which we 
 derive the clearest insight into character. The 
 object which the Father of Biography set before 
 him in writing the life of a great man was to 
 1 decipher the man and his nature,' and he thus 
 explains his omission to record some facts of 
 historical interest : ' For the noblest deeds do 
 not alwaies shew mens vertues and vices, but 
 oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, 
 makes mens naturall dispositions and maners 
 appeare more plaine than the famous battels 
 won, wherein are slaine ten thousand men ; or 
 the great armies, or cities won by siege or 
 assault.' f The student of Plutarch's Life of 
 Alexander the Great would not have been 
 enabled by it to give an account of the battles 
 of the Granicus and of Issus, or to show how these 
 
 * A Life of William Shakespeare, by Sir Sidney Lee. New 
 edition, 1915. 
 
 f Plutarch's Lives, Sir Thomas North's version {Life of 
 Alexander).
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 fields were won. But he could give an answer to 
 this question : What manner of man was he who 
 did these great things ? 
 
 It was by following in the footsteps of the 
 master that Boswell won the first place among 
 his disciples. No occasion was too light, no 
 word too trivial, no sport too insignificant 
 to be recorded by him, and so it came to 
 pass that Johnson, in the words of Macaulay, 
 ' is better known to us than any other man in 
 history.' 
 
 In Shakespeare's time biographies were not 
 written, and the instinct to which we owe the 
 modern interview was as yet undeveloped. We 
 have no contemporary account of Shakespeare 
 such as Boswell wrote of Johnson, and Lockhart 
 of Scott. But there were among his fellows and 
 contemporaries men greater than Boswell or 
 Lockhart, who, with others of lesser account, 
 wrote and spoke of Shakespeare many things 
 which aid us in attaining to some understanding 
 of the nature and character of a man who was 
 well known to them. 
 
 The industry of the last half century has 
 ransacked the plays, poems, and pamphlets of 
 his age in search of references to Shakespeare, 
 or to his work. The result is embodied in a 
 goodly volume published by the New Shakespere 
 
 B 2
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Society in 1874.* From Spenser's Colin Clouts 
 Come Home Again in 1591 to Ben Jonson's 
 Discoveries in 1641, the references collected in 
 this volume in number exceed one hundred and 
 twenty. They are, for the most part, notices 
 of the writings of Shakespeare, of no special 
 value. But some are of a more personal interest, 
 and among those from whose writings they are 
 collected are Shakespeare's fellow dramatists — 
 Nash, Dekker, Peele, Greene, Drayton, Chettle 
 and Fletcher. 
 
 Shakespeare became a member of a company 
 of players at the most interesting period of the 
 history of the stage. The occupation of player 
 was just assuming the character of a profession. 
 To the profession of actor Shakespeare was 
 loyally constant throughout his life, and his 
 chosen friends and associates are found among 
 his fellow players. It is due to the overpowering 
 interest which attaches itself to everything con- 
 nected with Shakespeare, rather than to mere 
 love of antiquarian or historical research, that 
 we are now in possession of a mass of informa- 
 tion, not only as to the condition of the stage 
 
 • Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse ; being materials for a history 
 of opinion on Shakespeare and his works. A.D. 1 59 1 — 1693, by 
 C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. Second edition by Lucy Toulmin Smith, 
 1879. ' AH is not " Prayse " that is celebrated in the ensuing 
 pages : but the prevailing character of the parts may fairly be allowed 
 to the whole.' (Forespeech to the first edition.)
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 in his time, but as to the lives and characters of 
 the individual players with whom he was more 
 particularly connected. Some questions we 
 should gladly ask of these players, and of the 
 brilliant band of University wits who had pre- 
 pared the way for the coming of Shakespeare. 
 We cannot go to them, and they cannot come to 
 us, and many questions to be asked must remain 
 for ever unanswered. But from what has been 
 recorded of the fellow players and fellow 
 dramatists of Shakespeare, from their relations 
 with him, and from what was said and written 
 by them, some assistance may be gained towards 
 supplying an answer to the questions which we 
 would ask. Some things deserving of note may 
 also be gleaned from Shakespeare's relations with 
 his family, and with his neighbours at Stratford. 
 
 Spenser, Marlowe and Ben Jonson are the 
 greatest names in the most interesting period of 
 our literary history. These men were in a special 
 sense the fellows of Shakespeare — fellow poets 
 or fellow dramatists. These pages have been 
 written in the hope that from a study of the 
 lives and characters of these great men, and of 
 their associations with Shakespeare, some aid 
 may be obtained in deciphering the man and 
 his nature. 
 
 The word ' fellow ' in the ear of Shakespeare 
 
 5
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 had a significance which it has since then lost. 
 He would have understood it to mean ' one that 
 is associated with another in habitual or tem- 
 porary companionship ; a companion, associate, 
 comrade.' This sense of the word, usual in the 
 time of Shakespeare and the next succeeding 
 age, is noted in the New English Dictionary as 
 ' now rare.' It is in this sense that the word 
 was used by Shakespeare in his will, and it is 
 in this sense that the word is employed in these 
 pages. No one of Shakespeare's contemporaries 
 is here accounted as his fellow, unless he is 
 shown to have been, in some manner, personally 
 associated with him. Bacon and Burleigh were 
 contemporaries, but no link has been discovered 
 associating either of them with the man Shake- 
 speare. According to Ben Jonson, the flights of 
 the swan of Avon ' did take Eliza and our 
 James,' and favour and patronage were extended 
 to Shakespeare by Southampton and by the 
 noblemen to whom the First Folio was dedi- 
 cated. But patronage is not fellowship, and to 
 find the fellows of Shakespeare we must mix with 
 the dramatists, players and poets of the age, 
 and with those of his family and friends among 
 whom his life was spent, and in finding them we 
 may find something of the man of whom we are 
 in search. 
 
 6
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 For our present purpose it may be noted with 
 satisfaction that when his contemporaries speak 
 of Shakespeare what they tell us relates to the 
 man rather than to his writings. In their 
 notices of Shakespeare we find nothing of the 
 profound literary criticism, the work of Shake- 
 spearian scholars at home and abroad, by which 
 his works have been illuminated. For the 
 attainment of a knowledge of Shakespeare, 
 poet and dramatist, it is not necessary to ap- 
 peal to his fellows and contemporaries. Nothing 
 more is needed than a careful and intelli- 
 gent study of what he has written, in view 
 of the literature, the history, and social con- 
 dition of his age. But a true instinct, born not 
 of mere curiosity, but of gratitude, impels us to 
 go further, and to attempt to discover something 
 of the man who bestowed upon humanity this 
 priceless gift. And so attempts have been made 
 to decipher the man Shakespeare and his nature 
 by a study of what he has written. These 
 attempts have ended in uncertainty, and there- 
 fore in failure. It is true that an artist must 
 of necessity put something of himself into the 
 works of his art. But when his work takes the 
 form of drama, the difficulty of discovering 
 the personality of the artist is greatest. The 
 medium in which he works is dialogue, and 
 
 7
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 the nearer the dialogue approaches to perfection 
 in expressing the character of the speaker, the 
 more effectually the personality of the artist is 
 concealed. 
 
 Some things about Shakespeare may be 
 known with certainty from what he has written. 
 Bagehot, in his essay ' Shakespeare — the Man,' 
 quoting from Venus and Adonis the description 
 of the hare hunt, writes : ' It is absurd by the 
 way to say we know nothing about the man that 
 wrote that : we know that he had been after a 
 hare.' We may conclude from his constant 
 habit of attributing to the characters in his plays 
 thoughts of field sports and horsemanship, that 
 these things were dear to his heart. But men 
 of the most opposite natures and characters 
 have been fond of sport and of horses, and, 
 beyond the exclusion of dispositions of a certain 
 kind, we get no nearer to a knowledge of the man. 
 We may, with Professor Dowden, follow the 
 development of the mind and art of Shakespeare. 
 We may at one time rest with him in the forest 
 of Ardcn ; at another we may note that he had 
 bade farewell to mirth; and, after the tragic period, 
 we may realise ' the pathetic yet august serenity 
 of Shakespeare's final period.' It is a study of 
 the deepest interest, and of great assistance in 
 arriving at a full understanding of what was 
 
 8
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 written in each of these periods. But these 
 were varying moods of one and the same man, 
 and we feel assured that if the question, What 
 manner of man is this your fellow, Master 
 Shakespeare ? had been put to Ben Jonson 
 or to Heming and Condell, the answer would 
 have been the same throughout his varying 
 moods, and at each stage of his intellectual 
 development. 
 
 But Shakespeare was not only a dramatist. 
 He was a poet whose thoughts found expression 
 in the form of the sonnet. Here again the 
 inquirer after the man is baffled, and from a 
 study of the Elizabethan sonnet he may rise 
 with the feeling that if Shakespeare's design in 
 writing his sonnets had been the mystification of 
 posterity, and the concealment of the identity 
 of the writer, he could not have chosen a more 
 effectual method of carrying out his purpose. 
 If, distrusting his judgment, he were to have 
 recourse to critics who by the aid of poetic in- 
 stinct might have power to solve the mystery 
 by which he has been baffled, his perplexity is 
 not lessened when he is told by Wordsworth : 
 ' With this key Shakespeare unlocked his 
 heart.' For while he is considering which among 
 the many and different kinds of hearts unlocked 
 
 9
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 in the sonnets ought to be attributed to Shake- 
 speare, he reads in Browning 
 
 With this same key 
 Shakespeare unlocked his heart ' once more.' 
 Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he. 
 
 In the end he may be content to accept the sober 
 conclusion in which Sir Sidney Lee sums up the 
 result of an exhaustive examination of the 
 sonnets of the Elizabethan age. ' Most of 
 Shakespeare's " sonnets " were produced under 
 the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnet- 
 eering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweep- 
 ing over France on its way to England, absorbed 
 for some half-dozen years in this country a 
 greater volume of literary energy than has been 
 applied to sonneteering within the same space 
 of time here or elsewhere before or since. . . . 
 Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experi- 
 ence inspired few Elizabethan sonnets, and no 
 literary historian can accept the claim which 
 has been preferred on behalf of Shakespeare's 
 " sonnets " to be at all points a self-evident 
 exception to the general rule. A personal note 
 may have escaped the poet involuntarily in the 
 sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of 
 melancholy and remorse, but Shakespeare's 
 dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no 
 
 10
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 proof that he is doing more there than produce 
 dramatically the illusion of a personal con- 
 fession.' * 
 
 The attempt to discover the man Shakespeare 
 in what he has written is never a fruitless search, 
 for the means by which it is prosecuted is a 
 careful study and thorough understanding of his 
 works. But if a definite result is to be attained, 
 there must be called in aid such information as 
 may be obtained from the men among whom 
 Shakespeare lived, moved and had his being. 
 What has been collected in these pages may be 
 no more than, here and there, ' a light occasion, 
 a word, or some sport,' but these things may 
 serve to make the man's ' naturall dispositions 
 and maners appeare more plaine than ' his most 
 famous achievements ; his Hamlet, his Lear, his 
 Othello, and his As You Like It. 
 
 * Life of Shakespeare, p. 229. 
 
 II
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 Shakespeare left Stratford for London in 
 the year 1586, as is commonly supposed. The 
 earliest reference to him that has been brought 
 to light was written in the year 1 591 . It is 
 from the pen of Edmund Spenser. 
 
 In the autumn of 1589 Spenser left his Irish 
 home for London, where he stayed for about two 
 years. He had come to Ireland in 1580 as 
 secretary to Arthur Lord Grey, of Wilton. In 
 1588 he obtained by purchase the post of clerk 
 of the Munstcr Council. He had already 
 acquired a grant of some forfeited lands in the 
 county of Cork, on which was the castle of 
 Kilcolman, an ancient scat of the Desmonds. 
 Here he settled on taking up the duties of his 
 office. 
 
 In the autumn of 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh was 
 living in the same county at Youghal, where the 
 visitor may find his house, reverently preserved, 
 and the garden where the potato first grew in 
 Irish soil. An intimacy had sprung up between 
 Raleigh and Spenser. Disappointed in love, and 
 debarred from the society which he had enjoyed 
 
 12
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 in London, and afterwards, as we shall see in 
 Dublin, Spenser was living with a sister in the 
 lonely castle of Kilcolman.* His relations with 
 his neighbours, so far as we know of them, were 
 not satisfactory. A dispute with a powerful 
 neighbour, Maurice Viscount Roche of Fermoy, 
 had involved him in long and harassing litigation. 
 Raleigh brought with him a welcome gleam of 
 hope and encouragement. He found Spenser 
 at work on the Faerie Queene, of which the first 
 three books were completed. Raleigh admired 
 the work, and sympathised with the loneliness 
 and desolation that had fallen to the lot of the 
 poet. He counselled Spenser to go with him 
 to London, where his work might be brought 
 out under the patronage of Elizabeth. In the 
 words of the poem in which Spenser tells the 
 tale of his stay in London, Raleigh 
 
 Gan to cast great lyking to my lore, 
 
 And great disliking to my luckless lot 
 
 That banisht had my selfe like wight forlore 
 
 Into that waste where I was quite forgot. 
 
 The which to leave thenceforth he counseld me, 
 
 Unmeet for man in whom was aught regarded, 
 
 And wend with him his Cynthia to see ; 
 
 Whose grace was great, and bounty most rewardfull. 
 
 * Sarah Spenser married John Travers, a member of a Lancashire 
 family, who held some office in Munster. Many of their descendants 
 are living in County Cork, and in other parts of Ireland. 
 
 13
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 The visit to London was successful. The first 
 three books of the Faerie Queene were brought 
 out under the patronage of Elizabeth, and, what 
 is more to our present purpose, Spenser spent 
 two years in the company of the most famous 
 wits and beauties of the day, and formed at 
 least one friendship which endured until it was 
 closed by death. 
 
 Spenser returned to Kilcolman some time 
 before the 27th of December, 1 591 , for on that 
 day he addressed to Raleigh the ' simple 
 pastorall,' in which he tells the story of his 
 visit to London. In Colin Clouts Come Home 
 Again, the shepherds of The Shepheards Calendar 
 reappear. Colin (Spenser), at the request of 
 Hobbinol (Gabriel Harvey), describes to them 
 what he saw and how he fared at the Court of 
 Cynthia (Elizabeth). The Shepheard of the 
 Ocean (Raleigh) inclined the ear of Cynthia to 
 Colin's oaten pipe, in which she 
 
 Gan take delight 
 And it desired at timely houres to heare. 
 
 Colin then tells the listeners of the Shepheards 
 who were ' in faithful service of faire Cynthia.' 
 The poem is full of the pastoral conceits then in 
 vogue. But there are passages of true poetic 
 beauty, and Spenser's estimate of the poets of 
 
 14
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 his time is intended to be taken seriously. ' I 
 make you a present,' he writes in his dedication 
 to Raleigh, ' of this simple Pastorall, unworthie 
 of your higher conceipt for the meanesse of the 
 stile, but agreeing with the truth in the circum- 
 stance and matter.' 
 
 The circumstances of his journey to London 
 by sea and by land, and his reception by the 
 Queen, are truthfully told, and we may accept 
 as likewise truthful the matter of the poem ; his 
 estimate of the poets whom he had met. 
 «* Raleigh could have had no difficulty in dis- 
 cerning the poets disguised under the names of 
 Harpalus, Corydon, Alcyon, Palemon, and Amyn- 
 tas ; and we need not concern ourselves with 
 the less effectual efforts of commentators. Three 
 or four of the Shepherds are identified beyond 
 doubt. The 'Shepherd of the Ocean' is Raleigh. 
 Alabaster and Daniel are mentioned by name. 
 
 Of another he writes 
 
 And there, though last not least, is Aetion ; 
 A gentler shepherd may no where be found, 
 Whose Muse, full of high thoughts invention 
 Doth like himself heroically sound. 
 
 Shakespeare is not addressed by name, as 
 Alabaster and Daniel are. But the reference 
 to a name that did ' heroically sound ' is 
 unmistakable. To no other poet of the day is 
 
 15
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 this play upon his name applicable. That 
 Shakespeare is here described under the name of 
 Aetion, ' a familiar Greek proper name derived 
 from Aerog,' Sir Sidney Lee regards as ' hardly 
 doubtful,' and this conclusion is now generally 
 adopted. The temptation presented by the 
 martial sound of Shakespeare's name was found 
 irresistible by others than Spenser. ' The war- 
 like sound of his surname (whence some may 
 conjecture him of a military extraction), Hasti- 
 vibrans or Shakespeare,' suggests to Fuller a 
 comparison with Martial.* William Winstanlcy 
 writes : ' In Mr. Shakespeare, the glory of the 
 English stage, three eminent poets may seem in 
 some sort to be compounded. Martial, in the 
 warlike sound of his surname, Ovid, the most 
 natural and witty of all poets, and Plautus, a 
 very exact comedian, and yet never any scholar.' 
 And Ben Jonson, in his lines prefixed to the 
 First Folio, says that Shakespeare in his well- 
 turned and true-filed lines 
 
 seemes to shake a Lance 
 As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance. _ 
 
 It was a happy inspiration that suggested to 
 Spenser this play on the word ' Shakespeare,' 
 for it enables us, without question as to the 
 identification of Aetion, to consider his estimate 
 
 • Worthies of England. 
 
 16
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 of the shepherd who bore this warlike name, 
 than whom a gentler might nowhere be found. 
 
 That Spenser, ' the greatest of Shakespeare's 
 poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the 
 poems into the rank of Shakespeare's admirers ' 
 Sir Sidney Lee regards as a likelihood. Shake- 
 speare's poems were known to his friends in 
 manuscript for some years before they were 
 given to the world in print. This is certainly 
 true of his sonnets. These incomparable poems 
 were known to Francis Meres in 1598 as circu- 
 lating among Shakespeare's private friends. 
 They were not published until 1609, when they 
 were printed by an adventurous publisher named 
 Thorpe, dedicated to their ' onlie begotter,' one 
 ' Mr. W. H.,' to the mystification of many gene- 
 rations of curious and learned Shakespearians. 
 Venus and Adonis was published in 1593. 
 But as the poet, in the dedication to South- 
 ampton, calls it ' the first heir of my invention,' 
 it must have been written before the production 
 of Love's Labour's Lost (1591). It was therefore 
 in manuscript at the time of Spenser's visit to 
 London. So in all probability was Lucrece, 
 which was not published until 1594. 
 
 For more than a century after the introduction 
 of printing, works differing as widely as poems, 
 and books of sport and horsemanship, circulated 
 
 17 c
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 in manuscript, and it was by the acceptance of 
 their works in this form that authors were 
 encouraged to appeal to a wider circle of readers 
 by means of print.* 
 
 Aetion was not the only one of Cynthia's 
 shepherds who was made known to Colin Clouts 
 by poems that were still in manuscript. William 
 Alabaster, of whom he writes by name, was the 
 author of a poem entitled E litis, written in 
 Latin hexameters in praise of Elizabeth. Of 
 this work Spenser writes 
 
 Who lives that can match that heroic song 
 Which he hath of that mightie princesse made ? 
 
 Notwithstanding this encouragement Alabaster 
 never completed the poem, the first book of 
 which is preserved in manuscript in the library 
 of Emmanuel College, Cambridge."]" Daniel also 
 was known to Spenser by a poem then in manu- 
 script. Of him Spenser writes 
 
 And there is a new shepheard late up sprong, 
 The which doth all afore him far surpasse ; 
 Appearing well in that well tuned song 
 Which late he sung unto a scornful lasse. 
 
 This is an apt description of his Delia, which 
 was not published until 1592. 
 
 For Daniel, as for Aetion, Spenser desires a 
 
 * See a note to Sir Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare, at p. 157. 
 | Diet. Nat, Biography, tit. ' Alabaster.' 
 
 18
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 stronger flight, and, less happy in his augury, 
 predicts for his trembling muse success in 
 tragedy : 
 
 Yet doth his trembling Muse but lowly flie 
 As daring not too rashly mount on hight. 
 
 Addressing Daniel by name, he bids him to 
 rouse his feathers quickly : 
 
 And to what course thou please thy selfe advance, 
 But most, me seemes, thy accent will excell 
 In tragick plaints, and passionate mischance. 
 
 Spenser may have been attracted to Shake- 
 speare by the melody of a love poem written 
 in discipleship to Ovid. With his friend Gabriel 
 Harvey he may have found in Lucrece a ' muse 
 full of high thoughts invention.' Harvey wrote 
 of this poem as comparable to Hamlet. ' The 
 younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's 
 Venus and Adonis, but his Lucrece and his tragedy 
 of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke have it in them 
 to please the wiser sort.' * Although Spenser 
 may have been attracted by the melody of Venus 
 and Adonis, and may have found high thoughts 
 invention in Lucrece, if we could catch an echo 
 of the heroic sound given forth by the muse of 
 
 * Written by Harvey in a copy of Speght's Chaucer, 1598. 
 The volume in which this note was written passed into the collection 
 of Bishop Burnet, whose library was burned in a fire at Northumber- 
 land House. The note had been seen by Malone and Steevens, and 
 its authenticity has never been questioned. 
 
 19
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Aetion, we must go beyond the poems, and we 
 need not travel far. 
 
 The first part of King Henry VI. was pro- 
 duced during Spenser's stay in London. The 
 exact date cannot be ascertained. Malone fixes 
 it at 1589. In Mr. FurnivalPs Trial Table of 
 the Order of Shakespeare *s Plays, prefixed by 
 Professor Dowden to his Shakespere His Mind 
 and Art, the supposed date is 1 590-1. Pro- 
 fessor Masson {Shakespeare Personally) regards 
 it as 'a specimen of Shakespeare, about 1589 
 or 1590, first trying his hand in a Chronicle Play 
 from English History.' 
 
 No time could have been more favourable for 
 the presentation to the public of a stirring 
 national and heroic drama. The patriotic fer- 
 vour that had been kindled by the defeat and 
 destruction of the Armada was at its height. 
 The groundlings saw in Talbot, the hero of the 
 drama, a great English champion, the scourge 
 of France, who scorned to be exchanged for an 
 ignoble prisoner, and they hailed with delight 
 his heroic speech and conduct. The success of 
 the play was extraordinary. Thomas Nash, in 
 Pierce Penile ss His Supplication to the Divell 
 (1592), wrote thus in defence of 'our English 
 Chronicles wherein our forefathers' valiant 
 actions (that have lien long buried in rustic brasse 
 
 20
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 and worme-eaten bookes) are revived, and they 
 themselves raysed from the grave of oblivion ' : 
 
 ' How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the 
 terror of the French) to thinke that after he 
 had lyne two hundred years in his Toomb hee 
 should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have 
 his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten 
 thousand spectators at least (at severall times) 
 who in the Tragedian that represents his person 
 imagine they behold him fresh bleeding ! ' 
 
 Among the tens of thousands who daily 
 crowded the playhouse we may surely place 
 Spenser. He saw beyond the shouting crowd, 
 and with the intuition of genius predicted an 
 eagle flight for the gentle poet with the warlike 
 name, whose muse gave forth a sound so heroical. 
 
 The enthusiastic reception accorded to this 
 play contrasts strongly with the comments of 
 modern critics who for the most part dismiss it 
 with the frigid remark that it must be accepted 
 as in some small part the work of Shakespeare, 
 because we find it included in the authentic 
 edition of his plays printed in 1623. The scene 
 in the Temple Gardens is the part that has been 
 generally accepted as justifying the inclusion of 
 the play. Professor Dowden writes : ' Whether 
 any portions of the first part of Henry VI. be 
 from the hand of Shakespeare, and if there be, 
 
 21
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 what those portions are, need not be here investi- 
 gated. The play belongs in the main to the pre- 
 Shakesperian school.' * 
 
 Regarded as a work of art, the play deserves the 
 condemnation that it has received at the hands 
 of these critics. It was in the main the work of 
 an inferior dramatist, whether Greene or Peele 
 it is needless to inquire. But the drama, as 
 revised by Shakespeare, strikes a heroic note, 
 and in the recognition of this strain the ground- 
 lings are at one with Spenser, and with the 
 greatest of later-day critics of Shakespeare, Swin- 
 burne, who by force of genius was able to catch 
 an echo of the heroic note which struck the ear 
 and stirred the heart of Spenser. 
 
 In his Study of Shakespeare Swinburne devotes 
 himself to this play, mainly as showing the 
 development of the art of Shakespeare, who, 
 under the influence of Marlowe, was passing 
 from rhyme to blank verse. He exonerates the 
 memory of Shakespeare from the imputation of 
 having perpetrated in its evil entirety the first part 
 of King Henry VI. He had no part or share in the 
 defamation of the Maid of Orleans. But to him, 
 as to Spenser, the heroic strain which Shakespeare 
 infused into a dull play, and which raised it to 
 the level of a work of genius, was apparent. 
 
 • Sbakespere His Mind and Art. 
 22
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 ' The last battle of Talbot seems to me as 
 undeniably the master's work as the scene in the 
 Temple Gardens, or the courtship of Margaret 
 by Suffolk.' Throughout the play he finds 
 ' Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both 
 hands — with his left hand of rhyme, and his 
 right hand of blank verse.' The noble scene of 
 parting between the old hero and his son on the 
 verge of desperate battle and certain death he 
 regards as ' the last and loftiest farewell note of 
 rhyming tragedy.' 
 
 Hark, countrymen ! either renew the fight 
 Or tear the lions out of England's coat. 
 
 He fables not ; I hear the enemy : 
 
 Out, some light horsemen, and peruse their wings. 
 
 O, negligent and heedless discipline ! 
 
 How are we park'd and bounded in a pale, 
 
 A little herd of England's timorous deer, 
 
 Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs ! 
 
 If we be English deer, be then in blood ; 
 
 Not rascal-like, to fall down with a pinch, 
 
 But rather, moody-mad and desperate stags, 
 
 Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel 
 
 And make the cowards stand aloof at bay : 
 
 Sell every man his life as dear as mine, 
 
 And they shall find dear deer of us, my friends. 
 
 God and Saint George, Talbot and England's right 
 
 Prosper our colours in this dangerous fight ! * 
 
 * i Hen. VI., I. v. 27 ; IV. ii. 42. 
 23
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Here is the heroic sound ; here is the brandish- 
 ing of the spear of which Spenser thought, when 
 from his castle of Kilcolman he wrote to Raleigh 
 of the poets by whom Cynthia was surrounded, 
 of whom none was more gentle than the shepherd 
 whose muse did like his name heroically sound. 
 
 But what Spenser tells us of the man whom he 
 knew in the year 1591, and whom he chose to 
 call Aetion, is more to our purpose than his 
 estimate of the qualities of his muse, for of these 
 we can form our own opinion unaided. Of this 
 man he writes : ' No gentler Shepheard may 
 no where be found.' 
 
 The word ' gentle,' in the sense in which it 
 was used by Spenser, has disappeared from the 
 English language, and it has left no successor. 
 In this sense, which is noted as archaic, it is thus 
 defined in the New English Dictionary : ' Having 
 the character appropriate to one of good birth : 
 noble, generous, courteous.' In these qualities, 
 in the opinion of Spenser, not one of the poets 
 whom he met in London surpassed the young 
 actor, commenced poet and dramatist, who had 
 come from the country town of Stratford a few 
 years ago, to seek his fortune, in, as was reported, 
 a very mean condition. 
 
 There was not one of Shakespeare's fellows 
 whose estimate of the qualities of a gentleman is 
 
 2 4
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 entitled to more respect than the writer of these 
 words. Edmund Spenser, son of a London 
 clothmaker, took his name from a ' house of 
 ancient fame.'* His relationship to the Spensers 
 of Althorp was acknowledged. He dedicated 
 poems to the daughters of Sir John Spenser, 
 the head of that branch of the family, and in 
 Colin Clouts he writes of these ladies as 
 
 The honor of the noble familie : 
 
 Of which I meanest boast myselfe to be. 
 
 And Gibbon writes : ' The nobility of the 
 Spensers has been illustrated and enriched by 
 the trophies of Marlborough ; but I exhort them 
 to consider the Faerie Queen as the most precious 
 jewel of their coronet.' 
 
 A more worthy conception of the obligations 
 of gentle birth — of late happily revived — held 
 good in Tudor times than in some later years, 
 and the poet's father, ' a gentleman,' brought 
 no discredit on his name when he became a free 
 journeyman in the ' art and mystery of cloth- 
 making.' 
 
 In this business he was not successful, for his 
 son Edmund received assistance as a poor 
 scholar of Merchant Taylors' school, when, in 
 1569, he entered Pembroke Hall, now Pembroke 
 
 * Epithalamium. 
 
 2 5
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 College, Cambridge, as a sizar. He took his 
 degree of M.A. in 1576. His lifelong friend, 
 Gabriel Harvey, the Hobbinol of the Shcpheards 
 Calendar and of Colin Clouts, obtained a fellow- 
 ship in this college in the following year. A man 
 of great ability and learning, he held a high 
 position in the University, and Spenser, through 
 his intimacy with Harvey, must have been 
 brought into touch with the best class of students 
 of his day. From his experience at the Uni- 
 versity, and afterwards in public life, Spenser 
 was well qualified to form an estimate of the 
 qualities which entitled a man to be regarded 
 as ' gentle.' 
 
 But Spenser has still stronger claims to our 
 attention. He was the intimate friend of Philip 
 Sidney and of Walter Raleigh, and his great work, 
 the Faerie Queene, was an allegory, of which the 
 general end was * to fashion a gentleman or 
 noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.' 
 Surely commendation from Spenser is praise 
 indeed. 
 
 It must startle a reader accustomed to the 
 ordinary description of the ' man from Strat- 
 ford,' commencing dramatist as a theatrical 
 fac totum, to find one like Spenser writing of him, 
 not only that he was ' gentle,' but that among 
 the poets of the day no ' gentler ' than he could 
 
 26
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 be found. For there were those among the 
 Shepherds of the Court of Cynthia to whom the 
 term ' gentle ' could have been applied with 
 undoubted fitness. Astrophel we know to be 
 Sir Philip Sidney, for he appears under the same 
 title in Spenser's elegy on his death. Alabaster, 
 educated in Westminster School, became a 
 Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Daniel 
 left Oxford without a degree, but he became 
 tutor to William Herbert, afterwards Earl of 
 Pembroke, to whom the Folio of 1623 was dedi- 
 cated in recognition of the favours with which 
 he had ' prosecuted ' the author. Amyntas 
 has, with probability, been identified with Ferdi- 
 nando, Earl of Derby. The young poet, who as a 
 gentleman compared favourably with men like 
 these, was very different from the illiterate clown 
 of whom we have read, the creature of the 
 imagination of certain later-day writers. 
 
 There was really nothing in the birth or 
 education of Shakespeare to render it improbable 
 that one of the fortunate ones 
 
 Quibus arte benigna 
 Et meliore luto finxit precordia Titan 
 
 should have possessed the qualities ascribed to 
 him by Spenser. Something more on this sub- 
 ject will be found in a chapter entitled ' Family 
 
 27
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 and Friends.' But antecedent improbability, 
 even where it exists, must yield to the testimony 
 of credible witnesses, a class in which Edmund 
 Spenser may surely be placed. 
 
 That Spenser was attracted by the personality 
 of Shakespeare appears from the terms of per- 
 sonal esteem in which he writes of Aetion. It 
 was not until after the death of Spenser that 
 Shakespeare gave expression to his feelings of 
 regard. But what he then wrote leaves us in 
 no doubt as to the reality and strength of the 
 friendship that had its origin in Spenser's visit 
 to London in 1589. 
 
 Spenser's disposition was social, and he had 
 the genius of friendship, qualities not always 
 united in the same individual. Throughout his 
 life he found delight in the society of men of 
 letters. With Philip Sidney, Sir Edward Dyer, 
 and some other friends, he formed a literary 
 club styled ' Areiopagus,' the meetings of which 
 appear to have been held in the years 1578 and 
 1 579 at Leicester House.* His correspondence 
 with Gabriel Harvey about the same time affords 
 evidence, not only of his literary activity, but 
 of his constancy in friendship. His lifelong 
 friendship with Harvey probably had its origin 
 in kindness shown by a senior member of the 
 
 * Diet. Nat. Biography. 
 28
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 University, of established position, to a poor 
 and unknown sizar. Some such explanation 
 seems to be needed, for no characters could be 
 more unlike than the author of the Faerie Queene, 
 and the arrogant and scurrilous pamphleteer 
 whose paper warfare with Nash and Greene is an 
 unedifying chapter of Elizabethan literature. 
 So scandalous did it become that in 1599 it was 
 ordered by authority ' that all Nashe's bookes 
 and Dr. Harvey's bookes be taken wherever they 
 may be found, and that none of the same bookes 
 be ever printed hereafter.'* Spenser's love of 
 Harvey was at one time a real danger to English 
 literature. The ambition of Harvey's lifetime 
 was to be known as the inventor of the English 
 hexameter. He did his utmost to induce his 
 friend to abandon rhyme for classical methods of 
 versification, and it appears from their correspon- 
 dence that he was at one time all but successful. 
 But Spenser's true literary sense and ear for 
 the music of words saved us from this calamity, 
 and he found salvation in rhyme, as Shakespeare 
 found it in blank verse. 
 
 Friendship was a necessary of life to Spenser. 
 When he found himself in the position of secre- 
 tary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland he surrounded 
 himself with the best literary society that Dublin 
 
 * Cooper, Atben. Cant. 
 29
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 could supply, and in Lodovick Bryskctt, an 
 Irish official, he found an intimate and congenial 
 friend. Bryskett, who is said to have been of 
 Italian descent, had filled the office of Clerk of 
 the Council under Sir Henry Sidney. Becoming 
 an intimate friend of Philip Sidney, he was his 
 companion in a three years' tour through 
 Germany, Italy and Poland. He was a poet, 
 and Spenser showed his appreciation of his 
 friend's work by including two of his poems in a 
 collection which he published in 1595 under the 
 title of Astrophel. He also addressed to Bryskett 
 as ' Lodwick,' a sonnet included in his Amoretti 
 (Sonnet xxxiii.). But Bryskett's claim to 
 grateful remembrance rests on the introduction 
 which he prefixed to a translation of an Italian 
 philosophical treatise entitled A Discourse of 
 Civill Life containing the Ethike Part of Morall 
 Philosophic. The introduction to this book, 
 addressed to Arthur Lord Grey, of Wilton, is 
 described by Sir Sidney Lee as of unique interest 
 in English literature. In it we find ourselves 
 in the company of a party of friends assembled 
 at the author's cottage, near Dublin. They were 
 described as ' Dr. Long, Primate of Ardmagh ; 
 Sir Robert Dillon, Knight ; M. Dormer, the 
 Queenes Sollicitor ; Capt. Christopher Carleil ; 
 Capt. Thomas Norreis : Capt. Warham St. 
 
 30
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 Leger ; Capt. Nicholas Dawtrey ; and M. 
 Edmond Spenser, late your Lordships Secre- 
 tary ; and M. Smith, apothecary.' 
 
 Bryskett, supported by the applause of the 
 company, appealed to Spenser as ' not onely 
 perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well 
 read in Philosophic both Morall and Naturall,' 
 to spend the time which they had ' destined to 
 familiar discourse and conversation, in declaring 
 to them the benefits obtained by the knowledge 
 of Moral Philosophy, and in expounding and 
 teaching them to understand it.' Spenser asks 
 to be excused on the ground that he had already 
 undertaken a work tending to the same effect, 
 ' which is in heroical verse, under the title of a 
 Faerie Queene, to represent all the moral virtues ; 
 assigning to every Virtue a Knight, to be the patron 
 and, defender of the same? The company were 
 well satisfied, and ' shewed an extreme longing 
 after his worke of the Faerie Queene whereof some 
 parcels had bin by some of them seene,' and 
 pressed Bryskett to produce his translation of 
 which Spenser had spoken. Bryskett complied, 
 and delivered his translation of the work of Giraldi, 
 with which the company must have been well 
 pleased, for the discussion of the book and of some 
 questions proposed by Spenser on the doctrines 
 of Plato and Aristotle lasted for three days. 
 
 31
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 With our knowledge of Spenser's sociable dis- 
 position and love of literary companionship, we 
 can understand how he bemoaned the ' luckless 
 lot ' that had banished him ' like wight forlore ' 
 to the waste in which he was forgotten, and we 
 can realise his enjoyment of the society of the 
 shepherds whom he celebrates in Colin Clouts. 
 We are also prepared to find in his writings, as 
 well as in those of Shakespeare, evidence that 
 he found in Action what most in life he prized — a 
 friend. 
 
 Spenser paid another visit to London towards 
 the end of the year 1595, returning to Ireland in 
 the beginning of 1597. Shakespeare's greatest 
 works had not then been produced. But the 
 author of Romeo and Julia, The Merchant of 
 Venice, Richard 11. and Richard 111. had gone 
 far in the eagle flight which Spenser six years 
 before had predicted for Aetion. During Spen- 
 ser's stay in London he produced the second 
 part of the Faerie Queene, and wrote his View 
 of the Present State of Ireland. There is no 
 record of his experiences in London, such as he 
 furnished to Raleigh in Colin Clouts on his 
 return from his former visit. Spenser was in no 
 fitting mood for telling a such like happy tale, 
 nor would it have had prosperity in the ear 
 of Raleigh. 
 
 3 2
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 In Protbalamion, published in 1596, he writes 
 
 of his 
 
 Sullein care 
 Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay- 
 in princes Court, and expectation vayne 
 Of idle hopes. 
 
 Raleigh, also, had learned from experience to 
 put no confidence in princes, and he had severed 
 his connection with Ireland by the sale of his 
 estates to the Earl of Cork. 
 
 For proof of the continuation of the friendship 
 which had its origin in Spenser's first visit to 
 London we must turn from him to what was 
 written by Shakespeare after the death of 
 Spenser. But some things happened, of no 
 particular significance in themselves, but worth 
 noting in connection with others of greater 
 importance. We have seen in Gabriel Harvey 
 not only a fierce pamphleteer, but also a critical 
 student of Shakespeare's work, attracted to him 
 in the first instance, like Spenser, by his poems, 
 but capable of appreciating his greatness as a 
 dramatist. His entry into the paper warfare 
 in which he engaged was by the publication of 
 a pamphlet entitled ' Foure Letters and Certain 
 Sonnets ; especially touching Robert Greene, 
 and other parties by him abused' (1593). The 
 abuse was contained in Greene's Groatsworth of 
 
 33
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Wit, of which more shall be said in another chap- 
 ter, and one of the parties abused by Greene and 
 vindicated by Harvey was William Shakespeare. 
 By this abuse the wrath of Harvey was kindled, 
 and he thus wrote of the Groatsworth of Wit : 
 
 1 If his other bookes be as holesome geere as 
 this, no marvaile though the gay-man conceive 
 trimlic of himself, and statelye scorn all besides 
 Greene ; vile Greene ! would thou wearest half 
 so honest as the worst of the foure whom thou 
 upbraideth, or halfe so learned as the unlearnedst 
 of the three.' 
 
 Among the sonnets printed in this pamphlet 
 is one addressed by Spenser to Harvey in praise 
 of his i doomeful writing ' as a critic. It is 
 addressed ' to the Right Worshipfull, my sin- 
 gular good frend Mr. Gabriel Harvey, Doctor 
 of the Lawes,' and it thus concludes 
 
 Like a great lord of peerelesse liberty 
 Lifting the good up to high Honour's seat, 
 And the evil damning evermore to dy, 
 For life and death is in thy doomeful writing 
 So thy renovvme lives ever by endighting. 
 
 Dublin, this 18 of July 1586 
 
 your devoted frend during life 
 
 Edmund Spenser. 
 
 This sonnet was not written in view of Harvey's 
 vindication of Shakespeare from the attacks of 
 
 34
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 Greene. But he was in constant communication 
 with Spenser, and Harvey would not have added 
 the sonnet to his pamphlet if he had not been 
 assured of the sympathy of the writer in the 
 cause of which he became the champion. 
 
 In the year 1599 a piratical publisher, named 
 William Jaggard, brought out a poetical mis- 
 cellany, entitled The Passionate Pilgrim, by 
 TV. Shakespeare, containing twenty pieces, some 
 of which are undoubtedly Shakespeare's. Among 
 these pieces is a sonnet addressed, as Shake- 
 speare's sonnets were, to a private friend. The 
 friend is a lover of music, the sonneteer a lover 
 of sweet poetry ; but 
 
 One god is God of both, as poets feign. 
 
 To the friend ravished by a heavenly touch on 
 the lute, the poet writes 
 
 Spenser to me, whose deepe Conceit is such, 
 As, passing all conceit, needs no defence. 
 
 1 The secret of Spenser's enduring popularity 
 with poets and lovers of poetry lies specially in 
 this, that he excels in the poet's peculiar gift, the 
 instinct for verbal music. Shakespeare, or the 
 author of the sonnet usually assigned to him, 
 felt and expressed this when he drew the parallel 
 between " music and sweet poetry " ' 
 
 35
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Thou lovest to hear the sweet melodious sound 
 That Phoebus' lute, the queen of music, makes ; 
 And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned 
 W'henas himself to singing he betakes. 
 
 ' This is an early word in criticism of Spenser, 
 and it is the last word about his prime and 
 unquestionable excellence — a word in which all 
 critics must agree.' * The sonnet attributed to 
 Shakespeare by Jaggard had appeared in the 
 preceding year in a volume entitled Poems in 
 diverse Humours as the work of Richard Barn- 
 field. Whether Barnfield had included in his 
 Poems an unclaimed sonnet written by Shake- 
 speare ; or Jaggard, greatly daring, had converted 
 to his use a sonnet which Barnfield had printed 
 as his own, is a question which cannot be here 
 discussed. There is a possibility that Barnfield 
 was the private friend to whom the sonnet was 
 addressed, and that with or without the consent 
 of Shakespeare — to whom his sonnets were 
 unconsidered trifles — he included it in his col- 
 lection of Poems. ' That he had some personal 
 relations with Shakespeare seems almost certain, 
 and the disputed authorship of the particular 
 pieces mentioned above has attracted students 
 to Barnficld's name. It is no small honour to 
 have written poems which everyone, until our 
 
 * Encyclopedia Britannica, tit. ' Spenser.' 
 
 36
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 own day, has been content to suppose were 
 Shakespeare's.' * 
 
 Spenser returned to Ireland early in 1597, 
 a broken and disappointed man. The short 
 remainder of his life was clouded in gloom, and 
 ended in tragedy. In the October of the fol- 
 lowing year his castle of Kilcolman was burned 
 over his head by the followers of Hugh O'Neill, 
 Earl of Tyrone. Spenser, with his family, fled 
 to Cork, whence he was sent to London on the 
 9th of December with a despatch by Sir Thomas 
 Norris, the President of Munster. A month after 
 his arrival in London, on the 1 6th of January, 
 1598-9, he died, in the words of Shakespeare, 
 ' in beggary.' 
 
 The story was thus told by Ben Jonson to 
 Drummond of Hawthornden : 
 
 ' The Irish having rob'd Spenser's goods, and 
 burnt his house and a little child new born, he 
 and his wyfe escaped ; and, after, he died for 
 lake of bread in King Street, and refused 20 pieces 
 sent to him by my Lord of Essex, and said, He 
 was sorrie he had no time to spend them.' 
 
 The exact facts of the case must have been 
 known to Ben Jonson and to Shakespeare, and 
 I prefer their testimony, as to a matter of fact 
 within their knowledge, to the speculations of 
 
 * Mr. Edmund Gosse in Diet. Nat. Biography, tit. ' Barnfield.' 
 
 37 

 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 later writers who are moved by the improbability 
 of Spenser, a favourite at Court, a pensioner of 
 the Crown, the bearer of an important despatch, 
 with friends in London, being allowed to die for 
 lack of bread. More improbable events have 
 in fact occurred than the death of Spenser for 
 lack of the nourishment necessary in his enfeebled 
 condition. His death, under such circumstances, 
 might well be described by Jonson as ' for 
 lake of bread,' and by Shakespeare as ' in 
 beggary.' * 
 
 That Spenser's friends were touched with 
 remorse when they realised the consequence of 
 their neglect adds to the pathos of the tragedy. 
 He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Essex, 
 whose failure to send timely aid may have been 
 due to Spenser's unwillingness to appeal for 
 assistance, paid the expense of the funeral. 
 Camden tells us that his hearse was attended by 
 poets ; and mournful elegies and poems, with the 
 pens that wrote them, were thrown into his 
 tomb. That Shakespeare was among the mourn- 
 ing poets who stood by the grave of his friend we 
 cannot doubt, for he was moved by the pity of 
 it to depart from his wont, and to introduce 
 
 • That Spenser died in poverty was generally known. It is men- 
 tioned by Fletcher, by John Wecvcr, and by the author of The 
 Returne from Pernassus. 
 
 3»
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 into one of his plays an allusion to an event of 
 the day. 
 
 A Midsummer Night's, Dream was first printed 
 in 1600, the year following the death of Spenser. 
 When the strange story of the midsummer night 
 had been told over, and the lovers had come, full 
 of joy and mirth, Theseus asks 
 
 What masques, what dances shall we have 
 To wear away this long age of three hours 
 Between our after-supper and bed-time f* 
 
 A paper is handed to him, showing how many 
 sports were ripe, and of these he was to make 
 choice. Theseus rejects ' The battle with the 
 Centaurs ' and ' The riot of the tipsy Bac- 
 chanals.' He is then tendered 
 
 The thrice three muses mourning for the death 
 Of Learning, late deceased in beggary. 
 
 Of this he says — 
 
 That is some satire, keen and critical, 
 Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony. 
 
 To our endless content he then makes choice of 
 
 A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus 
 And his love Thisbe ; very tragical mirth, 
 
 to be played by hard-handed men that work in 
 Athens. 
 
 * Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i. 32. 
 
 39
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 The reference to the thrice three mourning 
 muses has been accepted as an unmistakable 
 reference to Spenser's poem, entitled The Teares 
 of the Muses, in which each of the Nine laments 
 the decay of the branch of letters over which 
 she presides. 
 
 There was a special propriety in the tragic 
 death of Spenser being mourned by the thrice 
 three muses. He was the darling of the muses, 
 the ' poet's poet.' These words of Charles Lamb 
 describe the position in the literary world which 
 was held by Spenser after the publication of 
 the first part of the Faerie Queene. Then by the 
 mourning muses the scene in the Abbey is recalled 
 when the weeping poets cast into Spenser's grave 
 their elegies and the pens with which they were 
 written. 
 
 For the intimate friends of Spenser the words 
 of Shakespeare would have a special meaning. 
 They mourned the loss, not only of a great poet, 
 but of * Learning late deceased.' Lodovick 
 Bryskett, in his cottage near Dublin, appealed to 
 Spenser to favour the company with a discourse 
 of philosophy, ' knowing him to be not only 
 perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well 
 read in Philosophie, both morall and naturall. 
 For, of his love and kindness to me, he encour- 
 aged me long sithens to follow the reading of the 
 
 40
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 Greeke tongue and offered me his helpe to make 
 me understand it.' 
 
 The variety and extent of Spenser's learning, 
 which was known to those who were admitted 
 to his friendship, has of later years been realised, 
 as the result of a careful study of his writings. 
 
 ' Except Milton, and possibly Gray, Spenser 
 was the most learned of English poets, and signs 
 of his multifarious reading in the classics, and 
 modern French and Italian literature abound in 
 his writings.' * 
 
 What more fitting theme for a ' satire, keen 
 and critical,' than the death in beggary of one 
 like Spenser, the darling of the muses, the 
 favourite of the Queen, and high in office ; the 
 pompous funeral in Westminster Abbey ; the 
 broad pieces, gifts well meant but all too late ; 
 the poets with their elegies, deploring in good 
 set terms the loss of him whom they suffered to 
 die — from want of thought and not of heart, we 
 may well believe — neglected and uncared ? Well 
 might Theseus reject the theme as ' not sorting 
 with a nuptial ceremony.' 
 
 Professor Masson, in his Shakespeare Personally, 
 notes a certain respect in which Shakespeare 
 differed from his contemporaries. ' What do 
 
 * ' Life of Spenser,' in the Diet. Nat. Biography, by Professor J .W. 
 Hales and Sir Sidney Lee. 
 
 4 1
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 we find them, one and all, doing — Spenser, 
 Chapman, Drayton, Daniel, Nash, Donne, Ben 
 Jonson, Marston, Dekker, Chettle, and other 
 known poets and dramatists of rank, besides the 
 small fry of professed epigrammatists, like Owen 
 and John Davies, of Hereford ? Writing verses 
 to or about each other, commendatory poems on 
 each other's works, mutual invectives and lam- 
 poons, in prologues to their plays or otherwise, 
 epistles and dedications of compliment to eminent 
 noblemen and courtiers, epitaphs on noblemen or 
 ladies just dead, and comments in a thousand 
 forms on the incidents of the day. In the midst 
 of all this crossfire of epistles, epigrams, and 
 poems of occasion, stood Shakespeare ; coming 
 in, too, for his own share of notice in them — for 
 just a little of the invective and for a very great 
 deal of the eulogy. But he would not be brought 
 to return a shot. . . . From occurrence litera- 
 ture of any kind Shakespeare seems to have 
 systematically shrunk.' * 
 
 Even the death of Elizabeth, a theme wel- 
 comed by other poets of the day, is unmarked by 
 a line by him. This was noted as strange by 
 Chettle, who in England's Mourning Garment 
 (1603) wrote 
 
 • Shakespeare Personally, by David Masson. Edited and arranged 
 by Rosaline Masson. 
 
 4 2
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 Nor doth the siluer-tonge'd Melicert 
 Drop from his honied muse one sable teare 
 To mourne her death that graced his desert 
 And to his laies opened her royal ear. 
 Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth 
 And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death. 
 
 That Shakespeare departed from his custom 
 when he introduced into A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream a reference to the death of Spenser, shows 
 how profoundly he was moved by the personality 
 of the man, the beauty of his poetry, the extent 
 of his learning, and the tragedy of his death. 
 The death of Marlowe is the occasion of one 
 other reference to an event of the day to be found 
 in his works. But Spenser exerted no such 
 influence on the development of the art of Shake- 
 speare as was due to Marlowe. There is no 
 passage written by Shakespeare in which we 
 catch the faintest echo of the poetry of Spenser. 
 There is indeed one speech which, but for 
 Spenser, would not have been written. It is a 
 reminiscence of Spenser ; not of the poet, but of 
 the Irish official. 
 
 Spenser was not only a great poet, he was also 
 an Irish official, with a clear and definite Irish 
 policy. It was the policy of his patron and 
 friend, Arthur Lord Grey, of Wilton. Lord 
 Grey was recalled in 1582, two years after his 
 
 43
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 appointment as Lord Deputy ; but Spenser 
 remained constant to his political creed, and 
 throughout his life it was his mission, with 
 chivalrous loyalty to defend the policy and 
 vindicate the memory of Grey. This he did in 
 immortal verse in the fifth book of his Faerie 
 Queene, and in indifferent prose in his View of the 
 Present State of Ireland, written in 1587, after 
 the death of Grey. This is the policy that 
 Shakespeare, with his marvellous power of con- 
 densation, has expressed in four lines, put into 
 the mouth of Richard, when departing for 
 Ireland : 
 
 Now for our Irish wars : 
 We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns 
 Which live like venom where no venom else 
 But only they have privilege to live.* 
 
 Whence did Shakespeare derive this policy : 
 War, to be followed by the supplanting of the 
 native Irish ? And how comes he to speak of 
 them with contempt as ' rough, rug-headed 
 kerns,' and with hatred, as venom that had 
 escaped expulsion at the hands of St. Patrick ? 
 Questions to be asked — for Shakespeare is wont 
 to put into the mouths of characters in his 
 dramas an expression of his personal feelings 
 
 • King Richard II., II., i. 155. 
 
 44
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 and experiences, and if a different explanation 
 of this passage can be found it would be welcome. 
 When Spenser came to London with Raleigh 
 in 1589 he brought with him three completed 
 books of the Faerie Queene. What he calls ' his 
 whole intention in the course of this worke ' 
 had been long since thought out, and he was then 
 at work on the next succeeding books, the 
 Legends of Friendship and of Justice. Spenser 
 was always ready to take his friends into his 
 confidence as to the literary work in which he 
 was engaged, often far in advance of its com- 
 pletion. He had read the early books of his 
 poem to Raleigh in Kilcolman castle, and ' some 
 parcels ' of the Faerie Queene had been seen by 
 some of the company assembled in Bryskett's 
 cottage near Dublin — a prelate, a lawyer, four 
 soldiers, and ' M. Smith, apothecary.' If 
 Spenser was willing to expound his intention 
 to this assembly, he was not likely to be more 
 reticent in the company of the Shepherds who 
 served Cynthia, and when Aetion, or another, 
 put to him a question which has been repeated 
 throughout the centuries to succeeding genera- 
 tions of Irish officials on their visits to London, 
 and asked him to give the company his view of 
 the present state of Ireland, we know what view 
 he presented, and if he did not show them some 
 
 45
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 parcels of his forthcoming fifth book, what he 
 said was understood and treasured by at least 
 one of his hearers. 
 
 The view set forth in the treatise written in 
 1587 is presented in allegorical form in the fifth 
 book of the Faerie Queene. The legend of 
 Artegall, or of Justice, is the story of Arthur 
 Lord Grey's mission to Ireland, his policy and 
 his recall. The allegory in many parts of the 
 poem is obscure, and the riddle is not easily 
 solved. It is generally difficult, and often 
 impossible, to discover the counterparts in real 
 life of the allegorical personages of the poem. 
 But in regard to two we are left without doubt : 
 the Faerie Queen is Elizabeth, and Artegall, 
 Arthur Lord Grey. 
 
 A letter from the author to Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 ' expounding his whole intention in the course 
 of this worke,' is prefixed to the edition of the 
 three books published in 1581. The Faerie 
 Queen by whose excellent beauty when seen in 
 a vision King Arthur is ravished, and awaking 
 sets forth to seek her, is Faerie land, is Glory. 
 * In that Faerie Queene I mean glory in my 
 generall intention, but in my particular I con- 
 ceive the most excellent and glorious person of 
 our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdome in 
 Faerie land.' 
 
 46
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 The Faerie Queene was to be ' disposed into 
 twelve books, fashioning xn. morall vertues.' 
 Of each virtue a knight is the patron, whose 
 adventures form the legend of the book. This 
 is the general intention. The particular inten- 
 tion as to the Faerie Queen is to identify her 
 with Elizabeth, and as to Artegall to identify 
 him with Arthur Lord Grey. Artegall is sent 
 by the Faerie Queen (Elizabeth) to rescue Irena 
 (Ireland) from suffering under the power of 
 wrong (Grantorto). Armed with Chryseas, the 
 keen sword of Justice, and accompanied by Talus 
 and the iron flail of force, Artegall puts an end 
 to wrongdoing. He then abode with fair Irena, 
 when his study was to deal Justice. 
 
 And day and night employ'd his busie paine 
 How to reform that ragged common-weale 
 
 But, ere he coulde reforme it thoroughly 
 
 He through occasion called was away 
 
 To Faerie Court, that of necessity 
 
 His course of Justice he was forst to stay 
 
 And Talus to revoke from the right way 
 
 In which he was that Realme for to redresse ; 
 
 But envie's cloud still dimmeth vertue's ray. 
 
 So having freed Irena from distresse 
 
 He tooke his leave of her then left in heavinesse. 
 
 This was the doing of ' two old ill favour'd 
 Hags,' Envie and Detraction — 
 
 47
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Combyned in one 
 And linct together against Sir Artegall 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Besides, into themselves they gotten had 
 
 A monster, which the Blatant Beast they call. 
 
 Disregarding the assaults of Envie and Detrac- 
 tion, and the barking and baying of the Blatant 
 Beast, Artegall 
 
 Still the way did hold 
 To Faerie Court ; when what him fell shall else 
 be told. 
 
 This is the story of the recall of Grey. He 
 died in 1593, and the rest is silence. 
 
 It is not difficult to supply the explanation of 
 the policy of Arthur which was given to the 
 listening Shepherds, when the poet, as was his 
 wont, explained the general and particular inten- 
 tion of the Legend of Justice. But for this we 
 must turn to the View. 
 
 Spenser's Irish policy, like that of Richard II., 
 began with war, and ended in ' supplanting.' 
 In the View Eudoxus suggests that the reforma- 
 tion of the realm might be effected by ' making 
 of good lawes, and establishing of new statutes, 
 with sharpe penalties and punishments, for 
 amending of all that is presently amisse.' 
 Irenasus, by whom Spenser speaks, says — 
 < 48
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 But all the realme is first to be reformed, and lawes 
 are afterwards to be made for keeping and continuing it 
 in the reformed estate. 
 
 Eudox. How then doe you think is the reformation 
 thereof to be begunne, if not by lawes and ordinances ? 
 
 Iren. Even by the sword ; for all these evils must 
 first be cut away by a strong hand, before any good can 
 be planted. 
 
 Later on Irenaeus develops his scheme of 
 supplanting. ' All the lands will I give unto 
 Englishmen I will haue drawne thither, who shall 
 haue the same with such estates as shall bee 
 thought meete, and for such rent as shall eft- 
 soones be rated ; and under every of those 
 Englishmen will I place some of those Irish to 
 be tennants for a certaine rent, according to the 
 quantity of such land as every man shall have 
 allotted unto him, and shalbe found able to 
 wield, wherein this speciall regard shall be had, 
 that in no place under any land-lord there shall 
 be many of them placed together, but dispersed 
 wide from their acquaintance, and scattered 
 farre abroad thorough all the country.' 
 
 Thus would the tribal system be broken up, 
 and the kerns could no longer ' practice or con- 
 spire what they will.' Rough and shag-headed 
 they were in the eyes of Spenser, for he wrote 
 of their ' long glippes, which is a thicke curled 
 
 49
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 bush of hair, hanging downe over their eyes, and 
 monstrously disguising them, which arc both 
 very bad and hurtful.' 
 
 In the View Spenser recalls how when ' that 
 good Lord Grey, after long travell and many 
 perilous assayes, had brought things almost to 
 this passe that the country was ready for refor- 
 mation,' the Queen ' being by nature full of 
 moving and clemency,' listened to the complaint 
 against Grey, that ' he was a bloodie man, and 
 minded not the life of her subjects no more than 
 dogges,' and ' all suddenly turned topside- 
 turvey ; the noble Lord eft-soones was blamed ; 
 the wretched people pitticd ; and new counsells 
 plotted, in which it was concluded that a general 
 pardon should be sent over to all that would 
 accept of it, upon which all former purposes 
 were blanked, the governor at a bay, and not 
 only all that great and long change which she 
 had before beene at quite lost and cancelled, 
 but also all that hope of good which was 
 even at the doore put back and cleane frus- 
 trated.' 
 
 This is a prose version of the story of Grey's 
 recall as it is told in the fifth book of the Faerie 
 Queene. 
 
 If Shakespeare did not derive from converse 
 with Spenser the Irish policy which he put into 
 
 50
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 the mouth of Richard, I know not from what 
 contemporary source it was borrowed. 
 
 But why does Richard speak with hatred of 
 the native Irish, as the only venom which had 
 escaped expulsion by St. Patrick ? In a book 
 well known to Spenser — for he quotes from it 
 more than once in his View — Stanyhurst's 
 Description of Ireland, printed in Holinshed's 
 Chronicles (1577), tne writer, telling how ' Saint 
 Patricke was moved to expell all the venemous 
 wormes out of Ireland,' quotes from the 
 Dialogues of Alanus Copus these words : ' Dici 
 fortasse inde a nonnullis solet nihil esse in 
 Hibernia venenati praeter ipsos homines.' 
 Stanyhurst quotes these words with indignation. 
 But Spenser may well have treasured them with 
 different feelings, and repeated them to his 
 friend. He admired the natural beauties and 
 the abundant resources of Ireland, and found 
 ' sweet wit and good invention ' in her bardic 
 literature, but it must be acknowledged that 
 his feelings towards the native Irish were such 
 as might have found expression in the saying 
 recorded by Alanus Copus. Whether Shake- 
 speare learned this saying from Spenser, or from 
 Stanyhurst, whose description, with other parts 
 of Holinshed, he had studied with care, matters 
 not. It is not to be taken as the result of his 
 
 5i 
 
 E 2
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 own experience, but as a saying that might with 
 dramatic propriety be attributed to Richard. 
 
 The poetic element in the character of the 
 second Richard was noted by Coleridge and by 
 Professor Dowden. To Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 Richard is poetry itself. ' It is difficult to 
 condemn Richard without taking sides against 
 poetry. He has a delicate and prolific fancy, 
 which flows into many dream-shapes in the 
 prison ; a wide and true imagination, which 
 expresses itself in his great speech on the mon- 
 archy of Death ; and a deep discernment of 
 tragic issues, which gives thrilling effect to his 
 bitterest outcry.' It may be deserving of a 
 passing note that it is to this most poetic of 
 kings that Shakespeare attributes the ruthless 
 policy of warfare and supplanting which was 
 that of his friend, the poet's poet, Spenser. 
 
 Spenser was attracted to Shakespeare by the 
 quality in his nature, to which, in his days, the 
 word ' gentle ' was applied, not less than by 
 the high thoughts invention, and heroic strain 
 of a muse which gave promise of an eagle flight. 
 It was this quality, so early apprehended by 
 Spenser, that won for Shakespeare throughout 
 his life the love of his fellows. By bearing 
 this fact in mind as we trace his relations with 
 them, strange errors and misconceptions may be 
 
 52
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 
 
 avoided. And after his death this was the 
 thought uppermost in the mind of Ben Jonson, 
 when he wrote of the portrait prefixed to the 
 folio of 1623 
 
 This figure that thou here seest put, 
 It was for gentle Shakespeare cut. 
 
 53
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 Shakespeare by his will left ' to my fcllowcs, 
 John Hcmyngcs, Richard Burbagc, and Henry 
 Cundcll xxvj's viii d a peece to buy them ringes.' 
 A good many years before, Burbage, with Kempe, 
 had gloried in the triumph of ' our fellow 
 Shakespeare ' over the University pens, and 
 over Ben Jonson too ; and some years after the 
 death of Shakespeare Ben Jonson told how the 
 players, in their devotion to the memory of their 
 fellow, regarded as a ' malevolent speech ' one 
 that Ben Jonson had intended as literary criti- 
 cism, when he expressed a wish that Shakespeare 
 had blotted a thousand lines.* 
 
 The pride of the players in the success of their 
 fellow Shakespeare as a dramatist, outstripping 
 even the great Ben Jonson, was unalloyed by any 
 feeling of jealousy. He had become rich and 
 famous in the literary world. He had been 
 the subject of courtly favour and of the patronage 
 of the great, before he retired to his native town 
 to end his days in affluence and repute, a gentle- 
 
 • Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter. 
 
 54
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 man of coat armour. But his was not a nature 
 to be spoiled by success, and his last thoughts 
 were not for powerful patrons or literary mag- 
 nates, but for his fellow players, John Hem- 
 ing and Henry Condell, with Richard Burbage 
 the impersonator of his greatest characters. 
 
 The world owes much to the good fellowship 
 between Shakespeare and the players, which 
 endured throughout his life. For seven years 
 after his death Mr. William Shakespeare's 
 Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies were pub- 
 lished ' according to the True Originall copies ' 
 by John Heming and Henry Condell. Richard 
 Burbage had died in 1 619. In dedicating them 
 to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, who 
 had ' prosequuted both them, and their Authour 
 living with so much favour,' the editors write : 
 i We have but collected them, an office to the 
 dead, to procure his orphanes, guardians ; with- 
 out ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame ; 
 only to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend 
 & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare, by 
 humble offer of his player to your most noble 
 patronage.' 
 
 Heming and Condell were not altogether blind 
 to the priceless literary value of the gift that 
 they were presenting to the world. But the 
 thought uppermost in their minds was piety 
 
 55
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 towards the man whom they loved. That 
 piety was recognised as the motive by which 
 they were impelled, we learn from verses prefixed 
 to the First Folio, written by Leonard Digges, 
 a fair representative of the literary world of the 
 day, 
 
 Shakespeare, at length, thy pious fellowes give 
 The world thy workes. 
 
 - Shakespeare had been dead for seven years, 
 and the world of letters gave no sign. The 
 greatest treasures of English literature, perhaps 
 of all literature, were either tossing about in the 
 Globe theatre, or circulating in imperfect copies 
 surreptitiously obtained, and, for all the literary 
 world cared, they would have so remained. And 
 yet at that time the literary world of London 
 included Jonson, Drayton, Camden, Fletcher, 
 and such lesser lights as Leonard Digges and 
 Hugh Holland, each of whom was in some way 
 connected with Shakespeare or his works. It 
 did not occur to Shakespeare's literary fellows 
 that it might be worth while to edit in a collected 
 form the plays that had been printed in pirated 
 and inaccurate editions, or to make some inquiry 
 about the dramas in manuscript that were at the 
 mercy of the players at the Globe. The assist- 
 ance of any one of these men would have saved 
 
 56
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 the pious editors of the First Folio from the 
 manifest and glaring errors which mar the text 
 of the Folio, and have blinded the eyes of many 
 generations of critics to the true position of that 
 edition, and to its claims upon their attention. 
 
 There is some foundation for the suggestion 
 that Shakespeare had intended to give his 
 dramas to the world in a collected form, brought 
 out with the care that he had bestowed on his 
 poems, and that his work was cut short by death. 
 The editors of the Folio in their dedication ask 
 for indulgence, the author ' not having the fate, 
 common with some, to be exequutor to his owne 
 writings,' and in their address to ' the great 
 variety of Readers ' these words occur : ' It 
 had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have 
 bene wished, that the Author himselfe had liu'd 
 to haue set forth, and overseen his owne writings ; 
 But since it hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he 
 by death departed from that right, we pray you 
 do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, 
 and paine, to haue collected and publish'd them.' 
 These words are consistent with the supposition 
 that Shakespeare's death, which was sudden and 
 unexpected, cut short the work in which he was 
 engaged of the collection and revision of his 
 plays. But, on the other hand, there is the 
 fact that he never interfered to prevent the 
 
 57
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 printing of pirated and corrupt versions of his 
 greatest works, and permitted the manuscripts 
 to remain with the managers of the Globe 
 Theatre, to be altered from time to time, as the 
 exigencies of the playhouse might require ; for 
 it was as acting copies, and not as manuscripts 
 revised and corrected for the press, that the true 
 originals were received at the hands of the 
 author. 
 
 However this may be, the fact remains that 
 for the preservation and printing of these copies 
 we arc indebted to the piety of Shakespeare's 
 fellow players, and if to carelessness about the 
 preservation of his plays Shakespeare had added 
 the aggressive and unlovely personality of Ben 
 Jonson — ever ready, according to Drummond, to 
 sacrifice a friend to a jest — it is more than prob- 
 able that most, if not all of them, would have been 
 lost to the world. Of the thirty-six plays 
 included in the First Folio, sixteen had been 
 published in quarto from ' diverse stolne and 
 surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by 
 the frauds and stealthcs of incurious impostors 
 that expos'd them.' Among the twenty printed 
 for the first time in the Folio are The Tempest, 
 As Tou Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, 
 King Henry VIII., Coriolanus, 'Julius Ccesar, 
 Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. - 
 
 58
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 If the literature of Shakespeare criticism could 
 find its way to the Elysian fields, in no part would 
 Shakespeare be more concerned than in what 
 has been written of his fellows, Heming and 
 Condell. 
 
 He would not quarrel with Mr. Churton 
 Collins's criticism of the text of the First Folio — 
 ' words the restoration of which is obvious left 
 unsupplied, unfamiliar words transliterated into 
 gibberish ; punctuation as it pleases chance ; 
 sentences with the subordinate clauses higgledy- 
 piggledy or upside down ; lines transposed ; 
 verse printed as prose, and prose as verse ; 
 speeches belonging to one character given to 
 another ; stage directions incorporated in the 
 text ; actors' names suddenly substituted for 
 those of the dramatis personae ; scenes and acts 
 left unindicated or indicated wrongly — all this 
 and more makes the text of the First Folio one 
 of the most portentous specimens of typography 
 and editing in existence.' * 
 
 All this is true, for two honest players, no 
 literary aid being forthcoming, simply handed 
 over to Isaac Haggard and Edward Blount, two 
 honest printers, manuscripts which they knew 
 to have been honestly come by, to put them 
 into print as best they could. No one but the 
 
 * Essays and Studies. 
 
 59
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 author is blamablc for the inevitable result. 
 And if Shakespeare, reading this criticism of 
 their handiwork, chanced to be in the frame 
 of mind attributed to him by Pope when he 
 wrote 
 
 There hapless Shakespeare yet of Tibbald sore 
 Wish'd he had blotted for himself before, 
 
 he might well regret that he had not printed 
 for himself before. But he would learn with 
 righteous indignation that doubts had been 
 cast on the honesty and good faith of his pious 
 fellows. 
 
 ' There is no doubt,' writes Mr. Spalding,* 
 ' that they could at least have enumerated 
 Shakespeare's works correctly ; but their know- 
 ledge and design of profit did not suit each other.' 
 They must, he points out, be presumed to have 
 known perfectly what works were, and what 
 were not Shakespeare's. But these men were 
 ' unscrupulous and unfair ' in their selection. 
 Their whole conduct ' inspires distrust,' and 
 justifies a critic in throwing the First Folio 
 entirely out of view as a * dishonest ' and, it 
 might be added, hypocritical ' attempt to put 
 down editions of about fifteen separate plays of 
 Shakespeare, previously printed in quarto, which, 
 
 * Letter on Authorship of Two Noble Kinsmen. 
 60
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 though in most respects more accurate than 
 their successors, had evidently been taken from 
 stolen copies.' 
 
 The profession of the editors of the Folio that 
 they had done their work ' without ambition 
 either of selfe-profit or fame ' was pure hypocrisy, 
 although, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillips pointed out,* 
 they, * in giving unreservedly to the public 
 valuable literary property of which they were 
 sole proprietors, made a sacrifice for which the 
 profits on the sale of the Folio would not com- 
 pensate them.' 
 
 The language used by the editors of the first 
 edition of the Cambridge Shakespeare, Mr. W. G. 
 Clarke and Mr. J. Glover, is much to the same 
 effect. Their preface is prefixed to one of the 
 best editions of Shakespeare's works, the Cam- 
 bridge Shakespeare of 1893, edited by the late 
 Dr. William Aldis Wright ; but he is not respon- 
 sible for language used by his predecessors. The 
 editors are guilty of suggestio falsi in conveying 
 to the public the idea that the Folio was printed 
 from original manuscripts received by them at 
 the hands of the author. If the editors were 
 guilty of the fraudulent puffing of their own 
 wares, coupled with ' denunciation of editions 
 which they knew to be superior of their own,' 
 
 * Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. 
 6l
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 the plainer language used by Mr. Spalding would 
 be fully justified. 
 
 Criticism is foreign to these pages, but they 
 arc conversant with Shakespeare's relations with 
 his fellows, and it is satisfactory to note that he 
 has been acquitted by more enlightened critics 
 of having bestowed his love — testified, as was 
 then the custom, by the gift of mourning rings — 
 upon a pair of fraudulent knaves. The attitude 
 of modern editors towards the Folio is totally 
 different. Sir Sidney Lee writes : ' Whatever 
 be the First Folio's typographical and editorial 
 imperfections, it is the fountain-head of know- 
 ledge of Shakespeare's complete achievement.' * 
 Mr. Grant White, in his historical sketch of the 
 text of Shakespeare prefixed to the edition of his 
 works edited by him (Boston, 1865), writes : 
 ' Indeed, such is the authority given to this 
 volume by the auspices under which it appeared, 
 that had it been thoroughly prepared for the 
 press and printed with care, there would have 
 been no appeal from its text, and editorial labour 
 upon Shakespeare's plays, except that of an his- 
 torical or exegetical nature, would have been not 
 only without justification, but without oppor- 
 tunity.' The text of the late Mr. Horace Furness's 
 monumental Variorum Shakespeare is the First 
 
 • Life of Shakespeare, p. 557. 
 62
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 Folio the spelling of which he retains. An edition 
 of the plays by Charlotte Porter and H. A. Clarke, 
 with a general introduction by Mr. Churton 
 Collins, has been published, in which the text 
 of the Folio, with the original spelling, is adopted, 
 with no more than necessary corrections. Sir 
 Walter Raleigh, in a suggestive and interesting 
 volume on Shakespeare contributed to the 
 English Men of Letters series, writes : ' There 
 is no escape from the Folio ; for twenty of the 
 plays it is one sole authority ; for most of the 
 remainder it is the best authority that we shall 
 ever know.' 
 
 — Shakespeare's fellowship with the players of 
 his day dated from shortly after his advent to 
 London, and endured to the day of his death. 
 They had rescued him from the mean condition 
 to which he had fallen, and they took pride in 
 his success. What manner of men these players 
 were is an inquiry the answer to which may aid 
 us, in some degree, in understanding the character 
 of their associate and friend. 
 
 The players who were most closely associated 
 with Shakespeare were Heming, Burbage and 
 Condell. Their names are associated with his 
 in the licences granted to the players at the 
 Globe theatre, and they are all remembered by 
 him in his will. ~~ 
 
 63
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 With Burbagc, the impersonator of his greatest 
 creations in tragedy — Hamlet, Lear and Othello 
 — he appears to have been most intimately asso- 
 ciated. A merry tale, of a kind that is often 
 current about play-actors, in which their names 
 are connected, is recorded in Manningham's 
 Diary of the date of the 13th of March, 1601. 
 And after Shakespeare had settled in Stratford 
 we find him, in one of his visits to London, 
 engaged with Burbage in devising for the Earl 
 of Portland the kind of emblematic decoration 
 known as impresa, for his equipment at a tourna- 
 ment to be held at Whitehall. 
 
 We owe it to the pious care of Malone, followed 
 by Sir Sidney Lee and the late Mr. Joseph 
 Knight, that we have been granted some insight 
 into the character of the men who were, in a 
 special sense, the fellows and friends of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 Heming died in 1630 in his house in St. Mary's, 
 Aldenbury, where he and his wife had lived 
 together for thirty years, and where he served 
 as churchwarden in 1608. He left a large family, 
 for whom he made provision by his will, and that 
 he gave them a good education is evident, for 
 his ninth son, William, who is also noticed in the 
 Dictionary of National Biography, was educated 
 at Westminster School, whence in 1621 he was 
 
 64
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 elected a King's scholar at Christ Church, 
 Oxford. 
 
 Condell also lived in the parish of St. Mary, 
 in good repute, as we must infer from the fact 
 that he was sidesman in 1606, and churchwarden 
 in 1 61 8. He died in his country house at 
 Fulham in 1627, having by his will, in which he 
 styles himself ' gentleman,' disposed of con- 
 siderable property, in addition to shares in the 
 Blackfriars and Globe theatres. 
 
 Of Burbage, the most famous actor of his 
 own, or perhaps of any age, Sir Sidney Lee has 
 been able to collect more full information in 
 his interesting biography in the Dictionary of 
 National Biography. The estimation in which 
 he was held appears from the many poems written 
 to his memory, and from his ' occasional intro- 
 duction into plays in his own person, and in no 
 assumed character. ... In a petition addressed 
 by his wife and son William to the lord Cham- 
 berlain in 1635, relative to the shares in the 
 Blackfriars and Globe playhouses, they speak of 
 Richard Burbage as " one who for thirty yeares' 
 paines, cost and labour made meanes to leave 
 his wife and children some estate," which implies 
 that he died a rich man.' He had some repu- 
 tation as a painter, and a tradition recorded by 
 Oldys attributes to him the Chandos portrait 
 
 65
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 of Shakespeare, which became the property of 
 Sir William Davenant. 
 
 The reader of the biographies of these players 
 must be struck by the respectability of their 
 lives, compared with the sad tale that must be 
 told of the University pens of the day. Shake- 
 speare's most intimate friends appear to have been 
 estimable family men, who took an interest in 
 Church matters, put some money together, as 
 he did, and provided well for their families. 
 
 The most prosperous of the players of the day 
 was Edward Alleyn. He was a famous actor, 
 and accumulated great wealth, part of which 
 he expended in the foundation and endowment 
 of the college at Dulwich. In 1600 he built, in 
 conjunction with Henslowe, the Fortune theatre 
 in Cripplegate. We do not read of him in con- 
 nection with any of Shakespeare's plays. Great 
 as he undoubtedly was as an actor, it is not 
 uncharitable to attribute his extraordinary finan- 
 cial success not so much to the legitimate drama 
 as to a speculation in which Shakespeare would 
 have taken no interest,* for in 1594 he acquired 
 
 • Shakespeare had no respect for the patrons of the bear garden. 
 ' You'll leave your noise anon, ye rascals : do you take the Court 
 for Paris-garden ? ye rude slaves, leave your gaping' {Henry VIII., 
 V. iv. 2). The lovers and haunters of bear-baiting and such like sports 
 are Autolycus {Winter's Tale, IV. iii. 108), Abraham Slender 
 {Merry Wives, I. i. 302), Sir Andrew Aguecheek {Twelfth Night, 
 I. iii. 97), Sir Toby Belch (1*., II. v. 8), Richard III. (2 Henry 
 
 66
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 an interest in the baiting-house at Paris Garden, 
 and he and Henslowe obtained the office of 
 ' Master of the Royal Game of bears bulls and 
 Mastiff dogs.' 'On special occasions he seems 
 to have directed the sport in person, and a graphic 
 but revolting account of his baiting a lion before 
 James I. at the Tower is given in Stovfs Chronicle, 
 ed. 1631, p. 835/* 
 
 It is interesting to pass from the swollen 
 wealth of this ungentle Master Baiter, turned 
 philanthropist, to the modest fortunes of one of 
 Shakespeare's friends, and to his kindly thought 
 for his fellow players. 
 
 Augustine Phillips was, with Shakespeare, an 
 original shareholder of the Globe theatre. He 
 died in 1605, leaving by his will '"to my fellowe 
 William Shakespeare a thirty shilling peece in 
 gould." . . . Phillips died in affluent circum- 
 stances, and remembered many of his fellow 
 actors in his will, leaving to his " fellow," Henry 
 Condell, and to his theatrical servant, Christopher 
 Beeston, like sums as to Shakespeare. He also 
 bequeathed " twenty shillings in gould " to each 
 of the actors Lawrence Fletcher, Robert Armin, 
 Richard Cowley, Alexander Cash, Nicholas 
 
 VI., V. i. 151), Thersites (Troilus and Cressida, V. vii. 12), and 
 Aaron (Titus Andronicus, V. i. 10 1). 
 * Diet. Nat. Biography. 
 
 67
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Toolcy, together with forty shillings and clothes, 
 or musical instruments to two theatrical appren- 
 tices Samuel Gilborne and James Sands. Five 
 pounds were further to be equally distributed 
 amongst " the hired men of the company." Of 
 four executors, three were the actors John 
 Heminges, Richard Burbage and William Ely, 
 who each received a silver bowl of the value of 
 five pounds.' * 
 
 The will of Augustine Phillips is an interesting 
 document, for by its aid we can discern in the 
 profession of player, from its very infancy, the 
 good fellowship and readiness to succour the 
 less successful members, by which it has been 
 always honourably distinguished. 
 
 The position of the players, at the time when 
 Shakespeare was admitted to the fellowship, 
 was a strange one. At law, unless he had 
 obtained a licence for the exercise of his functions 
 under a statute passed in 1572 from a peer of 
 the realm or other honourable personage of 
 greater degree, he was liable to the punishment 
 inflicted by magistrates on rogues, vagabonds, 
 or sturdy beggars. j* By a fiction of law the 
 licensed players were considered to be retained 
 as the ' household servants daylie waytors,' of 
 
 • Life of Shakespeare, p. 453, note 1. 
 f 14 Eliz. c. 5, re-enacted 39 Eliz. c. 4. 
 
 68
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 the great nobleman. They craved no further 
 stipend or benefit at his hands but their liveries, 
 and ' also your honors Licence to certifye that 
 we are your household Servaunts when we shall 
 have occasion to travayle amongst our frendes.' * 
 
 The legal fiction by which the player escaped 
 whipping as a vagabond by enrolling himself as 
 a servant had, like most others, its origin in 
 historical fact. The fellowships of players may 
 be traced to the vast number of servants and 
 retainers which was, up to the early years of the 
 sixteenth century, attached to the house of a 
 great nobleman. It was part of their office to 
 afford entertainment on festive occasions, such 
 as a marriage. The servants were often called 
 upon to entertain their masters and his guests 
 by a dramatic performance of some kind. 
 
 Play-acting was in the air in the reign of 
 Elizabeth. The miracle plays and moralities of 
 the Middle Ages were becoming out of date, and 
 the drama was in course of development. We find 
 it in a rudimentary form when ' three carters, three 
 shepherds, three neat herds, three swine-herds, 
 that have made themselves all men of hair,' have 
 a dance ' which the wenches say is a gallimaufry 
 of gambols because they are not in it.' f More 
 
 * Life of Shakespeare, p. 47, note 1. 
 f Winters Tale, IV. iv. 331. 
 
 6 9
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 ambitious was the presentation of the Nine 
 Worthies^ in which the village Curate, Sir 
 Nathaniel, ' a foolish mild man, an honest man 
 look you, and soon dashed, though a marvellous 
 good neighbour 'faith, and a very good bowler,' 
 was, when cast for the part of Alexander, some- 
 what o'er-parted. The servants of Duke Theseus 
 of Athens were ready, under the master of the 
 revels, to provide a masque or play to wear 
 away a tedious hour. The Duke inquires of 
 Philostrate 
 
 What masques, what dances shall we have, 
 To wear away this long age of three hours 
 Between our after-supper and bed-time ? 
 Where is our usual manager of mirth ? 
 What revels are in hand ? Is there no play, 
 To ease the anguish of a torturing hour ? * 
 
 It so happened that Philostrate, the master 
 of the revels, had seen rehearsed a play, as brief 
 as he had known a play, wherewith 
 
 Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, 
 Which never labour'd in their minds till now, 
 
 had made ready against their lord's nuptial, 
 
 Which when I saw rehearsed, I must confess 
 Made mine eyes water ; but more merry teares 
 The passion of loud laughter never shed. 
 
 * Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i. 32. 
 70
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 To the master of the revels this was ' nothing, 
 
 nothing in the world.' But the magnanimous 
 
 Theseus would see the play : 
 
 For never anything can be amiss 
 When simpleness and duty tender it. 
 Go, bring them in. 
 
 The conversion of the feudal retinue of a great 
 nobleman into a company of players connected 
 with his name was due to the action of several 
 causes. The nobleman was no longer able to 
 bear the expense of the upkeep of a great feudal 
 retinue, except by the sale of a portion of his 
 inheritance, to which some had recourse, and the 
 national passion for the drama afforded the means 
 of maintaining at the expense of the public a 
 company of servants with which his name was 
 honourably associated. 
 
 The travelling companies in the time of 
 Elizabeth differed widely in importance. In the 
 old play upon which The Taming of the Shrew is 
 founded, we find this stage direction : ' Enter 
 player with a pack.' The company that visited 
 Elsinore was of a different class. 
 
 Rosencrantz tells Hamlet that he and his 
 companion had ' coted * them on the way, and 
 hither are they coming to offer you service.' 
 
 * In coursing language a greyhound outstripping his competitor 
 is said to have coted him. The players were travelling slowly with the 
 wardrobes and properties. 
 
 71
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Ham. He that plays the King shall be welcome : 
 his majesty shall have tribute of me ; the adventurous 
 knight shall use his foil and target ; the lover shall not 
 sigh gratis; the humorous man shall end his part in 
 peace ; the clown shall make those laugh whose lungs 
 are tickled o' the sere ; and the lady shall say her mind 
 freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't. What players 
 are they ? 
 
 Ros. Even those you were wont to take delight in, 
 the tragedians of the city. 
 
 Ham. How chances it they travel ? Their residence 
 both in reputation and profit was better both ways. 
 
 It is then explained that since a late innova- 
 tion they do not hold the same estimation, and 
 are not so followed as when Hamlet was in the 
 city. It is not their fault, for ' their endeavour 
 keeps in the wonted pace.' But companies of 
 children — ' an aery of children, little eyases, that 
 cry out on the top of question, and are most 
 tyrannically clapped for't — are now the fashion.' f 
 Hamlet has some pertinent remarks to make on 
 this new fashion, which show that he was on the 
 side of the tragedians in whom he was wont to 
 take delight. The players arrive and are received 
 
 • Hamlet, II. ii. 330. 
 
 I The cyass was a hawk taken and trained as a nestling. It was 
 not so highly esteemed by falconers as the wild hawk or haggard, 
 when reclaimed, ' Eycasses are tedious and do use to cry very much 
 in their feedings, they are troublesome and paynfull to be entered.' 
 Turbervile, Booke of Faulcotine, 1575. 
 
 72
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 with a friendly courtesy, removed alike from 
 offensive patronage and undue familiarity. 
 
 You are welcome, masters ; welcome, all. I am glad 
 to see thee well. Welcome, good friends. my old 
 friend! thy face is valanced since I saw thee last; 
 comest thou to beard me in Denmark ? What my 
 young lady and mistress ! By'r lady, your ladyship 
 is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the 
 altitude of a chopine. 
 
 The coming of the tragedians of the city to 
 Elsinore, and their reception by the Prince of 
 Denmark, are reminiscences of a visit made by 
 the company of which Shakespeare was a 
 member to a great house, such as Wilton, and 
 of the favour with which, in the language of the 
 editors of the First Folio, he was ' prosecuted ' 
 by its owner ; and it may be that the original of 
 Hamlet was found in some young nobleman 
 capable of great things, but through lack of 
 decision throwing away his life and oppor- 
 tunities ; distinguished nevertheless from the 
 idlers who occupied seats on the stage of the 
 Globe and passed jests to the actors, by genuine 
 interest in the drama, and by an understanding 
 of the true principles of the player's art. With 
 suchlike visitor to the Globe theatre Shakespeare 
 would hold converse, such as that of the First 
 Player with the Prince of Denmark. 
 
 73
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 In the year 1602 a curious satirical medley- 
 was produced in the University of Cambridge. 
 Although it was an academical production, and 
 full of classical quotations and allusions, it 
 excited sufficient general interest to lead to its 
 publication in 1606, by the title of The Returne 
 from Pernassus, or the Scourge of Simony, as it 
 was publickly acted by the Students in St. John's 
 College, Cambridge. ' It is a very singular, a 
 very ingenious, and, as I think, a very interesting 
 performance. It contains criticisms on con- 
 temporary authors, strictures on living manners, 
 and the earliest denunciation (I know of) of the 
 miseries and unprofitableness of a scholar's life.' * 
 The piece has no dramatic merit. The plot is a 
 slender thread on which are strung a number 
 of good things, in prose and in verse ; satire, 
 literary criticism, and reference to the men and 
 topics of the day ; a foretaste of the society 
 journalism of the present day. 
 
 When we find among the men, Shakespeare, 
 Ben Jonson and Burbage, and among the topics, 
 the position and reputation of thef play-actor, 
 and of the university playwright, with a 
 critical estimate of the poets and dramatists of 
 the day, the relevance of the piece to the present 
 inquiry becomes apparent. 
 
 • Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, W. Hazlitt. 
 
 74
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 The burden of the play is the little respect that 
 is paid to learning and worth, and the failure of 
 the highest academic merit to attain success in 
 life. It tells of the ill-fortune that befell certain 
 students who left the university to seek their 
 fortunes in the world, and who were compelled 
 to return from Parnassus to humbler pursuits. 
 
 The second title, the Scourge of Simony, 
 indicates that the piece contains a castigation of 
 the corrupt practices by which the deserving 
 Academico was deprived of presentation to a 
 living which was sold by a patron from whom he 
 had expectations to the father of an unlettered 
 boor. There is good comedy in the description 
 of the devices by which this ignoramus manages 
 to pass the necessary examination. But the 
 part of the piece in which we are interested is 
 that which relates to the fortunes of playwrights 
 and players. 
 
 The man of genius, Ingenioso, writes plays, 
 for which he is, somehow, prosecuted. ' To be 
 brief Academico,' he says, ' writts are out for 
 me to apprehend me for my playes, and now 
 I am bound for the He of Doggs.' 
 
 Two students, Philomusus and Studioso, 
 having tried medicine and acting, become 
 fiddlers. Finally leaving the ' baser fidling trade,' 
 they make choice of ' a shepheards poor secure 
 
 75
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 contented life ' and are content to end their 
 days on the Kentish downs. 
 
 True mirth we may enjoy in thacked stall 
 Not hoping higher rise, nor fearing lower fall. 
 
 In the fourth act we are introduced to a 
 travelling company of players, who have visited 
 Cambridge. They are represented by Burbage and 
 by Kempe, who filled the leading parts in tragedy 
 and in comedy. It is the company of which 
 Shakespeare was at this time a member. Burbage 
 had often noticed among the scholars an aptitude 
 for the stage, and suggests that they could 
 probably be engaged at a low rate. With their 
 experience of their fellow Shakespeare present 
 to his mind he suggests that they might also be 
 able to pen a part. Accordingly, the players 
 appointed to meet Philomusus and Studioso, in 
 order to make test of their quality. The students 
 keep the players waiting so long that when they 
 at length arrive the merry Kemp addresses 
 Studioso as Otioso. In the meantime the 
 players converse : 
 
 Bur. Now, Will Kempe, if we can intertaine these 
 schollers at a low rate, it will be well, they have often- 
 times a good conceite in a part. 
 
 Kempe. Its true indeede, honest Dick, but the slaves 
 are somewhat proud, and besides, it is a good sport in a 
 part, to see them never speake in their walke, but at the 
 
 7 6
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 end of the stage, iust as though in walking with a fellow 
 we should never speake but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, 
 where a man can go no further. I was once at a Comedie 
 in Cambridge, and there I saw a parasite make faces and 
 mouths of all sorts in this fashion. 
 
 Bur. A little teaching will mend these faults, and it 
 may bee beside they will be able to pen a part. 
 
 Kemp. Few of the vniversity pen plaies will, they 
 smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer 
 Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and 
 luppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them 
 all downe. I and Ben Ionson too. O that Ben Ionson 
 is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giuing the 
 poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a 
 purge that made him beray his credit. 
 
 Bur. Its a shrewd fellow indeed : I wonder these 
 schollers stay so long, they appointed to be here presently 
 that we might try them ; Oh here they come. 
 
 Studioso and Philomusus enter, and after 
 some pleasantry, they are tried. Kempe thinks 
 that Studioso should belong to his tuition. 
 ' Your face me thinkes would be good for a 
 foolish Mayre or a foolish justice of peace.' 
 
 Bur. {to Philomusus). I like your face, and the propor- 
 tion of your body for Richard the 3. I pray M. Phil, let 
 me see you act a little of it. 
 
 Phil. Now is the winter of our discontent 
 
 Made glorious summer by the sonne of York. 
 
 Bur. Very well I assure you, well M. Phil, and 
 M. Stud, wee see what ability you are of ; I pray walke 
 with us to our fellows, and weele agree presently. 
 
 77
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Notwithstanding this promising beginning, 
 nothing came of the project. The terms offered 
 by the thrifty players were too low, for in the 
 next scene Phil, and Stud, appear as fiddlers, 
 with their consort. 
 
 Stud. Better it is mongst fidlers to be chiefe 
 Then at plaiers trencher beg reliefe, 
 But ist not strange this mimick apes should prize 
 Unhappy schollers at a hireling rate. 
 Vile word, that lifts them vp to hye degree, 
 And treades vs dovvne in groueling misery. 
 England affordes these glorious vagabonds, 
 That carried earst their fardels on their backes 
 Coursers to rid on through the gazing streetes, 
 Sooping it in their glaring Satten sutes, 
 And Pages to attend their maisterships ; 
 With mouthing words that better wits have made 
 They purchase lands, and now Esquieres are made. 
 
 About three years before the representation of 
 The Returne from Pernassus Shakespeare had by 
 the purchase of New Place, in the words of Sir 
 Sidney Lee, inaugurated the building up at 
 Stratford of a large landed estate. The owner 
 of the largest house in Stratford, who had 
 applied for a grant of arms to his father, may 
 well have appeared to the envious student as 
 having attained to the estate of esquire, and that 
 Shakespeare (when his means allowed of it, but 
 no sooner) was seen riding through the streets 
 
 78
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 on a courser, on which passers by stopped to 
 gaze, cannot be doubted. It is the ' roan 
 Barbary ' which carried Henry Bolingbroke, 
 when he road into London 
 
 Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed 
 Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know.* 
 
 It is the red roan courser ' of the colour of the 
 nutmeg and of the heat of ginger,' in whose 
 praise the Dauphin wrote a sonnet which began 
 thus : { Wonder of Nature.' f 
 
 At some time of his life the fiery courage and 
 elastic tread of the Eastern horse came as a 
 revelation to one accustomed to the somewhat 
 wooden paces of the thickset, straight-pasterned 
 home-bred English horse of the early days when 
 Venus and Adonis was written. And thence- 
 forth Shakespeare would say in the words of 
 Hotspur, this ' roan shall be my throne.' 
 
 Can we wonder that a prosperous player — 
 a glorious vagabond — seated on this throne, 
 honoured and wealthy, should have excited the 
 envy of Studioso, at his wits' end to turn to 
 profitable use the learning of St. John's College ? 
 Or that he should have consoled himself with 
 the reflection that after all the players did no 
 
 * Richard 77., V. ii. 8. 
 f Henry V., III. vii. 20. 
 
 79
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 more than speak ' words that better wits had 
 made ' ? 
 
 A curious tractate of about the year 1605, of 
 which there was an unique copy in the Althorpe 
 library, was reprinted by the New Shakespere 
 Society.* A player is advised to betake himself 
 to London. ' There thou shalt learne to be 
 frugall (for players were never so thriftie as they 
 are now about London) & to feed upon all men, 
 to let none feede upon thee ; to make thy hand 
 a stranger to thy pocket, thy hart slow to per- 
 forme thy tongues promise : and when thou 
 feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place 
 of Lordship in the Country, that growing weary 
 of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to 
 dignitie and reputation. . . . Sir, I thanke thee 
 (quoth the player) for this good counsell, I 
 promise you I will make use of it, for, I have 
 heard indeede of some that have gone to London 
 very meanly, and have come in time to be 
 exceeding wealthy.' 
 
 From The Returne from Pernassus we can 
 understand the envy that was excited in the 
 university wits by the wealth and prosperity of 
 the successful players, but fully to realise the 
 feelings of the university pen, put down, in the 
 words of Kempc, by one of these players, 
 
 • Rat sets Ghost. 
 80
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 commencing dramatist, we must look else- 
 where. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare at the height of 
 his prosperity was regarded as the type of the 
 thrifty and successful player, and there are 
 allusions in the speech of Studioso and in 
 Ratseis Ghost which may well be applied to him. 
 But the players about London were noted as 
 generally thrifty, and some of Shakespeare's 
 fellows, as we have seen, acquired substantial 
 property. 
 
 The precise date at which Shakespeare was 
 admitted to the fellowship of players is unknown. 
 It is generally believed that he left Stratford for 
 London in the year 1586, and, according to 
 Rowe, ' he was received into the company 
 then in being, at first in a very mean rank.' 
 According to Davenant, his earliest connection 
 with the theatre was of a still humbler kind. 
 It was that of holding the horses of visitors to 
 the theatres. The story is thus told by Dr. 
 Johnson. When Shakespeare fled to London 
 ' his first expedient was to wait at the door of 
 the playhouse, and hold the horses of those that 
 had no servants, that they might be ready again 
 after the performance. In this office he became 
 so conspicuous for his care and readiness, that 
 in a short time every man as he alighted called 
 
 81
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 for Will. Shakespeare, and scarcely any other 
 waiter was trusted with a horse while Will. 
 Shakespeare could be had. This was the first 
 dawn of better fortune. Shakespeare finding 
 more horses put into his hand than he could 
 hold, hired boys to wait under his inspection, 
 who, when Will. Shakespeare was summoned, 
 were immediately to present themselves, " I am 
 Shakespeare's boy, Sir." In time Shakespeare 
 found higher employment, but as long as the 
 practice of riding to the playhouse continued, 
 the waiters that held the horses retained the 
 appellation of Shakespeare's boys.' Malone, 
 though he discredits the story, writes : ' The 
 genealogy of this story it must be acknowledged 
 is very correctly deduced.' It first appeared in 
 print in The Lives of the English Poets, published 
 in 1753 by Cibber, according to whom Sir 
 William Davenant told it to Betterton, who told 
 it to Rowe. Although Rowe told the story to 
 Pope, he did not include it in his Life. The 
 reason why it was discredited by Rowe was 
 probably that which was thus stated, a few 
 years later, by Steevens : ' the most popular 
 of the Theatres were on the Bankside ; and we 
 are told by the satirical writers of the time that 
 the usual mode of conveyance to these places 
 was by water ; but not a single writer so much 
 
 82
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 hints at the custom of riding to them, or at the 
 practice of having horses held during the time of 
 the exhibition.' To Rowe, as to Steevens, the 
 idea of riding to theatres on the Bankside 
 naturally seemed absurd. That Rowe discarded 
 a story which seemed to him to be so improbable 
 shows the carefulness with which he sifted the 
 information which was supplied to him. But by 
 a plain tale the criticism of Steevens and the 
 scepticism of Rowe and Malone are put down. 
 
 When Shakespeare came to London there 
 were only two theatres, the ' Theatre ' and the 
 1 Curtain,' to one of which he must have been 
 attached. These theatres were in the fields 
 within half a mile of the city wall, and we now 
 know that it was the custom to approach them 
 on horseback. Sir John Davies, in an epigram 
 written before 1599, wrote 
 
 Faustus, nor lord, nor knight, nor wise, nor old 
 To every place about the town doth ride ; 
 He rides into the fields, plays to behold ; 
 He rides to take boat at the waterside. 
 
 Later on, the Globe, and the Rose, the 
 popular theatres, were on Bankside, and 
 approached by water, and for more than one 
 hundred years before Rowe wrote no one had 
 spoken of riding to the play. Recent research 
 shows that there is no reason why Davenant's 
 
 83 
 
 a 2
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 story should be discredited. It must have had 
 its origin in the days of riding to the theatre. 
 It is accepted by Mr. Elton, and Sir Sidney Lee 
 sees no improbability of the main drift of the 
 strange tale. 
 
 The tradition that Shakespeare in extremity 
 of need turned to horses as a means of earning 
 his bread, and in some employment connected 
 with their care made a name which others 
 thought worth pirating, gains some confirmation 
 from the constant and needless occurrence in his 
 plays of the language of the groom, the farrier 
 and the horse master ; and still more from his 
 use of familiar corruptions and cant phrases 
 current in the stable and in the blacksmith's 
 shop.* 
 
 The story is interesting, not only as an incident 
 in the life of Shakespeare, but because it brings 
 into strong relief one side of his character. In 
 it we find the beginning of the qualities by the 
 use of which, in the words of Professor Dowden, 
 he came at the age of thirty-three ' posessor 
 
 • Over one hundred and fifty phrases and terms of art connected 
 with horses and horsemanship have been collected from the works 
 of Shakespeare. Among them arc the following corruptions current 
 in the stable : " The fives " for " vives " ; " springhalt " for 
 " stringhalt " ; " mosing " for " mourning " of the chine. " Farcy " 
 is, according to Gervase Markham (Maister-peece) " of our ignorant 
 smiths called the fashions." The word " fashions " used by Shake- 
 speare must have been picked up by him in some ignorant black- 
 smith's forge in Stratford. 
 
 8 4
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 of New Place at Stratford, and from year to 
 year added to his worldly dignity and wealth. 
 Such material advancement, argues a power of 
 understanding, and adapting oneself to the facts 
 of the material world.' 
 
 All places that the eye of heaven visits 
 
 Are to the wise man ports and happy havens. 
 
 In this spirit Shakespeare, fallen on evil days, 
 turned to practical use his love of horses, and the 
 practical knowledge of their care which he had 
 somehow acquired. Realising with Cassius that 
 ' men at some time are masters of their fate,' 
 and that the fault is not ' in our stars but in our- 
 selves that we are underlings,' he applied him- 
 self to the work that came to hand with an 
 understanding of the facts of the material world, 
 and a determination to be master of his fate, 
 which ensured success. 
 
 Some of the most interesting accounts of the 
 early years of Shakespeare's life have been 
 traced, through a respectable pedigree, to Sir 
 William Davenant. It is therefore important 
 to consider how far he ought to be regarded as a 
 trustworthy authority. Davenant was the son 
 of a well-known citizen of Oxford, Mr. John 
 D'Avenant (so the name was written), the 
 owner of a tavern afterwards known as the 
 
 85
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 1 Crown.' He was, according to Anthony a 
 Wood, a grave and discreet man, ' yet an 
 admirer and lover of plays and play writers, 
 especially Shakespeare, who frequented his house 
 in his journeys between Warwickshire and 
 London.' * Mrs. D'Avenant was ' a very 
 beautiful woman of good wit and understanding.' 
 Shakespeare was on terms of intimacy with the 
 family. William, the second son, was his god- 
 child. Another son, Robert, became a Fellow 
 of St. John's College, and a Doctor of Divinity. 
 Aubrey may be believed, when in his account of 
 Shakespeare he writes : ' I have heard parson 
 Robert say that Mr. Wm. Shakespeare having 
 given him a hundred kisses.' An ancient scandal 
 retailed by Aubrey is only to our present pur- 
 pose inasmuch as it is founded on the well- 
 known intimacy of Shakespeare with the 
 D'Avenant family. Shakespeare manifested a 
 special affection for his godchild which was 
 certainly returned. William was only ten years 
 of age when his godfather died, but from an 
 early age he was devoted to his memory, for at 
 the age of twelve he composed an ' Ode in 
 remembrance of Master Shakespeare,' which 
 was published in the year 1638. 
 
 Davenant's devotion to the memory of Shake- 
 
 • A then. Oxon. 
 
 86
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 speare continued throughout his life. At his 
 death he was the owner of a portrait which, from 
 its subsequent history, became known as the 
 Chandos portrait, and which became the 
 property of the actor Betterton. 
 .^■-Dryden, in his preface to The Tempest, altered 
 by him in collaboration with Davenant, writes : 
 ' I do not set any value on anything in this 
 play, but out of gratitude to the memory of 
 Sir William Davenant, who did me the honour 
 to join me with him in the alteration of it. It 
 was originally Shakespeare's, a poet for whom he 
 had particularly a high veneration, and whom he 
 first taught me to admire.' 
 
 Mr. Elton writes : ' If we could evoke some 
 shadow of the living Shakespeare, it could only 
 be with the help of Davenant's recollections. 
 We shall find little help from painting or sculp- 
 ture ; but we can compare what was said by 
 those who knew the poet, or had talked with his 
 friends.' Aubrey and Betterton had talked 
 with Davenant. Rowe received the story of the 
 organising of the brigade of ' Shakespeare's 
 Boys ' from Betterton, who had it directly from 
 Sir William Davenant. The leading facts of the 
 early life of an intimate friend who had become 
 so famous must have been treasured in the 
 memories of the D'Avenant family ; and the 
 
 87
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 struggles of his younger days were recalled with 
 pride, in the light of the success that he had 
 attained. Sir William's devotion to the memory 
 of his godfather would have led him to collect 
 the facts with pious care. A story that descends 
 from Davenant through a respectable pedigree 
 ought to be received with respect, and we now 
 know that men did in fact ride from town to the 
 theatre at the time when Shakespeare took 
 refuge in London. 
 
 We do not know how it came to be found out 
 by the players that Shakespeare's wits could be 
 turned to better account than in holding the 
 horses of the playgoers, and speculation on this 
 subject is idle. His admission to a company of 
 players was the first step of the ladder which 
 led him to the summit of his fame as a dramatist, 
 and the success of his plays, when presented on 
 the stage, is in great measure due to the prac- 
 tical acquaintance with stagecraft which he had 
 acquired when working in the theatre. ' Poet 
 as he was and philosopher and psychologist, 
 Shakespeare was first of all a playwright, com- 
 posing plays to be performed by actors in a 
 theatre, before his audience.' * "~ m *' 
 
 Shakespeare was successful as an actor, 
 although he did not attain to the highest emi- 
 
 • Shakespeare as a Playwright, by Brander Matthew (Preface). 
 
 88
 
 THE PLAYERS 
 
 nence. Five or six years after his advent to 
 London Chettle writes of him as ' exelent in the 
 qualitie he professes.'* And the prominent place 
 occupied by his name in the licences granted to 
 the companies with which he was connected is 
 evidence of the position which he held in the 
 theatre. Tradition assigns to him the parts of 
 the Ghost in his Hamlet, the top of his perform- 
 ance according to Rowe, and of Adam in As Tou 
 Like It. His name is not associated with any 
 great part. His heart was not in his profession.^ 
 ' His highest ambitions lay, it is true, elsewhere 
 than in acting or theatrical management, and 
 at an early period of his histrionic career he 
 undertook, with triumphant success, the labours 
 of a playwright. It was in dramatic poetry that 
 his genius found its goal. But he pursued the 
 profession of an actor, and fulfilled all the 
 obligations of a theatrical shareholder loyally 
 and uninterruptedly until very near the date of 
 his death. 'J 
 
 From Shakespeare's relations with the players 
 we learn that he was a man who inspired his 
 
 * Kind Harts Dream (Preface). " Quality, in Elizabethan English, 
 was the technical term for the actor's profession " {Life of Shake- 
 speare, p. 86, note 3). Hamlet used the word in this technical 
 meaning when he said to the players, " Come, give us a taste of 
 your quality." 
 
 f See Sonnets, ex. and cxi. 
 
 % Life of Shakespeare, p. 89. 
 
 89
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 fellows with feelings of affection as well as respect. 
 His was a sympathetic nature. The players 
 were proud of his success, and indignant when 
 they thought that his reputation was malevo- 
 lently attacked. They collected and published 
 his plays to keep alive the memory of ' so worthy 
 a friend.' Shakespeare was a worthy friend. 
 In his prosperity he was loyal to players by 
 whom he had been raised from the mean rank 
 to which he had fallen, and in his last hours, 
 when making his will, his thoughts turned, not 
 to powerful patrons or literary magnates, but 
 to his fellows, Heming and Condell. It is to 
 his rare i gentleness ' towards his fellows, and 
 to their appreciation of it, that we owe the gift 
 that they bestowed upon humanity. 
 
 90
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 Among the tens of thousands who daily heard 
 brave Talbot ' triumph again on the stage,' 
 there was one in whose ears the heroic strain 
 sounded as a death knell. He was the author 
 of the dull and lifeless historical drama which 
 had been redeemed from failure by an upstart 
 player, who dared to suppose that he could 
 ' bombast out ' a blank verse with the best of 
 the university pens. 
 
 The first part of Henry VI. in its original 
 form has not survived, and no record of its 
 production has been found. Whether it was in 
 fact presented to the public before the revision 
 of the piece by Shakespeare, and the introduction 
 of the Talbot scenes had ensured its enthusiastical 
 reception by a patriotic audience, is a matter of 
 uncertainty. The second and third parts of 
 Henry VI., as they stood before the final revision 
 by Shakespeare, are extant.* The theory that 
 
 * In The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous bouses 
 of Tork and Lancaster, published in 1594, and The True Tragedy of 
 Richard, Duke of Torke, and the death of good King Henry the Sixt, 
 as it was sundrie times acted by the Earl of Pembroke, his servants, 
 published in the following year. 
 
 9 1
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Greene and Peele, possibly with the assistance 
 of Marlowe, produced the original draft of the 
 three parts of Henry VI. may be accepted. That 
 they were finally revised by Shakespeare, that 
 they assumed the form in which they were printed 
 in the First Folio, is certain. The authorship, in 
 whole or in part, of Greene is supported by 
 stronger evidence than similarity of workmanship. 
 
 Robert Greene may be taken as representative 
 of a class with whom Shakespeare was brought 
 into literary fellowship when he commenced 
 dramatist. They were known as the uni- 
 versity pens. 
 
 In the early part of the reign of Elizabeth the 
 spread of the New Learning, and a wider outlook 
 on life, inspired the youth of the nation with 
 a desire to seek out new fields for the exercise 
 of the powers of which they were conscious. 
 ' Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,' 
 was a modern instance from the lips of one of 
 the ' two gentlemen of Verona.' 
 
 It was a time in which 
 
 Men of slender reputation 
 Put forth their sons to seek preferment out ; 
 Some to the wars, to try their fortune there ; 
 Some to discover islands far away ; 
 Some to the studious Universities.* 
 
 * Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. iii. 6. 
 9 2
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 But the university is not the end of life, and 
 the studious youth who had been sent thither 
 by his father to seek out preferment had no 
 sooner attained his degree than he found him 
 confronted with the problem of how he was to 
 earn his bread. The study of university life 
 from which we have quoted enables us to realise 
 the struggle for existence which awaited those 
 students who had made the best use of their time 
 at the university ; for the names under which 
 we know Studioso, Philomusus, and Ingenioso 
 indicate that they are intended to represent 
 this class.* 
 
 The Civil Service, the various branches of 
 which at home and abroad offer such a wide 
 field of useful and profitable employment, had 
 not come into existence. 
 
 According to the author of The Returne from 
 Pernassus, the Church was suffering under the 
 scourge of simony, and it is apparent that he 
 regarded the law as suitable only to a student 
 of ample means, for the student who is intended 
 for the law is the son of a man of property, the 
 owner of the advowson of the living that was the 
 victim of the scourge of simony. 
 
 Ingenioso, if he had lived at the present day, 
 would have found an exercise for his powers, and 
 
 * The Returne from Pernassus, ante, p. 74. 
 
 93
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 an immediate source of income, in writing for 
 the press. Failing any other resource, he joins 
 the fellowship of the university pens. 
 
 Robert Greene, born about 1560, matriculated 
 at St. John's College, Cambridge, and obtained 
 the degree of M.A. in 1588. If, as is stated, he 
 was incorporated at Oxford in 1588, he was 
 closely connected with university life. In the 
 course of a short and miserable life, as dramatist, 
 poet and pamphleteer, he produced works suf- 
 ficiently voluminous to be published in fifteen 
 volumes in the Huth Library (188 1-6). He was 
 a protagonist in the war of pamphleteers, in 
 which Gabriel Harvey and Nash took part, a 
 curious feature of the Elizabethan age, which 
 has been already noticed. It is, however, as a 
 dramatist that he is brought into relationship 
 with Shakespeare. His position among the 
 university playwrights is thus estimated by Sir 
 A. W. Ward : ' Greene's dramatic genius has 
 nothing in it of the intensity of Marlowe's tragic 
 muse ; nor perhaps does he ever equal Peele at 
 his best. On the other hand, his dramatic 
 poetry is occasionally animated with the breezy 
 freshness which no artifice can simulate. He 
 had considerable constructive skill, but he has 
 created no character of commanding power — 
 unless Ateukin be excepted ; but his personages 
 
 94
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 are living men and women, and marked out from 
 one another with a vigorous, but far from rude, 
 hand. His comic humour is undeniable, and 
 he had the gift of light and graceful dialogue. 
 His diction is overloaded with classical orna- 
 ment, but his versification is easy and fluent, and 
 its cadence is at times singularly sweet. He 
 creates his best effects by the simplest means, 
 and he is indisputably one of the most attractive 
 of early English dramatic authors.'* 
 
 His dramas have now no interest for any but 
 professed students of English literature. But 
 the story of his life may be profitably studied, 
 for it throws some light upon his relations with 
 Shakespeare, and in it we find, in an exaggerated 
 form, the character and experiences of many 
 members of the fellowship of dramatists at the 
 time when they were joined by Shakespeare. 
 
 Greene died in the year 1582, and on his 
 deathbed wrote the one of the thirty-five 
 prose tracts ascribed to his pen which has 
 secured for him an unenviable immortality. It 
 is one of three pamphlets which were published 
 after the author's death. They are all more or 
 less autobiographical in their character, but 
 that which is of special interest was edited by 
 Henry Chettle, and published in 1582 under the 
 
 * Encyclopedia Britannica, nth ed. 
 
 95
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 title of ' Greens Groats-worth of Wit, bought 
 with a Million of Repentance, describing the 
 follic of youth, the falshoode of makeshift 
 flatterers, the miserie of the negligent, and mis- 
 chiefes of deceiuing courtizans, written before 
 his death, and published at his dying request.' 
 
 Greene having come to a pass at which 
 ' sicknesse, riot, incontinence, have at once 
 shown their extremitie,' sends a message to his 
 readers ; ' the last I have writ ; and I fear me 
 the last I shall write.' Greene was, indeed, in 
 sore distress. He was dependent for his support 
 on a poor shoemaker and his wife. He gave a 
 bond for ten pounds to his host, and wrote on 
 the day before his death these pitiful lines to his 
 deserted wife : ' Doll, I charge thee by the love 
 of our youth and by my soules rest that thou 
 wilt see this man paide for if hce and his wife 
 had not succoured me I had died in the streetes.'* 
 
 In this tractate the story is told of a young 
 man named Roberto. The part which deals with 
 the parentage and early history of Roberto and 
 his wealthy brother is a moral tale which has no 
 relation to the life history of Greene. The 
 autobiographical part of the tract is easily 
 separable from the moral talc. Roberto, as he 
 lay on the ground in distress, is accosted by a 
 
 • " Life," by A. H. Bullen, in Diet. Nat. Biography. 
 
 96
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 stranger who has overheard his lamentation. 
 He offers to ' endeauour to doe the best, that 
 either may procure your profit or bring you 
 pleasure ; the rather for that I suppose you are 
 a scholar, and pittie it is men of learning should 
 Hue in lacke.' Employment may easily be 
 obtained, ' for men of my profession get by 
 scholars their whole living. What is your pro- 
 fession sayd Roberto ? Truely sir, said he, 
 " I am a player." " A player," quoth Roberto, 
 " I took you rather for a gentleman of great 
 liuing ; for if by outward habit men should 
 be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for 
 a substantiall man. So am I where I dwell 
 (quoth the player) reputed able at my proper 
 cost to build a Windmill, what though the 
 worlde once went hard with mee, when I was 
 faine to carrie my playing Fardle a footebacke ; 
 Tempora mutantur ; I know you know the mean- 
 ing of it better than I, but I thus conster it, it 
 is otherwise now ; for my very share in playing 
 apparrell will not be solde for two hundred 
 pounds." Roberto asks : ' How meane you to 
 use mee ? Why, sir, in making playes, said the 
 other, for which you shall be well paied if you 
 will take the paines.' Roberto went with the 
 player, and became ' famozed for an Arch- 
 plaimaking poet, his prose like the sea somtime 
 
 97
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 sweled, anon like the same sea fell to a low ebbe, 
 yet seldom he wanted, his labors were so well 
 esteemed.' The story of the bad company into 
 which Roberto fell, and the ill treatment of his 
 wife, is unhappily true of Greene, for a pathetic 
 letter was found among his papers after his death 
 addressed to his wife from ' thy repentent 
 husband for his disloyaltie Robert Greene.' 
 
 It is at this point in the narrative that Greene 
 intervenes in his proper person. ' Heere 
 (Gentlemen) breake I off Roberto's speech ; 
 whose life in most part agreeing with mine, 
 found one selfe punished as I haue doone. Here- 
 after suppose me the said Roberto, and I will 
 goe on with that hee promised : Greene will 
 send you new his groatsworth of wit, that never 
 showed a mites-worth in his life ; and though 
 no man now be by, to doe me good, yet ere I 
 die, I will by my repentance indeuour to doe all 
 men good.' 
 
 Greene in some fine verses bids farewell 
 to the 
 
 Deceiuing world, that with alluring toyes, 
 Hast made my life the subject of thy scorne. 
 
 Having delivered himself of some moral maxims, 
 he directs a few lines to his ' fellowe schollers 
 about this cittie ' addressed ' to those gentle- 
 
 9 8
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 men, his Quondam acquaintance, that spend 
 their wits in making Plaies, R. G. wisheth a 
 better exercise, and wisdome to preuent his 
 extremities.' 
 
 To the playwrights generally, Greene offers 
 the advice that they should be employed in 
 more profitable courses than in writing plays for 
 the benefit of the actors, of whom he writes with 
 contempt as ' those Puppits that speake from 
 our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our 
 colours, . . . for it is pitie men of such rare wits, 
 should be subject to the pleasures of such rude 
 groomes.' This is the point of view of the 
 students of Greene's old college, St. John's. 
 According to Studioso, the wealth by which the 
 players are enabled to purchase lands and 
 attain to dignity are ' mouthing words that 
 better wits have framed.' Trust not these men, 
 is his advice, for the playwright to whom they 
 are beholden for the words by the speaking of 
 which they attain to wealth and fame will be 
 allowed by them to perish for want of comfort. 
 ' Is it not strange that I to whom they al haue 
 been beholding ; is it not like that you to whom 
 they all haue been beholding, shall (were ye in 
 that case that I am now) be both at once of them 
 forsaken ? ' 
 
 To each of three players, his quondam 
 
 99
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 acquaintance, Greene addresses a special warn- 
 ing. One, the ' famous gracer of Tragedians,' 
 who has said in his heart there is no God, should 
 now ' give glorie vnto his greatness.' That 
 Marlowe is here intended has never been doubted. 
 Another, ' Young Juuenall, that byting satyrist, 
 that lastlie with mce together writ a Comedie,' 
 is advised not to get many enemies by bitter 
 words. As to a third who is ' no lesse deseruing 
 than the other two, in some things rarer, in 
 nothing inferiour ; driuen (as my selfe) to 
 extreme shifts ; a little have I to say to thee.' 
 That little seems to be not to depend ' on so 
 meane a stay ' as playwriting. The ' byting 
 satyrist ' has been identified as Nash, and the 
 third playwright as Peele. 
 
 Greene then goes on to write : ' Yes, trust 
 them not ; for there is an vpstart Crow, beauti- 
 fied with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart 
 wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well 
 able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best 
 of you ; and being an absolute lohannes fac 
 totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake- 
 scene in a Countrie.' 
 
 That this outburst of spleen refers to Shake- 
 speare cannot be doubted, the line ' O tiger's 
 heart wrapt in a woman's hide ' is found in 
 the third part of Henry VI. (I. iv. 137), and 
 
 100
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 also in the older version The True Trazedie 9 
 and the play on Shakespeare's name is unmis- 
 takable. 
 
 When we remember that these words were 
 written by Greene on his deathbed, forsaken of 
 all but a kindly and devoted hostess who after 
 his death crowned his head with a garland of 
 bays, we can understand the bitterness of heart 
 with which he thought of the prosperity of the 
 players for whom he had written, whose fortunes 
 he had made, and who had forgotten him in his 
 necessity ; and his jealousy of one who, a mere 
 literary fac totum, had suddenly sprung into fame 
 as the most popular playwright of the day. It 
 was hard for Greene to think that the drama 
 which daily filled the playhouse with tens of 
 thousands, and made the fortunes of the mana- 
 gers, was his Henry VI. ; and he may be forgiven 
 if the heroic strain to which it owed its vitality 
 and success presented itself to his mind as mere 
 ' shake-scene ' bombast. 
 
 The Groatezuorth of Wit was among the 
 papers left by Robert Greene in the hands of 
 sundry booksellers. The manuscript was copied 
 by Henry Chettle, who some years afterwards 
 became a dramatist. He was at that time what 
 would now be called a publisher. c Greene's 
 hand was none of the best ; licensed it must be, 
 
 IOI
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 ere it could be printed, which could ncuer be if 
 it might not be read.' 
 
 Chcttl'j-in the preface to Kind Harts Dream, 
 a kind of social satire published by him shortly 
 after the death of Greene, explains the part that 
 he had taken in regard to the Groatsworth of Wit. 
 He exonerates Nash from having any share in the 
 production. For himself, he says : ' I put some- 
 thing out, but in the whole booke not a worde in.' 
 
 Some such explanation was called for. The 
 ' Groatsworth of wit, in which a letter written 
 to diuers play-makers is offensiuely by one or 
 two of them taken ; and because on the dead 
 they cannot be auenged, they wilfully forge in 
 their conceites a liuing Author ; and after 
 tossing it to and fro, no remedy, but it must 
 light on me.' As Chettle had during all the 
 time of his ' conuersing in printing hindred the 
 bitter inueying against schollers,' he is naturally 
 hurt by the supposition that he was party to so 
 scandalous a production. 
 
 ' With neither of them that take offence was 
 I acquainted and with one of them I care not if I 
 neuer be.' 
 
 Those who took offence were Marlowe and 
 Shakespeare — one had been accused of a 
 capital offence, and the other had been lam- 
 pooned — for to no others was offence offered. 
 
 102
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 It is easy to understand why Chettle should 
 have dissociated himself from Marlowe, for he 
 was regarded as an atheist, and shortly before his 
 death in the following year a warrant was issued 
 from the Star Chamber for his arrest to answer 
 the charge of atheism. In a subsequent part of 
 the preface he recurs to the ' first whose learning 
 I reverence,' and states that in the perusing of 
 Greene's book, he ' stroke out what then in 
 conscience I thought he in some displeasure 
 writ ; or had it beene true, yet to publish it, was 
 intolerable.' 
 
 Of Shakespeare he writes : ' The other, 
 whome at that time I did not so much spare, as 
 since I wish I had, for that as I haue moderated 
 the heate of liuing writers, and might haue used 
 my owne discretion (especially in such a case) 
 the Author being dead, that I did not, I am as 
 sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, 
 because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no 
 less ciuill than he excelent in the qualitie he 
 professes ; Besides diuers of jvorship have re- 
 ported his uprightness of dealing, which argues 
 his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, 
 that approoves his Art.' 
 
 The earliest in date of the references to 
 Shakespeare that have been discovered is by 
 Spenser. The next is by Greene, followed by the 
 
 103
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 explanation and apology of Chcttlc. Spencer 
 and Chcttle both speak of Shakespeare from 
 personal knowledge and each of them affords to 
 us a glimpse of the personality of the man whom 
 they knew. It is but a glimpse, but the aspect 
 of his nature revealed in poetic phrase by 
 Spenser, and in plain prose by Chettle, is one and 
 the same. To Spenser it appeared that ' no 
 gentler shepherd could no where be found.' 
 When Chettle came to know Shakespeare he 
 found his demeanour so civil, that he was as 
 sorry for having published Greene's attack, as 
 if the original fault had been his own. More- 
 over, Shakespeare had become known to 
 gentlemen of position by the uprightness of 
 his dealing as a man of honour, and they 
 were ready to testify to the character that he 
 bore ; that is to say, he was possessed of the 
 essential qualities which were implied in the 
 word ' gentle ' in the sense in which it was used 
 by Spenser. 
 
 When Shakespeare commenced dramatist the 
 university pens held the field. ' Midway between 
 Lyly and his successful practice of the drama, 
 which for the most cultivated men and women 
 of his day, maintained and developed standards 
 supplied to him, at least in part, by his univer- 
 sity, and Thomas Lodge, who put the drama 
 
 104
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 aside as beneath a cultivated man of manifold 
 activities, stand Nashe, Peele and Greene. Nashe 
 feeling the attraction of a popular and finan- 
 cially alluring form, shows no special fitness for 
 it, and gives it relatively little attention. Peele, 
 properly endowed for his best expression in 
 another field, spends his strength in the drama, 
 because, at the time, it is the easiest source of 
 revenue, and turns from the drama of the culti- 
 vated to the drama of the less cultivated or the 
 uncultivated. Greene from the first, is the 
 facile, adaptive purveyor of wares to which he 
 is helped by his university experience, but to 
 which he gives a highly popular presentation. 
 Through Nashe and Lodge the drama gains 
 nothing. Passing through the hands of Lyly, 
 Greene, and even Peele, it comes to Shakespeare 
 something quite different from what it was 
 before they wrote. 
 
 ' University-bred, one and all, these five men 
 were proud of their breeding. However severe 
 from time to time might be their censures of 
 their intellectual mother, they were always ready 
 to take arms against the unwarranted assump- 
 tion, as it seemed to them, of certain dramatists 
 who lacked their university training, and 
 to confuse them by the sallies of their wit. 
 One and all, they demonstrated their right 
 
 105
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 to the title bestowed on them — " University 
 wits." ' * 
 
 The debt which literature owes to these men 
 is best realised by comparing the drama in the 
 form in which they presented it with the work 
 of their predecessors, lifeless dramas in the 
 manner of Seneca, bloody tragedies, and rude 
 comedies like Ralph Roister Doistcr. They had 
 prepared the way for the advent of Shakespeare. 
 Greene and the three specially addressed by 
 him, Marlowe, Nash and Peele, were in the fore- 
 most rank of the university pens. The greatness 
 of Marlowe and his influence on the life work of 
 Shakespeare place him in a class by himself, and 
 his relations with Shakespeare form the subject 
 of a separate chapter. Passing him by for the 
 present, it may be noted that no trace can be 
 found of cordial relations between Shakespeare 
 and the university pens, such as existed through- 
 out his life with his fellow players. 
 
 The lives and characters of such representative 
 players as Burbage, Hcming and Condcll stand 
 out in strong contrast to those of Greene, Peele 
 and Nash. George Peele, like Robert Greene, 
 was a typical representative of the class. He 
 was a student at Christ Church, Oxford, and 
 
 • Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. V., Ch. VI. 
 (Professor G. P. Baker). 
 
 106
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 graduated M. A. in 1579. While at the university- 
 he was noted as a poet, and the performance of 
 his translation of a play of Euripides was cele- 
 brated in two Latin poems, in one of which the 
 social gaieties as well as the academical success 
 of his Oxford career are mentioned. Like Greene 
 he was a successful playwright, and he also 
 resembled him in the course of dissipation in 
 which his great powers were wasted. We have 
 seen how Greene, in the Groats worth of Wit, 
 appealed to him, as one who had been, like the 
 writer, driven to ' extreme shifts,' to mend his 
 way. He died at about the age of thirty- 
 nine, and after his death a tract appeared, 
 entitled Merry conceited jests of George Peele, 
 some time a Student in Oxford, a collection of 
 facetice, which had no doubt a foundation 
 in fact.* 
 
 Thomas Nash matriculated as a sizar at St. 
 John's College, Cambridge, of which he writes 
 as the ' sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that 
 University.' He graduated B.A., and wrote : 
 ' It is well known I might have been a fellow 
 if I had would.' He also died at an early age — 
 thirty-four. * Till his death he suffered the 
 keenest pangs of poverty, and was (he confesses) 
 often so reduced as to pen unedifying " toyes for 
 
 * Diet. Nat. Biography. 
 IO7
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 gentlemen," by which he probably meant licen- 
 tious songs.' * 
 
 There was little in common between these 
 erratic men of genius and the thrifty players who 
 were the lifelong fellows and friends of Shake- 
 speare. Besides their reckless Bohemianism, 
 there was another characteristic of these uni- 
 versity pens which did not commend itself to 
 Shakespeare. It has been said that England in 
 the time of Elizabeth was a nest of singing birds. 
 Unhappily the inmates of this nest, so far from 
 agreeing, wasted their time and talents in libel- 
 lous recrimination and ungentle pamphleteering. 
 ' The bitter inueying against schollers ' was not 
 to the taste of the publisher Chettlc ; and Shake- 
 speare's concurrence in his opinion may well 
 have been part of the civil demeanour by which 
 he was impressed. Certain it is that Shakespeare 
 stood outside the wordy warfare in which Lodge 
 and Nash, and at a later time Jonson, Dekker 
 and Marston, delighted. 
 
 Chettle began to write for the stage some time 
 before the year 1598, for in that year he is men- 
 tioned by Meres in Palladis lamia as one of ' the 
 best for Comedy among us.' He did not attain 
 the success which these words seem to imply. 
 That he was highly regarded is shown by the 
 
 • Diet. Nat. Biography (Sir Sidney Lee). 
 108
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 readiness of Henslow, as appears by his Diary, to 
 assist him in his pecuniary troubles. His 
 England's Mourning Garland, published in 1603, 
 after the death of Elizabeth, was well received. 
 It contains an interesting passage which sug- 
 gests the possibility that his acquaintance with 
 Shakespeare, beginning in 1592, may have 
 ripened into friendship. Chettle addresses him- 
 self ' to all true Louers of the right gratious 
 Queene Elizabeth in her life,' and in particular, 
 to the poets of the day, complaining that they 
 had not celebrated in verse the memory of 
 the great Queen. Amongst those appealed to 
 are Sidney, Spenser and Chapman. Chettle's 
 appeal to Shakespeare, ' the siluer tonged Meli- 
 cert,' is printed elsewhere (p. 43). It met with 
 no response. 
 
 Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton have been 
 brought into close personal relations with Shake- 
 speare by trustworthy testimony. At the time 
 when Shakespeare contracted the fever of which 
 he died Drayton and Jonson were with him in 
 Stratford. This we have on the authority of the 
 Rev. John Ward, who became Vicar of Stratford 
 in 1662. The character and history of Drayton 
 are well known, and when they are studied in 
 connection with the pitiful story of the uni- 
 versity pens, we can understand why Drayton, 
 
 109
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 and not they, is found among the associates and 
 friends of Shakespeare. 
 
 Drayton was a native of Warwickshire. In 
 after life he was a constant visitor at Clifford 
 Chambers, a manor-house in the neighbourhood 
 of Stratford, the residence of Sir Henry and 
 Lady Rainsford. ' Their lifelong patronage of 
 Michael Drayton, another Warwickshire poet 
 and Shakespeare's friend, gives them an hon- 
 oured place in literary history. . . .' * Lady 
 Rainsford before her marriage was the adored 
 mistress of Drayton's youthful muse, and in the 
 days of his maturity Drayton, who was always 
 an enthusiastic lover of his native country, was 
 the guest for many months each year of her 
 husband and herself at Clifford Chambers, which, 
 as he wrote in his Polyolbion, had been many a 
 time the Muses' quiet port. 
 
 1 Drayton's host found at Stratford and its 
 environment his closest friends, and several of 
 his intimacies were freely shared by Shakespeare. 
 Shakespeare's son-in-law, John Hall, a medical 
 practitioner of Stratford, reckoned Lady Rains- 
 ford among his early patients from the first 
 years of the century, and Drayton himself, while 
 a guest at Clifford Chambers, came under 
 Hall's professional care. The dramatist's son- 
 
 • Life of Shakespeare, p. 468. 
 
 no
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 in-law cured Drayton of a " tertian " by the 
 administration of " syrup of violets," and 
 described him in his casebook as an " excellent 
 poet." ' 
 
 Drayton had written in his Legend of Mathilda, 
 published in 1594, 
 
 Lucrece, of whom proude Rome hath boasted long, 
 Lately reviv'd to live another age ; 
 
 and some years after the death of Shakespeare 
 he thus wrote in his Elegies : 
 
 Shakespeare, thou hadst as smooth a Comicke vaine 
 Fitting the socke, and in thy natural braine 
 As strong conception and as cleere a rage 
 As any one that trafiqu'd with the stage. 
 
 Drayton in his life and character presents a 
 marked contrast to Greene and to the ' quondam 
 acquaintances ' whom he addresses. Sir Sidney 
 Lee truly says : ' Bohemian ideals and modes 
 of life had no dominant attraction for Shake- 
 speare.' His chosen associates are the thrifty 
 players, and among the playwrights, Ben Jonson 
 and Drayton. Ben Jonson, on his own showing, 
 was not morally perfect, but his errors did not 
 lead him into Bohemia, and for many years he 
 held a position in the literary world of London 
 comparable to that held in after ages by Dryden 
 
 in
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 and by another Johnson. Of Drayton it was 
 written : ' His moral character was unassailable, 
 and he was regarded by his contemporaries as a 
 model of virtue.' * ' As Aulus Persius,' writes 
 Mercs, ' is reputed among all writers to be of 
 an honest life and upright conversation, so 
 Michael Drayton {quern toties honoris et amoris 
 causa nomino) among schollers, souldiers, poets, 
 and all sorts of people is heldc for a man of 
 vertuous disposition, honest conversation, and 
 well-governed carriage.' f Izaak Walton, in his 
 Compleat Angler, quotes a passage from the 
 Polyolbion ' of Michael Drayton, my honest old 
 friend.' Such was the character of Shake- 
 speare's friend. 
 
 Like Shakespeare, Drayton attached more 
 importance to his poems than to his plays ; but 
 unlike Shakespeare, he did not attain to eminence 
 as a dramatist, and the book by which he is best 
 known is his Polyolbion. It is what he calls a 
 chorographical description of the rivers, moun- 
 tains, forests, and other geographical features of 
 Great Britain. It was published in 1613, and is 
 a really great work, containing many passages of 
 true poetical beauty, among which may be noted 
 his description of the forest of Arden. This is 
 
 • Diet. Nat. Biography (A. H. Bullcn). 
 t Palladis 1 anna, 1598. 
 
 112
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PENS 
 
 the man whom we find associated with Ben 
 Jonson in the last days of the life of Shakespeare, 
 but Jonson's relations with Shakespeare were so 
 intimate and so instructive that they must form 
 the subject of a separate chapter. 
 
 113
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 If Ben Jonson was not the greatest of the 
 fellow poets and dramatists of Shakespeare — a 
 place which is Marlowe's of right — he held the 
 foremost position in the eyes of the public of his 
 day. This was inevitable. He was, in the words 
 of Swinburne, a giant, but not of the gods, and 
 giants are more easily discerned by unaided 
 vision than gods. ' If poets may be divided 
 into two exhaustive but not exclusive classes — 
 the gods of harmony and creation, the giants of 
 energy and invention — the supremacy of Shake- 
 speare among the gods of English verse is not 
 more unquestionable than the supremacy of 
 Jonson among its giants.' 
 
 If Scotland had furnished this earlier and 
 greater Johnson with another Boswell, the world 
 would have had a richer entertainment than the 
 scanty crumbs picked up by Drummond of 
 Hawthornden, when Jonson visited him in his 
 home near Edinburgh, and conversed with him 
 for many days. Drummond preserved a record 
 of Jonson's conversation in a paper entitled 
 
 114
 
 BEN JONSON. 
 
 ' Certain Informations and Maners of Ben 
 Johnson to W. Drummond,' printed by the 
 Shakespeare Society in the year 1842. The 
 ' conversations,' with footnotes, fill forty-one 
 pages of the volume published by the Society. 
 In all these pages the name of Shakespeare 
 appears twice. Jonson said of him that ' in a 
 play, he brought in a number of men saying they 
 had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, wher ther is 
 no sea neer by some 100 miles.' Jonson's 
 ' censure ' of Shakespeare is comprised in four 
 words : ' that Shakspeer wanted arte.' This 
 was probably conclusive with Drummond, who 
 is described by Sir Sidney Lee as a ' learned 
 poet.'* Happily we are not dependent for our 
 knowledge of Jonson's appreciation of the genius 
 of Shakespeare, and his affection for the man, 
 to Drummond's notes of his conversations. 
 Drummond felt no interest in Shakespeare, but 
 he has at the end of the ' conversations ' given 
 an estimate of the character of Jonson which is 
 of value in considering his relations with Shake- 
 speare. ' He is a great lover and praiser of him- 
 self ; a contemnor and scorner of others ; given 
 rather to losse a friend than a jest : jealous of 
 every word and action of those about him 
 (especiallie after drink, which is one of the 
 
 * Diet. Nat. Biography. 
 115
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 elements in which he liveth) ; a dissembler of 
 ill parts which raignc in him, a braggcr of some 
 good that he wantcth ; thinkcth nothing well 
 but what either he himself or some of his friends 
 and countrymen hath said or done ; he is pas- 
 sionately kynde and angry ; careless either to 
 gaine or keep ; vindictive, but if he be well 
 answered, at himself. For any religion, as being 
 versed in both. Interpreteth best sayings and 
 deeds often to the worst.' 
 
 This is a picture drawn in bold outline and 
 with striking contrasts of light and shade. 
 ' Passionately kynde and angry ' — in these four 
 words we have a key to the understanding of 
 what was written by Jonson of a successful 
 rival whom he regarded with mingled feelings of 
 jealousy and affection. 
 
 Jonson was born, probably, in the year 1573. 
 He laid the foundation of his vast classical 
 learning in Westminster Grammar School. He 
 was ' taken from school and put to a trade,' and 
 the degrees which he held in Oxford and in 
 Cambridge were ' by their favour, not his studie.' 
 So he told Drummond. His experiences during 
 the next few years include a campaign in 
 Flanders ; a duel with a fellow actor, whom he 
 killed, escaping the gallows by claiming benefit 
 of clergy ; and a change of religion, an experience 
 
 116
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 which he repeated in later years. He began to 
 write for the stage about the year 1595. His 
 earliest efforts were in tragedy, and in 1598 we 
 find him included by Francis Meres * with Shake- 
 speare among the poets who are best for 
 tragedy. 
 
 His first extant comedy, Every Man in his 
 Humour, was successfully produced at the Globe 
 in 1598, Shakespeare taking a part. Accord- 
 ing to a tradition of respectable antiquity 
 recorded by Rowe, the play when presented for 
 acceptance to the Lord Chamberlain's servants 
 was at first rejected, and was afterwards accepted 
 on the recommendation of Shakespeare. A 
 tradition of the stage accepted by Rowe should 
 not be lightly regarded, for, as we shall see here- 
 after, he had trustworthy sources of information 
 at his command, and he exercised a wise dis- 
 cretion in making use of them. In a man of 
 Jonson's temperament a sense of obligation due 
 to the kindness of a successful rival goes far to 
 account for the conflict between jealousy of a 
 rival, love of the man, and admiration of his 
 genius, to which this extraordinary man gave 
 varying expression during his lifetime. It was 
 not until after the death of Shakespeare that 
 feelings of love and admiration finally prevailed. 
 
 * Palladis lamia. 
 117
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Such evidence as we have of the relations of 
 Jonson with Shakespeare during his lifetime 
 suggest that they were friendly. A story which 
 was current not many years after the death of 
 Shakespeare was included by Sir Nicholas 
 L'Estrange, an industrious collector of anecdotes, 
 among Merry Passages and Jests, a compilation 
 from which a selection were printed by the 
 Camden Society. Sir Nicholas had the story 
 from ' Mr. Dun,' and if he was, as is supposed, 
 the poet Dr. John Donne, a contemporary of 
 Shakespeare, there could be no better authority. 
 At all events the story bears the impress of truth. 
 It is as follows : ' Shake-speare was Godfather 
 to one of Ben : Johnson's children and after the 
 christning being in a deepe study, Johnson came 
 to cheere him up, and askt him why he was so 
 Melancholy ? " No faith Ben ; (sayes he) not 
 I, but I have beene considering a great while 
 what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow 
 upon my God-child, and I have resolv'd at last ; 
 I pry' the what, sayes he ? I faith Ben : I'll 
 e'en give him a douzen good Lattin* Spoones 
 and thou shalt translate them." If Dr. Donne 
 had preserved for us the ponderous jest at the 
 expense of Shakespeare's small Latin to which this 
 
 • Latten was composition, something like brass, cf. Merry 
 Wives, I. i. 165. 
 
 Il8
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 was the retort courteous we could, in some sort, 
 realise the wit-combats of which Fuller writes — 
 
 ' Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and 
 Ben Johnson ; which two I behold like a Spanish 
 great Gallion and an English man of War : 
 Master Johnson (like the former) was built far 
 higher in Learning : solid, but slow in his per- 
 formances. Shake-spear, with the English man 
 of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could 
 turn with all tides, tack about, and take advan- 
 tage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and 
 Invention.' * 
 
 Fuller was born in the lifetime of Shakespeare, 
 and he must have received an account of these 
 wit-combats from those who were actually 
 present, for there was present to his mind's eye 
 such a living image that he writes of them as if 
 he himself had been the eyewitness. 
 
 These were the merry meetings of which 
 Francis Beaumont wrote, 
 
 What things have we seen 
 Done at the Mermaid ? Heard words that have been 
 So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
 As if that every one from whence they came 
 Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
 And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
 Of his dull life. 
 
 * Worthies of England, 1662." 
 119
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 The friendship which had its origin in an act 
 of kindness on the part of Shakespeare con- 
 tinued to the end, notwithstanding their rivalry 
 as popular playwrights. This rivalry is reflected 
 in the literature of the day, and of the next 
 succeeding age. It is the eternal rivalry between 
 what are commonly known as Nature and Art. 
 So it was regarded by Milton when he wrote, 
 
 Then to the well-trod stage anon 
 
 If Jonson's learned sock be on, 
 
 Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, 
 
 Warble his native wood notes wild. 
 
 Comedy, not tragedy, was present to the mind of 
 Shakespeare when, in U Allegro, he wrote thus 
 of Shakespeare : not Hamlet, but As You Like It, 
 and the forest of Arden. In // Penseroso he 
 writes in a different strain : 
 
 Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy, 
 In sceptred pall, come sweeping by, 
 Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, 
 Or the tale of Troy divine ; 
 Or what (though rare) of later age 
 Ennobled hath the buskin'd stage. 
 
 The noble Epitaph on the admirable dramaticke 
 poet, W . Shakespeare, prefixed to the second folio 
 edition, published in 1632, leaves us in no 
 doubt as to the tragedies by which the buskined 
 
 120
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 stage had been of later age, all too rarely, 
 ennobled. 
 
 Dear Sonne of Memory, great Heire of Fame, 
 
 What needst thou such dull witnesse of thy Name ? 
 
 Thou in our wonder and astonishment 
 
 Hast built thy selfe a lasting Monument : 
 
 For whil'st to th' shame of slow-endeavouring Art 
 
 Thy easie numbers flow. 
 
 ( Milton, a strict Puritan, when he wrote these 
 
 words of a dramatic poet, and allowed his verse 
 to be prefixed to a collection of his plays, showed 
 how profoundly he had been affected by the 
 work of Shakespeare. The study of his poetry 
 created in the mind of Milton a sense of personal 
 attachment to Shakespeare. He is ' My Shake- 
 speare,' ' Sweetest Shakespeare,' and ' dear 
 Sonne of Memory.' His ' wood notes wild ' 
 are contrasted with the ' learned sock ' of 
 Jonson, and in tragedy his easy numbers flow 
 to the shame of slow-endeavouring Art. 
 
 Milton wrote thus of Shakespeare in the life- 
 time of Jonson, at a time when the rivalry 
 between the works of the two great dramatists 
 was at its height .'-^rThat this rivalry continued 
 to be the talk of the town, and that the verdict 
 of the ordinary playgoer, like Milton's, was for 
 Shakespeare and Nature, may be learned from 
 verses by Leonard Digges, prefixed to the Folio 
 
 121
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 of 1640. Digges was a member of a family dis- 
 tinguished in science as well as in literature. 
 His father was a celebrated mathematician, 
 who had a seat in the Parliament of 1572. Other 
 members of the family were sufficiently dis- 
 tinguished to find places in the Dictionary of 
 National Biography. Leonard Digges was a 
 good classical scholar, well acquainted with 
 Spanish and French. He was a poet, and pub- 
 lished in 1 61 7 a verse translation from Claudian. 
 He may be accepted as a representative of the 
 intelligent literary criticisms of the day. Verses 
 by Digges were prefixed to the Folio of 1623, 
 and a more elaborate composition to the edition 
 of 1640. Of him Sir Sidney Lee writes : ' Few 
 contemporaries wrote more sympathetically of 
 Shakespeare's greatness.' 
 
 Digges and Kempe are of one mind in holding 
 that Shakespeare had outstripped the ' needy 
 Poetasters of the age ' — the university pens — 
 and even such a competitor as Ben Jonson. 
 
 Tis the fate 
 Of richer veines, prime judgements that have far'd 
 The worse, with this deceased man compar'd 
 So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare, 
 And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were, 
 Brutus and Cassius : oh how the Audience 
 Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence, 
 
 122
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 When some new day they would not brooke a line, 
 
 Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline ; 
 
 Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz'de more 
 
 Honest Iago, or the jealous Moore. 
 
 And though the Fox and subtill Alchimist, 
 
 Long intermitted could not quite be mist, 
 
 Though these have sham'd all the Ancients, and night 
 
 raise, 
 Their Authours merit with a crowne of Bayes. 
 Yet these sometimes, even at a friends desire 
 Acted, have scarce defrai'd the Seacoale fire 
 And doore-keepers ; when let but Falstaffe come, 
 Hall, Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have a roome. 
 All is so pester'd ; let but Beatrice 
 And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice 
 The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full 
 To hear Malvoglio that crosse gartered gull. 
 
 This was the drastic purge administered by 
 Shakespeare, of which Kempe spoke in The 
 Returne from Pernassus ; houses so badly filled 
 that, even when a favourite play was bespoken, 
 the money would scarce defray the cost of sea- 
 coal fire and doorkeepers, while Henry IV., 
 Much Ado and Twelfth Night drew such crowds 
 that a seat might hardly be found, and the 
 reason assigned by Digges is the same as that 
 noted by Milton ; Catiline is tedious, though 
 well laboured, while Shakespeare's work is 
 
 The patterne of all wit 
 Art without Art, unparalel'd as yet. 
 
 123
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 So drastic was the purge that, according to 
 Kempe, it made Ben Jonson ' beray his credit,' 
 that is to say, ' show the true nature of the 
 character with which he was credited.' This is 
 the nearest approach that can be made, with the 
 aid of the New English Dictionary, to this 
 phrase. Jonson, in the opinion of the players, 
 bewrayed his credit, and showed himself in his 
 true character of an envious detractor when he 
 expressed a wish that Shakespeare had blotted 
 a thousand lines. 
 
 Much allowance should be made for Jonson, 
 when, suffering under the effects of Shakespeare's 
 purge, he, now and then, indulged in a sneer at a 
 successful rival, who was so far without art as 
 to ignore the unities of time, place and action. 
 In such a mood he tells the audience in the 
 Prologue to Every Man in his Humour that he 
 will not purchase their delight 
 
 At such a rate 
 As, for it, he himself must justly hate : 
 To make a child, now swadled, to proceede 
 Man, and then shoote up, in one beard and 
 
 weede, 
 Past threescore years : or, with three rustie swords, 
 And helpe of some foot-and-halfe-foote words, 
 Fight over Torke, and Lancaster's long jarres ; 
 And in the tyring-house, bring wounds, to scarres. 
 
 124
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 Here and there traces can be found of the inter- 
 mittent action of this purge. The New Inn pro- 
 duced in 1629 failed to fill the playhouses, and 
 Jonson wrote in some lines prefixed to the play- 
 when published in 1631, 
 
 No doubt some mouldy tale, 
 
 Like Pericles, and stale 
 As the shrieve's crusts, and nasty as his fish 
 scraps, out of every dish 
 
 Throwne forth, and rak't into the common tub, 
 May keepe up the Play-club. 
 
 In the Induction to Bartholomew Fair the 
 Stagekeeper, introducing the piece, says : * If 
 there be never a servant-monster in the Fayre, 
 who can helpe it, he says ; nor a nest of 
 Antiques?' He is loth to make Nature afraid 
 in his Playes, ' like those that beget Tales, 
 Tempests and such like Drolleries, to mixe his 
 head with other mens heeles.' And through- 
 out his life a line which he attributes to Julius 
 Caesar, but which, as he quotes it, is not to 
 be found in any printed copy of the play, was 
 to him a source of genuine delight. In the 
 Prologue to the Staple of News this passage 
 occurs : 
 
 Expectation. I can doe that too if I have cause. 
 Prologue. Cry you mercy, you never did wrong but 
 with just cause. 
 
 125
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 That Jonson could be ' angry ' is true ; but 
 that, at the bottom of his heart, in his feelings 
 towards Shakespeare he was ' passionately 
 kynde ' will presently appear. 
 
 Many were the quarrels of Ben Jonson, in 
 which he bore himself like a giant. We are only 
 concerned with one ; the famous literary war- 
 fare carried on for years by Marston, Dckkcr and 
 Jonson. Shakespeare took no part in this 
 rather unseemly conflict. He cared for none of 
 those things. But as his name was introduced 
 into a play in which the fight is mentioned, and 
 as an attempt has been made by some critics 
 to implicate him in the quarrel, it ought not to 
 be overlooked. 
 
 The origin of the quarrel was described by 
 Jonson in his conversations with Drummond. 
 He had many quarrels with Marston, ' beat 
 him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his 
 ■poetaster on him ; the beginning of them were 
 that Marston represented him on the stage in 
 his youth given to venery.' The origin of his 
 quarrel with Dekker is obscure. In 1629 Jonson 
 told Drummond that Dekker was a knave. 
 This was a reminiscence of the old quarrel 
 which took a literary form in Cynthia's Revels 
 produced in 1600, in which Dekker and Marston 
 were satirised in the characters of Hedon and 
 
 126
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 Anaides. Marston and Dekker were engaged in 
 the preparation of a joint attack on Jonson- 
 Meanwhile, Jonson forestalled them by the 
 Poetaster (1601), in which he demolished with 
 his giant's club not only Marston and Dekker, 
 but lawyers, soldiers and actors. The quarrels 
 and reconciliation of the rival dramatists is a 
 curious, and not edifying, chapter in the literary 
 history of the Elizabethan age. Some Shake- 
 spearian commentators have exercised their in- 
 genuity in interpreting certain passages in the 
 works of Shakespeare as references to this 
 quarrel, but happily without success. It would 
 have been more to the purpose to note with 
 satisfaction that Shakespeare stood outside the 
 wordy strife. 
 
 Two of the plays which had their origin in this 
 contest are deserving of attention. The Poetaster 
 is possessed of literary merit. There is a fine 
 passage in praise of Virgil, who is exalted as the 
 chief of the Latin poets. It is supposed by some 
 that by Virgil Shakespeare has been intended, 
 and that he was introduced into the piece by 
 way of contrast to Marston and Dekker. If this 
 were so, the play would, indeed, be deserving of 
 note as regards the relations of Jonson and 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 The central idea of the Poetaster is the arraign- 
 
 127
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 mcnt on the prosecution of Horace, of Crispinus, 
 ' my brisk Poetaster ' and Demetrius, ' his 
 poor Journeyman.' Marston is Crispinus ; 
 Dekker, Demetrius ; and Horace, of course, 
 Ben Jonson. The indictment, drawn by Tibullus, 
 is under the Statute of Calumny, Lex Ruminia. 
 The offence is, that the prisoners, not having 
 the fear of Phoebus, or his shafts, before their 
 eyes, contrary to the peace of their liege lord, 
 Augustus Caesar, maliciously went about to de- 
 prave and calumniate the person and writings 
 of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, poet and priest to 
 the Muses, who is Ben Jonson. The prisoners 
 are convicted on the evidence of their own 
 writings, and sentenced by Virgil to suitable 
 punishment. 
 
 In the first scene Ovid is caught by his father, 
 Ovid, senior, in the act of composing a poem 
 which we know as El. 15, Jmor., Lib. 1, of which 
 Jonson gives his version in English. He is 
 warned of the approach of his father, Ovid, 
 senior, and hastily puts on the gown and cap 
 of a student. His father intends him to be a 
 lawyer, and is indignant to find him a poet and 
 playmaker. ' Name me a profest poet,' he says 
 to his son, * that his poetry did ever afford him 
 so much as a competency.' He leaves, telling 
 his son to keep his chamber and fall to his 
 
 128
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 studies. Ovid, junior, is at work when Tibullus 
 comes in, but at ' law cases in verse.' 
 
 Troth if I live I will new dress the law 
 In sprightly Poesy's habiliments. 
 
 The whole of this act is excellent comedy, with 
 amusing attacks on the law and lawyers. The 
 succeeding acts do not, regarded from this point 
 of view, come up to the same level. Jonson's 
 objects were twofold. To cover Marston and 
 Dekker with ridicule, in the characters of 
 Crispinus and Demetrius, and to associate him- 
 self, in the character of Horace, with the great 
 poets of the Augustan age, and in particular 
 with Ovid, Tibullus and Virgil. 
 
 The kind of classical medley which was 
 adopted had the incidental advantage that it 
 admitted of the introduction of translations in 
 verse of well-known passages from these poets. 
 Jonson valued himself specially on his transla- 
 tions : ' As for his translations he was perfectly 
 incorrigible there ; for he maintained to the last 
 that they were the best part of his works.' * 
 He succeeded in impressing this view on Drum- 
 mond, who writes in Conversations : i above all 
 he excelleth in a Translation.' Virgil was to 
 Jonson the King of Latin poets. He writes of 
 
 * Works, Ed. Gifford, Vol. II., p. 474. 
 s I29 K
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 him as ' the incomparable Virgil.' He is placed 
 at the right hand of Caesar. His address con- 
 sists of a rhyming translation of some lines from 
 the fourth book of the Aeneid. Jonson was justly 
 proud of his version of the lines beginning 
 Farna malum, quo non aliud vclocius ullum, for it 
 compares favourably with Dryden's. To suggest 
 that Shakespeare is presented in the character of 
 Virgil is not in accordance with the purpose of the 
 drama. There is no reason to suppose that the 
 Poetaster was written in praise of any of Jonson's 
 contemporaries. The primary object was the 
 castigation of Marston and Dekker ; a subordi- 
 nate one, the glorification of Virgil, and of Jonson, 
 his translator. In the acutest phase of the rivalry 
 between Jonson and Shakespeare, it is not 
 likely that he would have taken occasion to 
 exalt his rival above all his contemporaries. 
 The lines spoken by Horace in praise of Virgil 
 might have been written of Shakespeare, and 
 also of other great poets. But if Jonson were to 
 write in praise of Shakespeare, he would hardly 
 have selected his learning for special com- 
 mendation. 
 
 Hor. His learning savours not the school-like 
 gloss, 
 That most consists in echoing words and terms 
 And soonest wins a man an empty name ; 
 
 130
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance 
 Wrap'd in the curious generalities of arts ; 
 But a direct and analytic sum 
 Of all the worth and first effects of arts. 
 
 The Returne from Pernassus was produced 
 while the Poetaster was the talk of the town. His 
 Poetaster was the pill which Ben Jonson ' brought 
 up Horace giving the poets,' according to Kempe. 
 The significance of the piece was thoroughly 
 understood at the time. The intelligent author 
 of the Returne, so far from interpreting the 
 Poetaster as a glorification of Shakespeare, repre- 
 sents the players as taking part in the rivalry 
 between Shakespeare and Jonson. They were, 
 of course, on the side of Shakespeare, and gloried 
 in the purge of empty houses, by the administra- 
 tion of which the pestilent Jonson met with his 
 desert at the hands of their fellow Shakespeare ; 
 a shrewd fellow, indeed. 
 
 It was not until after the death of Shakespeare 
 that Jonson revealed the side of his nature 
 which Drummond noted as 'passionately kynde.' 
 In the year of Shakespeare's death he had pub- 
 lished in a folio volume a collection of his plays, 
 under the title of his Works, a title which 
 brought upon him a certain amount of ridicule, 
 as plays were not then regarded as literature 
 deserving of so pretentious a name. These plays 
 
 131
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 were carefully edited. It may not have occurred 
 to Jonson that the work of collecting and editing 
 the works of Shakespeare would have been 
 better done by a man of letters than by his 
 fellow players. At all events, the task was not 
 undertaken by him, and a volume published in 
 1623 under the modest title of Mr. William 
 Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, 
 presents a marked contrast in pretension, as well 
 as in editing, to the Works of 1616. But when 
 Jonson took up his pen at the request of the 
 players and wrote some lines ' to the memory 
 of my beloued, the Avthor, Mr. William Shake- 
 speare and what he has left us,' all feelings of 
 rivalry and jealousy disappeared, and the better 
 side of his nature found expression in words 
 which share the immortality of him of whom 
 they were written : 
 
 Soule of the Age 
 The Applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage ! 
 
 In these lines and in the following where he 
 would tell 
 
 how farre thou didst our Lily out-shine 
 Or sporting Kid, or Marlowes mighty line, 
 
 we have his true estimate of the greatness of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 132
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 He was not of an age, but for all time. 
 
 This noble line will be quoted at each recurring 
 centenary so long as the English language is 
 spoken. 
 
 Then his thoughts turn from contemplation 
 of the poet to the constant friend, and perhaps 
 with a regretful remembrance of some things 
 that he had said of Shakespeare's neglect of the 
 unities and of certain other artificial canons of 
 dramatic art, he adds 
 
 Yet must I not giue Nature all : Thy Art 
 My gentle Shakespeare, must enioy a part, 
 
 and in the address to the reader prefixed to the 
 Folio, recurring to the personal characteristics 
 expressed by the word ' gentle ' he writes 
 
 This Figure, that thou here seest put, 
 It was for gentle Shakespeare cut. 
 
 Five-and-twenty years after the death of 
 Shakespeare, a collection of essays, which had 
 been written by Jonson, was published under the 
 title Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and 
 Matter, in which some of the finest examples of the 
 prose of the age are to be found. What he writes 
 of his relations with Shakespeare is intended as 
 an apologia, addressed to posterity : 
 
 ' I remember the Players have often men- 
 tioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his 
 
 133
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 writing (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted 
 out line. My answer hath becne, would he had 
 blotted a thousand, which they thought a 
 malevolent speech. I had not told posterity 
 this, but for their ignorance, who choose that 
 circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein 
 he most faulted. And to justifie mine owne 
 candor (for I loved the man, and doe honour his 
 memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any). 
 Hee was (indeed) honest and of an open and free 
 nature : had an excellent Phantsie ; brave notions 
 and gentle expressions ; wherein he flow'd with 
 that facility, that sometimes it was necessary 
 that he should be stop'd ; Sujflaminandus erat ; 
 as Augustus said of Hatcrius. His wit was in his 
 owne power ; would the rule of it had beene so. 
 Many times hee fell into those things, could not 
 escape laughter. As when hee said in the person 
 of Caesar, one speaking to him ; Caesar thou 
 dost me wrong. Hee replyed, Caesar never did 
 wrong but with just cause ; and such like ; which 
 were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with 
 his vertues. There was even more in him to be 
 praysed, than to be pardoned.'* 
 
 The concluding words, in which he finds in 
 Shakespeare more to be praised than to be 
 
 • Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter. Works, 
 1641. 
 
 !34
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 pardoned, read strangely. They were perhaps 
 prompted by memory of the ' purge,' and they 
 should be overlooked for the sake of the noble 
 words in which Jonson does honour to the 
 memory of the man. 
 
 ' Honest and of an open and free nature,' 
 these are the qualities which Henry Chettle 
 found in the man who had been traduced by 
 Greene, and they are essential parts of the 
 character and nature which Spenser had, many 
 years before, discerned in Aetion. The influence 
 which Shakespeare had obtained over an intellect 
 of the giant force of Jonson's reveals to us a 
 different aspect of his nature from that which is 
 suggested by his relations with Spenser or with 
 the players. The indomitable force of will by 
 which Shakespeare gained mastery over a fate 
 which at one time seemed to be invincible 
 accords with the character which compelled the 
 honour, on this side idolatry, paid to him by a 
 man so great, and little given to worship as 
 Jonson, ' a great lover and praiser of himself ; 
 a contemnor and scorner of others.' 
 
 We have no evidence of affectionate regard 
 for Jonson, such as is afforded by his gift of 
 mourning rings to his fellow players, and his 
 tributes to the memory of Spenser and of 
 Marlowe. If Drummond's sketch of the character 
 
 135
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 of Jonson approaches the truth, his nature and 
 Shakespeare's were not sympathetic. But they 
 lived on terms of friendship. They took part 
 in the witcombats at the Mermaid tavern, 
 and in family gatherings, and Jonson, with 
 Drayton, was with Shakespeare at the time 
 when he contracted the fever of which he died. 
 
 136
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 Marlowe stands by himself among the fel- 
 lows and contemporaries of Shakespeare, for of 
 him alone can it be said that he was the Master 
 of Shakespeare. ' He first, and he alone, 
 guided Shakespeare into the right way of work ; 
 his music, in which there is no echo of any man's 
 before him, found its own echo in the more pro- 
 longed, but hardly more exalted, harmony of 
 Milton. He is the greatest discoverer, the most 
 daring and inspired pioneer in all our poetic 
 literature. Before him there was neither genuine 
 blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. 
 After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths 
 made straight, for Shakespeare.' * 
 
 Christopher, or Kit, Marlowe as he was 
 familiarly known, is one of whose life and 
 character trustworthy information is to be 
 desired, not only on account of his greatness as a 
 poet, but by reason of the influence which he 
 exerted on one whose name is among the greatest, 
 if not the greatest in all literature. 
 
 He was born in Canterbury in 1564. He 
 
 * A. C. Swinburne, Encyclopedia Britannica. 
 137
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 matriculated as a pensioner in Corpus Christi 
 College, Cambridge, and graduated as B.A. in 
 1583, and M.A. in 1587. His earliest play, 
 Tamburlaine, was licensed on the 14th of August, 
 1 590, and published in the same year. Of the early 
 years of his life we have no certain knowledge. 
 It has been suggested that on leaving the 
 university he joined a company of players, and 
 also that he saw some military service in the 
 Low Countries. But there is no contemporary 
 evidence in support of either suggestion. In a 
 book entitled The Theatre of God's 'Judgments, 
 published in 1597, four years after the death of 
 Marlowe, he is described as ' by profession a 
 scholler, brought up from his youth in the uni- 
 versitie of Cambridge, but by practice a play- 
 maker and a poet of scurrilitie.' The author, 
 Thomas Beard, a Puritan divine, was the school- 
 master of Oliver Cromwell at Huntingdon. He 
 was educated at Cambridge, and held the degree 
 of D.D. This book contains the earliest account 
 of the tragical death of Marlowe, which the 
 author regarded as a judgment brought upon 
 him by his atheistical opinions. The account 
 here given of the death of Marlowe is utterly 
 untrustworthy, but what is said by Beard to 
 the credit of Marlowe may be accepted as prob- 
 ably true. What is meant by the words ' by 
 
 138
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 profession a scholler ' is uncertain. It may mean 
 that, like Beard, he lived by teaching, and in this 
 way made a profession of his scholarship. More 
 probably, it was a statement of the reputation 
 as a scholar which he had in the University of 
 Cambridge, of which Beard was a graduate. 
 ' While a student Marlowe mainly confined him- 
 self to the Latin classics, and probably before 
 leaving Cambridge he translated Ovid's Amores 
 into English heroic verse. His rendering, which 
 was not published until after his death, does 
 full justice to the sensuous warmth of the 
 original. He is also credited at the same period 
 with a translation of Colathon's Rape of Helen, 
 but this is no longer extant.' His unfinished 
 paraphrase of the ' Hero and Leander of Musaeus, 
 when completed by George Chapman, had a 
 popularity comparable to the first heir of Shake- 
 speare's invention. Marlowe's translation of The 
 First Book of Lucan's Pharsalia into epic blank 
 verse was published in 1600, and reprinted by 
 Percy in his specimens of blank verse before 
 Milton.'* After his arrival in London we find 
 him among the men of letters of all classes and 
 tastes who were associated with Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, and it was probably in this society that 
 he became a freethinker in regard to religion. 
 
 * Diet. Nat. Biography (Sir Sidney Lee). 
 139
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 4 Although he [Raleigh] did not personally 
 adopt the scepticism in matters of religion 
 which was avowed by many Elizabethan authors, 
 it attracted his speculative cast of mind, and he 
 sought among the sceptics his closest com- 
 panions. . . . With Christopher Marlowe, whose 
 religious views were equally heterodox, he was 
 in equally confidential relations. Izaak Walton 
 testifies that he wrote the well-known answer to 
 Marlowe's familiar lyric, Come live with me and be 
 my love.''* 
 
 Marlowe was on terms of intimate friendship 
 with George Chapman, one of the most inter- 
 esting characters of the Elizabethan age. Chap- 
 man did not hold the degree of either of the 
 universities, and his life and character differed 
 widely from those of the university pens. Wood 
 (Athen. Oxon.) describes Chapman as ' a person 
 of most revered aspect, religious and temperate, 
 qualities rarely meeting in a poet.' Of all the 
 English dramatists, Charles Lamb thought that 
 Chapman approached nearest to Shakespeare in 
 descriptive and didactic passages. His trans- 
 lation of Homer, with many defects, has some- 
 what of the spirit of the original, and among the 
 admirers of this fine old version are Dryden, 
 Pope, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. But Chap- 
 
 • Diet. Nat. Biography, tit. ' Raleigh.' 
 I4O
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 man's name is best known to the present genera- 
 tion by Keat's fine sonnet written ' on first 
 looking into Chapman's Homer ' : 
 
 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 
 That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ; 
 Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : 
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken. 
 
 Marlowe's beautiful poem, Hero and Leander, 
 unfinished at his death, was published in 1598. 
 It was afterwards completed by Chapman, and 
 published in this form in the same year. Chap- 
 man says that Marlowe ' drunk to me half this 
 Musaean story,' which implies that he had been 
 shown the unfinished tale. From some words 
 in Chapman's addition it appears to have been 
 completed at the ' late desires ' of Marlowe. 
 
 A career so full of promise and of early per- 
 formance had a tragical ending. The burial 
 register of the church of St. Nicholas, Deptford, 
 contains this entry : ' Christopher Marlow, 
 slain by ffrancis Archer the 1 of June 1593.' 
 Marlowe was then in the thirtieth year of his age. 
 Nothing more is known with certainty. 
 
 Cut in the branch that might have grown full straight, 
 And burned is Apollo's laurel bough. * 
 
 * The Tragical History of Doctor Eaustus, Sc. XVI. 
 
 141
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 The earliest notice of the death of Marlowe is 
 in the book already referred to by Thomas Beard, 
 published in 1597. The Puritan divine, in his 
 desire to improve the occasion, gives an account 
 of dying blasphemies of Marlowe, leading to the 
 conclusion that his death was ' not only a 
 manifest signe of God's Judgment, but also a 
 horrible and fcarefull to all that beheld him.' 
 This account would be read with pain by every 
 lover of Marlowe, if it were not obviously a tissue 
 of lies. Marlowe ' not onely in word blasphemed 
 the Trinitie, but also (as is credibly reported) 
 wrote bookes against it, affirming our Saviour 
 to be but a deceiver.' Other things were said 
 which need not be recorded, as the existence of 
 any such book is a pure fabrication. Beard's 
 account of the occurrence is equally devoid of 
 truth. According to him it took place in 
 ' London streets,' Marlowe dying from a wound 
 inflicted by himself. That Marlowe died on the 
 spot with an oath on his lips to the terror of the 
 beholders is a palpable falsehood, for he sur- 
 vived the fatal blow long enough to convey to 
 Chapman his ' late desires,' which were carried 
 out by the completion of his Hero and Leandcr. 
 
 The respectable author of Palladis lamia 
 (1598), Francis Meres, had received a different 
 version of the occurrence, and, yielding to his 
 
 142
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 love of antithesis, wrote : ' As the poet Lyco- 
 phron was shot to death by a certain rival of his ? 
 so Christopher Marlowe was stabd to death by 
 a bawdy serving man, a rival of his in his lewde 
 love.' A few years later Vaughan, in his Golden 
 Grove (1600), gave another account, according 
 to which Marlowe meant to stab a man named 
 Ingram, with whom he was playing at tables, 
 but Ingram avoided the thrust, and, drawing his 
 dagger, stabbed Marlowe into the brain through 
 the eye, so that he shortly after died. This is 
 noted as the execution of Divine justice upon 
 Marlowe, ' who as is reported about 14 yeres 
 agoe wrote a Booke against the Trinitie.' 
 Marlowe had written no such book, and the 
 man's name as recorded in the Church register 
 was Archer, not Ingram. 
 
 The occurrence in which Marlowe lost his life 
 has been described by some recent writers as a 
 1 drunken brawl.' It may have had its origin 
 in a quarrel or brawl, although the only account 
 of the event which is entitled to respect as a 
 historical document — the entry in the parish 
 register — records nothing but violence at the 
 hands of Archer. Drunkenness is not hinted at 
 as the origin of the quarrel in any one of the 
 contemporary accounts. It forms no part of 
 the lurid picture which we owe to the imagination 
 
 143
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 of the Puritan divine, Thomas Beard. The 
 statement that Marlowe lived an irregular and 
 vicious life is a not unnatural conclusion from 
 the manner in which he met his death. But 
 against this conclusion should be set the purity 
 of his writings ; the exemplary character of 
 Chapman, his intimate friend ; and his asso- 
 ciation with men like Raleigh and Sir Thomas 
 Walsingham. Edward Blount, the publisher, in 
 dedicating Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas 
 Walsingham, writes of Marlowe as a man that 
 had been dear to them. The book is dedicated to 
 Walsingham in these words : ' Knowing that 
 in his lifetime you bestowed many kind favours, 
 entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth 
 which you found in him with good countenance 
 and liberal affection.' To these names may be 
 added that of Shakespeare. 
 
 An event had occurred shortly before the death 
 of Marlowe which made a certain class of writers 
 ready to accept any story to the discredit of 
 Marlowe, without inquiry as to its truth, and to 
 draw from the unfortunate circumstances of his 
 death the most unfavourable inferences as to his 
 life and character. 
 
 On the 1 8th of May, 1593, the Privy Council 
 had issued ' a warrant to Henry Mander, one of 
 the messengers of Her Majesties Chamber, to 
 
 144
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 repair to the house of Mr. Thomas Walsingham, 
 in Kent, or to anie other place where he shall 
 understand Christopher Marlow to be remayning, 
 and by virtue hereof to apprehend and bring 
 him to the Court in his companie, and in case of 
 need to require ayd. . . . Some weeks earlier 
 (19th March) similar proceedings had been taken 
 by the council against Richard Cholmley and 
 Richard Strange : the former is known to have 
 been concerned with Marlowe in disseminating 
 irreligious doctrines {Privy Council Reg., p. 288).' * 
 A document entitled ' a note,' and headed as 
 ' Contayninge the opinion of one Christofer 
 Marly concernynge his damnable opinions and 
 judgment of relygion and scorne of Gods worde,' 
 is printed, in so far as this could be done with 
 propriety, in the edition of Marlowe's works 
 edited by Mr. Bullen (Vol. III., App. III.). The 
 substance of the charge is that Marlowe was not 
 only an atheist himself, ' but almost in every 
 company he commeth persuadest man to 
 Athiesme.' It is alleged ' that one Richard 
 Cholmelei hath confessed that he was persuaded 
 by Marloes reason to become an Athieste,' and a 
 warrant was issued from the Star Chamber for 
 the arrest of Cholmeley. 
 
 The charge against Marlowe was not supported 
 
 * Diet. Nat. Biography, tit. ' Marlowe.' 
 H5
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 by sworn testimony. The informant by whom 
 the note was signed was a man of infamous 
 character, and it is not possible to avoid sympa- 
 thising with Mr. Bullen when he writes : ' It is 
 a comfort to know that the ruffian who drew up 
 the charges, a certain " Rychard Bame," was 
 hanged at Tyburn on 6th December 1594-' 
 One of the charges in the note signed by this 
 malefactor is that Marlowe, having learned the 
 art of coining from one Poole, a prisoner in 
 Newgate, ' ment through help of a connynge 
 stampe-maker, to coyne french crownes pisto- 
 lettes and english shillinges.' The manifest 
 absurdity of this statement and the infamous 
 character of the informant would justify us in 
 discrediting the scandalous part of the charges 
 in the note. The substance of the accusation 
 which Marlowe had to meet was that he was an 
 avowed atheist, of an aggressive character. The 
 proceedings were cut short by the death of 
 Marlowe, but the general acceptance of the 
 charge of atheism by the writers of the day leaves 
 no doubt that it was well founded. 
 
 Marlowe's views on religious matters had been 
 for some time known to his fellows. Greene, in 
 his Groatsivorth of JFit, appeals to Marlowe with 
 evident sincerity, as one who, with himself, had 
 said, ' like the foole in his heart, There is no 
 
 146
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 God,' to ' now give glorie unto his greatnesse.' 
 He warns him, addressing him as a friend, not 
 to follow his example in deferring ' till this last 
 point of extremitie ; for little knowest thou 
 how in the end thou shalt be visited.' These 
 words were ' offensively taken ' by Marlowe, for 
 profession of atheism was an offence punishable 
 by death. In the year 1589 a clergyman named 
 Kett had been executed for heresy, which did 
 not merit so strong a name. Chettle, dissociating 
 himself from Marlowe probably on this ground, 
 simply expresses regret that he had been the 
 means of making the charge public {ante, p. 103). 
 A charge of this kind made against one so 
 beloved as Marlowe would not have been readily 
 accepted if it were not well founded. The con- 
 temporary notices of Marlowe's fall are written 
 more in sorrow than in anger. In a poem in 
 manuscript written in 1600, signed S.M., quoted 
 by Halli well- Phillips in his Life of Shakespeare, 
 the writer speaks of ' Kynde Kit Marloe.' The 
 ' biting satirist ' Nash in the epistle to the 
 reader prefixed to the second edition of Christes 
 Teares over Jerusalem writes of ' poore deceased 
 Kit Marlowe.' He was still called ' Kit ' when 
 his success as a poet seemed to call for a more 
 respectful address. So thought Heywood when, 
 in his Hier archie of the Blessed, (1635), he wrote 
 
 H7
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Mario renowned for his rare art and wit 
 Could ne'er attain beyond the name of Kit, 
 Although his Hero and Leander did 
 Merit addition rather. 
 
 He was ' Kit ' to Izaak Walton when, years 
 afterwards, he wrote lovingly of a ditty fitted for 
 a voice like the note of a nightingale : ' twas 
 that smooth song, which was made by Kit. 
 Marlow now at least fifty years ago ; and the 
 Milk-maid's mother sung an answer to it, which 
 was made by Walter Raleigh in his younger days. 
 They were old fashioned poetry, but choicely 
 good. I think much better than the strong lines 
 that are now in fashion in this critical age.' 
 
 Marlowe was happy in his buskin'd Muse — 
 Alas, unhappy in his life and end. 
 
 Thus in sorrow wrote the author of The Returne 
 from Pernassus, and Peele, shortly after the 
 death of Marlowe, thus gave expression to his 
 admiration and regret : 
 
 Unhappy in thine end 
 Marley, the Muses' darling, for thy verse, 
 Fit to write passions for the souls below 
 If any wretched souls in passion speak.* 
 
 Greene's dying appeal to the ' famous gracer 
 of Tragedians ' to abandon his atheism was 
 prompted by affection for a friend. Drayton, 
 
 • Prologue to Honour of the Garter, 1593. 
 I48
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 the friend of Shakespeare, bestowed on him 
 worthy praise when he wrote — 
 
 Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, 
 Had in him those brave translunary things 
 That the first poets had ; his raptures were 
 All air and fire, which made his verses clear ; 
 For that fine madness still he did retain 
 Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. 
 
 But the noblest tribute of affectionate regard 
 to the memory of Marlowe was that paid by 
 Shakespeare. It has been noted that he was 
 moved by the tragedy of Spenser, ' late deceased 
 in beggary,' to depart from his wont, and to 
 introduce into one of his plays a reference to an 
 event of the day. The pitiful death of a still 
 nearer friend, his master, led him to break 
 silence, and he wrote these words : 
 
 Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might 
 Who ever loved that loved not at first sight ? * 
 
 The line quoted by Shakespeare occurs in 
 Hero and Leander. There is an unmistakable 
 note of affectionate regret in these words. 
 ' Shepherd ' was in those days a not unusual 
 word to denote a poet. Cynthia's Shepherds in 
 Colin Clouts were the poets by whom Elizabeth 
 was surrounded. But there was a special signifi- 
 cance in the word ' Shepherd ' as applied by 
 
 * As Ton Like It, III. v. 82. 
 149
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Shakespeare to Marlowe. Dramatists were often 
 known among their friends by the name of one 
 of their characters, and we know that Marlowe 
 was known to his friends as Tamburlaine, the 
 Shepherd King, the hero of the drama by which 
 he was best known. 
 
 Fragments of the poetry of Marlowe, and 
 reminiscences of his work, are to be found here 
 and there throughout the writings of Shake- 
 speare. Sir Hugh Evans trolled snatches from 
 the smooth song beloved by Izaak Walton, 
 
 ''Pless my soul, how full of chollors I am, 
 and trempling of mind,' says Sir Hugh Evans, 
 and he relieves his mind by singing 
 
 To shallow rivers, to whose falls 
 Melodious birds sings madrigals ; 
 There will we make our peds of roses, 
 And a thousand fragrant posies, 
 To shallow — 
 
 Mercy on me ! I have a great dispositions to cry 
 [sings] 
 
 Melodious birds sing madrigals — 
 When as I sat in Pabylon — 
 And a thousand vagram posies. 
 To shallow, &c* 
 
 When Helen was presented to Doctor Faustus 
 by Mephistophilcs, in obedience to his demand, he 
 exclaims — 
 
 • Merry JFivesf III. i. II. 
 
 150
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Iliam ? 
 
 These matchless lines were present to the mind of 
 Shakespeare when he wrote of Helen 
 
 Why, she is a pearl 
 Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships.* 
 
 And there is an echo of the music when the 
 Countess's call for Helena, by the name of Helen, 
 provokes the clown's song — 
 
 Was this fair face the cause, quoth she, 
 Why the Grecians sacked Troy ? f 
 
 and a fainter echo, when Richard, beholding his 
 features in a glass, exclaims — 
 
 Was this face the face 
 That every day under his household roof 
 Did keep ten thousand men ? was this the face 
 That, like the sun, did make beholders wink ? J 
 
 The greatness of Marlowe's influence on the 
 work and character of Shakespeare cannot be 
 measured by quotations from their works, or by 
 a consideration of the extent to which they may 
 have worked in collaboration. There is no more 
 interesting chapter in the history of literature 
 than that which tells of the work done by Shake- 
 
 * Troilus and Cressida, II. ii. 81. 
 
 t All's Well, I. in. 75. 
 
 % King Richard II., IV. i. 281. 
 
 151
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 spcarc in disciplcship to Marlowe. To what 
 extent they worked together is uncertain, and to 
 discuss the question would transcend the purpose 
 with which these pages have been written. It 
 may be profitably studied with Sir Sidney Lee 
 in his Life of Shakespeare and with Dr. Brandcs 
 in William Shakespeare, a Critical Study. It is 
 sufficient here to note that collaboration, to the 
 extent which is admitted by all critics, involves 
 personal relations between the workers, and an 
 intimacy which may be expected to exert an 
 influence on character and opinions other than 
 those which are merely literary. 
 
 The abiding influence of Marlowe on the 
 work of Shakespeare, and his strongest claim to 
 our gratitude, is due to his discovery that the 
 resources of the English language were equal to 
 the creation of a mighty line, an unrhymed 
 measure, comparable in strength and beauty to 
 the finest metres of Greece or Rome, and adapted 
 alike to the uses of the noblest tragic and epic 
 poetry. 
 
 ' When Christopher Marlowe came up to 
 London from Cambridge, a boy in years, a man 
 in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the 
 stage, which he was born to transfigure and 
 re-create by the might and masterdom of his 
 genius, encumbered with a litter of rude rhyming 
 
 152
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 farces and tragedies which the first wave of his 
 imperial hand swept so utterly out of sight and 
 hearing that hardly by piecing together such 
 fragments of that buried rubbish as it is now 
 possible to unearth can we rebuild in imagination 
 so much of the rough and crumbling wall that 
 fell before the trumpet-blast of Tamburlaine, 
 as may give us some conception of the rabble of 
 dynasty of rhymers whom he overthrew — of the 
 citadel of dramatic barbarism which was stormed 
 and sacked at the first charge of the young 
 conqueror who came to lead English audiences 
 and to deliver English poetry 
 
 From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits 
 And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,'* 
 
 The trumpet-blast was blown in the prologue 
 to Tamburlaine from which these lines are taken. 
 Of this play, Swinburne writes : ' It is the first 
 poem ever written in English blank verse, as 
 distinguished from mere rhymeless decasyllables ; 
 and it contains one of the noblest passages, 
 perhaps indeed the noblest, in the literature of 
 the world ever written by one of the greatest 
 masters of poetry in loving praise of the glorious 
 delights and sublime submission to the ever- 
 lasting limits of his art ' : "j" 
 
 * A Study of Shakespeare. 
 f Encyclopedia Britannica. 
 
 153
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 If all the pens that ever poets held 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 
 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
 Their minds, and muses on admired themes ; 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
 Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
 The highest reaches of a human wit ; 
 If these had made one poem's period, 
 And all combined in beauty's worthiness, 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least 
 Which into words no virtue can digest.* 
 
 Tamburlaine has many and obvious faults. In 
 some parts it descends to the level of mere 
 bombast. | But of the character of Tamburlaine, 
 the Shepherd King, we may say, as Goethe said 
 of Doctor Faustus, ' How grandly it is all 
 planned ! ' and in many passages, in this his 
 earliest drama, we find Marlowe's mighty line at 
 its best. 
 
 It was no part of Marlowe's design to banish 
 rhyme from lyrical or descriptive poetry. It had 
 
 • First part, V. i. 161. 
 
 f For example, in Tamburlaine's address to the captured Kings : 
 ' Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia.' 
 Shakespeare's love of Marlowe did not restrain him from joining in 
 the chorus of laughter which this line evoked, for Pistol speaks of 
 pack-horses 
 
 ' and hollow pampered jades of Asia 
 Which cannot go but thirty mile a-day.' 
 
 2 Hen. IV.y II. iv. 177. 
 
 154
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 no place in the measure which he created for 
 tragedy or epic poetry. He was indeed a master 
 of rhyme, as unrivalled as of blank verse. His 
 Passionate Pilgrim contains the lyric beloved by 
 Izaak Walton and by Sir Hugh Evans, and a 
 fragment of descriptive poetry of extraordinary 
 beauty. Of these, writes one who has brought to 
 perfection the charm of rhyme : ' One of the 
 most faultless lyrics, and one of the loveliest 
 fragments in the whole range of descriptive and 
 fanciful poetry would have secured a place for 
 Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, 
 even if his plays had perished with himself. His 
 Passionate Pilgrim remains ever since unrivalled 
 in its way — a way of pure fancy and radiant 
 melody without break or lapse ' ; and of Hero 
 and Leander Swinburne writes : ' It is doubtful 
 whether the heroic couplet has ever been more 
 finely handled.' 
 
 Shakespeare, in discipleship to Marlowe, aban- 
 doned the use of rhyming couplets which is to be 
 found in his earlier plays, and he also followed 
 the example of his master in retaining the melody 
 of rhyme in his lyrics, of which, perhaps the 
 most beautiful are those in his latest plays. 
 
 When Swinburne's glorious description of the 
 advent of Marlowe has been reduced to pedestrian 
 prose, it tells of the coming into the life of 
 
 155
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Shakespeare of a personality by which it was 
 profoundly affected. The manner in which his 
 work as an artist was affected was the infusion 
 into it of the spirit of the classical Renaissance, 
 or of the New Learning, as it was more accurately 
 termed in its relation to England. The outward 
 and visible sign of the infusion of this new spirit 
 was the gradual abandonment by Shakespeare 
 of rhyme in the composition of his plays. The 
 story of Shakespeare's conversion from rhyme 
 to blank verse can best be studied in the glowing 
 pages of Swinburne.* Shakespeare * was natu- 
 rally addicted to rhyme. . . . But in his very 
 first plays, comic or tragic or historic, we can 
 see the collision and conflict of the two influences ; 
 his evil angel rhyme, yielding step by step to the 
 strong advance of that better genius who came 
 to lead him into the loftier path of Marlowe.' 
 Rhyme in King Richard 11. and Romeo and Juliet, 
 ' struggles for awhile to keep its footing, but 
 now more visibly in vain. The rhymed scenes 
 in these plays are too plainly the survivals of a 
 ruder and feebler stage of work. ... In two 
 scenes we may say that the whole heart or spirit 
 of Romeo and Juliet is summed up and distilled 
 into perfect and pure expression ; and these two 
 are written in blank verse of equable and blamc- 
 
 • A Study of Shakespeare. 
 
 156
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 less melody.' A passage in Richard II. ' must be 
 regarded as the last hysterical struggle of rhyme 
 to maintain its place in tragedy.' 
 
 The effect of the New Learning upon the work 
 of Shakespeare, under the influence of Marlowe, 
 cannot be fully appreciated without a glance at 
 the condition of the vernacular literature of 
 England at the beginning of the century in 
 which he was born^^Jiallam fixes the year 1400 
 as the beginning of a national literature written 
 in English, a language that was then growing 
 into literary existence. This was the year of the 
 death of Chaucer. The vernacular literature 
 which showed such promise in Chaucer, made no 
 progress in the century and a half between his 
 death and the accession of Elizabeth. The only 
 book written in England in those years which 
 holds a first-class position in literature, More's 
 Utopia, was written in Latin. Then had come 
 the great intellectual movement known as the 
 Classical Renaissance, which reached England 
 in the early years of the sixteenth century. 
 St. Paul's School was founded by Dean Colet, 
 and William Lily, a famous grammarian, who 
 had studied Greek and Latin in Italy, was 
 appointed High Master in 15 12. The grammar 
 school at Stratford held a high position, and was 
 one of the first in which Greek was taught, and 
 
 "57
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 by the teaching of that school Shakespeare was 
 made ready for discipleship to Marlowe. Dull 
 and long-forgotten plays after the manner of 
 Seneca had no effect on the development of the 
 national drama. Ralph Roister Doister, written 
 in 1550, may be taken as the precursor of the 
 Elizabethan national drama, the first fruit of 
 the Classical Renaissance. The author, Nicholas 
 Udall, was headmaster at Eton, and a famous 
 classical scholar. The play is founded on the 
 Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, and is in the form of 
 a Latin comedy. But it is written in rhyming 
 doggerel verse. Only thirty-seven years inter- 
 vened between the writing of this play and the 
 production of Tamburlaine. The greatness of the 
 revolution worked by the genius of Marlowe can 
 best be realised by a comparison of his line with 
 the jigging vein of the rhyming mother wit which 
 found expression in Ralph Roister Doister. 
 
 It was by the spirit and not the letter of the 
 ancient learning that Marlowe was inspired. 
 The difference between the letter and the spirit 
 of this influence is illustrated by a comparison of 
 the work of Marlowe with the efforts of a school 
 of pedants who with Gabriel Harvey and William 
 Webbe * were engaged in a fruitless endeavour 
 to i reform ' English versification by forcing it 
 
 • A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586). 
 
 158
 
 CHRISTOPHER {MARLOWE 
 
 into the metres of Latin poetry. It is also seen 
 by a comparison of Shakespeare's Roman plays 
 with Jonson's. Jonson's plays are ' well 
 laboured.' His characters ' are made to speak 
 according to the very words of Tacitus and 
 Suetonius ; but they are not living men ' ; and 
 we know from Leonard Digges how the audience 
 was ravished when Shakespeare's Caesar would 
 appear on the stage. Such was the mighty in- 
 fluence which, mainly through the instrumen- 
 tality of Marlowe, was brought to bear upon 
 Shakespeare's work as a dramatist. 
 
 Professor Dowden, in writing of Shakespeare, 
 devotes himself to a ' critical study of his mind 
 and art.' It is in regard to the art of Shake- 
 speare that the influence of Marlowe has been, 
 for the most part, considered. But no less real 
 was his influence upon the mind of Shakespeare, 
 upon his outlook on life, upon the character of 
 the man, and upon his office as teacher. 
 
 While Marlowe was engaged in his great work 
 of literary pioneer and discoverer he had under- 
 taken a mission of a different kind. The charge 
 of atheism which Marlowe was called upon to 
 answer was never tried, or, indeed, exactly 
 formulated. The word was, in those days, 
 applied to deviations from orthodoxy of different 
 degrees. It was applied to the freethinking of 
 
 159
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Raleigh and his literary circle. It is evident 
 from Greene's friendly expostulation that he 
 used the term, in its application to Marlowe, 
 in its literal sense. It is impossible to avoid the 
 conclusion that Marlowe towards the end of his 
 life had become the apostle of a kind of un- 
 orthodoxy, to which the word ' atheism ' was 
 regarded as applicable by friends as well as foes. 
 Marlowe had an influential friend and patron 
 in Sir Thomas Walsingham, who is said to have 
 been nearly related to Elizabeth's famous minis- 
 ter. Chapman was his intimate friend, and, as 
 we have seen, he was beloved as well as admired 
 by his literary brethren, who would have been 
 moved by the tragedy of his death to clear his 
 memory of so odious a charge, if it had been 
 possible so to do. 
 
 Association with Marlowe had not the influence 
 on the mind of Shakespeare which it was said, 
 probably with truth, to have exerted on weaker 
 intellects. Shakespeare remained unshaken in 
 his hold of the great truths of religion, and three 
 centuries having elapsed, the anniversary of his 
 death will be celebrated, with gratitude for his 
 teaching, in services of the church of which he 
 was a member. 
 
 But although Shakespeare emerged unscathed 
 from the fiery trial of his faith to which intimate 
 
 160
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 association with one like Marlowe must have 
 exposed him, the influence of Marlowe on his 
 religious belief, as well as on his work as an artist, 
 is clearly discernible. No question has been 
 oftener asked in regard to Shakespeare than this : 
 What was his creed ? It is a question that can 
 be easily answered with regard to other great 
 men of the Elizabethan age. But as to Shake- 
 speare it has not been answered yet ; or, rather, 
 it has been answered so differently by various 
 earnest students of his work as to lead to the con- 
 clusion that the problem is insoluble. Charles 
 Butler, in Historical Memoirs of English Catholics, 
 claims him as a Roman Catholic ; and a French 
 man of letters, A. J. Rio, in his Shakespeare, 
 arrives without doubt at the same conclusion. 
 He has been described as an atheist, and as a 
 deist, and Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. 
 Andrews, claims him as a faithful son of the 
 English Church of the Reformation. 
 
 Many of us in our passage through life have 
 come across a young man of exceptionally 
 brilliant intellect, who, under the influence of a 
 friend of a masterful personality, was led to 
 abandon for agnosticism the religion in which 
 he was brought up. After a time such a one 
 ' like him who travels ' may return again. But 
 he returns a different man. Should he become 
 
 161
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 a divine, his theological teaching will be cha- 
 racterised by a spirit of tolerance, and by an 
 understanding of forms of belief and unbelief to 
 which he would otherwise have been a stranger. 
 If he should become a dramatist or novelist, 
 there will be found in his work the characteristics 
 which have baffled inquirers after the creed of 
 Shakespeare ; a firm grasp of eternal verities, 
 with an indifference to the forms and dogmas of 
 any particular Church. 
 
 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
 Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.* 
 
 With words like these he may close a dis- 
 cussion on religious subjects, relegating, with 
 Milton, reasoning high 
 
 Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute 
 
 to spirits of another sort, in another place. 
 
 A firm religious faith is consistent in a man like 
 Shakespeare, with easy-going toleration, and 
 even with occasional indulgence in an unseemly 
 jest. Some such thought was present to his 
 mind when he put these words into the mouth 
 of Don Pedro : 
 
 • Hamlet, I. v. 167. The ' our ' of the Folio has been need- 
 lessly altered to ' your.' Hamlet and Horatio had been fellow 
 b tudents in Wittenberg. 
 
 l62
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 The man doth fear God, howsoever it seems not in 
 him by some large jests he will make.* 
 
 Large jests were in vogue in Shakespeare's day, 
 and even his Beatrice indulged in a kind of 
 pleasantry that has been long since banished 
 from the servants' hall. But there is no irrever- 
 ence in Shakespeare's jests. He never calls evil 
 good, or good, evil. He did not love a Puritan, 
 and he had no taste for frequent churchgoing. 
 ' An honest, willing, kind fellow,' says Mistress 
 Quickly of Rugby, ' as ever servant shall come 
 in house withal, and, I warrant you, no tell- 
 tale nor no breed-bate ; his worst fault is that 
 he is given to prayer ; he is something peevish 
 that way ; but nobody but has his fault ; but 
 let that pass.'f At times, under special provo- 
 cation, he might be of the mind of Sir Andrew 
 Aguecheek : 
 
 Mar. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan. 
 
 Sir And. O, if I thought that Fid beat him like a dog ! 
 
 Sir To. What, for being a puritan ? Thy exquisite 
 reason, dear knight ? 
 
 Sir And. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have 
 reason good enough. | 
 
 But more often his mood would be that of the 
 good-humoured indifference underlying the cha- 
 
 * Much Ado, II. iii. 204. 
 f Merry Wives, I. iv. 10. 
 % Twelfth Night, II. iii. 151.
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 racteristic language of a certain clown : ' Young 
 Charbon the puritan and old Poysam the papist, 
 hovvsome'er their hearts arc severed in religion, 
 their heads are both one ; they may joul horns 
 together, like any deer i' the herd.' * 
 
 We are certain that he received with ' gentle ' 
 courtesy the preacher whose entertainment at 
 New Place has been recorded. If another such 
 visit had been paid when Shakespeare was 
 writing Cymbriine, we can understand how when 
 the worthy man departed his host could con- 
 tain himself no longer, and relieved his feelings 
 by writing some things of which Sir Sidney Lee 
 says : l Although most of the scenes of Cymbeline 
 are laid in Britain in the first century before the 
 Christian era, there is no pretence of historical 
 vraisemblance. With an almost ludicrous inap- 
 propriateness the British King's courtiers make 
 merry with technical terms peculiar to Calvin- 
 istic theology, like " grace ' and " election." 
 In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as " past 
 grace " in the theological sense. In I. ii. 30-31 
 the Second Lord remarks : " If it be a sin to 
 make a true election, she is damned." 
 
 A report regarding Shakespeare that ' he dyed 
 a papist ' reached the Rev. Richard Davies, 
 
 • All's Well, I. iii. 55. 
 
 f Life of Shakespeare, p. 424, and note 1 . 
 
 164
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 Rector of Sapperton, who inserted it in some 
 brief notes respecting Shakespeare which are in 
 the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
 Davies died in 1708, and the report probably had 
 its origin towards the end of the seventeenth 
 century. Although it was not founded in fact, 
 it is easy to understand how it came to be said of 
 Shakespeare by the Puritans among whom his 
 lot was cast. He had heard in his youth from 
 old people of the beauty of the old services, and 
 the sweet singing of the monks. With this in 
 his mind, when he thought of the fair proportions 
 of some abbey church, dismantled and going to 
 ruin, he wrote these words : 
 
 That time of year thou mayst in me behold 
 When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold 
 Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.* 
 
 If the passages in his writings by which learned 
 and thoughtful readers have been led to con- 
 clude that he was a Roman Catholic had a 
 counterpart in his daily converse at Stratford, 
 his Protestantism would certainly have been 
 called in question by the good folk of that town, 
 and the story would go abroad that he was 
 reconciled to the old faith before his death. 
 
 ' Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shake- 
 
 * Sonnet lxxiii. 
 
 165
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 speare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible (fourth 
 edition, 1892), gives a long list of passages for 
 which Shakespeare may have been indebted to 
 the Bible. But the Bishop's deductions as to 
 the strength of Shakespeare's adult piety seem 
 strained. The Rev. Thomas Carter's Shake- 
 speare and Holy Scripture (1905) is open to the 
 same exceptions as the Bishop's volume, but no 
 Shakespearean student will fail to derive profit 
 from examining his exhaustive collection of 
 parallel passages.' * It may be, as Sir Sidney 
 Lee thinks, that Shakespeare's ' scriptural remi- 
 niscences bear trace of the assimilative or recep- 
 tive tendency of an alert youthful mind,' and it 
 may be a mistake ' to urge that his knowledge 
 of the Bible was mainly the fruit of close and 
 continuous application in adult life.' But his 
 knowledge of the Bible, however acquired, was 
 a fact, and in it he found a safeguard against the 
 missionary efforts of Marlowe, all the more 
 dangerous by reason of the admiration and 
 affection with which he was regarded by his friend 
 and disciple. 
 
 An interesting feature of the annual celebra- 
 tion at Stratford of the birthday of Shakespeare 
 is the preaching of a memorial sermon in the 
 parish church. In one of these the late Canon 
 
 # Life of Shakespeare, p. 23, note 2. 
 166
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 Ainger, having spoken of the discipline ' under 
 which he grew to be a prophet and a teacher to 
 his kind,' says ' wherever men do congregate, 
 or wherever they muse in solitude, there abides 
 this great cause of thankfulness to Almighty God 
 that the greatest name in our literature should 
 be also our wisest and profoundest teacher.' * 
 
 Coleridge expressed his confidence ' that 
 Shakespeare was a writer of all others the most 
 calculated to make his readers better as well as 
 wiser,' f and Professor Dowden writes : ' Is 
 Shakespeare a religious poet ? An answer 
 has been given to this question by Mr. Walter 
 Bagehot, which contains the essential truth : 
 " If this world is not all evil, he who has under- 
 stood and painted it best, must probably have 
 some good. If the underlying and almighty 
 essence of this world be good, then it is likely 
 that the writer who most deeply approached to 
 that essence will be himself good. There is a 
 religion of weekdays as well as of Sundays, a 
 religion of ' cakes and ale,' as well as of pews 
 and altar cloths. This England lay before 
 Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with its green 
 fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many 
 trees, and its great towns, and its endless ham- 
 
 * Shakespeare Sermons, preached in the Collegiate Church of Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon (1900). 
 
 f Lecture on Shakespeare and Milton. 
 
 167
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 lets, and its motley society, and its long history, 
 and its bold exploits, and its gathering power ; 
 and he saw that they were good. To him per- 
 haps more than to anyone else has it been given 
 to see that they were a great unity, a great 
 religious object ; that if you could only descend 
 to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret 
 principles of its noble vigour, to the essence of 
 character ... we might, so far as we are capable 
 of so doing, understand the nature which God 
 has made. Let us then think of him, not as a 
 teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard 
 
 sayings, but as 
 
 A priest to us all 
 Of the wonder and bloom of the world, 
 
 a teacher of the hearts of men and women." 
 
 From Shakespeare's fellowship with Marlowe 
 we learn something of the strength and sanity 
 of his character, and also of his constancy in 
 friendship. He was ready to learn from Marlowe 
 what he had to teach, and to follow him where 
 he ought to tread, but no further. He was loyal 
 to the memory of a fallen and discredited friend. 
 Deaf to Chettle's entreaty that he would drop a 
 tear on the sable hearse of Elizabeth, he was 
 moved to depart from his use by the tragic death 
 
 • Shakespeare, his Mind and Art, quoting from Estimates of Some 
 Englishmen and Scotchmen. 
 
 1 68
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 of Marlowe, as he was by the circumstances of the 
 last days of Spenser : 
 
 Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, 
 Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. 
 
 Loyalty such as Shakespeare's to his fellows and 
 friends is a sure token of the genuineness of the 
 character which Spenser was the first to discover 
 in Shakespeare. 
 
 169
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 Towards the end of the century in which 
 Shakespeare died an attempt was made to 
 collect and record what was then remembered 
 of the facts of his life. Nicholas Rowe, Poet 
 Laureate, the earliest critical editor of the plays 
 of Shakespeare, was also his earliest biographer, 
 for none of the scanty notes of former writers 
 deserve the name of biography. Rowe was a 
 man of note, as a poet and as a dramatist. 
 The popularity of his best-known drama, The 
 Fair Penitent, is attested by the survival from 
 it of the phrase ' gallant gay Lothario,' de- 
 scriptive of the villain of the piece. Of this 
 play, Dr. Johnson writes : ' There is scarcely 
 any work of any poet at once so interesting by 
 the fable, and so delightful in the language.' 
 Rowc's work as editor was of considerable value 
 at the time, but his edition of the plays which 
 appeared in 1709 was before long superseded by 
 that of Pope (1725) and by the far superior work 
 of Theobald, ' the Porson of Shakespearian 
 
 criticism.' * 
 
 • Essays and Studies (Churton Collins). 
 I70
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 Rowe's poems and plays are now forgotten. 
 But he has a claim to our undying gratitude, 
 second only to that which is due to the players 
 to whom we owe the Folio of 1623. It is founded 
 on the pains that he took, by careful inquiries 
 at Stratford, to preserve from oblivion such 
 knowledge of Shakespeare's life as had then sur- 
 vived, and on the discrimination and restraint 
 with which he made use of the material which 
 was supplied to him. 
 
 In this pious labour he had the assistance of 
 the famous actor Thomas Betterton. Born about 
 the year 1635, Betterton in 1661 joined a com- 
 pany of players formed by Sir William Davenant 
 at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre. He was thus 
 brought into contact with one who was closely 
 connected with Shakespeare. Shakespeare's 
 intimacy with the D'Avenant family has been 
 noted in an earlier chapter. With William the 
 connection was closest, for he was Shakespeare's 
 godchild, and devoted to the memory of his 
 godfather. Betterton was not only an actor, 
 but a dramatist, many of whose plays were 
 produced, and in the words of Pepys, ' well 
 liked.' 
 
 Betterton was known to Rowe not only as 
 a great actor, but as an earnest student of 
 Shakespeare. ' No man,' he writes, ' is better 
 
 I7 1
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 acquainted with Shakespeare's manner of expres- 
 sion, and, indeed, he has studied him so well, 
 and is so much a master of him, that whatever 
 part of his he performs, he does it as if it had 
 been written on purpose for him, and that the 
 author had exactly conceived it.' 
 
 Betterton was the first to make a serious 
 attempt to collect material for a biography of 
 Shakespeare : ' his veneration for the memory 
 of Shakespeare having engaged him to make a 
 journey into Warwickshire on purpose to gather 
 up what remains he could of a name for which 
 he had so great a veneration.' 
 
 At what time Betterton's veneration engaged 
 him to journey to Stratford we do not know. 
 No time is more probable than shortly after the 
 death of Davenant in 1668. The strong per- 
 sonal interest in Shakespeare which prompted 
 this undertaking can be traced back to this date, 
 when Betterton purchased the Chandos portrait, 
 which had been in the possession of Davenant. 
 In his later years Betterton was in straitened 
 circumstances and a martyr to gout, and in 
 those days a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon 
 was a serious undertaking. Rowe, when he 
 published his Life in 1709, made use of the infor- 
 mation which had been collected by Betterton, 
 but there is no reason to suppose that Betterton's 
 
 172
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 visit to Stratford was made in contemplation of 
 Rowe's work. 
 
 Fifty-two years after the death of Shakespeare 
 there must have been men and women living at 
 Stratford who had not reached the extreme limit 
 of life, and who had spoken with Shakespeare 
 when he was resident at Stratford during his 
 later years. 
 
 Nothing can be more commonplace than the 
 story as told by Rowe. He tells us of the birth 
 of Shakespeare in April, 1564. * His family, as 
 appears by the register and public writings 
 relating to that town, were of good figure and 
 fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. 
 His father, who was a considerable dealer in 
 wool, had a large family, ten children in all, and 
 could give his eldest son no better education 
 than one to fit him for his own employment.' 
 He was educated for some time at a free school, 
 ' but the narrowness of his circumstances, and 
 the want of his assistance at home, forced his 
 father to withdraw him from thence. . . . Upon 
 his leaving school he seems to have given entirely 
 into that way of living which his father proposed 
 to him ; and in order to settle in the world after 
 a family manner, he thought fit to marry while 
 he was yet very young. His wife was the 
 daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a 
 
 173
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of 
 Stratford. In this kind of settlement he con- 
 tinued for some time till an extravagance that 
 he was guilty of forced him both out of the 
 country and that way of living which he had 
 taken up.' 
 
 Rowe tells the tale of the stealing of the deer 
 of Sir Thomas Lucy, for which he was prose- 
 cuted, as he thought too severely ; of Shake- 
 speare's revenge for the ill-usage in the form of 
 a ballad, ' the first essay of his poetry,' then 
 lost, which ' redoubled the prosecution against 
 him to that degree that he was obliged to leave 
 his business and family in Warwickshire for 
 some time, and shelter himself in London. . . . 
 The latter part of his life was spent, as all 
 men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in 
 ease, retirement, and the conversation of his 
 friends. He had the good fortune to gather an 
 estate equal to his occasion, and, in that to his 
 wish, and is said to have spent some years before 
 his death at his native Stratford. His pleasur- 
 able wit and good nature engaged him in the 
 acquaintance, and entitled him to the friendship 
 of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood.' 
 
 This commonplace record, the result of the 
 inquiries of Betterton and Rowe, may be taken 
 as representing the impression made on the good
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 folk of Stratford by the life of Shakespeare, in 
 so far as it was spent among them, and of this 
 record no part is more commonplace than the 
 reference to his marriage. His early marriage 
 to the daughter of a substantial yeoman is 
 attributed to a desire to settle in the world in a 
 family manner, in the way of living which his 
 father proposed to him ; that is to say, as an 
 assistant in his business as a considerable dealer 
 in wool. It never occurred to Betterton's 
 informants, or to the seventeenth-century col- 
 lectors of Stratford gossip and scandal, that 
 there was anything out of the common, or worthy 
 of note, about the circumstances of Shakespeare's 
 marriage. Not a hint at unhappy relations 
 between husband and wife can be found in the 
 local gossip collected by Aubrey, Ward, Davies, 
 Hall, and Oldys. 
 
 With the revival of interest in the facts of 
 Shakespeare's life came the searching of ancient 
 records, and the discovery of certain facts which, 
 read in the light of nineteenth-century ideas, 
 seemed to have a significance that had not been 
 attached to them by the sixteenth-century folk 
 among whom they took place. On Monday, 
 the 28th of November, 1582, Shakespeare 
 obtained at the Bishop's Registry at Worcester 
 a licence to be married to Anne Hathaway, after 
 
 I7S
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 publication of banns. In what church the 
 celebration of the marriage took place is unknown. 
 The eldest child of the marriage, Susanna, was 
 baptized in the parish church of Stratford on 
 the 26th of May, 1583. 
 
 A marriage in November, followed by the 
 birth of a child in the following May, if these 
 facts were to occur in our day, would naturally 
 lead to the conclusion that prenuptial inter- 
 course had been followed by a forced marriage, 
 at the instance of the wife's relations, and this 
 is the conclusion from which most biographers 
 have started in their accounts of the domestic 
 life of Shakespeare. 
 
 It is always dangerous to draw inferences 
 from facts which have a relation to conduct 
 without a complete knowledge of the laws and 
 customs of the period at which they took place, 
 and this peril is especially imminent when the 
 facts and inferences are conversant with the 
 relations between the sexes, as governed by the 
 law of marriage, and the ecclesiastical and social 
 customs which had grown up around the law, 
 and which disappeared when the law ceased to 
 exist. 
 
 Mr. Charles Elton has earned the gratitude of 
 all who seek to attain to a real knowledge of the 
 life and character of Shakespeare by the care 
 
 176
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 with which he has investigated the circumstances 
 of his marriage in the light of contemporary 
 customs and ecclesiastical regulations. 
 
 Mr. Elton had rare qualifications for the task. 
 A fine scholar, and a lawyer of real learning, 
 especially in the branches of law which are 
 akin to history and archaeology, he would have 
 attained to a high position in his profession had 
 not his accession early in life to an ample estate 
 made it possible for him to devote his powers to 
 historical and literary research, while he was at 
 the same time engaged in such practical work 
 as the discharge of his duties as Member of 
 Parliament, and the collection and cataloguing 
 of an interesting library. As the result we have 
 the Origins of English History, and William 
 Shakespeare His Family and Friends, published 
 in the year 1904, after the death of the author, 
 with a memoir by Andrew Lang. In this work, 
 which is a storehouse of information indus- 
 triously collected from all quarters, and sifted 
 with critical care, he thus sums up the result of 
 his investigations : 
 
 6 We may say at once that there is no reason 
 to suppose that Shakespeare and his wife had 
 made an irregular or clandestine marriage, 
 though they appear to have been united by a 
 civil marriage some time before the ceremony 
 
 *77
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 was performed in the face of the Church. We 
 should distinguish between regular and irregular 
 contracts. A contract of future espousals was 
 regular, but it did not amount to marriage, 
 being nothing more in reality than a mutual 
 covenant to be married at a future time. A 
 contract of present espousals, on the contrary, 
 was a legal marriage. . . . 
 
 1 The congregation was frequently warned 
 that such civil marriages ought to be contracted 
 publicly, and before several witnesses. If these 
 rules were broken the offenders were liable to 
 the punishments for clandestine marriage, such as 
 fine, imprisonment, or excommunication, and 
 the victim might be compelled to walk, like the 
 Duchess of Gloucester, in a white sheet, with 
 bare feet and a taper alight : 
 
 Methinks I should not thus be led along, 
 Mail'd up in shame, with papers on my back ; 
 And follow'd with a rabble that rejoice 
 To see my tears and hear my deep-fet groans. 
 
 The civil marriage required the religious 
 solemnity to give the parties their legal status 
 as to property, but otherwise it was both valid 
 and regular. The clandestine marriage was 
 valid, but all parties could be punished for their 
 offences against the law.' 
 
 This is an accurate statement of the - " Canon 
 
 178
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 Law as it was in force in England in the year 
 1582. But it leaves unanswered this question : 
 If Anne Hathaway had become the lawful wife 
 of William Shakespeare at some time before the 
 month of November, 1582, why was not their 
 marriage solemnised in church, after publishing 
 of banns, in the usual way ? The fact that the 
 marriage was not so solemnised has led writers 
 who approached the subject with nineteenth- 
 century prepossessions (including the writer of 
 these pages) to conclude that there must have 
 been something clandestine or irregular about 
 this civil marriage, although it was, by the laws 
 then in force, valid and binding. 
 
 Mr. Elton was an antiquary as well as a lawyer, 
 and his research has supplied an answer to the 
 question, which he puts in these words : ' Why 
 marriages were not always solemnised in church 
 after banns published, or special licence obtained. 
 . . . The answer is that it was difficult to 
 get married [in church] especially with due 
 publication of banns, except in the latter half 
 of the year, between Trinity and Advent. The 
 ancient prohibitions had been relaxed by the 
 Council of Trent ; but the decrees of that 
 assembly were not accepted in England. In our 
 own country the ancient rules prevailed. The 
 banns could not be published, nor marriages 
 
 179
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 solemnised, although they might certainly be 
 legally contracted during any of the periods of 
 prohibition, unless, indeed, a special licence were 
 obtained. The periods extended from Advent 
 to the octave of the Epiphany, or January 
 the 13th inclusive; from Septuagesima to the 
 end of Easter week ; and from the first Rogation 
 day, three days before the feast of the Ascension, 
 to Trinity Sunday, inclusive.' Attempts were 
 made after the Reformation, without success, 
 in Parliament and in Convocation to remove 
 these disabilities. Ultimately ' these distinctions 
 being invented only at first as a fund (among 
 many others) for dispensations and being built 
 upon no rational foundation, nor upon any law 
 of the Church of England, have vanished of 
 themselves.'* 
 
 But in the year 1582 they were in force. 
 Shakespeare was one who believed that 
 
 No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall 
 To make this contract grow, 
 
 if heed be not taken that 
 
 All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
 With full and holy rite be minister'd. 
 
 And so he took the necessary steps, at a time 
 when the law of his Church permitted, to have 
 
 • William Shakespeare His Family and Friends. 
 
 180
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 the marriage solemnised in Church, after due 
 publishing of banns.* But neither at the time 
 of his marriage, nor when, many years after- 
 wards, he put these words into the mouth of 
 Prospero, would it have occurred to him to be a 
 necessary condition of a happy married life that 
 the holy rite and the indissoluble civil contract 
 should have taken place at one and the same 
 time. Indeed this would not have been possible 
 in the case of a marriage contracted during any 
 of the prohibited periods. There is a principle 
 of our jurisprudence, not founded on legal 
 technicality, but the result of the garnered 
 experience of centuries, which tells us that the 
 best way of arriving at truth, in the absence 
 of direct testimony, is to refer events to a 
 legal origin, when it is possible so to do, and 
 to presume, in the language of the law, omnia 
 rite esse acta. 
 
 Shakespeare was born in the month of April, 
 1564. He was thus about eighteen years of age 
 at the time of his marriage in 1582. Anne, his 
 widow, died on the 8th of August, 1623, at 
 the age of sixty-seven. She was therefore 
 twenty-six years of age at the time of the 
 
 * The banns were to be published once. But from the researches 
 in ancient registers of Mr. Elton and Mr. Gray {Shakespeare's 
 Marriage, etc.) it appears that a licence in this form was not unusual. 
 
 l8l
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 marriage. After about eighteen years Shakespeare 
 wrote these words : 
 
 Duke. Let still the woman take 
 
 An elder than herself : so wears she to him, 
 So sways she level in her husband's heart : 
 For boy, however we do praise ourselves, 
 Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm. 
 More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn 
 Than women's are. 
 
 Vio. I think it well, my lord. 
 
 Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, 
 Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.* 
 
 When Shakespeare wrote these words he could 
 look back on eighteen years of married life, and 
 no one has doubted that in the speech of Orsino, 
 which is devoid of dramatic significance, we have 
 the result of this retrospection : Eighteen years 
 before, a boy of eighteen, he had married a woman 
 of the mature age of twenty-six. Then followed 
 a few years of married life at Stratford, and the 
 birth of three children. There is no reason why 
 we should import into these years the idea of 
 unhappiness or discord. Shakespeare left his 
 wife and family, not of choice, but of necessity. 
 The trouble in which his reckless love of sport 
 involved him is not suggestive of domestic 
 trouble. Then followed long years of separa- 
 
 • Twelfth Night, II. iv. 29. 
 182
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 tion, of solitary struggles in London ; it may 
 be of error and estrangement. Looking back 
 on these years, Shakespeare may well have 
 thought that it would have been better for his 
 wife had she taken an elder than herself, for so 
 might she have swayed ' level in her husband's 
 heart,' and have exerted more influence on his 
 life and character. But his thoughts and sympa- 
 thies were for the older wife, not for the younger 
 husband, whose giddy and infirm fancies brought 
 on her trouble and disappointment. 
 
 Aubrey's statement that Shakespeare was 
 wont to go to his country once a year was 
 probably not true of the earlier years of his stay 
 in London. But with his improving fortunes 
 his thoughts turned towards home, and the 
 homing instinct that was part of his nature 
 asserted itself. When Twelfth Night was written 
 the tide in his affairs had turned, and had set in 
 the direction of the return to domestic life and 
 permanent reunion, which was fully consum- 
 mated when some ten years later he came to live 
 in New Place. Towards this consummation, 
 devoutly wished, his efforts during many years 
 had consistently tended. He had already 
 obtained from the Heralds' College a grant of 
 arms to his father, by virtue of which he came 
 to be described in the deed conveying to him a 
 
 183
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 share in the tithes of Stratford as ' of Stratford- 
 upon-Avon, gentleman.' He had in 1597, in 
 the words of Sir Sidney Lee, ' taken openly in 
 his own person a more effective step in the way 
 of rehabilitating himself and his family in the 
 eyes of his fellow-townsmen.' On the 4th of May 
 he purchased the largest house in the town, 
 known as ' New Place,' and at the time when 
 Twelfth Night was produced in the Hall of the 
 Middle Temple he must have been in treaty for 
 the purchase of a substantial real estate, the 
 conveyance of which was executed shortly 
 afterwards. According to the careful estimate 
 of Sir Sidney Lee, ' a sum approaching 150/. 
 (equal to 750/. of to-day) would be the poet's 
 average annual revenue before 1599. Such a 
 sum would be regarded as a very large income 
 in a country town.'* In the full splendour of 
 his fame as a poet and successful dramatist, and 
 in the receipt of an ample income, at an age at 
 which he might reasonably have looked forward 
 to the enjoyment of many years in the life of 
 London, ' like him that travels he returned 
 again,' to spend the remaining years of his life 
 in a dull country town, for no other reason that 
 can be assigned except that it was his native 
 place and the home of his wife and children. 
 
 • Life of Shakespeare, p. 300. 
 184
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 One would have thought that the fact that 
 Shakespeare was not kept by the attractions of 
 life in London from visiting once in every year 
 the country town in which he had left his wife 
 and family, and that when he had made an ample 
 fortune he came home to end his life in their 
 company, in the house which he had made ready 
 for them some years before, would have led to 
 the conclusion that their relations were, at all 
 events, fairly satisfactory. But against all this 
 is the unforgettable fact that he left his wife 
 his second-best bed. 
 
 The truth is that Shakespeare, when making 
 his will, failed to realise that he was writing, not 
 for his executors and legatees, but for all time. 
 It has been a source of disappointment and 
 serious concern to many that he made no mention 
 of Drayton, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, or other of 
 his literary friends, and that his will contains 
 no mention of his own writings. Memorial rings 
 might have been bequeathed to them, and to the 
 " incomparable pair " to whom the First Folio was 
 dedicated, who, in the words of the editors, prose- 
 cuted the author when alive with so much favour. 
 They were provided for some fellow players and 
 a few obscure neighbours. The master of the 
 Grammar School at Stratford, who made a 
 transcript of the will in 1747 when interest began 
 
 185
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 to be taken in the subject, was sorely dis- 
 appointed when he read it, and could not help 
 observing that it was ' absolutely void of the 
 least particle of that spirit which animated our 
 great poet.' On which Mr. Halliwell-Phillips 
 pertinently remarks, ' It might be thought 
 from this impeachment that this worthy pre- 
 ceptor expected to find it written in blank-verse,' 
 adding, ' The preponderance of Shakespeare's 
 domestic over his literary sympathies is strikingly 
 exhibited in this final record.' 
 
 Shakespeare's will might well be left to rest 
 in the obscurity of a registry were it not for the 
 extravagant ideas to which this very common- 
 place document has given rise. Not only did 
 he leave his wife entirely unprovided for, but to 
 this injury a deliberate insult was added by the 
 introduction of an interlineation into the original 
 draft by which his second-best bed was given to 
 his wife, showing that this trifling and insulting 
 notice of her existence was a mere afterthought. 
 
 Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in the notes to his 
 Outlines, has printed the will in a convenient 
 manner, which enables the reader to understand 
 the process by which it attained its ultimate 
 form. The portions of the print included in 
 square brackets represent erasures, and those 
 in italics, interlineations. The erasures are of 
 
 186
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 no significance, and the only interlineations 
 with which we need concern ourselves are those 
 which relate to the provision for the wife of the 
 testator. 
 
 By the original draft, New Place, with practi- 
 cally the whole of Shakespeare's property in land, 
 was settled on his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, 
 for her life, with remainder to her issue male, in 
 strict settlement. In the draft, the gift was 
 without qualification, but before the will was 
 executed the following words had been intro- 
 duced by interlineation, immediately after the 
 gift to Susanna Hall : ' for better enabling of 
 her to performe this my will and towardes the 
 performance thereof.' By these words, the sig- 
 nificance of which has been overlooked, Susanna 
 was constituted a trustee of the property which 
 was devised to her, in order to enable her to per- 
 form and give effect to what the testator calls 
 ' this my will.' What was the will which 
 Susanna was to perform by means of her owner- 
 ship of New Place ? It was not anything 
 expressed on the face of the will, which contains 
 no indication of any trust or obligation imposed 
 on her. The words ' this my will,' if taken 
 literally, would refer to something contained in 
 the document in which they occur. Shake- 
 speare's will was composed neither in the blank 
 
 i8 7
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 verse of a poet nor with the technical exactness 
 of a conveyancing draftsman, but the meaning is 
 quite clear. The testator must be taken to have 
 meant something by the words ' this my will,' 
 and if they are to be given any significance 
 they must be taken as meaning ' the whole of 
 my testamentary disposition now declared.' 
 Directions given to his daughter by word of 
 mouth as to the use that she was to make of the 
 property given to her by the will would be 
 legally binding, if she accepted the gift, and the 
 testator's entire disposition might fairly be 
 spoken of as ' this my will.' 
 
 From what was done before and after the 
 making of the will there can be no doubt as to 
 the nature of the trust that was imposed on the 
 owner of New Place or as to the loyalty with 
 which it was carried into effect. For some reason 
 or other Shakespeare had for some time made up 
 his mind to provide for his wife otherwise than 
 by putting her into the possession and manage- 
 ment of property of any kind. When he 
 acquired by purchase the Blackfriars estate he 
 was at pains to take the conveyance in such a 
 form as to bar his wife's title to dower. We 
 must assume that there was some good reason 
 why Shakespeare did not make his wife the 
 mistress of New Place for her life, and why he 
 
 1 88
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 did not put in writing the entire of his testa- 
 mentary disposition. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, with 
 the sanity by which his speculations are charac- 
 terised, suggests an explanation which is accepted 
 by Mr. Elton and in substance approved by 
 Sir Sidney Lee. ' Perhaps the only theory that 
 would be consistent with the terms of the will, 
 and with the deep affection which she is tra- 
 ditionally recorded to have entertained for him 
 to the end of his life, is the possibility of her 
 having been afflicted with some chronic infir- 
 mity of a nature that precluded all hope of 
 recovery. In such a case to relieve her from 
 household anxieties and select a comfortable 
 apartment at New Place, where she would be 
 under the care of an affectionate daughter and 
 an experienced physician, would have been the 
 wisest and kindest measure which could have 
 been adopted.' * Susanna had married in 1607 
 a physician of great local eminence, named John 
 Hall, resident in Stratford. He was a gentleman 
 by birth, bearing two talbots on his crest. 
 ' He was well educated, travelled abroad, and 
 acquired a good knowledge of French.' f A 
 Master of Arts, of what university is not known, 
 he was a good Latin scholar. In 1657 a volume 
 
 * Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. 
 t Sir Sidney Lee in Diet. Nat. Biography. 
 
 189
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 was published entitled ' Select Observations on 
 English Bodies, and Cures both Empericall and 
 Historicall performed upon very eminent persons 
 in desperate diseases, first written in Latin by 
 Mr. John Hall, physician, living at Stratford- 
 upon-Avon in Warwickshire, where he was very 
 famous, as also in the counties adjacent.' A 
 second edition was published in 1679, which was 
 reissued in 1683. The confidence placed in Hall 
 and in his wife, of whom something will be said 
 hereafter, was fully justified. Shakespeare's 
 widow lived with them at New Place until her 
 death in 1623. Her position, living under these 
 circumstances in a house of which she had been 
 the mistress, was a trying one, both to her and 
 to her successor, and after her death Mr. Hall 
 paid a tribute to the memory of his mother-in- 
 law in a copy of Latin elegiacs which was 
 inscribed on her monument, a striking testimony 
 to her virtues and also to the harmony that 
 reigned in New Place. 
 
 But why the second-best bed ? It would be 
 contrary to all received ideas of the relations of 
 Shakespeare with his wife to suggest that he 
 left her this bed because she wished to have it. 
 The best bed was in the guest chamber, the 
 second best in the room which she and her hus- 
 band'occupied If Shakespeare had only realised 
 
 190
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 his duty to posterity, and, after the residuary 
 gift to his son-in-law, John Hall, and his daughter 
 Susanna, his wife, of his goods, chattels, and 
 household stuff, had by interlineation inserted 
 the words ' except the bed which my wife and 
 I have occupied together, which is to be her 
 property,' much searching of heart would have 
 been saved, and justice might have been done 
 to the affectionate forethought which prompted 
 Shakespeare, when he read over the first draft 
 of his will, to secure to his wife, as a matter of 
 right, such maintenance as he thought most 
 suitable to her condition, and also to gratify 
 what we may well believe to have been a wish 
 expressed by her, by excepting from the general 
 bequest of household stuff one article, that 
 known in the family as the second-best bed. 
 
 Nature will out, even in an epitaph, and the 
 pilgrim to Stratford in search of stray glimpses 
 of the life that was lived in New Place three 
 centuries ago may learn something of the 
 occupants of the house from a study of the 
 inscriptions on their monuments in the parish 
 church. 
 
 The ' Stratford Monument ' was a public 
 testimonial to an eminent fellow townsman, and 
 nothing of a personal character was to be looked 
 for in the verses inscribed on it. In^the Latin 
 
 I 9 I
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 lines at the head of the inscription Shakespeare 
 is compared, with a disregard of quantity par- 
 donable in the case of a proper noun, and with 
 still less regard to aptness, to Nestor in wisdom, 
 to Socrates in genius, and to Virgil in art ; by 
 which last words Ben Jonson is absolved from 
 all suspicion of complicity in the composition. 
 Halliwell-Phillipps notes the absence from the 
 verses which follow of any allusion to personal 
 character, and also of the local knowledge which 
 would have forbidden the author to describe the 
 subject of the verse as lying within the monu- 
 ment. The whole thing was probably imported 
 from London, where the bust was certainly 
 executed by Gerard Johnson, or Janssen, a 
 Dutch sculptor, or tombmaker, settled in South- 
 ward From it, the pilgrim turns to some 
 homely words inscribed on a stone covering the 
 grave, which, according to an early tradition, 
 ' were ordered to be cutt by Mr. Shakespeare,' 
 who had a horror of his bones being dug up and 
 removed from the church to the adjoining 
 charnel-house to make room for the reception, in 
 accordance with ancient right, of another tithe- 
 owner. With the reflection that Shakespeare 
 was a man of like passions with ourselves, he 
 passes from the conventionality of the monument 
 and tomb to memorials of domestic affection, 
 
 192
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 and here he is not disappointed. e Mrs. Hall,' 
 Mr. Elton writes, ' placed a strange inscription 
 over her mother's grave a few years afterwards : 
 " Here lieth interred the body of Anne, wife of 
 William Shakespeare, who departed this life the 
 6th day of August, 1623, being of the age of 
 67 years." ' The inscription proceeds with six 
 lines of Latin verse,* to the effect that the 
 spirit as well as the body was held in the 
 sepulchre : — 
 
 * " Ubera tu mater," it commences. " A mother's 
 bosom thou gavest, and milk, and life ; for such 
 bounty, alas ! can I only render stones ! Rather 
 would I pray the good angel to roll away the 
 stone from the mouth of the tomb, that thy 
 spirit, even as the body of Christ, should go 
 forth," and the hope is expressed that Christ 
 may quickly come, so that the imprisoned soul 
 may be able to " seek the stars." After noting 
 that * the mother's care for the infant is treated 
 as a matter of high importance, but nothing is 
 said about the rest of her life,' Mr. Elton adds : 
 ' But the exclusive reference to the earliest cares 
 
 * 
 
 Ubera tu mater, tu lac, vitamque dedisti 
 
 Vae mihi, pro tanto munere saxa dabo ? 
 
 Quam mallem, amoueat lapidem, bonus angelus ore 
 
 Exeat ut, Christi corpus, imago tua 
 
 Sed nil vota valent, venias cito Christe ; resurget 
 
 Clausa licet tumulo mater et astra petet. 
 
 193
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 of motherhood may very well point to a subse- 
 quent incapacity from later duties as the mother 
 of a household.' 
 
 In these words the memory of a woman 
 lovable and loving, noted rather for piety than 
 for intellectual gifts or strength of character, is 
 piously embalmed. And if she were physically 
 infirm, we can understand the thoughtful care 
 that provided for her maintenance in a way that 
 would not involve her in the management of 
 property or the duties of housekeeping. 
 
 Of such a woman it is natural that tradition 
 should tell us little. But what it has recorded 
 is in accordance with the testimony of her monu- 
 ment. A man named Dowdall, who wrote in the 
 year 1693, visited Stratford Church. He read 
 the inscription on the tombstone, and had a talk 
 with the gossiping clerk, who was above eighty 
 years old. ' Not one,' he writes, ' for fear of 
 the curse aforesaid, dare touch his gravestone, 
 tho' his wife and daughters did earnestly desire 
 to be layd in the same grave with him/ 
 
 It is at least possible that the expression of a 
 similar affectionate desire to be associated in 
 memory with her husband may have prompted 
 to Shakespeare the addition to the original draft 
 of his will which made her the owner of the bed 
 which they had occupied together. 
 
 194
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 To such a woman, affectionate and pious, the 
 wife of his youth, we may well believe that Shake- 
 speare, though in his 
 
 Nature reign'd 
 All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, 
 
 would, like one who travels, return again, with 
 real love, and memories of happy days at 
 Shottery and years of early married life. 
 
 Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a yeoman, 
 and twenty-six years of age, was not the wife 
 that we should have chosen for Shakespeare 
 with an expectation that she would sway level 
 in her husband's heart. But she was Shake- 
 speare's choice. According to Jane Austen, it 
 sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer 
 at twenty-nine than she was ten years before. At 
 twenty-seven Anne Elliott had ' every beauty 
 excepting bloom.' Anne Hathaway at twenty- 
 six was capable of fascinating a poetical and 
 impressionable youth of eighteen. It is at all 
 events certain that she retained sufficient attrac- 
 tion to induce Shakespeare, when his prospects 
 improved, to visit Stratford every autumn. It 
 is true that he did not bring his wife and family 
 to London, and live with them in suburban com- 
 fort and respectability, like his fellows Heming 
 and Condell. But if Halliwell-Phillipps' specu- 
 
 195 °*
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 lation is well founded, the infirmity which 
 induced Shakespeare to provide for his wife 
 by imposing on his daughter a trust for her 
 maintenance will equally explain why he 
 considered her unfit for the strenuous life of 
 London. 
 
 It is at all events certain that Shakespeare did 
 return to Stratford to spend with his wife a life 
 that might reasonably have been expected to 
 continue for many years. It is also certain that 
 some years before his settlement in Stratford 
 he had written this sonnet : 
 
 O, never say that I was false of heart, 
 Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify. 
 As easy might I from myself depart 
 As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie ; 
 That is my home of love : if I have ranged, 
 Like him that travels I return again, 
 Just to the time, not with the time exchanged, 
 So that myself bring water for my stain. 
 Never believe, though in my nature reign'd 
 All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, 
 That it could so preposterously be stain'd 
 To leave for nothing all thy sum of good ; 
 For nothing this wide universe I call 
 Save thou, my rose ; in it thou art my all. 
 
 It is probably an accident that this sonnet (cix.) 
 was printed by Mr. Thorpe with two sonnets 
 (ex. and cxi.) which have been generally 
 
 196
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 accepted as autobiographical, in. the sense that 
 they express ideas and feelings present to the 
 mind of the writer which can be referred to 
 known facts in his experience. Those who favour 
 the autobiographical reading of the sonnets have 
 taken infinite pains to discover a foundation in 
 the experiences of the writer for sonnets relating 
 to a rival poet, and to a dark and sinful woman, 
 who obtained, for a time, a strange influence on 
 the poet's life. The searchers after the dark 
 woman would be the first to allow that at some 
 time of Shakespeare's life he was the victim of 
 ' all frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,' 
 and they cannot deny that in the end he returned 
 again to end his days with the wife of his youth. 
 And yet I do not find that any one of these 
 writers has attempted to support the auto- 
 biographical theory by a reference to Son- 
 net cix. 
 
 Susanna Hall survived her father, her mother, 
 and her husband, dying at the age of sixty-six 
 on the nth of July, 1649. On her tombstone in 
 the chancel of Stratford Church the following 
 lines were inscribed : 
 
 Witty above her sexe, but that's not all : 
 Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall ; 
 Something of Shakespere was in that, but this 
 Wholly of Him with whom she's now in blisse. 
 
 197
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Then, passenger, hast ne'er a teare 
 
 To weepe with her, that wept with all ? 
 
 That wept, yet set herself to chere 
 
 Them up with comforts cordiall ? 
 
 Her love shall live, 1; :r memory spread, 
 
 When thou hast ne'er a tear to shed. 
 
 Reading these simple lines, the pilgrim felt 
 that he had been well repaid for his pains. They 
 bear the impress of truth, and owe nothing to 
 the partiality of a husband's love, for Hall had 
 died in the year 1635. They tell us what was 
 thought and said of Shakespeare's daughter 
 Susanna by the people among whom she had 
 spent her life. They tell us that thirty-three 
 years after the death of Shakespeare it was said 
 in Stratford that Mistress Hall had wits above 
 her sex, but that was not to be marvelled at in 
 the daughter of Shakespeare, of whom they were 
 often put in mind when they spoke to her. Then 
 a precisian of the straiter sect would say that 
 this was the least of her virtues, and would tell 
 of her Christlikc charity, how she would weep 
 with those that wept. Another would add that 
 Mistress Hall did more than weep with the 
 sorrowful ; that while she wept she set herself 
 to cheer up the sufferer with ' comforts cordiall,' 
 not of words only, spoken in her merry, cheerful 
 way within the limits of becoming mirth — some- 
 
 198
 
 "*& 
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 thing of Shakespeare was in that — but by deeds 
 of mercy, the memory of which would long 
 survive. 
 
 To such a daughter, keen-witted, and Christ- 
 like in practical charity, a fond father might well 
 give the name ' Miranda.' 
 ^ JSir Walter Raleigh writes of The Tempest : 
 ' The thought which occurs at once to almost 
 every reader of the play, that Prospero resembles 
 Shakespeare himself, can hardly have been absent 
 from the mind of the author.' In Shakespere, 
 his Mind and Art, Professor Dowden has given 
 the fullest expression to a reading of the cha- 
 racter of Shakespeare that has found general 
 acceptance. ' It is not chiefly,' he writes, 
 ' because Prospero is a great enchanter, now 
 about to break his magic staff, to drown his 
 book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to 
 dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the 
 practical service of his dukedom, that we identify 
 Prospero in some measure with Shakespeare 
 himself. It is rather because of the temper of 
 Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, 
 his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his 
 sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, 
 and with these a certain abandonment, a remote- 
 ness from the common joys and sorrows of the 
 world, are characteristics of Shakespeare as 
 
 199
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 discovered to us in all his latest plays.' ' It is 
 Shakespeare's own nature which overflows into 
 Prospero,' writes Dr. Brandes, and from that 
 source may have flowed the love of daughter 
 and the love of books which are the most striking 
 characteristics of Prospero, as revealed to us by 
 Shakespeare. :£==* 
 
 Of Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, 
 we know little. About two months before the 
 death of her father she married Thomas Quiney, 
 whose father, Richard Quiney, had been High 
 Bailiff of Stratford. Quiney, who was a vintner, 
 had received a good education. This is shown 
 by his use of a French motto in one of his 
 accounts, the penmanship of which is par- 
 ticularly good. He was unsuccessful in business, 
 and the marriage was an unfortunate one. 
 Judith died in Stratford in the year 1662, at the 
 age of seventy-six. Her husband, in education 
 and position, was far inferior to Hall, and it is 
 no violent assumption to conclude that there 
 was a corresponding difference between Susanna 
 and Judith, and that a truthful epitaph might 
 have recorded that, as Susanna had inherited 
 the wits of her father, the virtues of her mother 
 had descended on Judith. 
 
 ' In the latest plays the country life of Strat- 
 ford reasserts itself. After all our martial and 
 
 200
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 political adventures, our long-drawn passions and 
 deadly sorrows, we are back in Perdita's flower- 
 garden, and join in the festivities of a sheep- 
 shearing. A new type of character meets us in 
 these plays : a girl innocent, frank, dutiful, and 
 wise, cherished and watched over by her devoted 
 father, or restored to him after long separation. 
 It is impossible to escape the thought that we are 
 indebted to Judith Shakespeare for something 
 of the beauty and simplicity which appear in 
 [Miranda and] Perdita, and in the earlier sketch 
 of Marina. In his will Shakespeare bequeathes 
 to Judith a " broad silver-gilt bowl " — doubtless 
 the bride-cup that was used at her wedding. 
 There were many other girls within reach of his 
 observation, but (such are the limitations of 
 humanity) there were few so likely as his own 
 daughter to exercise him in disinterested sym- 
 pathy and insight, or to touch him with a sense 
 of the pathos of youth ' {Shakespeare, Raleigh). 
 
 This delightful picture of Judith Shakespeare 
 has no monumental inscription to vouch for its 
 truthfulness. It has a deeper and a sounder 
 foundation, an appreciation of the nature of 
 Shakespeare, and an understanding of the kind 
 of domestic life for the sake of which he was 
 ready to abandon the intellectual society and the 
 fuller life of London. It has a relation to fact 
 
 201
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 widely different from the gloomy fancies about 
 the family life of Shakespeare with which we are 
 familiar, for it is at all events consistent with 
 fact. 
 
 The most distressing of these nightmares 
 results from the inability of certain critics 
 inwardly to digest a speech into which Shake- 
 speare, irrelevantly after his manner, intro- 
 duced certain ideas borrowed from a book that 
 lay open before him as he wrote. 
 
 The book was a copy of Florio's English 
 version of Montaigne's Essayes. Whether it 
 was the very copy which may be seen in the 
 British Museum is an interesting inquiry, but it 
 is nothing to our present purpose. 
 
 Gonzalo. V the commonwealth I would by 
 contraries 
 Execute all things ; for no kind of traffic 
 Would I admit ; no name of magistrate ; 
 Letters should not be known ; riches, poverty, 
 And use of service, none ; contract, succession, 
 Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none ; 
 No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil ; 
 No occupation ; all men idle, all ; 
 And women too, but innocent and pure ; 
 No sovereignty.* 
 
 In these words a passage is reproduced with 
 literal accuracy from Montaigne. 
 
 • Tempest, II. i. 150. 
 202
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 In another page of the same volume he had 
 read these words : 
 
 1 Few men have wedded their sweet hartes, 
 their paramours or Mistrises, but have come 
 home by weeping crosse, and erelong repented 
 their bargain. And even in the other world 
 what an unquiet life leads Jupiter with his wife, 
 whom before he had secretly knowen and 
 lovingly enjoyed ? ' 
 
 Shakespeare was a dramatist, ever ready to 
 adapt to his purpose whatever he might have 
 seen or read which was capable of artistic treat- 
 ment. There is no particular reason apparent 
 why he should have worked Montaigne's descrip- 
 tion of an ideal commonwealth into a speech put 
 into the mouth of Gonzalo. But having done 
 so, it is natural that the passage should be repro- 
 duced with the faithful and prosaic accuracy that 
 was suitable to his character. 
 
 For some reason, equally inscrutable, he puts 
 into the mouth of Prospero Montaigne's warning 
 against the destruction of happiness in married 
 life consequent on marrying a paramour or 
 mistress ; attracted, possibly, by the quaintness 
 of the appeal to Jupiter's experience of the un- 
 quiet life which he led with his wife. Shake- 
 speare was not a copyist. If such a warning 
 were to be given by Prospero, Shakespeare's 
 
 203
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 dramatic instinct taught him that it should be 
 expressed with poetic fervour, inspired by the 
 love of a precious daughter, which was part of 
 the nature which he had poured into Prospero. 
 And so he wrote 
 
 Take my daughter : but 
 If thou dost break her virgin-knot before 
 All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
 With full and holy rite be minister'd, 
 No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall 
 To make this contract grow ; but barren hate, 
 Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew 
 The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
 That you shall hate it both ; therefore take heed 
 As Hymens lamps shall light you.* 
 
 Two thoughts are involved in this address. 
 Lovers should take heed as Hymen's lamps shall 
 light them, for the consequences of anticipating 
 marriage will be fatal to the happiness of their 
 married life. And, moreover if they would 
 have the blessing of heaven upon the marriage 
 contract, the blessing should be invoked by all 
 sanctimonious ceremonies, with full and holy 
 rite. These ideas which arc easily separable in 
 prose, arc somewhat involved, in a manner 
 characteristic of Shakespeare, and Prospero spoke 
 of the contract and of the holy rite as one and 
 
 • Tempest, IV. i. 15. 
 204
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 the same thing. But the offence to which a 
 terrible punishment is attached in these words 
 
 barren hate, 
 Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew 
 The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
 That you shall hate it both, 
 
 is not that of separating the civil contract from 
 the holy rite, but that of breaking the virgin 
 knot heedless of Hymen's lamps : in plain prose, 
 before marriage. To those who are obsessed 
 with the idea that Shakespeare, when he wrote 
 of barren hate, sour-eyed disdain, discord, and 
 loathing, had in his mind the torture to which 
 he had yielded himself up when he returned to 
 Stratford, it would be idle to prescribe a remedy 
 in the form of reasoning, even if argumentation 
 or controversy could be admitted to pages which 
 deal simply with ascertained fact. But those 
 who suffer under this affliction — and they are, 
 happily, a decreasing number — may find some 
 relief in reading what has been written by some 
 whose minds were unclouded by theories and 
 prepossessions which have no foundation in 
 fact. 
 
 ' No writer of any time — and his own time was 
 certainly not one of special respect for marriage 
 — has represented it so constantly as not only 
 " good," but " delightful," to retort La Roche- 
 
 205
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 foucauld's injurious distinction. Except Goneril 
 and Regan, who designedly are monsters, there 
 is hardly a bad wife in Shakespeare — there are 
 no unloving, few unloved, ones. It is not 
 merely in his objects of courtship — Juliet, Viola, 
 Rosalind, Portia, Miranda — that he is a woman- 
 worshipper. Even Gertrude — a questionable 
 widow — seems not to have been an unsatis- 
 factory wife to Hamlet the elder, as she certainly 
 was not to his brother. One might hesitate a 
 little as to Lady Macbeth as a hostess — certainly 
 not as a wife. From the novice sketch of 
 Adriana in the Errors to the unmatchable triumph 
 of Imogen, from the buxom honesty of Mistress 
 Ford to the wronged innocence and queenly 
 grace of Hermione, Shakespeare has nothing but 
 the beau role for wives. And if in this invariable 
 gynasolatry he was actuated by disappointment 
 in his own wife or repentance for his own mar- 
 riage, he must either have been the best good 
 Christian, or the most pigeon-livered philosopher, 
 or the most cryptic and incomprehensible ironist 
 that the world has ever seen. Indeed, he might 
 be all these things, and feel nothing of the 
 kind.' * 
 
 1 In the plays of Shakespeare's closing years 
 
 * Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. V., p. 168 (George 
 
 Saintsbury). 
 
 206
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 there is a pervading sense of quiet and happi- 
 ness,' Sir Walter Raleigh writes, ' which seems 
 to bear witness to a change in the mind of their 
 author. . . . An all-embracing tolerance and 
 kindliness inspires these last plays.' 
 
 And of the last of his plays Professor Dowden 
 writes : ' The sympathetic reader can discern 
 unmistakably a certain abandoning of the com- 
 mon joy of the world, a certain remoteness from 
 the usual pleasures and sadness of life, and at 
 the same time, all the more, this tender bending 
 over those who are like children still absorbed 
 in their individual joys and sorrows.' 
 
 By the homely words ' ease and retirement,' 
 the tradition of Stratford, as recorded by Rowe, 
 expressed the idea that critics have extracted 
 from the plays written in the later years of 
 Shakespeare's life 
 
 Me, poor fool, my library 
 Was dukedom large enough. 
 
 Shakespeare wrote these touching words as 
 one who was bidding farewell to public life, in 
 which he had taken an active and successful 
 part, and by none other could they have been 
 written. In them Shakespeare, through Pros- 
 pero, reveals to us his inner self ; his love of 
 his books and of the library by the narrow 
 
 207
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 limits of which his dukedom was henceforth 
 to be bounded. And we find Prospero-Shake- 
 speare recurring to the thought of his library 
 when he tells Miranda how a noble Neapolitan, 
 Gonzalo, out of his charity, supplied them with 
 ' rich garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries,' 
 adding — 
 
 So, of his gentleness, 
 Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me 
 From mine own library with volumes that 
 I prize above my dukedom.* 
 
 It is in modern times, according to the New 
 English Dictionary, that the word ' library ' has 
 come to denote a room above a certain level of 
 size and pretensions. To Shakespeare the word 
 meant no more than a collection or ' study ' 
 of books in some unpretending room, or closet, 
 in New Place. It is not to be believed that 
 Shakespeare, when at the age of forty-seven he 
 passed, in the words of Professor Dowden, 
 ' from his service as artist to his service as 
 English gentleman,' and from companionship 
 with the world of letters to the society of a 
 country town, did not better for his life provide 
 than to divorce it from fellowship, through his 
 books, with the mighty minds of old. 
 
 • Tempest, I. ii. 162. 
 208
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 My days among the Dead are past ; 
 
 Around me I behold 
 
 Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 
 
 The mighty minds of old ; 
 
 My never failing friends are they 
 
 With whom I converse day by day. 
 
 It would, be a grave omission from pages in 
 which it is sought to learn something from the 
 fellowship wherein we find Shakespeare engaged 
 throughout his life, to leave unconsidered such 
 beloved and constant companions as his books, 
 and here we can tread with certainty, without 
 encroaching on the forbidden ground of specu- 
 lation. Shakespeare's library, like other libraries 
 of the time, has been long since scattered to the 
 winds. But unlike many more important col- 
 lections, it has left certain traces behind. Walter 
 Bagehot, in his essay on Shakespeare — the Man, 
 writes : ' On few subjects has more nonsense 
 been written than on the learning of Shake- 
 speare.' I do not propose to make any contri- 
 bution to the accumulated mass, for I am satis- 
 fied with the testimony of Ben Jonson, rightly 
 understood. When he said of Shakespeare that 
 he had ' small Latin and less Greek,' he criti- 
 cised him as classical scholar, who had proceeded 
 so far as to have some knowledge of Greek — a 
 rare acquisition in those days — but who, in this 
 
 s - 209 p
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 particular, was vastly his inferior. Jonson's 
 testimony, in the lines in which these words arc 
 found, to the surpassing greatness of Shake- 
 speare is so generous and so nobly expressed 
 that we need not grudge him this small satis- 
 faction.* 
 
 An examination of the traces that may be 
 found of Shakespeare's library involves no 
 inquiry into the extent of his learning. Shake- 
 speare makes no mention of books in his will. 
 He gave his ' broad silver-gilt bole ' to his 
 daughter Judith, and with the disregard which 
 has been already noted of the testamentary 
 obligations to posterity which devolved on him 
 as a famous poet and dramatist, he allowed his 
 books to become the property of his son-in-law, 
 John Hall, by the gift to him and to his daughter 
 Susanna of all the rest of his ' goodes, chattels, 
 leases, and household stuffe whatsoever.' 
 
 Their daughter, Elizabeth Hall, the last lineal 
 descendant of Shakespeare, married Thomas 
 Nash in 1626. Hall, in 1635, made what is 
 known as a nuncupative will, in which the 
 following words occur : ' Item concerning my 
 
 * Those who desire to pursue the subject of the learning of Shake- 
 speare cannot do better than study Professor Baynes' essay, entitled 
 What Shakespeare learned at School, published in his Shakespeare 
 Studies, where the question is discussed in a judicial spirit, removed 
 from the extremes of Farmer on the one hand, and Churton Collins 
 on the other. 
 
 210
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 study of books, I leave them, said he, to you my 
 son Nash, to dispose of them as you see good.' 
 
 And here again we owe an obligation to Mr. 
 Elton and to his studies as an antiquary, through 
 which we have made known to us the meaning, 
 in the seventeenth century, of the words ' study 
 of books.' ' We know hardly anything about 
 Shakespeare's books, except that they must 
 have passed to Mr. Nash and afterwards to his 
 widow, as his residuary legatee. . . . There is 
 no list of the " study of books," but it appears 
 by several authorities that the phrase means a 
 collection or library.' * 
 
 Elizabeth, after the death of her first husband, 
 married a Mr. John Barnard, who was created 
 a baronet by Charles II. in 1661. She died in 
 1669. Malone records an old tradition men- 
 tioned by Sir Hugh Clopton to Mr. Macklin 
 in 1742, that Elizabeth ' carried away with 
 her from Stratford many of her grandfather's 
 papers.' 
 
 However this may be, all attempts to trace the 
 ' study of books ' have failed, and that it was 
 dispersed is evident from the fact of the dis- 
 covery in the course of the eighteenth century 
 of two books that it had contained. 
 
 * William Shakespeare, his Family and Friends. An authority 
 referred to by Mr. Elton is of the year 1667. 
 
 211 P2
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 There is in the Bodleian library a copy of the 
 Aldine edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1502), 
 on the title of which is the signature ' Wm. Sh e ,' 
 and a note : ' This little Booke of Ovid was 
 given to me by W. Hall, who sayd it was once 
 Will. Shakespere's.' The opinions of the experts 
 in favour of its authenticity will be found in the 
 Annals of the Bodleian Library 1890 (Macray). 
 But belief in the presence of a copy of Ovid in 
 Shakespeare's library rests on what is to some 
 minds a firmer foundation, for the book brings 
 us into certain touch with the earliest period of 
 Shakespeare's literary work. 
 
 Venus and Adonis was published in 1593, but 
 as the poet calls it, in the dedication to the Earl 
 of Southampton, the first heir of his invention, 
 it must have been written some years before its 
 publication. It is a love poem written in the 
 manner of Ovid, founded on a story told in the 
 Metamorphoses. Two lines from the Amores are 
 printed on the title page : 
 
 Vilia miretur vulgus : mihi flavus Apollo 
 Pocula castalia plena ministret aqua. 
 
 The poem had an extraordinary success, and 
 the poet was acclaimed as a second Ovid. 
 Francis Meres writes in Palladis Tamia (1598) : 
 ' As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live 
 
 212
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid 
 lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shake- 
 speare, witnes his Venus and Adonis his Lucrece 
 his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.' 
 Shakespeare's love of Ovid is shown not only by 
 imitation, but, characteristically, by making him 
 the subject of a pun : ' Ovidus Naso was the man ; 
 and why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the 
 odoriferous flowers of fancy.' * For many years 
 Shakespeare's literary position was estimated by 
 his poems rather than by his dramas. This was 
 in accordance with the ideas of the time, for 
 poems were literature, plays were not. Ben 
 Jonson was ridiculed when in 1616 he published 
 a collection of plays under the title of his Works. 
 In The Returne from Pernassus Judicio, in his 
 censure of Shakespeare, says 
 
 Who loves Adonis love or Lucre 's rape 
 His sweeter verse containes hart robbing life 
 Could but a graver subject him content 
 Without love's foolish lazy languishment. 
 
 And yet when this play was presented (1602) 
 Shakespeare had given to the world Henry IV ., 
 King John and Henry V . A critic of the 
 day, writing after the production of Hamlet, 
 says — 
 
 * Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 130. 
 213
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 And Shakespeare thou, whose hony-flowing vein 
 (Pleasing the world) thy praises doth obtain. 
 \\ hose Venus, and whose Lucrece (sweet and chaste) 
 Thy name in fame's immortal book have placed. 
 
 It is remarkable that the claim to immortality 
 of the creator of Hamlet should have been rested 
 on the authorship of Venus and Adonis and 
 Lucrece. It is still more strange that Shake- 
 speare would have it so, for his poems were 
 given by him to the world edited with care. 
 As to his plays, he was satisfied with the applause 
 of the playgoers and the profits of the Globe 
 theatre. We owe their preservation, as we have 
 seen, to the piety of his fellow-playgoers, and the 
 sonnets which in literary merit far exceed these 
 poems, remained tossing about among his private 
 friends, and but for the adventure of Thomas 
 Thorpe, would have been lost to the world. 
 
 An analogy may be found in the instance of 
 another great creative genius, worthy of being 
 named with Shakespeare. Scott, for many years 
 after his immortal novels had been given to the 
 world, preferred to be known as a poet rather than 
 as a novelist, and if a serious illness, contracted 
 when he was of about the age at which Shakes- 
 peare died, had proved fatal, the world would have 
 been bequeathed a true mystery for solution. 
 
 We can replace Shakespeare's Aldine Ovid in 
 
 214
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 his study of books with the satisfactory reflection 
 that Shakespeare's interest in his poems was 
 rewarded by success. Six editions of Venus and 
 Adonis and of Lucrece were published in his 
 lifetime, and the eagerness with which they were 
 devoured appears from the fact that but few 
 copies have survived the wear and tear of 
 generations of admiring readers. ' The strangest 
 fact to be noticed in regard to the bibliography 
 of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is that, 
 though there were at least six editions issued in 
 the poet's lifetime, and seven in the two genera- 
 tions following his death, in the case of only two 
 — the second and the sixth — of these thirteen 
 editions do so many as three copies survive. 
 In regard to the twelve other editions, the 
 surviving copies of each are fewer.' * 
 
 In the year 1844 John Payne Collier pub- 
 lished under the name of Shakespeare'' s Library 
 a collection of the plays, romances, novels and 
 histories employed by Shakespeare in the com- 
 position of his works. In the preface he writes : 
 ' We have ventured to call the work Shake- 
 speare's Library, since our great dramatist in all 
 probability must have possessed the books to 
 which he was indebted, and some of which he 
 
 * Sir Sidney Lee. Note to Venus and Adonis, Oxford facsimile 
 reprint. 
 
 215
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 applied so directly and minutely to his own 
 purposes.' * 
 
 Shakespeare may have had these books in his 
 possession for a time as part of his professional 
 outfit. But that they were admitted to intel- 
 lectual fellowship is doubtful. He probably 
 looked on them as a lawyer regards his law books : 
 biblia abiblia, necessary but unwelcome occu- 
 pants of his bookshelves. And it is to be noted 
 that the two books of his library that have sur- 
 vived were admitted to the ' study ' purely on 
 account of their literary quality. 
 
 Notice has been already taken of the copy of 
 Florio's Montaigne bearing the signature of 
 Shakespeare, which is preserved in the library of 
 the British Museum. That Shakespeare added 
 to his library a book of essays published in 1603 
 suggests that he was a student and purchaser of 
 what might be called current literature. Mon- 
 taigne did not serve him, like his Holinshed or 
 Plutarch, as a storehouse of useful plots for 
 histories or tragedies. Much has been written 
 on the subject of Shakespeare and Montaigne, 
 and it has been suggested that Montaigne exer- 
 cised an influence on the mind of Shakespeare in 
 later life comparable to that of Ovid when he was 
 
 • A new and improved edition of this collection was brought out 
 in 1875 by William Hazlitt the younger. 
 
 2l6
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 in the Venus and Adonis stage of existence. 
 These speculations are interesting, as suggesting 
 a special literary fellowship, with the two volumes 
 included in his study of books which have sur- 
 vived the ruin of time. But they are foreign to 
 pages which are conversant, not with literary 
 criticism, but with matters of fact. 
 
 With two, indeed, of the books which supplied 
 him with plots for his dramas, he had a relation- 
 ship so close as to justify their inclusion in his 
 study of books. His Holinshed must have been 
 near at hand from about the year 1591, for from 
 it he derived the plots of the series of historical 
 plays, in which he followed the Chronicle in 
 greater or less degree of exactness. Of 
 Henry VIII. Sir Sidney Lee writes : ' The 
 Shakespearean dramas followed Holinshed with 
 exceptional closeness. . . . One of the finest 
 speeches in the Shakespearean play, Queen 
 Katharine's opening appeal on her trial, is in 
 great part the chronicler's prose rendered into 
 blank verse, without change of a word.' * 
 
 The second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, 
 published in 1586, lay open before Shakespeare 
 when, in about the year 1593, he took from it the 
 plot of Richard III., and copied a misprint, or 
 slip of the pen, which does not occur in the 
 
 * Life of Shakespeare, p. 443. 
 217
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 earlier edition of 1577. It was in Holinshed that 
 he found the plot of Macbeth, and there also he 
 found the story of Lear. And the well worn 
 folio followed him in his retirement to New Place, 
 for it was in this, his great storehouse of English 
 history, that he found some account of a British 
 king, Kimbeline or Cimbeline, and interweaving 
 with this fragment a story from Boccacio's 
 Decameron, gave us Cymbeline. 
 
 The two volumes of Holinshed contain, in 
 addition to his Chronicles, descriptions of England 
 and Ireland ; the latter, the work of Richard 
 Stanyhurst, an accomplished scholar educated at 
 the famous school of Kilkenny — in after years the 
 school of Berkeley, Swift and Congreve — whom 
 Gabriel Harvey ranked as a poet with Spenser. 
 His reputation would have been higher if he had 
 not been misled by Harvey into the folly of 
 translating the Aeneid of Virgil into English 
 hexameter, a fate from which Spenser was 
 happily rescued. It is impossible to read this 
 interesting Description without having the know- 
 ledge borne in on one that Shakespeare had been 
 over the same ground ; no doubt in search of the 
 plot that he failed to find. 
 
 But although Shakespeare failed to find in 
 Holinshed a plot to his mind, for History or 
 Tragedy, he found many things that excited an 
 
 218
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 interest, of which traces may be found through- 
 out his writings. He found his stage Irishman, 
 Captain Macmorris, ' An Irishman, a very 
 valiant gentleman i' faith,' who is made to dis- 
 play a number of national characteristics, every 
 one of which was noted by Stanyhurst in his 
 description. The stage Irishman of Ben Jonson 
 and of Dekker was a comic footboy. It is owing 
 to his habit of ' turning over the pages ' of his 
 Holinshed, even in the most unpromising chap- 
 ters, that Shakespeare's stage Irishman is a 
 soldier and a gentleman. Holinshed's Chronicles 
 were in his hands for so many years, and were 
 at times copied with such exactitude, that they 
 have gained a title to be placed in his study of 
 books. 
 
 If Holinshed must be admitted to literary 
 fellowship with Shakespeare, the claims of Sir 
 Thomas North's version of Plutarch from the 
 French translation by Amyot are far stronger. 
 The claim of North's Plutarch to admission to 
 Shakespeare's study of books could not be put 
 better than it has been by my lamented friend, 
 Robert Tyrrell. ' The Master Mind of all time, 
 the Artist of Artists, not only drew from him the 
 materials for his amazing pictures of the ancient 
 world, but sometimes transferred to his plays 
 whole scenes from the Lives, with scarcely a 
 
 219
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 phrase or a word altered or modified. Had 
 Plutarch never written his Lives, or had they not 
 been translated by some sympathetic mind like 
 Sir Thomas North's, it is very unlikely that the 
 world would ever have had Coriolanus, Julius 
 Caesar, or Antony and Cleopatra.'' The final scene 
 in Cleopatra's life is ' one perfect example of the 
 confidence with which the " myriad-minded ' 
 Englishman was content to put himself into the 
 hands of the simple Boeotion, borrowing from 
 him every artistic touch, and adding only the 
 dramatic framework. Greece took captive her 
 proud Roman conqueror, but never had she a 
 greater triumph over posterity than when a Greek 
 wrote a scene on which not even a Shakespeare 
 could make an improvement.' * 
 
 In addition to his Ovid, two works in the 
 Latin language may be traced to this library 
 with a reasonable degree of probability, founded 
 not only on what he has written of them, but of 
 an ancient and trustworthy tradition. They are 
 deserving of attention, for they aid in the attempt 
 to supply an answer to a question that has been 
 often asked : How did Shakespeare employ 
 himself after he left school, and before he married 
 
 • Essays on Greek Literature, by Robert Yclverton Tyrrell 
 Litt.D., etc., etc., Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of Trinity 
 College and formerly Professor of Greek in the University of Dublin. 
 
 2 20
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 and settled down, according to Rowe, to assist 
 in his father's business ? His frequent and 
 accurate use of legal phraseology led Lord 
 Campbell to conclude that Shakespeare, like 
 another great creative genius, Charles Dickens, 
 had been employed in his early years in an 
 attorney's office, of which there were at that 
 time several in Stratford. A good deal can be 
 said in support of this supposition, but there 
 is no hint of it in any contemporary writing, and 
 no suggestion of any such employment can be 
 found in the traditions that were current in 
 Stratford shortly after his death. It follows that 
 no law-book can make good a claim to be 
 admitted to Shakespeare's library. 
 
 Some of the gossip retailed in the notice of 
 Shakespeare in Aubrey's Lives of Eminent Men 
 is undeserving of serious attention. But state- 
 ments made by him on the authority of Sir 
 William Davenant stand in a different position, 
 for reasons which have been stated in an earlier 
 chapter {ante, pp. 85 — 88). 
 
 ' I have heard Sr. Wm. Davenant and Mr. 
 Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best 
 comcedian we have now) say that he had a most 
 prodigious witt, and did admire his naturall 
 parts beyond all other Dramaticall writing. He 
 was wont to say that he " never blotted out a 
 
 221
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 line in his life," sayd Ben: Johnson " I wish he 
 had blotted out a thousand." His Comoedics 
 will rcmaine witt as long as the English tongue is 
 understood ; for that he handles mores hominum ; 
 now our present writers reflect so much upon 
 particular persons and coxcombeities that 20 
 yeares hence they will not be understood. 
 Though, as Ben Johnson sayes of him, that he had 
 but little Latine and lesse Greek, he understood 
 Latinc pretty well ; for he had been in his 
 younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey.' 
 
 If the responsibility for this account is to be 
 apportioned between Davcnant and Shadwell, 
 the story about the players should be assigned 
 to Shadwell, and Davenant should be held 
 responsible for an account of an incident in the 
 early life of Shakespeare with which the 
 D'Avenant family were more likely to be ac- 
 quainted than an actor who flourished so lately 
 as the time of Aubrey, and who merely retailed 
 the tradition of the theatre. Shadwell's story 
 we know to be true, and there is no reason to 
 discredit what was said by Davenant, even if it 
 did not receive confirmation from what has been 
 written by Shakespeare. 
 
 It has often been noted that Shakespeare's 
 earliest play is full of reminiscences of school 
 life. ' In the mouth of his schoolmaster Holo- 
 
 222
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 femes, in Love's Labour's Lost,' Sir Sidney Lee 
 writes, ' and Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives 
 of Windsor, Shakespeare places Latin phrases 
 drawn directly from Lily's grammar, from the 
 Sentential puereles and from the " good old 
 Mantuan." ' 
 
 In Love's Labour's Lost the following speech is 
 put into the mouth of the pedant Holofernes : 
 ' Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub 
 umbra Ruminat — and so forth. Ah, good old 
 Mantuan ! I may say of thee, as the traveller 
 doth of Venice ; 
 
 Venetia, Venetia, 
 Chi non ti vede non ti pretia. 
 Old Mantuan, Old Mantuan ! who understandeth thee 
 not loves thee not.' * 
 
 Baptista Spagnolus, surnamed Mantuanus from 
 the place of his birth, was a writer of poems in 
 Latin, who lived in the fourteenth century. The 
 words quoted by Holofernes form the first line 
 of the first of his Eclogues. This quotation is 
 referred to by Nash in his Pierce Peniless, pub- 
 lished in 1592, as the learning of a 'grammar 
 school boy.' A French writer, quoted by War- 
 burton, said that the pedants of his day preferred 
 Fauste precor gelida to arma virumque cano — 
 
 * Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 95. 
 223
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 that is to say, the Eclogues of Mantuan to the 
 Aencid of Virgil. 
 
 The late Mr. Horace Furness, in his Variorum 
 edition of Love's Labour s Lost, thus explains the 
 extraordinary popularity of Mantuanus in the 
 sixteenth century as a school book, of which he 
 has collected much evidence : ' I think it is 
 not utterly incomprehensible. His verse is very 
 smooth, and being a poet, his ideas are common- 
 place, and expressed in lucid language quite 
 suited to teachers of moderate intelligence and 
 latinity.' One phrase, he points out, has 
 become one of our hackneyed quotations — 
 ' Semel insanivimus omnes.'' * 
 
 Such a teacher was Holofernes. We may hope 
 that it was as a dramatist that Shakespeare 
 wrote in praise of Mantuan, attributing to 
 Holofernes the opinion which as a pedant he was 
 likely to entertain. At the same time it must be 
 admitted that there is a note of affectionate 
 reminiscence in Shakespeare's quotation of 
 Fauste precor, and a genuine ring about his 
 praise of ' good old Mantuan.' 
 
 Another reminiscence of school days is found 
 in the words addressed by Holofernes to Natha- 
 niel : ' Bone ? bone for bene. Priscian a little 
 
 • Sec also Sir Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare, p. 16, 
 note 3. 
 
 224
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 scratched, 't will serve.' * This was a school- 
 master's phrase. Priscianus, who taught gram- 
 mar at Constantinople about a.d. 525 was the 
 great grammarian of the middle ages. ' Diminuis 
 Prisciani caput'' was a common phrase applied to 
 those who spoke false Latin, and as Mr. Clark, 
 one of the Cambridge editors, writes, ' a little 
 scratched ' is a phrase familiar to the school- 
 master, from his daily task of correcting his 
 pupils' ' latines.' 
 
 How many classical authors in the original 
 were to be found in this study of books, and how 
 many in the translations in prose and in verse — 
 a long list of which is to be found in the Prole- 
 gomena to the Variorum edition of 1821 — is a 
 question that cannot be discussed without 
 treading on forbidden ground. But it is worth 
 noting that three writers in the Latin language, 
 mentioned by name in Shakespeare's writings, 
 are associated with his early days : Ovid 
 inspired the first heir of his invention, and 
 Mantuan with Priscian were part of the stock-in- 
 trade of the occupation in which he is said to 
 have been engaged when young. The grammar 
 school at Stratford was one of the first in which 
 Greek was taught. A fair acquaintance with the 
 
 * Theobald's emendation of the text of the Folio, which is here 
 hopelessly corrupt. 
 
 22S Q
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 ancient classics would be required in a young 
 man promoted from student to teacher ; a kind 
 of scholarship which might be described by a 
 great scholar, when in an envious mood, as small 
 Latin and less Greek. 
 
 The Book of Sport of the sixteenth century has 
 no place in treatises on English literature. It had 
 nevertheless a very real existence. Allusions 
 to the Book of Sport are to be found here and 
 there in the literature of the period, but none 
 more definite than Shakespeare's. 
 
 Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy marvels 
 at the ' world of Bookes — not alone on arts and 
 sciences, but on riding of horses, fencing, 
 swimming, gardening, planting, great tomes of 
 husbandry, cookery, falconry, hunting, fishing, 
 fowling, and with exquisite pictures of all sports 
 games and what not ? ' ' Nothing is now so 
 frequent,' he says, ' as hawking, a great art, and 
 manv books written of it.' Fourteen books on 
 horses and horsemanship were published during 
 the lifetime of Shakespeare, one of which went 
 through four editions in this period. The books 
 on hunting and falconry were nearly as numerous, 
 some of them famous in their time, but now 
 forgotten by all but book collectors, or an 
 occasional wanderer in the bypaths of Eliza- 
 bethan literature. These books were studied 
 
 226
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 not only by genuine sportsmen for love and 
 understanding of the subject, but by the would-be 
 gentlemen of the Tudor age, who afford a constant 
 topic to the dramatist and satirist ; for correct 
 use of the language of sport was expected of a 
 gentleman. Bishop Earle says of his upstart 
 knight ' a hawke, hee esteemes the true burden 
 of Nobilitie' (Micro - cosmographie). Master 
 Stephen, in Ben Jonson's Every Man in his 
 Humour, asks his uncle Knowell, ' Can you tell 
 me can we have e'er a book of the sciences of 
 hawking and hunting ? I would fain borrow it.' 
 To his uncle, who regards this as most ridiculous, 
 he says, ' Why you know if a man have not skill 
 in the hawking and hunting languages nowadays 
 I'll not give a rush for him ; they are more 
 studied than the Greek or the Latin ' ; and this 
 was natural, for they were compulsory studies 
 for every one who pretended to be a gentleman. 
 There was a term of art for every action or 
 incident of sport, with an endless array of 
 appropriate verbs, nouns and adjectives, the 
 misapplication of any one of which would have 
 been fatal to any such pretension. The earliest 
 attempt to teach the hunting and hawking 
 language by means of a printed book is to be 
 found in the Book of St. Albans, published in 
 1476. Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners was the 
 
 227 Q2
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 first English authoress to find her way into print. 
 In the part of the Book which is attributed to 
 her with probability, she addresses herself to 
 ' gentill men ' as well as to c honest persones,' 
 and attributes to them a desire to ' know the 
 gentill termys in comuning of their hawkys.' 
 The greater your accuracy in the use of this 
 language ' the moore worshipp may ye have 
 among all menne.' The Book of St. Albans was 
 reprinted in whole or in part no fewer than 
 fourteen times before the death of Shakespeare. 
 An ancient English treatise on falconry bears 
 the significant title of The Institute of a Gentleman. 
 ' There is a saying among hunters,' says the 
 author, ' that he cannot be a gentleman whyche 
 loveth not hawking and hunting.' 
 
 Shakespeare's vocabulary of sport is as copious 
 and accurate as that of the books of sport. 
 There have been collected from his works one 
 hundred and thirty-two terms and phrases of art 
 relating to woodcraft, and eighty-two relating to 
 falconry. The minute accuracy with which these 
 terms are employed could not have been attained 
 by a practical sportsman without the aid of his 
 Book of Sport, even if he had been engaged 
 in the task for many more years than Shakespeare 
 could have devoted to it. 
 
 We might therefore have been justified in 
 
 822
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 placing the Book of Sport in Shakespeare's 
 library, even if he had not let us into the secret 
 of his knowledge and appreciation of it. 
 
 In the passage in Troilus and Cressida, in 
 which Hector, unarmed, visits the tents of the 
 Greeks, Achilles says to him — 
 
 Now, Hector, I have fed my eyes on thee. I have 
 with exact view perused thee, Hector, and quoted 
 joint by joint. 
 
 This dialogue follows : 
 
 Hect. Is this Achilles ? 
 
 Achil. I am Achilles. 
 
 Hect. Stand fair, I pray thee ; let me look on thee. 
 
 Achil. Behold thy fill. 
 
 Hect. Nay I have done already. 
 
 Achil. Thou art too brief : I will the second time, 
 As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb. 
 
 Hect. 0, like a book of sport, thou'ld read me o'er. 
 But there's more in me than thou understand'st.* 
 
 When Shakespeare attributes to one of the 
 characters in his play the expression of a thought 
 which is an irrelevance, unconnected with the 
 action of the drama, or the character of the 
 speaker — especially when it is an anachronism — 
 we may be pretty certain that he is giving 
 expression, in characteristic fashion, to an idea 
 that was present to his mind at the moment. 
 
 • Troilus and Cressida, IV. v. 231. 
 229
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 In the words of Hector we find an expression of 
 the contempt which a genuine English sportsman 
 would feel for the would-be gentleman who reads 
 over his book of sport to get a smattering of the 
 hunting and hawking language, without any real 
 understanding of the ' more ' that is to be 
 found in it. 
 
 It is to the Book of Sport, in which the Book of 
 Horsemanship may be included, that we owe the 
 following passage — 
 
 Ner. What warmth is there in your affection 
 towards any of these princely suitors that are already 
 come ? 
 
 Por. I pray thee over-name them ; and as thou 
 namest them, I will describe them ; and according to 
 my description, level at my affection. 
 
 Ner. First, there is the Neapolitan prince. 
 
 Por. Ay, that's a colt indeed, for he doth nothing 
 but talk of his horse ; and he makes it a great appro- 
 priation to his own good parts, that he can shoe him 
 himself. I am much afeard my lady his mother 
 played false with a smith.* 
 
 How did it come to the knowledge of Shake- 
 speare that the words of Portia were a charac- 
 teristic description of a Neapolitan prince ? 
 Quite easily, if we may place on his shelves a 
 treatise on riding by one Astley, Master of the 
 Jewel House, published in 1 584, in which he would 
 
 • Merchant of I'enice, I. ii. 36. 
 23O
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 have read of ' wel-neere a hundred as well 
 Princes as Noblemen and gentlemen : among the 
 which Noblemen of that cetie (Naples) that were 
 descended of the senators ' who brought the 
 art of riding to its highest perfection. The 
 classic work of Grisone, ' a noble gentleman of 
 the citie of Naples,' translated under the 
 auspices of Burleigh, was the foundation of 
 Blundevill' swell-known treatise on horsemanship, 
 and Neapolitan riding-masters had been im- 
 ported into England. But that a Neapolitan 
 prince could be best described as a practical 
 horseman proud of shoeing his horse himself, 
 could hardly have been a matter of common 
 knowledge. 
 
 The most interesting of the additions to Sir 
 Sidney Lee's Life which are to be found in the 
 latest edition are contained in the chapter 
 entitled ' The Close of Life.' By the aid of the 
 information which he has succeeded in collecting, 
 we can realise the truth of the account recorded 
 by Rowe that the latter part of Shakespeare's 
 life was spent in * ease, retirement, and the 
 conversation of his friends.' We find in the 
 immediate neighbourhood some who were worthy 
 of his friendship. The poet and politician, Sir 
 Fulke Greville, chosen in 1606 to the office of 
 Recorder of the Borough of Stratford, lived at 
 
 231
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 Alcester, nine miles distant. Sir Henry and Lady 
 Rainsford, whose residence, Clifford Chambers, 
 was at a short distance from Stratford, were 
 the friends and patrons of Michael Drayton, a 
 Warwickshire poet who is brought into fellow- 
 ship with Shakespeare, for he is found, with Ben 
 Jonson, at New Place at the time of his last 
 illness. 
 
 It is pleasant to read in these pages an account 
 of Shakespeare's relations with the Combe 
 family, and the interest that he took in the 
 attempt, which proved unsuccessful in the end, to 
 enclose the common fields at Welcombe. But 
 among these friends and neighbours we find 
 none who can be admitted to the degree of 
 fellowship. 
 
 Sir Thomas Lucy had been dead for some years 
 when Shakespeare settled in Stratford. The 
 story of the trouble about deer had not been 
 forgotten, but it would be told to the credit of 
 Shakespeare. It showed him to have been a 
 young man of spirit and a sportsman. Coney- 
 catching, as a gentleman's recreation, did not 
 rank so high as deer-stealing, and yet Simple says 
 with pride of his master, Slender : ' He is as tall 
 a man of his hands as any is between this and 
 his head ; he hath fought with a warrener.'* 
 
 • Merry fVives, I. iv. 26. 
 232
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 No offence, but rather the reverse, was intended 
 to Aaron the Moor when he was asked 
 
 What, hast thou not full often struck a doe, 
 And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose ? * 
 
 Deer-stealing was the recognised extravagance 
 of young gentlemen of spirit. Fosbroke, in his 
 History of Gloucestershire ', writes : ' The last 
 anecdote I have to record of this chase [Michael- 
 wood] shows that some of the principal persons 
 in this country (whose names I suppress when 
 the family is still in existence) were not ashamed 
 of the practice of deer-stealing.' 
 
 Shakespeare's popularity among the lesser 
 gentry about Stratford would be rather enhanced 
 by the ridicule which he cast upon the great Sir 
 Thomas Lucy, if, as seems probable, the proto- 
 type of the Master Robert Shallow of the amended 
 edition of the Merry Wives — a very different 
 person from the immortal Justice of King 
 Henry IV. — was a pompous and self-asserting 
 man, dwelling on his dignities and posing as a 
 personage. 
 
 On the whole, there is every reason to believe 
 that Shakespeare's expectations of happiness 
 were realised, when, attaining the end towards 
 which he had been tending for many years, he 
 
 * Titus Andronicus, II. i. 93. 
 233
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 came back to end his days in Stratford. But 
 however happy he may have been in the fellow- 
 ship of domestic life and in his relations with the 
 townsfolk of Stratford and the surrounding 
 gentry, he was not forgetful of his fellows, the 
 players, and of his chosen friends among the 
 playwrights. We have found him engaged, in 
 one of his visits to London, in co-operating with 
 Burbage in devising an Impresa for the Earl of 
 Rutland, and in the diary of the Rev. John 
 Ward, who became Vicar of Stratford in the year 
 1662, there is this note : ' Shakespeare, Drayton 
 and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting, and it 
 seems drunk too hard, for Shakespeare died of a 
 feavour there contracted.' 
 
 The meeting of these men, united to Shake- 
 speare in the fellowship of letters, we may accept 
 as a fact, and also that their meeting was a merry 
 one. That they drank too hard is not a recorded 
 fact, but an inference drawn by the worthy rector 
 from the fact that Shakespeare contracted a 
 fever, from the effects of which he died. This is 
 the meaning of the words ' it seems.' There 
 was no reason why such an inference should have 
 been drawn. There can be no doubt that the 
 fever by which Shakespeare was carried off was 
 the epidemic of fever which was then raging. 
 ' The first quarter of the seventeenth century 
 
 234
 
 FAMILY AND FRIENDS 
 
 was marked by the appearance of epidemic 
 fevers more malignant in type than the old- 
 fashioned tertian and ague.' To this should be 
 added the insanitary condition of the sur- 
 roundings of New Place.* 
 
 " The cause of Shakespeare's death is unde- 
 termined. Chapel Lane, which ran beside his 
 house, was known as a noisome resort of straying 
 pigs, and the insanitary atmosphere is likely to 
 have prejudiced the failing health of a neigh- 
 bouring resident. "f 
 
 The design which the writer of this chapter 
 kept in view was to present Shakespeare as he 
 may be seen in his relations with his family and 
 friends, leaving it to the reader to draw any 
 inferences as to the character of the man which 
 the recorded facts may seem to suggest. 
 
 It sometimes happens that a painter can be 
 found with skill to collect from casual sketches 
 and stray hints an understanding of a man 
 whom he has not seen, and to give expression to 
 his conception in a portrait which bears a fair 
 resemblance to life. In the future it may fall to 
 
 * See Shakespeare, his Family and Friends (Elton), where 
 interesting information on this subject is collected, 
 f Life of Shakespeare, p. 484 (Sir Sidney Lee). 
 
 235
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS FELLOWS 
 
 the lot of some Artist, from a study of Shake- 
 speare in his works, aided by the testimony of his 
 fellows, and by such scattered hints as are here 
 collected, to give to the world a portrait in words 
 which will be accepted as an adequate present- 
 ment of the Master. If what has been here 
 written should in any degree tend to this result, 
 and if it should, in the meantime, assist a student 
 who desires to form for himself a conception of 
 the man and his nature, in an endeavour to hold 
 by what is true, and to reject what is false, the 
 purpose of the writer will have been fulfilled. 
 
 236
 
 INDEX 
 
 BAGEH0T 
 
 Bagehot, Walter, 8, 209 
 Baker, Professor G. P., 106 
 Barnfield, Richard, 36 
 Better ton, 82, 172 
 Beaumont, 1 19 
 Books. See Library. 
 Brandes, Dr. George, 152, 200 
 Browning on the Sonnets, 10 
 Bryskett, Lodovick, friend of 
 
 Spenser, 30-2, 40, 45 
 Bullen, A. //., 96, 145, 146 
 
 Carter, Rev. Thomas, 166 
 Chettle, Henry, publishes Greene's 
 Groatswortb of Wit, 10 1 ; 
 expresses regret, 103 ; his 
 estimate of Shakespeare, 89, 
 103 ; wrote for the stage, 108 ; 
 appeals to Shakespeare to sing 
 the praises of Elizabeth, 42, 
 109, 168 
 Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 4, 
 
 *4> 2 5> 32, H9 
 
 Collins, Churton, 59, 63 
 
 Davenant, Sir William, 81, 
 
 85-8, 171, 221 
 Deer-stealing, how esteemed, 232 
 Digges, Leonard, 56, 12 1-2 
 Dowden, Edward, 8, 21, 84, 167, 
 
 199, 207, 208 
 Drayton, Michael, his character, 
 
 112; friend of Izaak Walton, 
 
 FAMILY 
 
 112; friend of Shakespeare, 
 109, 113; connection with 
 Stratford, no 
 Drummond of Hawtbornden, 37, 
 1 14-16 
 
 Elton, Charles, 84, 87, 176-80, 
 193,211,235 
 
 Family and Friends, Shake- 
 speare's relations with, 170- 
 236 ; life of, by Rowe, 170-5 ; 
 assisted by Betterton, 171 ; no 
 hint of unhappy relations with 
 wife, 175 ; inferences recently 
 drawn from circumstances of 
 marriage, 176 ; result of Mr. 
 Elton's investigations, 176-80; 
 ecclesiastical law then in force, 
 179-81 ; his wife eight years 
 his senior, 181 ; speech of 
 Orsino, 182 ; Shakespeare's 
 homing instinct, 183 ; pur- 
 chases property at Stratford, 
 184 ; explanation of his will, 
 186-91 ; his widow main- 
 tained by daughter and her 
 husband, 187 ; reason sug- 
 gested for this provision, 188 ; 
 draft of will altered by im- 
 posing a trust, 187 ; and by 
 gift of bed to wife, 190 ; her 
 
 237
 
 INDEX 
 
 FELLOW 
 
 character, 195 ; his daughter 
 
 Susanna, 197-9 
 Fellow, sense in which the word is 
 
 used, 6 
 Fuller, T., 119 
 Furness, Horace, 62, 224 
 
 Gosse, Edmund, 37 
 
 Greene, Robert, authorship of the 
 first part of Henry VI., 91 ; 
 representative of the univer- 
 sity pens, 92 ; estimate of his 
 genius, 94 ; his Groatsworth 
 of Wit, 96-102 ; miserable 
 condition of the author, 96 ; 
 how far autobiographical,96-9; 
 his address to the playwrights, 
 99-101 ; reference to Shake- 
 speare, 100 ; apology for 
 Greene's bitterness, 101 ; pub- 
 lished after his death by 
 Chettle, 101 ; who expresses 
 his regret, 103 
 
 Hall, Susanna (daughter of 
 Shakespeare), married to Dr. 
 John Hall, 189; inscription on 
 her monument, 197; descrip- 
 tive of her character, 197 
 
 Halliwell-Phillipps, 61, 186, 189, 
 192, 195 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel, 14, 19, 26, 28, 
 
 33-4, 94, 218 
 Holinsbed's Chronicles, 217, 219 
 Horses, story as to Shakespeare's 
 
 holding, 81-5 ; his knowledge 
 
 of, 84 
 
 Ireland, Shakespeare's refer- 
 ences to, 51 
 
 Jonson, Ben, a ' fellow ' of 
 Shakespeare's, 5 ; regarded as 
 
 MARLOWE 
 
 malevolent by the players, 54 ; 
 Shakespeare preferred to, by 
 the players, 77 ; his fellowship 
 with Shakespeare, 114-36; 
 described by Drummond, 
 115; friendly relations with 
 Shakespeare, 118; rivalry as 
 a dramatist, 121-5 ; Shake- 
 speare's ' purge,' 123 ; quar- 
 rels with fellow dramatists, 
 1 26-30; his Poetaster, 127-31 ; 
 did he intend Shakespeare by 
 Virgil ? 129-31 ; greatness of 
 his tributes to the memory 
 of Shakespeare, 1 3 1—5 ; with 
 Shakespeare before his death, 
 234 
 
 Kempe, William, 122 
 Knight, Joseph, 64 
 
 Lee, Sir Sidney, 2, 10, 16, 62, 
 64, 84, 122, 139, 152, 184, 189 
 
 Library, Prospero's love of his, 
 207 ; meaning of the word 
 in Shakespeare's time, 208 ; 
 Shakespeare's library, 210-31 ; 
 his ' study of books ' disposed 
 of by Dr. Hall, 210 ; his 
 'Montaigne,' 202, 216; his 
 'Ovid,' 212; Holinshed's 
 Chronicles, 217-19 ; North's 
 Plutarch, 219 ; Mantuan, 223 ; 
 Priscian, 225 ; the Book of 
 Sport, 226 ; evidences of in 
 library, 226-31 ; books on 
 horsemanship, 230 
 
 Malone, Edmund, 64, 82 
 
 Mantuan, 223, 224 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher, Swin- 
 burne's estimate of, 137, 153 ; 
 prepared the way for Shake- 
 
 238
 
 INDEX 
 
 MASSON 
 
 speare, 137 ; 'by profession a 
 scholler,' 138 ; uncertainty as 
 to early life of, 138 5 friend of 
 Raleigh, 139 ; tragedy of his 
 death, 141 ; misrepresentations 
 of certain writers, 142-4 ; 
 prosecution for atheism, 144-7; 
 how far charge well founded, 
 146-7 ; beloved by his fellows, 
 147 ; Shakespeare's tribute to 
 his memory, 149 ; and re- 
 ferences to his works, 150, 151 ; 
 Tamburlaine, 153; Hero and 
 Leander, 141, 144, 149, 155 5 
 influence on Shakespeare, 151, 
 155 ; the creator of English 
 blank verse, 152 ; effect of the 
 Classical Renaissance, 157; his 
 aggressive atheism, 159, 161 ; 
 its effect on the mind of Shake- 
 speare, 160, 166 ; what was 
 Shakespeare's creed ? 161 ; 
 Shakespeare's attitude to- 
 wards religious questions, 162- 
 8 5 attributed to the influence 
 of Marlowe, 161 ; firm grasp 
 of realities, with indifference 
 to lesser matters, 162; his 
 attitude towards Puritans, 
 163, 164 ; statement that he 
 'dyed a papist,' 164; ac- 
 counted for, 165 ; his know- 
 ledge of the Bible, 165, 166 
 Masson, Professor, 20, 41, 42 
 Mathews, Brander, 88 
 Meres, Francis {Palladis Tamia), 
 
 17, 108, 117, 142 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, refer- 
 ence to Shakespeare, 39 
 Milton, 120, 162 
 Montaigne, 202, 216 
 
 Nash, Thomas, distinction at St. 
 John's College, Cambridge, 
 
 PLAYERS 
 
 107 ; dissipation and early 
 death, 107, 108 5 his Pierce 
 Peniless quoted, 20 
 
 Ovid, 212, 213, 225 
 
 Passionate Pilgrim, The, 35 
 
 Peele, George, representative of 
 university pens, 106 ; suc- 
 cessful career at Oxford, 107 ; 
 powers wasted in dissipation, 
 107 ; early death, 107 
 
 Phillips, Augustine, 67 
 
 Pierce Peniless, 20 
 
 Players, The, their pride in 
 Shakespeare, 54-6 ; publish 
 his plays, 55 ; neglected by 
 the literary world, 56 ; pre- 
 servation due to fellow players, 
 58 ; text of the First Folio, 
 59-62 ; value of this edition, 
 62, 63 ; players closely asso- 
 ciated with Shakespeare : 
 Heming, 63-5 ; Burbage, 64-6, 
 Condell, 65 ; Phillips, 67, 68 ; 
 great wealth of Edward Alleyn, 
 66 ; due in part to bear-bait- 
 ing, 66, 67 ; position of 
 players when joined by Shake- 
 speare, 68, 69 ; origin of the 
 companies of players, 69-71 ; 
 servants of Duke Theseus, 70 ; 
 companies of different classes, 
 71 ; the company at Elsinore, 
 71-3 ; Hamlet's converse with 
 them, 72, 73 ; The Returne 
 jromPernassus, 74-9 ; Kempe's 
 praise of Shakespeare, jj ; 
 the scholars' estimate of 
 players, 78 ; suggested re- 
 ference to Shakespeare, 78 ; 
 players envied by university 
 
 239
 
 INDEX 
 
 PLUTARCH 
 
 wits, 80 ; Shakespeare's intro- 
 duction to the players, 81 ; 
 story of his holding horses, its 
 authenticity considered, 81-85; 
 value of the incident, 84; 
 traced to Sir William Dave- 
 nant, 85 ; his authority as a 
 witness, 85-8 ; Shakespeare as 
 an actor, 88, 89 ; his loyalty 
 to his profession, and to his 
 fellows, 4 
 
 Plutarch, his idea of biography, 
 2 ; Shakespeare's indebted- 
 ness to, 216 
 
 Priscian, 224 
 
 Quiney, Judith (daughter of 
 Shakespeare), little known of, 
 200 5 Sir Walter Raleigh's 
 estimate of, 200 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 12-15, 2 ^» 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter (Professor), 
 52, 63, 199, 200 
 
 Ratseis Ghost, 80 
 
 Returne jrom Pernassus, The, 
 value of the play, 74 ; refer- 
 ence to Shakespeare, 77 ; esti- 
 mate by the players, 78-80 ; 
 referred to, 93, 123, 131, 148, 
 213 
 
 Rowe, Nicholas, 82, 170-175 
 
 Saintsbury, George, 205 
 
 Shakespeare, Anne (see Family 
 
 and Friends), inscription on 
 
 her monument, 193 ; her 
 
 character, 194-6 
 
 Shakespeare, William, studied 
 
 SPENSER 
 
 in his plays, 7-9 ; in his 
 sonnets, 9-1 1; contempo- 
 rary references, 3, 4 ; testi- 
 mony of his ' fellows,' 3-7 ; 
 meaning of the word, 6 ; 
 earliest reference to, 12 ; rela- 
 tions with Spenser, 12-53 (see 
 Spenser, Edmund) ; with fellow 
 players, 54-90 (see Players); 
 with university pens, 91-113 
 (see University Pens) ; with 
 Ben Jonson, 1 14-136 (see Ben 
 Jonson); with Marlowe, 137- 
 64 (see Marlowe, Christopher) ; 
 with family and friends, 170- 
 236 (see Family and Friends) ; 
 compared to Prospero, 199; 
 his daughter Judith, 200 ; 
 borrows ideas from Montaigne, 
 202-206 ; Gonzalo's speech, 
 202 ; Prospero's, 204 ; cha- 
 racter of his last plays, 206 ; 
 Prospero's love of his library, 
 207 ; Shakespeare's books (see 
 Library) ; last years of life, 
 232 ; his will, 185-9 > death, 234 
 Shakespeare's Centurie of Pray se, 
 
 4 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 28 
 Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 9-1 1, 196, 
 
 214 
 Spenser, Edmund, visited at 
 Rilcolman by Raleigh who 
 brings him to London, 13 ; 
 Spenser returns in 1591, 14; 
 account of his visit in Colin 
 Clouts Come Home Again, 
 14-18 ; reference to poets of 
 the day, 14-18 ; to Shake- 
 speare as Aetion, 15 ; this 
 reference explained, 19, 24 ; 
 the word ' gentle ' applied to 
 Shakespeare, 24 ; significance 
 as used by Spenser, 24-7; his 
 
 24O
 
 INDEX 
 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 need of friendship, 28 ; friend- 
 ship with Lodovick Bryskett, 
 30, 31 ; reads to his friends 
 parcels of the Faerie Queene, 
 31 ; his visit to London in 
 1595, 32; evidence of friend- 
 ship with Shakespeare, 33-6 ; 
 castle of Kilcolman burned, 37; 
 return to London and death, 
 37 ; Shakespeare's reference 
 to his death, 37-43 ; his learn- 
 ing, 40 ; his Irish policy, 43- 
 51 ; attributed by Shake- 
 speare to Richard II., 44 
 Swinburne, A. C., 22, 137, 152-5 
 
 Tyrrell, Robert, Y. 219 
 
 WORD9WORTH 
 
 University Pens, The, the result 
 of the new learning, 92 ; debt 
 due to them by literature, 
 IC4-6 : prepared the way for 
 Shakespeare, 106; their lives 
 contrasted with representative 
 players, ic6 : not found among 
 Shakespeare's friends, 108, III. 
 See Greene, Robert; Peele, 
 George ; Nash, Thomas. 
 
 Venus and Adonis, 8, 17, 19 
 
 Ward, Sir A. W., 94 
 Wordsworth on the Sonnets, 9 
 Wordsworth, Bishop Charles, 161, 
 165 
 
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