*RARY 'ERSITY Of LIFORNIA IL WILLIAM SHAKSPERE, A BIOGRAPHY. FORMING A COMPANION VOLUME TO THE NATIONAL EDITION OF THE PICTORIAL SHAKSPERE. BY CHARLES KNIGHT. LONDON: CHARLES KNIGHT, FLEET STREET. 1851. LONDON : WILLIAM WILCOCKSON, ROLLS PRINTING OFFICK. Ur/ ADVERTISEMENT. THIS is a re-publication, with many alterations of arrangement, and some modifi- cations of opinion grounded upon new information, of a volume published in 1843. That book has befcn long out of print ; and it is a gratification to me to re-produce it in a cheap form. In the original advertisement I said, " Every Life of Shakspere must, to a certain extent, be conjectural; and all the Lives that have been written are conjectural. This ' Biography ' is only so far more conjectural than any other, as regards the form which it assumes, by which it has been endeavoured to associate Shakspere with the circumstances around him, in a manner which may fix them in the mind of the reader by exciting his interest." I quoted the opinion of Steevens " All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakspere is, that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon married, and had children there went to London, where he commenced actor and wrote poems and plays returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." I pointed out that this was exaggeration, but I somewhat hastily termed it " slight exaggeration." I fully agree with Mr. Hunter, with regard to the want of information on the life of Shakspere, that he is, in this respect, in the state in which most of his contemporary poets are Spenser for instance but with this difference, that we do know more concerning Shakspere than we know of most of his contemporaries of the same class. Admitting this sound reasoning, I still believe that the attempt which I ventured to make, for the first time in English Literature, to write a Biography which, in the absence of Diaries and Letters, should surround the known facts with the local and temporary circumstances, and with the social relations amidst which one of so defined a position must have moved, was not a freak of fancy a " Burlesque" as one critic has been pleased to call it, but an approximation to the truth, which could not have been reached by a mere documentary narrative. I venture to think that I have made the course of Shakspere clear and consistent, without any extravagant theories, and with some successful resistance to long received prejudices. If there were faults of taste in the original attempt, I have endeavoured to correct them, in this edition, to the best of my judgment. CHARLES KNIGHT. MARCH 1, 1850. CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE BIOGRAPHY. BOOK I. PAGE 1. Half-Title to Book I. Infant Shakspere, after Romney 1 CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY. 2. Arms of John Shakspere . .314. Church of Aston Cantlow . . 8 3. Village of Wilmecote . . 6 | CHAPTER II. STRATFORD. 5. Clopton's Bridge . . . .9(6. Snitterfield, 15 CHAPTER III. THE REGISTER. 7. Ancient Font, formerly in Stratford Church 10 8. Fac-simile of baptismal register of W. Shakspere . . . .17 9. The Church Avenue 18 10. Stratford Church . . . .19 11. John Shakspere's House in Henley Street 21 12. Room in the House in Henley Street 23 CHAPTER IV. THE SCHOOL. 13. Inner Court of the Grammar School 24 I 15. Chapel of the Guild, and Grammar 14. Interior of the Grammar School . 30 | School : Street Front . . .31 CHAPTER V. THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 16. Village of Aston Cantlow . . 33 | 17. The Fair 38 CHAPTER VI. HOLIDAYS. 18. The Boundary Elm, Stratford . 40 I 20. Bidford Bridge . . . .46 19. Shottery 45 | 21. Clopton House .... 50 CHAPTER VII. KENILWORTH 22. Chimney-piece in Gatehouse, at Kenil worth . . . .51 23. Queen Elizabeth . . . .52 24. Entrance to the Hall, Kenilworth . 53 25. Earl of Leicester . . . .56 CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. CHAPTER VIII. PAGEANTS. PAGE 26. Coventry Cross . . . . 57 | 27. St. Mary's Hall, Coventry : Street Front 63 CHAPTER IX. THE FIEESIDE. 28. Fireside in the House in Henley | 29. The Fireside. . . . .68 Street . 64 BOOK II. 30. Half-Title to Book II. 69 CHAPTER I. A CALLING. 31. Stratford Church and Mill. From an original Drawing at the beginning of the last Century 71 CHAPTER II. THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD. 32. The Bailiff's Play . . . . 78 | 33. Thomas Sackville .... 83 CHAPTER III. LIVING IN THE PAST. 34. Guy's Cliff in the 17th Century . 84 35. Tomb of King John, Worcester . 87 37. Ancient Statue of Guy at Guy's Cliff 90 38. St. Mary's Hall: Court Front . . 92 36. Bridge at Evesham CHAPTER IV. YORK AND LANCASTER. 39. St. Mary's Hall : Interior . . 94 I 41. Leicester Abbey . . . .103 40. Entrance to Warwick Castle . 98 | CHAPTER V. RUINS, NOT or TIME. 42. Evesham : the Bell Tower . . 104 43. Chapter-House, Gateway . . 106 44. Old House : Evesham . . .107 45. Bengeworth Church, 'seen through the Arch of the Bell Tower . Ill CHAPTER VI. THE WAKE. 46. Welford: the Wake 112 CHAPTER VII. CHARLCOTE. 47. Charlcote Church .... 117 I 49. Charlcote House : from Avenue . 121 48. Deer Barn : Fulbrooke . . . 120 | 50. Charlcote House : from the Avon . 122 CHAPTER VIII. SPORTS. 51. Daisy Hill 125 52. Ingon Hill 128 54. The Crab Tree . . . .132 55. Bidford Grange . . . .134 53. Marl Cliffs : near Bidford . 128 bis* * By an error of the Printer, 127 and 128 have been numbered twice. CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. CHAPTER IX. SOLITARY HOUES. PAGE 56. Hampton Lucy : from Road near Alveston . . . . 137 57. Meadows near Welford . . .140 58. Near Alveston 144 59. Old Church of Hampton Lucy . 145 60. A Peep at Charlcote . . . 146 61. Below Charlcote .... 147 62. Near Alveston 149 CHAPTER X. THE TROTHPLIGHT AND THE WEDDING. 63. Hampton Lucy : Old Church . 150 | 65. House in Charlcote Village . . 159 64. Shottery Cottage . . . .152 BOOK III. 66. Half-Title to Book III 163 CHAPTER I. LEAVING HOME. 67. Clifford Church 165 Note . 174 CHAPTER II, A NEW PLAY. 68. A Play at the Blackfriars 175 CHAPTER III. THE ONLY SHAKE- SCENE. 69. Old London 184 CHAPTER IV. THE MIGHTY HEART. 70. Funeral of Sydney . . . 199 | 71. Camp at Tilbury . . . .201 CHAPTER V. LEISURE. 72. Richmond 210 73. St. James's 211 74. Somerset House .... 213 75. Merry Wives of Windsor, performed before Elizabeth at Windsor . 220 76. Windsor . 221 CHAPTER VI. THE GLOBE. 77. The Globe Theatre . . .222 78. Entry in Parish Register of Strat- ford of the Burial of Hamnet Shakspere . . . .227 79. Seal and Autograph of Susanna Hall 227 80. Autograph of Judith Shakspere . 228 81. Lord Southampton . . .231 CHAPTER VII. EVIL DAYS. 82. Essex House . . . . 232 I 84. Fac- simile pf the Register of the 83. Earl of Essex . . . . 238 | Burial of John Shakspere . . 240 CHAPTER VIII. DID SHAKSPERE VISIT SCOTLAND. 85. Edinburgh in the 17th Century . 241 I 87. James the Sixth of Scotland and 86. Dunsinane 244 First of England . . .249 CONTENTS AND ILLUSTEATIONS. BOOK IV. Half-Title to Book IV 251 CHAPTER I. GLIMPSES OF SOCIETY. PAGE Jonson . . . . . 253 | 90. Thomas Dekker .... 267 CHAPTER II. LABOURS AND REWARDS. 91. Hall of the Middle Temple . . 268 92. Interior of the Temple Church . 270 93. Harefield 272 94. Tenement at Stratford . . 273 95. Funeral of Queen Elizabeth . 274 96. William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke 276 97. Philip Herbert, Earl of Mont- gomery 277 98. Wolsey's Hall, Hampton Court . 278 99. Banqueting-House, Whitehall . 279 CHAPTER III. REST. 100. The Garden of New Place . . 281 101. Monument of Sir Thomas Lucy . '289 102. The CoUege . . . .291 103. Ancient Hall in the CoUege . 292 104. Fac-simile of entry hi Parish Register of the Marriage of John 105. Signature of Dr. Hall . . .295 106. House in the High Street, Strat- ford 296 107. Bishopton Chapel . . . 297 108. Foot-bridge above the Mill . . 298 109. Stratford Church . . 299 Hall and Susanna Shakspere . 295 CHAPTER IV. VISITS TO LONDON. 110. The Bear Garden 300 CHAPTER V. THE LAST BIRTHDAY. 111. Chancel of Stratford Church . 308 112. Monument of John Combe . . 310 113. Weston Church . . . .312 114. Signature of Thomas Quiney . 312 115. Fac-simile of entry in Parish Register of the Burial of Wil- liam Shakspere . . .316 APPENDIX. I. SHAKSPERE'S WILL. 116. Monument at Stratford 3J9 II. SOME POINTS OF SHAKSPERE'S WILL. 117. Fac-simile of Register of the Burial of Mrs. Shakspere . . .323 118. Ditto of Susanna Hall . . .323 III. THE AUTOGRAPHS OF SHAKSPERE. 121. Fac-simile of Autographs, as Frontispiece. IV. STRATFORD REGISTERS. V. THE PORTRAITS OF SHAKSPERE. 119. Ditto of Judith Quiney . . 324 120. Signature of Eliza Barnard . 324 I Infant Shaksp*re.) ==g I Arras of John Shakspere.l CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY ON the 22nd of August, 1485, there was a battle fought for the crown of England, a short battle ending in a decisive victory. In that field a crowned king, " manfully fighting in the middle of his enemies, was slain and brought to his death;" and a politic adventurer put on the crown, which the immediate descendants of his house wore for nearly a century and a quarter. The battle-field was Bosworth. Two months afterwards the Earl of Richmond was more solemnly crowned and anointed at Westminster by the name of King Henry VII. ; arid " after this," continues the chronicler, " he began to remember his especial friends and fautors, of whom some he advanced to honour and dignity, and some he enriched with possessions and goods, every man according to his desert and merit." * Was there hi that victo- rious army of the Earl of Richmond, which Richard denounced as a " company of traitors, thieves, outlaws, and runagates," an Englishman bearing the name of Chacksper, or Shakespeyre, or Schakespere, or Schakespeire, or Shakespeyre, or Schakspere, or Shakespere, or Shakspere,t a martial name, however spelt ? " Breakspear, Shakespear, and the like, have been surnames imposed upon the first bearers of them for valour and feats of arms." J Of the warlike achievements of * Hall's Chronicle. t A list of the brethren and sisters of the Guild of Knowle, near Rowington, in Warwickshire, exhibits a great number of the name of Shakspere in that fraternity, from about 1460 to 1527 ; and the names are spelt with the diversity here given, Shakspere being the latest. t Verstegan's " Restitution," &c. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. this Shakspcre there is no record : his name or his deeds would have no interest for us unless there had been born, eighty years after this battle-day, a direct de- scendant from him ention, " Whose muse, full of high thought's inventi Doth like himself heroically sound ; " * a Shakspcre, of whom it is also said '* He seems to shake a lance As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance." f A public document, bearing the date of 1599, affirms, upon "credible report," of " John Shakspere, now of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentle- man," that his " parent, great-grandfather, and late antccessor, for his faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince King Henry VII. of famous memory, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements, given to him in those parts of Warwickshire, where they have continued by some descents in good reputation and credit." Such is the recital of a grant of arms to John Shakspere, the father of William Shakspere, which document refers to "his ancient coat of arms, heretofore assigned to him, whilst he was her Majesty's officer and bailiff of Stratford." In those parts of Warwickshire, then, lived and died, we may assume, the faithful and approved servant of the " unknown Welshman," as Richard called him, who won for himself the more equivocal name of " the most prudent prince." He was probably advanced in years when Henry ascended the throne ; for in the first year of Queen Elizabeth, 1558, his great-grandson, John Shakspere, was a burgess of the corporation of Stratford, and was in all probability born about 1530. The family had continued in those parts, we are assured, " by some descents ; " but how they were occupied in the business of life, what was their station in society, how they branched out into other lines of Shaksperes, we have no distinct record. The name may be traced by legal documents in many parishes of Warwickshire ; but we learn from a deed of trust executed in 1 550, by Robert Arden, the maternal grand- father of William Shakspere, that Richard Shakspere was the occupier of land in Snitterfield, the property of Robert Arden. At this parish of Snitterfield lived a Henry Shakspere, who as we learn from a declaration in the Court of Record at Strat- ford, was the brother of John Shakspere.IjI It is conjectured, and very reasonably, that Richard Shakspere, of Snitterfield, was the paternal grandfather of William Shakspere. Snitterfield is only three miles distant from Stratford. They probably were cultivators of the soil, unambitious small proprietors. Harrison, a painter of manners who comes near the time of John Shakspere, has described the probable condition of his immediate ancestors : " Yeomen are those which by our law are called legates homines, free men born English The truth is, that the word is derived from the Saxon term zeoman, or geoman, which signifieth (as I have read) a settled or staid man This sort of people have a certain pre-eminence and more estimation than labourers and the common sort of artificers." But the grant of arms in 1599, opens another branch of inquiry into Shakspere's ancestry. It says, " for that the said John Shakespere having married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wellingcote, [Wilmecote] and also produced this his ancient coat of arms, we [the heralds] have likewise upon one other escutcheon impaled the same with the ancient arms of the said Arden of Welling- * Spenser. f Ben Jonson. J See Halliwell's "Life of Shakspere," p. 8, and Collier's " Life," p. 62. CHAP. I.] ANCESTRY. cote." They add that John Shakspere, and his children, issue, and posterity, may bear and use the same shield of arms, single or impaled. The family of Arden was one of the highest antiquity in Warwickshire. Dugdale traces its pedigree uninterruptedly up to the time of Edward the Confessor. Under the head of Curd worth, a parish in the hundred of Hemlingford, he says " In this place I have made choice to speak historically of that most ancient and worthy family, whose surname was first assumed from their residence in this part of the country, then and yet called Arden, by reason of its woodiness, the old Britons and Gauls using the word in that sense." At the time of the Norman invasion there resided at Warwick, Turchil, " a man of especial note and power " and of " great possessions." In the Domesday Book his father, Alwyne, is styled vice comes. Turchil, as well as his father, received favour at the hands of the Conqueror. He retained the possession of vast lands in the shire, and he occupied Warwick Castle as a military governor. He was thence called Turchil de Warwick by the Normans. But Dugdale goes oil to say " He was one of the first here in England that, in imitation of the Normans, assumed a surname, for so it appears that he did, and wrote himself Turchittus de Eardene, in the days of King William Rufus." The history of the De Ardens, as collected with wonderful industry by Dugdale, spreads over six centuries. Such records seldom present much variety of incident, however great and wealthy be the family to which they are linked. In this instance a shrievalty or an attainder varies the register of birth and marriage, but generation after generation passes away without leaving any enduring traces of its sojourn on the earth. Fuller has not the name of a single De Arden amongst his " Worthies" men illustrious for something more than birth or riches, with the exception of those who swell the lists of sheriffs for the county. The pedigree which Dugdale gives of the Arden family brings us no nearer in the direct line to the mother of Shakspere than to Robert Arden, her great-grandfather : he was the third son of Walter Ardeu, who married Eleanor, the daughter of John Hampden, of Buck- inghamshire ; and he was brother to Sir John Arden, squire for the body to Henry VII. Malone, with laudable industry, has continued the pedigree in the younger branch. Robert's son, also called Robert, was groom of the chamber to Henry VII. He appears to have been a favourite ; for he had a valuable lease granted him by the king of the manor of Yoxsall, in Staffordshire, and was also made keeper of the royal park of Aldercar. Robert Arden, the groom of the chamber, probably left the court upon the death of his master. He married, and he had a son, also Robert, who had a family of seven daughters. The youngest was Mary, the mother of William Shakspere. From the connection of these immediate ancestors of Shakspere's mother with the court of Henry VII., Malone has assumed that they were the " antecessors "* of John Shakspere declared to have been advanced and rewarded by the conqueror of Bosworth Field. Because Robert Arden had a lease of the royal manor of Yoxsall, in Staffordshire, Malone also contends that the reward of lands and tenements stated in the grant of arms to have been bestowed upon the ancestor of John Shakspere really means the beneficial lease to Robert Arden. He holds that popularly the grandfather of Mary Arden would have been called the grandfather of John Shak- spere, and that John Shakspere himself would have so called him. The answer is very direct. The grant of arms recites that the greatgrandfather of John Shakspere had been advanced and rewarded by Henry VII., and then goes on to say that John * In a draft of the grant of arms, dated 1596, there are several variations from that of 1599. Amongst others we have, " whose parents and late antecessors were for this valiant and faithful service " instead of " parent, great-grandfather, and late antecesaor, for his faithful and approved sen-ice," &c. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK i. Shakspere had married the daughter of Eobert Arden of Wellingcote : He has an ancieiit coat-of-arms of his own derived from his ancestor, and the arms of his wife are to be impaled with these his own arms. Can the interpretation of this docu- ment then be that Mary Arden's grandfather is the person pointed out as John Shakspere's grraz-grandfather ; and that, having an ancient coat-of-arms himself, his ancestry is really that of his wife, whose arms are totally different 1 Mary Ardeii ! The name breathes of poetry. It seems the personification of some Dryad of " Many a huge-grown wood, and many a shady grove/' called by that generic name of Arden, a forest with many towns, *' Whose footsteps yet are found, In her rough woodlands more than any other ground, That mighty Arden held even in her height of pride, Her one hand touching Trent, the other Severn's side." * High as was her descent, wealthy and powerful as were the numerous branches of her family, Mary Arden, we doubt not, led a life of usefulness as well as innocence, within her native forest hamlet. Her father died in December, 1556. His will is dated the 24th of November in the same year, and the testator styles himself " Kobert Arden, of Wyhncote, in the paryche of Aston Cauntlow." [Village of Wilmecote,] The face of the country must have been greatly changed in three centuries. A canal, with lock rising upon lock, now crosses the hill upon which the village stands ; but traffic has not robbed the place of its green pastures and its shady nooks, though nothing is left of the ancient magnificence of the great forest. There is very slight Drayton. " Polyolb'on," 13th Song. CHAP. I.] ANCESTRY. appearance of antiquity about the present village, and certainly not a house in which we can conceive that Robert Arden resided. It was in the reign of Philip and Mary that Robert Arden died ; and we cannot therefore be sure that the wording of his will is any absolute proof of his religious opinions : " First, I bequeath my soul to Almighty God and to our blessed Lady Saint Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven, and my body to be buried in the churchyard of Saint John the Baptist in Aston aforesaid." Mary, his youngest daughter, occupies the most prominent position in the will : " I give and bequeath to my youngest daughter Mary all my land in "Wilmecote, called Asbies, and the crop upon the ground, sown and tilled as it is, and six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence of money to be paid over ere my goods be divided," To his daughter Alice he bequeaths the third part of all his goods, moveable and unmoveable, in field and town : to his wife Agnes (the step-mother of his children) six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence, under the condition that she should allow his daughter Alice to occupy half of a copyhold at Wilmecote, the widow having her "jointure in Snitterfield." The remainder of his goods is divided amongst his other children. Alice and Mary are made the "full executors" to his will. We thus see that the youngest daughter has an undivided estate and a sum of money ; and the crop was also bequeathed to her. The estate consisted of fifty-six acres of arable and pasture, and a house. But she also possessed some property in Snitterfield, which had probably been secured to her upon her father's second marriage. It was in Snitterfield that Richard Shakspere occupied part of the Arden property. Some twenty years after the death of Robert Ardeii, Harrison described the growth of domestic luxury in England, saying, " There are old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain, which have noted three things to be marvellously altered in England within their sound remembrance." One of these enormities is the multitude of chimneys lately erected, whereas formerly each one made his fire against a reredosse in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat : the second thing is the great amendment of lodging the pillows, the beds, the sheets, instead of the straw pallet, the rough mat, the good round log or the sack of chaff under the head : the third thing is the exchange of vessels, as of treen platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. He then describes the altered splendour of the substantial farmer : " A fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more in odd vessels going about the house ; three or four feather-beds ; so many coverlids and carpets of tapestry ; a silver salt, a bowl for wine, and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit." Robert Arden had certainly not a mansion filled with many needless articles for use or ornament. In the inventory of his goods taken after his death we find table-boards, forms, cushions, benches, and one cupboard in his hall ; there are painted cloths [pictures] in the hall and in the chamber ; seven pair of sheets, five board-cloths, and three towels ; there is one feather-bed and two mat- tresses, with sundry coverlets, and articles called canvasses, three bolsters, and one pillow. The kitchen boasts four pans, four pots, four candlesticks, a basin, a chafing-dish, two cauldrons, a frying-pan, and a gridiron. And yet this is the grandson of a groom of a king's bedchamber, an office filled by the noble and the rich, and who, in the somewhat elevated station of a gentleman of worship, would probably possess as many conveniences and comforts as a rude state of society could command. There was plenty outdoors oxen, bullocks, kine, weaning calves, swine, bees, poultry, wheat in the barns, barley, oats, hay, peas, wood in the yard, horses, colts, carts, ploughs. Robert Arden had lived through unquiet times, when there was little accumulation, and men thought rather of safety than of indulgence : the days of security were at hand. Then came the luxuries that Harrison looked upon with much astonishment and some little heartburning. 8 WILLIAM SHAKSFERE t A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK i And so iu the winter of 1556 was Mary Ardcn left without the guidance of a father. We learn from a proceeding in chancery some forty years later, that with the land of Asbies there went a messuage. Mary Arden had therefore a roof-tree of her own. Her sister Alice was to occupy another property in Wilmecote with the widow. Mary Arden lived in a peaceful hamlet ; but there were some strange things around her, incomprehensible things to a very young woman. When she went to the church of Aston Cantlow, she now heard the mass sung, and saw the beads bidden ; whereas a few years before there was another form of worship within those walls. She learnt, perhaps, of mutual persecutions and intolerance, of neigh- bour warring against neighbour, of child opposed to father, of wife to husband. She might have beheld these evils. The rich religious houses of her county and vicinity had been suppressed, their property scattered, their chapels and fair chambers desecrated, their very walls demolished. The new power was trying to restore them, but, even if it could have brought back the old riches, the old reverence had passed away. In that solitude she probably mused upon many things with an anxious heart. The wealthier Ardens of Kingsbury and Hampton, of Kotley and Rodburne and Park Hall, were her good cousins ; but bad roads and bad times perhaps kept them separate. And so she lived a somewhat lonely life, till a young yeoman of Stratford, whose family were her father's tenants, came to sit oftener and oftener upon the wooden benches in the old hall a substantial yeoman, a burgess of the corporation in 1557 or 1558 ; and then in due season, perhaps in the very year when Romanism was lighting its last fires in England, and a queen was dying with "Calais" written on her heart, Mary Arden and John Shakspere were, in all likelihood, standing before the altar of the parish church of Aston Cantlow, and the house and lands of Asbies became administered by one who took possession " by the right of the said Mary," who thenceforward abided for half a century in the good town of Stratford. There is no register of the marriage discovered : but the date must have been about a year after the father's death ; for " Joan Shakspere, daughter to John Shakspere," was, according to the Stratford register, baptized on the 15th September, 1558. "^ '*>k* J [Church of Aston Cantlow.] CHAP, n.] STRATFORD. - ' [Clopton's Bridge.] CHAPTER II. STRATFORD. A PLEASANT place is this quiet town of Stratford a place of ancient traffic, " the name having been originally occasioned from the ford or passage over the water upon the great street or road leading from Henley in Arden towards London."* England was not always a country of bridges : rivers asserted their own natural rights, and were not bestrid by domineering man. If the people of Henley in Arden would travel towards London, the Avon might invite or oppose their passage at his own good will ; and, indeed, the river so often swelled into a rapid and dangerous stream, that the honest folk of the one bank might be content to hold somewhat less intercourse with their neighbours on the other than Englishmen now hold with the antipodes. But the days of improvement were sure to arrive. There were charters for markets, and charters for fairs, obtained from King Richard and King John ; and in process of time Stratford could shew in a wooden bridge, though with- out a causey, and exposed to constant damage by flood. And then an alderman of London, in days when the very rich were not slow to do magnificent things for public benefit, and did less for their own vain pride and luxury, built a stone bridge over the Avon, which has borne the name of Clopton's Bridge, even from the days of Henry VII. until this day. Ecclesiastical foundations were numerous at Stratford ; and such were, in every case, the centres of civilization and prosperity. The parish church was a collegiate one, with a chantry of five priests ; and there was an ancient guild and chapel of the Holy Cross, partly a religious and partly a civil institution. A grammar-school was connected with the guild ; and the muni- * Dugdale. 10 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. cipal government of the town was settled in a corporation by charter of Edward VI., and the grammar-school especially maintained. Here then was a liberal accumula- tion, such as belongs only to an old country, to make a succession of thriving communities at Stratford ; and they did thrive, according to the notion of thrift in those days. But we are not to infer that when John Shakspere removed the daughter and heiress of Arden from the old hall of Wilmecote he placed her in some substantial mansion in his corporate town, ornamental as well as solid in its archi- tecture, spacious, convenient, fitted up with taste, if not with splendour. Stratford had, in all likelihood, no such houses to offer ; it was a town of wooden houses, a scattered town, no doubt with gardens separating the low and irregular tenements, sleeping ditches intersecting the properties, and stagnant pools exhaling in the road. A zealous antiquarian has discovered that John Shakspere inhabited a house in Henley Street as early as 1552 ; and that he, as well as two other neighbours, was fined for making a dung-heap s in the street.* In 1553, the jurors of Stratford present certain inhabitants as violators of the municipal laws : from which present- ment we learn that ban-dogs were not to go about unmuzzled ; nor sheep pastured in the ban-croft for more than an hour each day ; nor swine to feed on the common land uuringed.t It is evident that Stratford was a rural town, surrounded with common fields, and containing a mixed population of agriculturists and craftsmen. The same character was retained as late as 1618, when the privy council represented to the corporation of Stratford that great and lamentable loss had " happened to that town by casualty of fire, which, of late years, hath been very frequently occa- sioned by means of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and such-like combus- tible stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most of the principal parts of the town without restraint."! The population of the corporate town of Stratford, containing within itself rich endowments and all the framework of civil superiority, would appear insignificant in a modern census. The average annual number of baptisms in 1564 was fifty- five ; of burials in the same year forty-two : these numbers, upon received principles of calculation, would give us a total population of about one thousand four hundred. In a certificate of charities, &c., in the thirty-seventh year of Henry VIII., the number of "houselyng people" in Stratford is stated to be fifteen hundred. This population was furnished with all the machinery by which Englishmen, even in very early times, managed their own local affairs, and thus obtained that aptitude for practical good government which equally rejects the tyranny of the one or of the many. The corporation in the time of John Shakspere consisted of fourteen alder- men and fourteen burgesses, one of the aldermen being annually elected to the office of bailiff. The bailiff held a court of record every fortnight, for the trial of all causes within the jurisdiction of the borough in which the debt and damages did not amount to thirty pounds. There was a court-leet also, which appointed its ale- tasters, who presided over the just measure and wholesome quality of beer, that necessary of life in ancient times ; and which court-leet chose also, annually, four affeerors, who had the power in their hands of summary punishment for offences for which no penalty was prescribed by statute. The constable was the great police officer, and he was a man of importance, for the burgesses of the corporation inva- riably served the office. John Shakspere appears from the records of Stratford to have gone through the whole regular course of municipal duty. In 1556 he was on the jury of the court-leet ; in 1557, an ale-taster ; in 1558, a burgess ; in 1559, a * Hunter : "New Illustrations," vol. i. p. 18. f The proceedings of the court are given in Mr. Halliwell's "Life of Shakespeare/' a book which may be fairly held to contain all the documentary evidence of this life which has been discovered. | Chalmers's "Apology," p. 618. CHAP. II.] STRATFORD. 11 constable ; in 1560, an affeeror ; in 1561, a chamberlain ; in 1565, an alderman ; and in 1568, high bailiff of the borough, the chief magistrate. There have been endless theories, old and new, as to the worldly calling of John Shakspere. There are ancient registers in Stratford, minutes of the Common Hall, proceedings of the Court-leet, pleas of the Court of Record, writs, which have been hunted over with unwearied diligence, and yet they tell us little of John Shak- spere ; and what they tell us is too often obscure. When he was elected an alderman in 1565, we can trace out the occupations of his brother aldermen, and readily come to the conclusion that the municipal authority of Stratford was vested, as we may naturally suppose it to have been, in the hands of substantial tradesmen, brewers, bakers, butchers, grocers, victuallers, mercers, woollen-drapers.* Prying into the secrets of time, we are enabled to form some notion of the literary acquire- ments of this worshipful body. On rare, very rare occasions, the aldermen and burgesses constituting the town council affixed their signatures, for greater solemnity, to some order of the court ; and on the 29th of September, in the seventh of Eliza- beth, upon an order that John Wheler should take the office of bailiff, we have nineteen names subscribed, aldermen and burgesses. There is something in this document which suggests a motive higher than mere curiosity for calling up these dignitaries from their happy oblivion, saying to each, " Dost thou use to write thy name ? or hast thou a mark to thyself like an honest, plain-dealing man ? " Out of the nineteen six only can answer, " I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name." We were reluctant to yield our assent to Malone's assertion that Shakspere's father had a mark to himself. The marks are not distinctly affixed to each name, in this document. But subsequent discoveries establish the fact that he used two marks one, something like an open pair of compasses the other, the common cross. Even half a century later, to write was not held indispensable by persons of some pretension. In Decker's " Wonder of a Kingdom," the following dialogue takes place between Gentili and Buzardo : " Gen. Wh.it qualities arc you furnished withl Buz. My education has been like a gentleman. Gen. Have you any skill in song or instrument ? Buz. As a gentleman should have ; I know all but play on none : I am no barber. Gen. Barber ! no, sir. I think it. Are you a linguist'? Buz. As a gentleman ought to be ; one tongue serves one head; I am no pedlar, to travel countries. Gen. What skill ha' you in horsemanship '{ Buz. As other gentlemen have ; I ha' rid some beasts in my time. Gen. Can you write and read then ? Buz. As most of your gentlemen do ; my bond has been taken with my mark at it.' We must not infer that one who gave his bond with his mark at it, was necessarily ignorant of all literature. It was very common for an individual to adopt, in the language of Jack Cade, " a mark to himself," possessing distinctness of character, and almost heraldically alluding to his name or occupation. Many of these are like ancient merchants' marks ; and on some old deeds the mark of a landowner alien- ating property corresponds with the mark described in the conveyance as cut in the turf, or upon boundary stones, of unenclosed fields. One of the aldermen of Stratford in 1565, John Wheler, is described in the town records as a yeoman. He must have been dwelling in Stratford, for we have seen that he was ordered to take the office of high bailiff, an office demanding a near and constant residence. We can imagine a moderate landed proprietor cultivating his * See Malone's " Life of Shakspeare," Boswell's Malone, vol. ii., p. 77. 1 2 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. own soil, renting perhaps other land, seated in a house in the town of Stratford, such as it was in the middle of the sixteenth century, as conveniently as in a soli- tary grange several miles away from it. Such a proprietor, cultivator, yeoman, we consider John Shakspere to have been. In 1556, the year that Robert, the father of Mary Arden, died, John Shakspere was admitted at the court-leet to two copyhold estates in Stratford. The jurors of the leet present that George Tumor had alienated to John Shakspere and his heirs one tenement, with a garden and croft, and other premises in Grenehyll Street, held of the lord at an annual quit-rent ; and John Shakspere, who is present in court and does fealty, is admitted to the same. The same jurors present that Edward West has alienated to John Shakspere one tene- ment and a garden adjacent in Henley Street, who is in the same way admitted, upon fealty done to the lord. Here then is John Shakspere, before his marriage, the purchaser of two copyholds in Stratford, both with gardens, and one with a croft, or small enclosed field.* In 1570 John Shakspere is holding, as tenant under William Clopton, a meadow of fourteen acres, with its appurtenances, called Ingon, at the annual rent of eight pounds. When he married, the estate of Asbies, within a short ride of Stratford, came also into his possession ; and so did some landed property at Snitterfield. With these facts before us, scanty as they are, can we reasonably doubt that John Shakspere was living upon his own land, renting the land of others, actively engaged in the business of cultivation, in an age when men of substance very often thought it better to take the profits direct than to share them with the tenant ? In " A Briefe Conceipte touching the Commonweale of this Realme of Englande," pub- lished in 1581, a Dialogue once attributed to William Shakspere, the knight says, speaking of his class, " many of us are enforced either to keep pieces of our own lands when they fall in our own possession, or to purchase some farm of other men's lands, and to store it with sheep or some other cattle, to help make up the decay in our revenues, and to maintain our old estate withal, and yet all is little enough." The belief that the father of Shakspere was a small landed proprietor and culti- vator, employing his labour and capital in various modes which grew out of the occupation of land, offers a better, because a more natural, explanation of the cir- cumstances connected with the early life of the great poet than those stories which would make him of obscure birth and servile employments. Take old Aubrey's story, the shrewd learned gossip and antiquary, who survived Shakspere some eighty years : " Mr. William Shakespear was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade ; but when he killed a calf he would do it in high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young." With an undoubting confidence in Aubrey, Dr. Farmer averred that, when he that killed the calf wrote " There's a divinity that shapes OUT ends, Rough hew them how we will,"f the poet-butcher was thinking of skewers ? Malone also held that he who, when a * Malone, with the documents before him, treats this purchase as if it had been the mere assign- ment of a lease ; and, Malone having printed the documents, no one who wrote about Shakspere previous to the publication of our "Biography," in 1843, deduced from them that Shakspere's father was necessarily a person of some substance before his marriage, a purchaser of property. f " Hamlet," Act v. Sc. n. CHAP. II.] STRATFORD. 13 boy, exercised his father's trade, has described the process of calf-killing with an accuracy which nothing but profound experience could give " And as the butcher takes away the calf, And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays, Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house ; Even so, remorseless, have they borne him hence. And as the dam runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went, And can do nought but wail her darling's loss, Even so," &c.* The story, however, has a variation. There was at Stratford, in the year 1693, a clerk of the parish church, eighty years old, that is, he was three years old when William Shakspere died, and he, pointing to the monument of the poet, with the pithy remark that he was the " best of his family," proclaimed to a member of one of the Inns of Court that " this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound ap- prentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London." t His father was a butcher, says Aubrey ; he was apprentice to a butcher, says the parish clerk. Aubrey was picking up his gossip for his friend Anthony-a-Wood in 1680, and it is not very difficult to imagine that the identical parish clerk was his authority. That honest chronicler, old as he was, had forty years of tradition to deal with in this matter of the butcher's son and the butcher's apprentice ; and the result of such glimpses into the thick night of the past is sensibly enough stated by Aubrey him- self : " What uncertainty do we find in printed histories ! They either treading too near on the heels of truth, that they dare not speak plain ; or else for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and dark." Akin to the butcher's trade is that of the dealer in wool. .It is upon the autho- rity of Betterton, the actor, who, in the beginning of the last century, made a journey into Warwickshire to collect anecdotes relating to Shakspere, that Rowe tells us that John Shakspere was a dealer in wool : " His family, as appears by the register and the 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 so large a family, ten children in all, that, though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment." We are now peeping " through the blanket of the dark." But daylight is not as yet. Malone was a believer in Howe's account ; and he was confirmed in his belief by possessing a piece of stained glass, bearing the arms of the merchants of the staple, which had been removed from a window of John Shakspere's house in Henley Street. But, unfor- tunately for the credibility of Howe, as then held, Malone made a discovery, as it is usual to term such glimpses of the past : " I began to despair of ever being able to obtain any certain intelligence concerning his trade ; when, at length, I met with the following entry, in a very ancient manuscript, containing an account of the pro- ceedings in the bailiff's court, which furnished me with the long sought-for infor- mation, and ascertains that the trade of our great poet's father was that of a glover ;" " Thomas Siche de Arscotte in com. Wigorn. querif versus Johm Shakyspere de Stretford, in com. Warwic. Glover, in plac. quod reddat ei oct. libras, &c." This Malone held to be decisive. We give this record above as Malone printed it, not very correctly ; and having seen the original, we maintained that the word was not O lover. Mr. Collier and Mr. Halliwell affirm that the word Glo, with the second syllable contracted, is glover ; and we accept their interpretation. But we still hold to our original belief that he was, in 1556, a landed proprietor and an occupier of land ; one who, although * "Henry VL," Part II. Act in. Sc. i. f "Traditionary Anecdotes of Shakespere." 14 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. sued as a glover on the 1 7th June of that year, was a suitor in the same court on the 19th November, in a plea against a neighbour for unjustly detaining eighteen quarters of barley. We still refuse to believe that John Shakspere, when he is described as a yeoman in after years, " had relinquished his retail trade," as Mr. Halliwell judges ; or that his mark, according to the same authority, was emblema- tical of the glove-sticks used for stretching the cheveril for fair fingers. We have no confidence that he had stores in Henley Street of the treasures of Autolycus, " Gloves as sweet as damask roses." We think, that butcher, dealer in wool, glover, may all be reconciled with our position, that he was a landed proprietor, occupying land. Our proofs are not purely hypothetical. Harrison, who mingles laments at the increasing luxury of the farmer, with some- what contradictory denouncements of the oppression of the tenant by the landlord, holds that the landlord is monopolizing the tenant's profits. His complaints are the natural commentary upon the social condition of England, described in "A Briefe Conceipte touching the Commonweale :" " Most sorrowful of all to under- stand, that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have any gain at all, that they themselves become GRAZIERS, BUTCHERS, TANNERS, SHEEPMASTERS, WOODMEN, and denique quid non, thereby to enrich themselves, and bring all the wealth of the country into their own hands, leaving the commonalty weak, or as an idol with broken or feeble arms, which may in time of peace have a plausible show, but, when necessity shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." Has not Harrison solved the mystery of the butcher ; explained the tradition of the wool-merchant ; shewn how John Shakspere, the woodman, naturally sold a piece of timber to the corporation, which we find recorded ; and, what is most difficult of credence, indicated how the glover is reconcilable with all these employments? We open an authentic record of this very period, and the solution of the difficulty is palpable : In John Strype's " Memorials Ecclesiastical under Queen Mary I," under the date of 1558, we find this passage: "It is certain that one Edward Home suffered at Newent, where this Deighton had been, and spake with one or two of the same parish that did see him there burnt, and did testify that they knew the two persons that made the fire to burn him ; they were two glovers or FELLMONGERS."* A fellmonger and a glover appear from this passage to have been one and the same. The fellmonger is he who prepares skins for the use of the leather-dresser, by separating the wool from the hide the natural coadjutor of the sheep-master and the wool- man. Shakspere himself implies that the glover was a manufacturer of skins : Dame Quickly asks of Slender's man, " Does he not wear a great round beard like a glover's paring knife?" The peltry is shaved upon a circular board, with a great round knife, to this day. The fellmonger's trade, as it now exists, and the trade in un- tanned leather, the glover's trade, would be so slightly different, that the generic term, glover, might be applied to each. There are few examples of the word " fell- monger" in any early writers. " Glover" is so common that it has become one of the universal English names derived from occupation, far more common than if it merely applied to him who made coverings for the hands. At Coventry, in the middle of the sixteenth century, (the period of which we are writing) the Glovers and Whittawers formed one craft. A whittawer is one who prepares tawed leather untanned leather leather chiefly dressed -from sheep skins and lamb skins by a simple process of soaking, and scraping, and liming, and softening _by alum and salt. Of such were the large and coarse gloves in use in a rural district, even amongst * Vol. y., p. 277 edit. 1816. CHAP. II.] STRATFORD. 15 labourers ; and such process might be readily earned on by one engaged in agricul- tural operations, especially when we bear in mind that the white leather was the especial leather of " husbandly furniture," as described by old Tusser. We may reasonably persist, therefore, even in accord with "flesh and fell" tradition, in drawing the portrait of Shakspere's father, at the time of his marriage, in the free air, on his horse, with his team, at market, at fair and yet a dealer in carcases, or wood, or wool, or skins, his own produce. He was a proprietor of land, and an agriculturist, li ving in a peculiar state of society, as we shall see hereafter, in which the division of employments was imperfectly established, and the small rural capitalists strove to turn their own products to the greatest advantage. [Snitterfield.] WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. [Ancient Font, formerly in Stratford Church.] CHAPTER III. THE REGISTER. TJS the eleventh century the Norman Conqueror commanded a Register to be com- pleted of the lands of England, with the names of their possessors, and the number of their free tenants, their villains, and their slaves. In the sixteenth century Thomas Cromwell, as the vicegerent of Henry VIII. for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, issued Injunctions to the Clergy, ordaining, amongst other matters, that every offi- ciating minister shall, for every Church, keep a Book, wherein he shall register every Marriage, Christening, or Burial. In the different character of these two Registers we read what five centuries of civilization had effected for England. Instead of being recorded in the gross as cotarii or servi, the meanest labourer, his wife, and his children, had become children of their country and their country's religion, as much as the highest lord and his family. Their names were to be inscribed in a book and carefully preserved. But the people doubted the intent of this wise and liberal injunction. A friend of Cromwell writes to him, " There is much secret and several communications between the King's subjects ; and [some] of them, in sundry places within the shires of Cornwall and Devonshire, be in great fear and mistrust what the King's Highness and his Council should mean, to give in commandment to the parsons and vicars of every parish that they should make a book, and surely to be kept, wherein to be specified the names of as many as be wedded, and the names of them that be buried, and of all those that be christened." * They dreaded new " charges ; " and well they might dread. But Thomas Cromwell had not regal * Cromwell's Correspondence, in the Chapter-House, Quoted in Rickman's Preface to Population Returns, 1831. CHAP. III.] THE REGISTER. 17 exactions in his mind. The Registers were at first imperfectly kept ; but the regu- lation of 1538 was strictly enforced in the first year of Elizabeth; and then the Register of the Parish of Stratford-upon-Avon commences, that is, in 1558. Every such record of human life is a solemn document. Birth, Marriage, Death ! this is the whole history of the sojourn upon earth of nearly every name inscribed in these time-preserved pages. And after a few years what is the interest, even to their own descendants, of these brief annals ? The last entry is too frequently the most interesting ; for the question is, Did they leave property ? Is some legal verification of their possession of property necessary '? " No further seek their merits to disclose." But there are entries in this Register-book of Stratford that are interesting to us to all Englishmen to universal mankind. We have all received a precious legacy from one whose progress from the cradle to the grave is here recorded a bequest large enough for us all, and for all who will come after us. Pause we on the one entry of that book which most concerns the human race : William, the son of John Shakspere, baptized on the 26th April, 1564.* And when born ? The want of such information is a defect in all parish-registers. Baptism so immediately followed birth in those times, when infancy was surrounded with greater dangers than in our own days of improved medical science, that we may believe that William Shakspere first saw the light only a day or two previous to this legal record of his existence. There is no direct evidence that he was born on the 23rd of April according to the common belief. But there was probably a tradition to that effect, for some years ago the Rev. Joseph Greene, a master of the grammar-school at Strat- ford, in an extract which he made from the Register of Shakspere's baptism, wrote in the margin, " Born on the 23rd." We turn back to the first year of the registry, 1558, and we find the baptism of Joan, daughter to John Shakspere, on the 15th of September. Again, in 1562, on the 2nd of December, Margaret, daughter to John Shakspere, is baptized. In the entry of burials in 1563 we find, under date of April 30, that Margaret closed a short life in five months. The elder daughter Joan also died young. We look forward, and in 1566 find the birth of a son, after William, registered : Gilbert, son of John Shakspere, was baptized on the 1 3th of October of that year. In 1569 there is the registry of the baptism of Joan, daughter of John Shakspere, on the 15th of April. Thus, the registry of a second Joan leaves no reasonable doubt that the first died, and that a favourite name was preserved in the family. In 1571 Anne is baptized ; she died in 1579. In 1573-4 another son was baptized, Richard, son of Master (Magister) John Shakspere, on the 1 1th of * The date of the year, and the word April, occur three lines above the entry the baptism being the fourth registered in that month. The register of Stratford is a tall narrow book, of considerable thickness, the leaves formed of very fine vellum. But this book is only a transcript, attested by the vicar and four churchwardens, on every page of the registers from 1558 to 1600. The above is there- fore not a fac-simile of the original entry. 18 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. March. The last entry, which determines the extent of John Shakspcre's family, is that of Edmund, son of Master John Shakspere, baptized on the 3rd of May, 1580. Here, then, we find that two sisters of William were removed by death, probably before his birth. In two years and a half another son, Gilbert, came to be his play- mate ; and when he was five years old that most precious gift to a loving boy was granted, a sister, who grew up with him, and survived him. Another sister was born when he had reached seven years ; and as he was growing into youthful strength, a boy of fifteen, his last sister died ; and then his youngest brother was born. William, Gilbert, Joan, Richard, Edmund, constituted the whole of the family who survived the period of infancy. Howe, we have already seen, mentions the large family of John Shakspere, " ten children in all." Malone has established very satisfactorily the origin of this error into which Howe has fallen. In later years there was another John Shakspere in Stratford. In the books of the coq^oration the name of John Shakspere, shoemaker, can be traced in 1580 ; in the register in 1584 we find him married to Margery Roberts, who died in 1587 ; he is, without doubt, married a second time, for in 1589, 1590, and 1591, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip, are born. It is unquestionable that these are not the children of the father of William Shakspere, for they are entered in the register as the daughter, or sons, of John Shakspere, without the style which our John Shakspere always bore after 1569 -" Magister." There can be no doubt that the mother of all the children of Master John Shakspere was Mary Arden ; for in proceedings in Chancery in 1597, which we shall notice hereafter, it is set forth that John Shakspere and his wife Mary, in the 20th Elizabeth, 1577, mortgaged her inheritance of Asbies. Nor can there be a doubt that the children born before 1569, when he is styled John Shakspere, with- out the honourable addition of Master, were also her children. The history of the family up to the period of William Shakspere's manhood is as clear as can reason- ably be expected. William Shakspere has been carried to the baptismal font in that fine old church of Stratford. The "thick-pleached alley" that leads through the churchyard to [The Church Avenue.] CHAP. III.] THE REGISTER. the porch is putting forth its buds and leaves.* The chestnut hangs its white blossoms over the grassy mounds of that resting-place. All is joyous in the spring sunshine. Kind neighbours arc smiling upon the happy father ; maidens and matrons snatch a kiss of the sleeping boy. There is "a spirit of life in everything" on this 26th of April, 1564. Summer comes, but it brings not joy to Stratford. There is wailing in her streets and woe in her houses. The death- register tells a fearful history. From the 30th June to the 31st December, two hundred and thirty-eight inhabitants, a sixth of the population, are carried to the grave. * The plague is in the fated town ; the doors are marked with the red cross, and the terrible inscription, " Lord, have mercy upon us." It is the same epidemic which ravaged Europe in that year ; which in the previous year had desolated London, and still continued there ; of which sad time Stow pithily says " The poor citizens of London were this year plagued with a three- fold plague, pestilence, scarcity of money, and dearth of victuals ; the misery whereof were too long here to write : no doubt the poor remember it ; the rich by flight into the countries made shift for themselves." Scarcity of money and dearth of victuals arc the harbingers and the ministers of pestilence. Despair gathers up itself to die. Labour goes not forth to its accustomed duties. Shops are closed. The market-cross hears no hum of trade. The harvest lies almost ungathered in the fields. At last the destroying angel has gone on his way. The labourers ace thinned ; there is more demand for labour ; "victuals" arc not more abundant, but there are fewer left to share the earth's bounty. Then the adult rush into marriage. A year of pestilence is followed by a year of weddings;* and such a "strange eventful history" does the Stratford register tell. The Charnel-house a melan- choly-looking appendage to the chancel of Stratford Church, (now removed,) had [Stratford Church.] * It is supposed that such a green avenue was an okl appendage to the church, the present trees having taken the place of more ancient ones. f See " Malthus on Population," book ii., chap. 12. c 2 20 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. then its heaps of unhonoured bones fearfully disturbed : but soon the old tower heard again the wedding-peal. The red cross was probably not on the door of John Shakspere's dwelling. " Fortunately for mankind," says Malone, " it did not reach the house where the infant Shakspere lay ; for not one of that name appears on the dead list. A poetical enthusiast will find no difficulty in believing that, like Horace, he reposed secure and fearless in the midst of contagion and death, protected by the Muses to whom his future life was to be devoted : 'sacra Lauroque, collataque myrto, Non sine diis animosus infans.' " There were more real dangers around Shakspere than could be averted by the sacred laurel and the myrtle something more fearful than the serpent and the bear of the Koman poet.* He, by whom " Spirits are not finely touch'd But to fine issues," may be said, without offence, to have guarded this unconscious child. William Shakspere was to be an instrument, and a great one, in the intellectual advancement of mankind. The guards that He placed around that threshold of Stratford, as secondary ministers, were cleanliness, abundance, free air, parental watchfulness. The " non sine diis" the " protected by the Muses," rightly considered, must mean the same guardianship. Each is a recognition of something higher than acci- dent and mere physical laws. The parish of Stratford, then, was unquestionably the birth-place of William Shakspere. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his parents in the year 1564 ? It was ten years after this that his father became the purchaser of two freehold houses in Henley Street houses which still exist houses which the people of England have agreed to preserve as a precious relic of their greatest brother. William Shakspere, then, might have been born at either of his father's copyhold houses, in Greenhill Street, or in Henley Street ; he might have been born at Ingon ; or his father might have occupied one of the two freehold houses in Henley Street at the time of the birth of his eldest son. Tradition says, that William Shakspere ivas born in one of these houses ; tradition points out the very room in which he was born. Whether Shakspere were born here, or not, there can be little doubt that this property was the home of his boyhood. It was purchased by John Shakspere, from Edmund Hall and Emma his wife, for forty pounds. In a copy of the chirograph of the fine levied on this occasion (which is now in the possession of Mr. Wheler, of Stratford) the property is described as two messuages, two gardens, and two orchards, with their appurtenances. This document does not define the situation of the property, beyond its being in Stratford-upon-Avon ; but in the deed of sale of another property in 1591, that property is described as situate between the houses of Robert Johnson and John Shakspere ; and in 1597 John Shakspere himself sells a " toft, or parcel of land," in Henley Street, to the purchaser of the property in 1591. The properties can be traced, and leave no doubt of this house in Henley Street being the residence of John Shakspere. He retained the property during his life ; and it descended, as his heir-at-law, to his son William. In the last testament of the poet is this bequest to his " sister Joan : " " I do will arid devise unto her the house, with the appurtenances, in Stratford, wherein she dwelleth, for her natural life, under the yearly rent of twelve-pence." His sister Joan, whose name by mar- * Hor. lib. iii., car. iv. 22 WILLIAM BHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK. I. riagc was Hart, was residing there in 1639, and she probably continued to reside there till her death in 1646. The one house in which Mrs. Hart resided was doubtless the half of the building now forming the butcher's shop and the tenement adjoining; for the other house was known as the Maidenhead Inn, in 1642. In another part of Shakspcre's will he bequeaths, amongst the bulk of his property, to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, with remainder to her male issue, " two messuages or tenements, with the appurtenances, situate, lying, and being in Henley Street, within the borough of Stratford." There are existing settlements of this very property in the family of Shakspere's eldest daughter and grand-daughter ; and this grand-daughter, Elizabeth Nash, who was married a second time to Sir John Barnard, left both houses, namely, " the inn, called the Maidenhead, and the adjoining house and barn," to her kinsmen Thomas and George Hart, the grandsons of her grand- father's " sister Joan." These persons left descendants, with whom this property remained until the beginning of the present century. But it was gradually dimi- nished. The orchards and gardens were originally extensive : a century ago tene- ments had been built upon them, and they were alienated by the Hart then in possession. The Maidenhead Iim became the Swan Inn, and is now the Swan and Maidenhead. The White Lion, on the other side of the property, was extended, so as to include the remaining orchards and gardens. The house in which Mrs. Hart had lived so long became divided into two tenements ; and at the end of the last century the lower part of one was a butcher's shop. The engraving (page 21) exhibits John Shakspere's houses in Henley Street under three different aspects. No. 1 (the top) is from an original drawing made by Colonel Delamotte in 1788. The houses, it will be observed, then presented one uniform front ; and there were dormer windows connected with rooms in the roof. We have a plan before us, accompanying Mr. Wheler's account of these premises, which shows that they occupied a frontage of thirty-one feet. No. 2 is from an original drawing made by Mr. Pyne, after a sketch by Mr. Edridge in 1807. We now see that the dormer windows are removed, as also the gable at the east end of the front. The house has been shorn of much of its external importance. No. 3 is from a lithograph engraving in Mr. Wheler's account, published in 1824. The premises, we now see, have been pretty equally divided. The Swan and Maidenhead half has had its windows modernized, and the continuation of the timber-frame has been obliterated by a brick casing. In 1807, we observe that the western half had been divided into two tenements ; the fourth of the whole premises, that is the butcher's shop, the kitchen behind, and the two rooms over, being the portion commonly shown as Shakspere's House. Some years ago, upon a frontage in con- tinuation of the tenement at the west, three small cottages were built. The whole of this portion of the property has been purchased for the nation, as well as the two tenements. Was William Shakspere, then, born in the house in Henley Street which has been purchased by the nation 1 - For ourselves, we frankly confess that the want of absolute certainty that Shakspere was there born, produces a state of mind that is something higher and pleasanter than the conviction that depends upon positive evidence. We are content to follow the popular faith undoubtingly. The traditionary belief is sanctified by long usage and universal acceptation. The merely curious look in reverent silence upon that mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak, where they are told the poet of the human race was born. Eyes now closed on the world, but who have left that behind which the world " will not willingly let die," have glistened under this humble roof, and there have been thoughts unutterable solemn, confiding, grateful, humble clustering round their hearts in that hour. The autographs of Byron and Scott are amongst CHAP, m.] THE REGISTER. 23 hundreds of perishable inscriptions. Disturb not the belief that William Shakspere first saw the light in this venerated room. " The victor Time has stood on Avon's side To doom the fall of many a home of pride ; Eapine o'er Evesham's gilded fane has strode, And gorgeous Kenilworth has paved the road : But Time has gently laid his withering hands On one frail House the House of Shakspere stands ; Centuries are gone fallen ' the cloud-capp'd tow'rs ; ' But Shakspere *8 home, his boyhood's home, is ours ! " Prologue for the Shakspere Night, Dec. 7, 1847, by C. Knight. [Room in the House in Henley Street.] 24 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK i. [Inner Court of the Grammar School.] CHAPTER IV. THE SCHOOL. THE poet in his well-known " Seven Ages" has necessarily presented to us only the great boundary-marks of a human life : the progress from one stage to another he has left to be imagined : " At first the infant Muling and puking in the nurse's arms." Perhaps the most influential, though the least observed part of man's existence, that in which he learns most of good or of evil, lies in the progress between this first act and the second : " And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school." Between the "nurse's arms" and the "school" there is an important interval, filled up by a mother's education. There is a passage in one of Shakspere's Sonnets, the 89th, which has induced a CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 25 belief that he had the misfortune of a physical defect, which would render him peculiarly the object of maternal solicitude: "Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault, And I will comment upon that offence : Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt ; Against thy reasons making no defence." Again, in the 37th Sonnet: "Asa decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth." These lines have been interpreted to mean that William Shakspere was literally lame, and that his lameness was such as to limit him, when he became an actor, to the representation of the parts of old men. Mr. Harness has truly observed that " many an infirmity of the kind may be skilfully concealed, or only become visible in the moments of hurried movement ;" and he adds, "either Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron might, without any impropriety, have written the verses in question." We should have no doubt whatever that the verses we have quoted may be most fitly received in a metaphorical sense, were there not some subsequent lines in the 37th Sonnet which really appear to have a literal meaning ; and thus to render the pre- vious lame and lameness expressive of something more than the general self-abasement which they would otherwise appear to imply. In the following line's lame means something distinct from poor and despised : "For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, of all, or more. Entitled in thy parts do crowncc. sit, I make my love engrafted to this store : So then I am not lime, poor, nor despis'd, Whilst that tliis shadow doth such substance give." Of one thing, however, we may be quite sure that, if Shakspere were lame, his infirmity was not such as to disqualify him for active bodily exertion. The same series of verses that have suggested this belief that he was lame also show r that he was a horseman.* His entire works exhibit that familiarity with external nature, with rural occupations, with athletic sports, which is incompatible with an inactive boyhood. It is not impossible that some natural defect, or some accidental injury, may have modified the energy of such a child ; and have cherished in him that love of books, and traditionary lore, and silent contemplation, without which his intellect could not have been nourished into its wondrous strength. But we cannot imagine William Shaksperc a petted child, chained to home, not breathing the free air upon his native hills, denied the boy's privilege to explore every nook of his own river. We would imagine him communing from the first with Nature, as Gray has painted him " The dauntless child Strctch'd forth his little arms and smil'd." The only qualifications necessary for the admission of a boy into the Free Grammar School of Stratford \vere, that he should be a resident in the town, of seven years of age, and able to read. The Grammar School was essentially connected with the Corporation of Stratford ; and it is impossible to imagine that, when the son of John Shakspere became qualified by age for admission to a school where the best education of the time was given, literally for nothing, his father, in that year, being chief alder- * See Sonnets 50 and 51. WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. man, should not have sent him to the school. We assume, without any hesitation, that William Shakspere did receive in every just sense of the word the education of a scholar ; and as such education was to be had at his own door, we also assume that he was brought up at the Free Grammar School of his own town. His earlier instruction would therefore be a preparation for this school. In the first year of Edward VI. was published by authority " The ABC, with the Pater-noster, Ave, Crede, and Ten Commandementtes in Englysshe, newly translated and set forth at the kynges most gracious commandement." But the ABC soon became more immediately connected with systematic instruction in religious belief. The alphabet and a few short lessons were followed by the catechism, so that the book containing the catechism came to be called an A B C book, or Absey-book. Towards the end of Edward's reign was put forth by authority " A Short Cate- chisme, or playne instruction, conteynynge the sume of Christian learninge," which all schoolmasters were called upon to teach after the "little catechism" previously set forth. Such books were undoubtedly suppressed in the reign of Mary, but upon the accession of Elizabeth they were again circulated. A question then arises, Did William Shakspere receive his elementary instruction in Christianity from the books sanctioned by the Eeformed Church 1 It has been maintained that his father be- longed to the Koman Catholic persuasion. This belief rests upon the following foundation. In the year 1770, Thomas Hart, who then inhabited one of the tene- ments in Henley Street which had been bequeathed to his family by William Shakspere's grand-daughter, employed a bricklayer to new tile the house ; and this bricklayer, by name Mosely, found hidden between the rafters and the tiling a manuscript consisting of six leaves stitched together, which he gave to Mr. Peyton, an alderman of Stratford, who sent it to Mr. Malone, through the Rev. Mr. Devon- port, vicar of Stratford. This paper, which was first published by Malone in 1790, is printed also in Reed's Shakspeare and in Drake's " Shakspeare and his Times." It consists of fourteen articles, purporting to be a confession of faith of " John Shakspear, an unworthy member of the holy Catholic religion." We have no hesi- tation whatever in believing this document to be altogether a fabrication. Chalmers says, " It was the performance of a clerk, the undoubted work of the family priest."* Malone, when he first published the paper in his edition of Shakspeare, said " I have taken some pains to ascertain the authenticity of this manuscript, and, after a very careful inquiry, am perfectly satisfied that it is genuine." In 1796, however, in his work on the Ireland forgeries, he asserts " I have since obtained documents that clearly prove it could not have been the composition of any one of our poet's family." We not only do not believe that it was " the composition of any one of our poet's family," nor " the undoubted work of the family priest," but we do not believe that it is the work of a Roman Catholic at all. It professes to be the writer's "last spiritual will, testament, confession, protestation, and confession of faith." Now, if the writer had been a Roman Catholic, or if it had been drawn up for his approval and signature by his priest, it would necessarily, professing such fulness and completeness, have contained something of belief touching the then material points of spiritual difference between the Roman and the Reformed Church. Nothing, however, can be more vague than all this tedious protestation and confession ; with the exception that phrases, and indeed long passages, are introduced for the purpose of marking the supposed writer's opinions in the way that should be most offensive to those of a contrary opinion, as if by way of bravado or seeking of persecution. In this his last confession, spiritual will, and testament, he calls upon all his kins- folks to assist and succour him after his death " with the holy sacrifice of the mass," with a promise that he " will not be ungrateful unto them for so great a benefit," * "Apology for the Believers," page 199. CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 27 well knowing that by the Act of 1581 the saying of mass was punishable by a year's imprisonment and a fine of 200 marks, and the hearing of it by a similar imprison- ment and fine of 100 marks. The fabrication appears to us as gross as can well be imagined. That John Shakspere was what we popularly call a Protestant in the year 1568, when his son William was four years old, may be shown by the clearest of proofs. He was in that year the chief magistrate of Stratford ; he could not have become so without taking the Oath of Supremacy, according to the statute of the 1st of Elizabeth, 1558-9. To refuse this oath was made punishable with forfeiture and imprisonment, with the pains of prsemunire and high treason. " The conjecture," says Chalmers (speaking in support of the authenticity of this confession of faith), " that Shakspeare's family were Roman Catholics, is strengthened by the fact that his father declined to attend the corporation meetings, and was at last removed from the corporate body." He was removed from the corporate body in 1586, with a distinct statement of the reason for this removal his non-attendance when sum- moned to the halls. But a subsequent discovery of a document in the State Paper Office, communicated by Mr. Lemon to Mr. Collier, shews that in 1592, Mr. John Shakspere, with fourteen of his neighbours, were returned by certain Commissioners as " such recusants as have been heretofore presented for not coming monthly to the church according to her Majesty's laws, and yet are thought to forbear the church for debt and for fear of process, or for some other worse faults, or for age, sickness, or impotency of body." John Shakspere is classed amongst nine who " came not to church for fear of process for debt." We shall have to notice this assigned reason for the recusancy in a future Chapter. But the religious part of the question is capable of another solution, than that the father of Shakspere had become reconciled to the Romish religion. At that period the puritan section of the English church were acquiring great strength in Stratford and the neighbourhood; and in 1596, Richard Bifield, one of the most zealous of the puritan ministers, became its Vicar.* John Shakspere and his neighbours might not have been Popish recusants, and yet have avoided the church. It must be borne in mind that the parents of William Shakspere passed through the great changes of religious opinion, as the greater portion of the people passed, without any violent corresponding change in their habits derived from their forefathers. In the time of Henry VIII. the great contest of opinion was confined to the supremacy of the Pope ; the great practical state measure was the suppression of the religious houses. Under Edward VI. there was a very careful compromise of all those opinions and practices in which the laity were participant. In the short reign of Mary the persecution of the Reformers must have been offensive even to those who clung fastest to the ancient institutions and modes of belief ; and even when the Reformation was fully established under Elizabeth, the habits of the people were still very slightly interfered with. The astounding majority of the conforming clergy is a convincing proof how little the opinions of the laity must have been disturbed. They would naturally go along with their old teachers. We have to imagine, then, that the father of William Shakspere, and his mother, were, at the time of his birth, of the religion established by law. His father, by holding a high municipal office after the accession of Elizabeth, had solemnly de- clared his adherence to the great principle of Protestantism the acknowledgment of the civil sovereign as the head of the church. The speculative opinions in which the child was brought up would naturally shape themselves to the creed which his father must have professed in his capacity of magistrate ; but, according to some opinions, this profession was a disguise on the part of his father. The young Shak- spere was brought up in the Roman persuasion, according to these notions, because * Hunter: "New Illustrations," Vol. I., p. 106. 28 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. he intimates an acquaintance with the practices of the Roman church, and mentions purgatory, shrift, confession, in his dramas.* Surely the poet might exhibit this familiarity with the ancient language of all Christendom, without thus speaking "from the overflow of Roman Catholic zeal."t Was it "Roman Catholic zeal" which induced him to write those strong lines in King John against the " Italian priest," and against those who " Purchase corrupted pardon of a man 1 " Was it " Roman Catholic zeal" which made him introduce these words into the famous prophecy of the glory and happiness of the reign of Elizabeth " God shall be truly known ?" He was brought up, without doubt, in the opinions which his father publicly pro- fessed, in holding office subject to his most solemn affirmation of those opinions. The distinctions between the Protestant and the Popish recusant were then not so numerous or speculative as they afterwards became. But, such as they were, we may be sure that William Shakspere learnt his catechism in all sincerity ; that he frequented the church in which he and his brothers and sisters were baptized ; that he was prepared for the discipline of the school in which religious instruction by a minister of the church was regularly afforded as the end of the other knowledge there taught. He became tolerant, according to the manifestation of his after-writings, through nature and the habits and friendships of his early life. But that tolerance does not presume insincerity in himself or his family. The " Confession of Faith," found in the roof of his father's house two hundred years after he was born, would argue the extreme of religious zeal, even to the defiance of all law and authority, on the part of a man who had by the acceptance of office professed his adherence to the established national faith. If that paper were to be believed, we must be driven to the conclusion that John Shakspere was an unconscientious hypocrite for one part of his life, and a furious bigot for the other part. It is much easier to believe that the Reformation fell lightly upon John Shakspere, as it did upon the bulk of the laity ; and that he and his wife, without any offence to their consciences, saw the Common Prayer take the place of the Mass-book, and acknowledged the temporal sovereign to be head of the church : that in the education of their children they dispensed with auricular confession and penance ; but that they, in common with their neighbours, tolerated, and perhaps delighted in, many of the festivals and imaginative forms of the old religion, and even looked up for heavenly aid through intercession, without fancying that they were yielding to an idolatrous superstition, such as Puritanism came subsequently to denounce. The transition from the old worship to the new was not an ungentle one for the laity. The early reformers were too wise to attempt to root up habits those deep-sunk foundations of the past which break the plough- shares of legislation when it strives to work an inch below the earth's surface. To the grammar-school, then, with some preparation, we hold that William Shakspere goes, about the year 1571. His father is at this time, as we have said, chief alderman of his town ; he is a gentleman, now, of repute and authority, he is Master John Shakspere ; and assuredly the worthy curate of the neighbouring village of Luddington, Thomas Hunt, who was also the school-master, would have received his new scholar with some kindness. As his " shining morning face " first passed out of the main street into that old court through which the upper room of learning was to be reached, a new life would be opening upon him. The humble minister of religion who was his first instructor has left no memorials * See Chalmers's " Apology," p. 200. f Chalmers. See also Drake, who adopts, in great measure, Chalmers's argument. CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 29 of his talents or his acquirements ; and in a few years another master came after him, Thomas Jenkins, also unknown to fame. All praise and honour be to them ; for it is impossible to imagine that the teachers of William Shakspere were evil instruc- tors giving the boy husks instead of wholesome aliment. They could not have been harsh and perverse instructors, for such spoil the gentlest natures, and his was always gentle : " My gentle Shakspere" is he called by a rough but noble spirit one in whom was all honesty and genial friendship under a rude exterior. His wondrous abilities could not be spoiled even by ignorant instructors. In the seventh year of the reign of Edward VI. a royal charter was granted to Stratford for the incorporation of the inhabitants. That charter recites "That the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon was an ancient borough, in which a certain guild was theretofore founded, and endowed with divers lands, tenements, and posses- sions, out of the rents, revenues, and profits whereof a certain free grammar-school for the education of boys there was made and supported."* The charter further recites the other public objects to which the property of the guild had been applied ; that it was dissolved ; and that its possessions had come into the hands of the king. The charter of incorporation then grants to the bailiff and burgesses certain properties which were parcel of the possessions of the guild, for the general charges of the borough, for the maintenance of an ancient almshouse, " and that the free grammar-school for the instruction and education of boys and youth there should be thereafter kept up and maintained as theretofore it used to be." It may be doubted whether Stratford was benefited by the dissolution of ita guild. We sec that its grammar-school was an ancient establishment : it was not a creation of the charter of Edward VI., although it is popularly called one of the grammar- schools of that king, and was the last school established by him.t The people of Stratford had possessed the advantage of a school for instruction in Greek and Latin, which is the distinct object of a grammar-school, from the time of Edward IV., when Thomas Jolyffe, in 1482, "granted to the guild of the Holy Cross of Strat- ford-upon-Avon all his lands and tenements in Stratford and Dodwell, in the county of Warwick, upon condition that the master, aldermen, and proctors of the said guild should find a priest, fit and able in knowledge, to teach grammar freely to all scholars coming to the school in the said town to him, taking nothing of the scholars for their teaching."! Dugdale describes the origin of guilds, speaking of this of Stratford : " Such meetings were at first used by a mutual agreement of friends and neighbours, and particular licenses granted to them for conferring lands or rents to defray their public charges in respect that, by the statute of mortmain, such gifts would otherwise have been forfeited." In the surveys of Henry VIII., previous to the dissolution of religious houses, there were four salaried priests belonging to the guild of Stratford, with a clerk, who was also schoolmaster, at a salary of ten pounds per annum. They were a hospit- able body these guild-folk, for there was an annual feast, to which all the fraternity resorted, with their tenants and farmers ; and an inventory of their goods in the 15th of Edward IV. shows that they were rich in plate for the service of the table, as well as of the chapel. That chapel was partly rebuilt by the great benefactor of Stratford, Sir Hugh Clopton ; and after the dissolution of the guild and the esta- blishment of the grammar-school by the charter of Edward VI., the school was in all probability kept within it. There is an entry in the Corporation books, of February 18, 1594-5 "At this hall it was agreed by the bailiff and the greater number of the company now present that there shall be no school kept in the chapel from this time following." In associating, therefore, the schoolboy days of William * " Report of the Commissioners for inquiring concerning Charities." f See Strype's " Memorials." !J! " Report of Commissioners," &c. Dugdale. 30 WILLIAM 8HA.K8PBBE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. Shakspcre with the Free Grammar-School of Stratford, we cannot with any certainty imagine him engaged in his daily tasks in the ancient room which is now the school- [ Interior of the Grammar School.] room. And yet the use of the chapel as a school, discontinued in 1595, might only have been a temporary u3e. A little space may be occupied in a notice of each building. The grammar-school is now an ancient room over the old town-hall of Stratford ; both, no doubt, offices of the ancient guild. We enter from the street into a court, of which one side is formed by the chapel of the Holy Cross. Opposite the chapel is a staircase, ascending which we are in a plain room, with a ceiling. But it is evident that this work of plaster is modern, and that above it we have the oak roof of the sixteenth century. In this room are a few forms and a rude antique desk. The Chapel of the Guild is in great part a very perfect specimen of the plainer ecclesiastical architecture of the reign of Henry VII. : a building of just propor- tions and some ornament, but not running into elaborate decoration. The interior now presents nothing very remarkable. But upon a general repair of the chapel in 1804, beneath the whitewash of successive generations, was discovered a series of most remarkable paintings, some in that portion of the building erected by Sir Hugh Clopton, and others in the far more ancient chancel. A very elaborate series of coloured engravings has been published from these paintings, from drawings made at the time of their discovery by Mr. Thomas Fisher. There can be little doubt, from the defacement of some of the paintings, that they were partially destroyed by violence, and all attempted to be obliterated in the progress of the Reformation. But that outbreak of zeal did not belong to the first periods of religious change ; and it is most probable that these paintings were existing in the early years of CHAP. IV.] THE SCHOOL. 31 [Chapel of the Guild, and Grammar School: Streit Front.] Elizabeth's reign. When the five priests of the guild were driven from their home and their means of maintenance, the chapel no doubt ceased to be a place of worship ; and it probably became the school-room, after the foundation of the grammar-school, distinct from the guild, under the charter of Edward VI. If it was the school-room of William Shakspere, those rude paintings must have pro- duced a powerful effect upon his imagination. Many of them in the ancient chancel constituted a pictorial romance the history of the Holy Cross, from its origin as a tree at the Creation of the World to its rescue from the pagan Cosdroy, King of Persia, by the Christian King, Heraclius ; and its final Exaltation at Jerusalem, the anniversary of which event was celebrated at Stratford at its annual fair, held on the 1 4th of September. There were other pictures of Saints, and Martyrdoms ; and one, especially, of the murder of Thomas h, Becket, which exhibits great force, without that grotesqueness which generally belongs to our early paintings. There were fearful pictures, too, of the last Judgment ; with the Seven Deadly Sins visibly portrayed, the punishments of the evil, the rewards of the just. Surrounded as he was with the memorials of the old religion with great changes on every side, but still very recent changes how impossible was it that Shakspere should not have been thoroughly imbued with a knowledge of all that pertained to the faith of his ancestors ! One of the most philosophical writers of our day has said that Catholicism gave us Shakspere.* Not so, entirely. Shakspere belonged to the tran- * Carlvle : " French Revolution." 32 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. sition period, or he could not have been quite what he was. His intellect was not the dwarfish and precocious growth of the hot-bed of change, and still less of con- vulsion. His whole soul was permeated with the ancient vitalities the things which the changes of institutions could not touch ; but it could bourgeon under the new influences, and blend the past and the present, as the "giant oak" of five hundred winters is covered with the foliage of one spring. But there was one blessing which Catholicism would have withheld from him. When in the year 1537 the Bible in English was first printed by authority, Eichard Grafton, the printer, sent six copies to Cranmer, beseeching the archbishop to accept them as his simple gift, adding, " For your lordship, moving our most gracious prince to the allowance and licensing of such a work, hath wrought such an act worthy of praise as never was mentioned in any chronicle in this realm." From that time, with the excep- tion of the short interval of the reign of Mary, the presses of London were for the most part employed in printing Bibles. That book, to whose wonderful heart- stirring narratives the child listens with awe arid love, was now and ever after to be the solace of the English home. With "the Great Bible" open before her, the mother would read aloud to her little ones that beautiful story of Joseph sold into slavery, and then advanced to honour and how his brethren knew him not when, suppressing his tears, he said, " Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spake f ' or, how, when the child Samuel was laid down to sleep, the Lord called to him three times, and he grew, and God was with him ; or, how the three holy men who would not worship the golden image walked about in the midst of the burning fiery furnace ; or how the prophet that was unjustly cast into the den of lions was found unhurt, because the true God had sent his angels and shut the lions' mouths. These were the solemn and affecting narratives, wonderfully preserved for our instruction from a long antiquity, that in the middle of the sixteenth century became unclosed to the people of England. But more especially was that other Testament opened which most imported them to know ; and thus, when the child repeated in lisping accents the Christian's prayer to his Father in heaven, the mother could expound to him that, when the Divine Author of that prayer first gave it to us, He taught us that the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, were the happy and the beloved of God ; and laid down that comprehesive law of justice, " All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." We believe that the education of William Shakspere was grounded upon this Book ; and that, if this Book had been sealed to his childhood, he might have been the poet of nature, of passion, his humour might have been as rich as we find it, and his wit as pointed, but that he would not have been the poet of the most profound as well as the most tolerant philosophy ; his insight into the nature of man, his meanness and his grandeur, his weakness and his strength, would not have been what it is. CHAP. V.] THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 33 ^T^-eces^-^ , ^ s [Village of Aston Cantlow.] CHAPTER V. THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. LET us pass over for a time the young Shakspere at his school-desk, inquiring not when he went from "The Short Dictionary" forward to the use of " Cooper's Lexi- con," or whether he was most drilled in the " Eclogues" of Virgil, or those of the " good old Mantuan." Of one thing we may be well assured, that the instruction of the grammar-school was the right instruction for the most vivacious mind, as for him of slower capacity. To spend a considerable portion of the years of boyhood in the acquirement of Latin and Greek was not to waste them, as modern illumi- nation would instruct us. Something was to be acquired, accurately and completely, that was of universal application, and within the boy's power of acquirement. The particular knowledge that would fit him for a chosen course of life would be an after acquirement ; and, having attained the habit of patient study, and established in his own mind a standard to apply to all branches of knowledge by knowing one branch well, he would enter upon the race of life without being over-weighted with the elements of many arts and sciences, which it belongs only to the mature intellect to bear easily and gracefully, and to employ to lasting profit. Our grammar-schools were wise institutions. They opened the road to usefulness and honour to the humblest in the land ; they bestowed upon the son of the peasant the same advan- tages of education as the son of the noble could receive from the most accomplished teacher in his father's halls. Long may they be preserved amongst us in their integrity ; not converted by the meddlings of innovation into lecture-rooms for cramming children with the nomenclature of every science ; presenting little idea 34 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. even of the physical world beyond that of its being a vast aggregation of objects that may be classified and catalogued ; and leaving the spiritual world utterly uncared for, as a region whose products cannot be readily estimated by a money value. Every schoolboy's dwelling-place is a microcosm ; but the little world lying around William Shakspere was something larger than that in which boys of our own time for the most part live. The division of employments had riot so com- pletely separated a town life from a country life as with us ; and even the town occupations, the town amusements, and the town wonders, had more variety in them than our own days of systematic arrangement can present. Much of the education of Shakspere was unquestionably in the fields. A thousand incidental allusions manifest his familiarity with all the external aspects of nature. He is very rarely a descriptive poet, distinctively so called ; but images of mead and grove, of dale and upland, of forest depths, of quiet walks by gentle rivers, reflections of his own native scenery, spread themselves without an effort over all his writings. All the occupations of a rural life are glanced at or embodied in his characters. The sports, the festivals, of the lone farm or the secluded hamlet are presented by him with all the charms of an Arcadian age, but with a truthfulness that is not found in Arcadia. The nicest peculiarities in the habits of the lower creation are given at a touch : we see the rook wing his evening flight to the wood ; we hear the drowsy hum of the sharded beetle. He wreathes all the flowers of the field in his delicate chaplets ; and even the nicest mysteries of the gardener's art can be expounded by him. All this he appears to do as if from an instinctive power. His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself ; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the " green lap " in which the boy-poet was " laid." The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness. Looking on its placid stream, its gently swelling hills, its rich pastures, its sleeping woodlands, the external world would to him be full of images of repose : it was in the heart of man that he was to seek for the sublime. Nature has thus ever with him something genial and exhilarating. There are storms in his great dramas, but they are the accompaniments of the more terrible storms of human passions : they are raised by the poet's art to make the agony of Lear more intense, and the murder of Duncan more awful. But his love of a smiling creation seems ever present. We must image Stratford as it was, to see how the young Shakspere walked " in glory and in joy" amongst his native fields. Upon the bank of the Avon, having a very slight rise, is placed a scattered town ; a town whose dwellings have orchards and gardens, with lofty trees growing in its pathways. Its splendid collegiate church, in the time of Henry VIII., was described to lie half a mile from the town. Its eastern window is reflected in the river which flows beneath ; its gray tower is embowered amidst lofty elm-rows. At the opposite end of the town is a fine old bridge, with a cause- way whose "wearisome but needful length" tells of inundations in the low pastures that lie all around it. We look upon Dugdale's Map of Barichway Hundred, in which Stratford is situated, published in 1656, and we see four roads issuing from the town. The one to Henley in Arden, which lies through the street in which Shak- spere may be supposed to have passed his boyhood, continues over a valley of some breadth and extent, unenclosed fields undoubtedly in the sixteenth century, with the hamlets of Shottery and Bishopton amidst them. The road leads into the then woody district of Arden. At a short distance from it is the hamlet of Wilmecote, where Mary Arden dwelt ; and some two miles aside, more in the heart of the CHAP. V.] THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 35 woodland district, and hard by the river Alne, is the village of Aston Cantlow. Another road indicated on this old map is that to Warwick. The wooded hills of Welcombe overhang it, and a little aside, some mile and a half from Stratford, is the meadow of Ingon which John Shakspere rented in 1570. Very beautiful, even now, is this part of the neighbourhood, with its rapid undulations, little dells which shut in the scattered sheep, and sudden hills opening upon a wide landscape. Ancient crab-trees and hawthorns tell of uncultivated downs which have rung to the call of the falconer or the horn of the huntsman ; and then, having crossed the ridge, we are amongst rich corn-lands, with farm-houses of no modern date scattered about ; and deep in the hollow, so as to be hidden till we are upon it, the old village of Snitterficld, with its ancient church and its yew-tree as ancient. Here the poet's mother had property ; and here, it is reasonably conjectured, his father's family lived On the opposite side of Stratford, the third road runs in the direction of the Avon to the village of Bidford, with a nearer pathway along the river-bank. We cross the ancient bridge by the fourth road (which also diverges to Shipston), and we are on our way to the celebrated house and estate of Charlcote, the ancient seat of the Lucys, the Shaksperian locality with which most persons are familiar through traditions of deer-stealing. A pleasant ramble indeed is this to Charlcote and Hampton Lucy, even with glimpses of the Avon from a turnpike-road. But let the road run through meadows without hedgerows, with pathways following the river's bank, now diverging when the mill is close upon the stream, now crossing a leafy elevation, and then suddenly dropping under a precipitous wooded rock, and we have a walk such as poet might covet, and such as Shakspere did enjoy in his early rambles. Through these pleasant places would the boy William Shakspere walk hand in hand with his father, or wander at his own free will with his school companions. All the simple processes of farming life would be familiar to him. The profitable mysteries of modern agriculture would not embarrass his youthful experience. He would witness none of that anxious diligence which compels the earth to yield double crops, and places little reliance upon the unassisted operations of nature. The seed-time and the harvest in the corn-fields, the gathering-in of the thin grass on the uplands and of the ranker produce of the flooded meadows, the folding of the flocks on the hills, the sheep-shearing, would seem to him like the humble and patient waiting of man upon a bounteous Providence. There would-be no systematic rotation of crops to make him marvel at the skill of the cultivator. Implements most skilfully adapted for the saving of animal labour would be unknown to him. The rude plough of his Saxon ancestors would be dragged along by a powerful team of sturdy oxen ; the sound of the flail alone would be heard in the barn. Around him would, however, be the glad indications of plenty. The farmer would have abundant stacks, and beeves, and kine, though the supply would fail in precarious seasons, when price did not regulate consumption ; he would brew his beer and bake his rye-bread ; his swine would be fattening on the beech-mast and the acorns of the tree wood ; his skcps of bees would be numerous in his garden ; the colewort would sprout from spring to winter for his homely meal, and in the fruitful season the strawberry would present its much coveted luxury. The old orchard would be rich with the choicest apples, grafts from the curious monastic varieties ; the rarer fruits from southern climates would be almost wholly unknown. There would be no niggard economy defeating itself ; the stock, such as it was would be of the best, although no Bakewell had arisen to preside over its improvement : " Let careen and barren be shifted away, For best is the best, whatsoever ye pay." * * Tusser, chapter xvi. 36 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. William Shakspere would go out with his father on a Michaelmas morning, and the fields would be busy with the sowing of rye and white wheat and barley. The apples and the walnuts would be then gathered ; honey and wax taken from the hives ; timber would be felled, sawn, and stacked for seasoning. In the solitary fields, then, would stand the birdkeeper with his bow. As winter approached would come what Tusser calls " the slaughter-time," the killing of sheep and bullocks for home con- sumption ; the thresher would be busy now and then for the farmer's family, but the wheat for the baker would lie in sheaf. No hurrying then to market for fear of a fall in price ; there is abundance around, and the time of stint is far off. The simple routine was this : " In spring-time we rear, we do sow, and we plant ; In summer get victuals, lest after we want. In harvest we carry in corn, and the fruit, In winter to spend, as we need of each suit." * The joyous hospitality of Christmas had little fears that the stock would bo prema- turely spent ; and whilst the mighty wood-fire blazed in the hall to the mirth of song and carol, neighbours went from house to house to partake of the abundance, and the poor were fed at the same board with the opulent. As the frost breaks, the labourer is again in the fields ; hedging and ditching are somewhat understood, but the whole system of drainage is very rude. With such agriculture man seems to have his winter sleep as well as the earth. But nature is again alive ; spring corn is to be sown ; the ewes and lambs are to be carefully tended ; the sheep, now again in the fields, are to be watched, for there are hungry " mastiffs and mongrels" about ; the crow and pie are to be destroyed in their nests ere they are yet feathered ; trees are to be barked before timber is fallen. Then comes the active business of the dairy, and, what to us would be a strange sight, the lambs have been taken from their mothers, and the ewes are milked in the, folds. May demands the labour of the weed-hook ; no horse-hoeing in those simple days. There are the flax and hemp too to be sown to supply the ceaseless labour of the spinner's wheel ; bees arc to be swarmed ; and herbs are to be stored for the housewife's still. June brings its sheep-washing and shearing ; with its haymaking, where the farmer is captain in the field, presiding over the bottles and the wallets, from the hour when the dew is dry to set of sun. Bustle is there now to get " grist to the mill," for the streams are drying, and if the meal be wanting how shall the household be fed ? The harvest- time comes ; the reapers cry " largess " for their gloves ; the tithe is set out for " Sir Parson ; " and then, after the poor have gleaned, and the cattle have been turned in "to mouth up" what is left, " In harvest-time, harvest folk, servants and all, Should make, all together, good cheer in the hall ; And fill out the black bowl of blythe to their song, And let them be merry all harvest-time long."f Such was the ancient farmer's year, which Tusser has described with wonderful spirit even to the minutest detail ; and such were the operations of husbandry that the boy Shakspere would have beheld with interest amidst his native corn-fields and pastures. When the boy became deep-thoughted he would perceive that many things were ill undertood, and most operations indifferently carried through. He would hear of dearth and sickness, and he would seek to know the causes. But that time was not as yet. The poet who has delineated human life and character under every variety of passion and humour, must have had some early experience of mankind. The * Tusser, chapter xxiv. f Ibid, chapter xlvii. CHAP, v.] THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 37 loftiest imagination must work upon the humblest materials. In his father's home, amongst his father's neighbours, he would observe those striking differences in the tempers and habits of mankind which are obvious even to a child. Cupidity would be contrasted with generosity, parsimony with extravagance. He would hear of injustice and of ingratitude, of uprightness and of fidelity. Curiosity would lead him to the bailiff's court ; and there he would learn of bitter quarrels and obsti- nate enmities, of friends parted " on a dissension of a doit," of foes who " interjoin their issues" to worry some wretched offender. Small ambition and empty pride would grow bloated upon the pettiest distinctions ; and " the insolence of office " would thrust humility off the causeway. There would be loud talk of loyalty and religion, while the peaceful and the pious would be suspected ; and the sycophant who wore the great man's livery would strive to crush the independent in spirit. Much of this the observing boy would see, but much also would be concealed in the general hollowness that belongs to a period of inquietude and change. The time would come when he would penetrate into the depths of these things ; but mean- while what was upon the surface would be food for thought. At the weekly market there would be the familiar congregation of buyers and sellers. The house- wife from her little farm would ride in gallantly between her panniers laden with butter, eggs, chickens, and capons. The farmer would stand by his pitched corn, and, as Harrison complains, if the poor man handled the sample with the intent to purchase his humble bushel, the man of many sacks would declare that it was sold. The engrosser, according to the same authority, would be there with his understand- ing nod, successfully evading every statute that could be made against forestalling, because no statutes could prevail against the power of the best price. There, before shops were many, and their stocks extensive, would come the dealers from Birming- ham and Coventry, with wares for use and wares for show, horse-gear and women- gear, Sheffield whittles, and rings with posies. At the joyous Fair-season it would seem that the wealth of a world was emptied into Stratford ; not only the sub- stantial things, the wine, the wax, the wheat, the wool, the malt, the cheese, the clothes, the uapery, such as even great lords sent their stewards to the fairs to buy,* but every possible variety of such trumpery as fill the pedlar's pack, ribbons, inkles, caddises, coifs, stomachers, pomanders, brooches, tapes, shoe-ties. Great dealings were there on these occasions in beeves and horses, tedious chafferings, stout affirmations, saints profanely invoked to ratify a bargain. A mighty man rides into the fair who scatters consternation around. It is the Queen's Purveyor. The best horses are taken up for her Majesty's use, at her Majesty's price ; and they probably find their way to the Earl of Leicester's or the Earl of Warwick's stables at a considerable profit to Master Purveyor. The country buyers and sellers look blank ; but there is no remedy. There is solace, however, if there is not redress. The ivy-bush is at many a door, and the sounds of merriment are within, as the ale and the sack are quaffed to friendly greetings. In the streets there are morris- dancers, the juggler with his ape, and the minstrel with his ballads. We can imagine the foremost in a group of boys listening to the " small popular music sung by these cantabcuiqui upon benches and barrels' heads," or more earnestly to some one of the " blind harpers, or such-like tavern minstrels, that give a fit of mirth for a groat ; their matters being for the most part stories of old time, as ' The Tale of Sir Topas,' < Bevis of Southampton,' ' Guy of Warwick,' 'Adam BeU and Clyrnme of the dough,' and such other old romances or historical rhymes, made purposely for the recreation of the common people."t A bold fellow, who is full of queer stories and cant phrases, strikes a few notes upon his gittern, and the lads and * See the " Northumberland Household Book." f Puttenham's "Art of Poetry/' 1689. 38 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK i. lasses are around him ready to dance their country measures. He is thus described in the year 1564, in a tract by William Bulleyn : "Sir, there is one lately come into this hall, in a green Kendal coat, with yellow hose, a beard of the same colour, only upon the upper lip ; a russet hat, with a great plume of strange feathers, and a brave scarf about his neck, in cut buskins. He is playing at the trey-trip with our host's son : he playeth trick upon the gittern, and dances ' Trenchmore ' and ' Heie de Gie,' and telleth news from Terra Florida." Upon this strange sort of indigenous troubadour would the schoolboy gaze, for he would seem to belong to a more know- ing race than dwelt on Avon's side. His " news from Terra Florida " tells us of an age of newstongues, before newspapers were. Doubtless such as he had many a story of home wonders ; he had seen London perhaps ; he could tell of Queens and Parliaments ; might have seen a noble beheaded, or a heretic burnt ; he could speak, we may fancy, of the wonders of the sea ; of ships laden with rich merchandize, unloading in havens far from this inland region ; of other ships wrecked on inhos- [The Fair.] pitable coasts, and poor men made rich by the ocean's spoils. At the fair, too, would be the poor old minstrel, with his gown of Kendal green, not tattered though somewhat tarnished. The harp laid by his side upon the bench tells his profession. There was a time when he was welcomed at every hall, and he might fitly wear starched ruffs, and a chain of pewter as bright as silver, and have the rest of his harp jauntily suspended by a green lace. Those times are past. He scarcely now dares to enter worshipful men's houses ; and at the fairs a short song of love or good fellowship, or a dp rice to the gittern, are preferred by most to his tedious CHAP, v.] THE SCHOOLBOY'S WORLD. 39 legends. For many a long "fitte" had he, which told of doughty deeds of Arthur and his chivalry, Sir Bevis, Sir Gawain, Sir Launfal, and Sir Isenbras ; and, after he had preluded with his harp, the minstrel would begin each in stately wise with " Listen, lordings, and hold you still," or " Listen to me a little stond." He might maunder on, neglected by most, though one youth might treasure up his words. There are many traces in the works of Shakspere of his familiarity with old romances and old ballads ; but like all his other acquirements, there is no repro- duction of the same thing under a new form. Howe fancied that Shakspere's knowledge of the learned languages was but small, because " it is without con- troversy that in his works we scarce find any traces of anything that looks like an imitation of the ancients." It is for inferior men to imitate. It was for Shakspere to subject his knowledge to his original power of thought, so that his knowledge and his invention should become "one entire and perfect chrysolite;" and thus the minute critic, who desires to find the classical jewels set in the English gold, proclaims that they are not there, because they were unknown and unappreciated by the uneducated poet. So of the traditionary lore with which Shakspere must have been familiar from his very boyhood. That lore is not in his writings in any very palpable shape, but its spirit is there. The simplicity, the vigour, the pathos, the essential dramatic power, of the ballad poetry stood out in Shakspere's boyhood in remarkable contrast to the drawling pedantry of the moral plays of the early stage. The ballads kept the love and the knowledge of real poetry in the hearts of the people. There was something high, and generous, and tolerant, in those which were most popular ; something which demonstratively told they belonged to a nation which admired courage, which loved truth, which respected misfortune. Percy, speaking of the more ancient ballad of " Chevy Chase," says " One may also observe a generous impartiality in the old original bard, when in the conclusion of his tale he represents both nations as quitting the field without any reproachful reflection on either ; though he gives to his own countrymen the credit of being the smaller number." The author of that ballad was an Englishman ; and we may believe this " impartiality" to have been an ingredient of the old English patriotism. At any rate it entered into the patriotism of Shakspere. 40 WILLIAM 8HAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. BOOK I. [The Boundary Elm, Stratford.] CHAPTER VI. HOLIDAYS. IT is the twenty-third of April, and the birthday of William Shakspere is a general holiday at Stratford. It is St. George's day. There is high feasting at Westminster or at Windsor. The green rushes are strewn in the outward courts of the Palace ; the choristers lift up the solemn chants of the Litany as a procession advances from the Queen's Hall to her Chapel ; the Heralds move on gorgeously in their coat- armour ; the Knights of the Garter and the Sovereign glitter in their velvet robes ; the Yeomen of the Guard close round in their richest liveries.* At Stratford there is humbler pageantry. Upon the walls of the Chapel of the Holy Cross there was a wondrous painting of a terrible dragon pierced through the neck with a spear ; but he has snapped the weapon in two with his fearful talons, and a gallant knight in complete armour is uplifting his sword, whilst the bold horse which he bestrides rushes upon the monster with his pointed champfrein :t in the background is a crowned lady with a lamb ; and on distant towers a king and queen watching the combat. This story of Saint George and the delivery of the Princess of Silcne from the power of the dragon was, on the twenty-third of April, wont to be dramatized at Stratford. From the altar of Saint George was annually taken down an ancient * See Nichols's " Progresses of Elizabeth," vol. i., p. 88. f The armour for the horse's head, with a long projecting spike, so as to make the horse resemble an unicorn. CHAP. VI.] HOLIDAYS. 41 suit of harness, which was duly scoured and repaired ; and from some storehouse was produced the figure of a dragon, which had also all needful annual reparation. Upon the back of a sturdy labourer was the harness fitted, and another powerful man had to bear the dragon, into whose body he no doubt entered. Then, all the dignitaries of the town being duly assembled, did Saint George and the Dragon march along, amidst the ringing of bells and the firing of chambers, and the shout of the patriotic population of "Saint George for England."* Here is the simplest of dramatic exhibitions, presented through a series of years to the observing eyes of a boy in whom the dramatic power of going out of himself to portray some incident, or character, or passion with incomparable truth, was to be developed and matured in the growth of his poetical faculty. As he looked upon that rude representation of a familiar legend, he may first have conceived the capability of exhibiting to the eye a moving picture of events, and of informing it with life by appropriate dialogue. But in truth the essentially dramatic spirit of the ancient church had infused itself thoroughly into the popular mind ; and thus, long after the Reformation had swept away most of the ecclesiastical ceremonials that were held to belong to the supersti- tions of Popery, the people retained this principle of personation in their common festivals ; and many were the occasions in which the boy and the man, the maiden and the matron were called upon to enact some part, that might require bodily activity and mental readiness ; in which something of grace and even of dignity might be called forth ; in which a free but good-tempered wit might command the applause of uncritical listeners ; and a sweet or mellow voice, pouring forth our nation's songs, would receive the exhilarating homage of a jocund chorus. Let us follow the boy William Shakspere, now, we will suppose, some ten or eleven years old, through the annual course of the principal rustic holidays, in which the yeoman and the peasant, the tradesman and the artisan, with their wives and children, were equally ready to partake. We may discover in these familiar scenes not only those peculiar forms of a dramatic spirit in real manners which might in some degree have given a direction to his genius, but, what is perhaps of greater importance, that poetical aspect of common life which was to supply materials of thought and of imagery to him who was to become in the most eminent degree the poet of humanity in all its imaginative relations. The festivities of Christmas are over. The opening year calls the husbandman again to his labours ; and Plough Monday, with its plough dragged along to rustic music, and its sword-dance, proclaims that wassail must give place to work. The rosemary and the bays, the misletoe arid the holly, are removed from the porch and the hall, and the delicate leaves of the box are twined into the domestic garland/t* The Vigil of Saint Agnes has rewarded or disappointed the fateful charm of the village maiden. The husbandman has noted whether Saint Paul's day " be fair and clear," to guide his presages of the year's fertility. " Cupid's Kalendere" has been searched on the day of "Seynte Valentine," as Lydgate tells. The old English chorus, which Shakspere himself has preserved, has been duly sung " 'T is merry in hall, when beards wag all, And welcome merry Shrove-tide." Easter is come, after a season of solemnity. The ashes were no longer blessed at the beginning of Lent, nor the palms borne at the close ; yet there was strong devotion in the reformed church real penitence and serious contemplation. But * It appears from accounts which are given in fac-simile in Fisher's Work on the Chapel of the Guild that this procession repeatedly took place in the reign of Henry VIII. ; and other accounts show that it was continued as late as 1579. f Hcrrick. 42 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE I A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. the day of gladness arrives a joy which even the great eye of the natural world was to make manifest. Surely there was something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter-day, to see him mounting over the hills with a tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind. The young poet might have joined his simple neighbours on this cheerful morning, and yet have thought with Sir Thomas Browne, " We shall not, I hope, disparage the Resurrection of our Redeemer if we say that the sun doth not dance on Easter-day." But one of the most glorious images of one of his early plays has given life and movement to the sun : "Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain's tops. Saw he not the sun dance heard he not the expression of the undoubting belief that the sun danced as he went forth into Stratford meadows in the early twilight of Easter-day ? On the road to Henley-in-Arden, about two or three hundred yards from the house in Henley Street where John Shakspere once dwelt, there stood, when this Biography was first written, a very ancient boundary-tree an elm which is recorded in a Presentment of the Perambulation of the boundaries of the Borough of Strat- ford, on the 7th of April, 1591, as " The Elme at the Dovehouse-Close end."* The boundary from that elm in the Henley road continued in another direction to " the two elms in Evesham highway." Such are the boundaries of the borough at this day. At a period, then, when it was usual for the boys of Grammar Schools to attend the annual perambulations in Rogation-week of the clergy, the magistrates and public officers, and the inhabitants, of parishes and towns,t would William Shakspere be found, in gleeful companionship, under this old boundary elm. There would be assembled the parish priest and the schoolmaster, the bailiff and the church- wardens. Banners would wave, poles crowned with garlands would be carried by old and young. Under each Gospel-tree, of which this Dovehouse-Close Elm would be one, a passage from Scripture would be read, a collect recited, a psalm sung. With more pomp at the same season might the Doge of Venice espouse the Sea in testimony of the perpetual domination of the Republic, but not with more heartfelt joy than these the people of Stratford traced the boundaries of their little sway. The Reformation left us these parochial processions. In the 7th year of Elizabeth (1565) the form of devotion for the "Rogation days of Procession" was prescribed, " without addition of any superstitious ceremonies heretofore used;" and it was subsequently ordered that the curate on such occasions " shall admonish the people to give thanks to God in the beholding of God's benefits," and enforce the scriptural denouncements against those who removed their neighbours' landmarks. Beauti- fully has Walton described how Hooker encouraged these annual ceremonials : " He would by no means omit the customary time of procession, persuading all, both rich and poor, if they desired the preservation of love and their parish rights and liberties, to accompany him in his perambulation ; and most did so ; in which per- ambulation he would usually express more pleasant discourse than at other times, and would then always drop some loving and facetious observations, to be remem- bered against the next year, especially by the boys and young people ; still inclining them, and all his present parishioners, to meekness and mutual kindnesses and love, because love thinks not evil, but covers a multitude of infirmities." And so, per- haps, listening to the gentle words of some venerable Hooker of his time, would the young Shakspere walk the bounds of his native parish. One day would not suffice * The original is in the possession of R. Wheler, Esq., of Stratford. f See Brand's " Popular Antiquities/' by Sir H. Ellis, edit. 1841, vol. i., p. 123. CHAP. VI.] HOLIDAYS. 43 ;o visit its numerous Gospel-trees. Hours would be spent in reconciling differences amongst the cultivators of the common-fields ; in largesses to the poor ; in merry- making at convenient halting-places. A wide parish is this of Stratford, including leven villages and hamlets. A district of beautiful and varied scenery is this parish hill and valley, wood and water. Following the Avon upon the north bank, against the stream, for some two miles, the processionists would walk through low and fertile meadows, unenclosed pastures then in all likelihood. A little brook falls into ,he river, coming down from the marshy uplands of Ingon, where, in spite of modern mprovement, the frequent bog attests the accuracy of Dugdale's description ' Inge signifyeth in our old English a meadow or low ground." The brook is traced upwards into the hills of Welcombe ; and then for nearly three miles from Welcombe Grreenhill the boundary lies along a wooded, ridge, opening prospects of surpassing jeauty. There may the distant spires of Coventry be seen peeping above the ntermediate hills, and the nearer towers of Warwick lying cradled in their surround- ng woods. In another direction a cloud-like spot in the extreme distance is the far-famed Wrekin ; and turning to the north-west are the noble hills of Malvern, with their well-defined outlines. The Cotswolds lock-in the landscape on another side ; while in the middle distance the bold Bredon-hill looks down upon the vale of Evesham. All around is a country of unrivalled fertility, with now and then a plain of considerable extent ; but more commonly a succession of undulating hills, some wood-crowned, but all cultivated. At the northern extremity of this high land, which principally belongs to the estate of Clopton, and which was doubtless a park in early times, we have a panoramic view of the valley in which Stratford lies, with its hamlets of Bishopton, Little Wilmecote, Shottery, and Drayton. As the marvellous boy of the Stratford grammar-school looked upon that plain, how little could he have foreseen the course of his future life ! For twenty years of his manhood he was to have no constant dwelling-place in that his native town ; but it was to be the home of his affections. He would be gathering fame and opulence in an almost untrodden path, of which his young ambition could shape no definite image ; but in the prime of his life he was to bring his wealth to his own Stratford, and become the proprietor and the contented cultivator of some of the loved fields that he now saw mapped out at his feet. Then, a little while, and an early tomb under that gray tower a tomb so to be honoured in all ages to come, " That kings for such a tomb would wish to die." For some six miles the boundary runs from north to south, partly through land which was formerly barren, and still known as Drayton Bushes and Drayton Wild Moor. Here, " Far from her nest the lapwing cries away." * The green bank of the Avon is again reached at the western extremity of the boundary, and the pretty hamlet of Luddington, with its cottages and old trees standing high above the river sedges, is included. The Avon is crossed where the Stour unites with it ; and the boundary extends considerably to the south-east, returning to the town over Clopton's Bridge. Shottery, the prettiest of hamlets, is scarcely a mile from Stratford. Here, in all probability dwelt one who in a few years was to have an important influence upon the destiny of the boy-poet. A Court Roll of the 34th Henry VIII. (1543) shows us that John Hathaway then resided at Shottery ; and the substantial house which the Hathaway s possessed, now divided into several cottages, remained with their descendants till the very recent period of 1838. There were Hathaways, also, living * " Comedy of Errors." 44 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. in the town of Stratford, contemporaries of John Shakspere. We cannot say, absolutely, that Anne Hathaway, the future wife of William Shakspere, was of Shottery ; but the prettiest of maidens (for the veracious antiquarian Oldys says there is a tradition that she was eminently beautiful) would have fitly dwelt in the pleasantcst of hamlets. Pass the back of the cottage in which the Hathaways lived, and enter that beautiful meadow which rises into a gentle eminence commanding the hamlet at several points. Throw down the hedges, and there is here the fittest of localities for the May-games. An impatient group is gathered under the shade of the old elms, for the morning sun casts his slanting beams dazzlingly across that green. There is the distant sound of tabor and bagpipe : " Hark, hark ! I hear the dancing, And a nimble inorris prancing ; The bagpipe and the morris bells, That they are not far hence us tells." * From out of the leafy Arden are they bringing in the May-pole. The oxen move slowly with the ponderous wain : they are garlanded, but not for the sacrifice. Around the spoil of the forest are the pipers and the dancers maidens in blue kirtles, and foresters in green tunics. Amidst the shouts of young and old, child- hood leaping and clapping its hands, is the May-pole raised. But there are great personages forthcoming not so great, however, as in more ancient times. There are Robin Hood and Little John, in their grass-green tunics ; but their bows and their sheaves of arrows are more for show than use. Maid Marian is there ; but she is a mockery a smooth-faced youth in a watchet-coloured tunic, with flowers and coronets, and a mincing gait, but not the shepherdess who " With garlands gay Was made the lady of the May." f There is farce amidst the pastoral. The age of unrealities has already in part arrived. Even amongst country-folks there is burlesque. There is personation, with a laugh at the things that are represented. The Hobby-horse and the Dragon, however, produce their shouts of merriment. But the hearty Morris-dancers soon spread a spirit of genial mirth amidst all the spectators. The clownish Maid Marian will now " Caper upright like a wild Morisco : " J Friar Tuck sneaks away from his ancient companions to join hands with some undisguised maiden ; the Hobby-horse gets rid of his pasteboard and his foot-cloth ; and the Dragon quietly deposits his neck and tail for another season. Something like the genial chorus of " Summer's Last Will and Testament " is rung out : " Trip and go, heave and ho, Up and down, to and fro, From the town to the grove, Two and two, let us rove, A Maying, a playing ; Love hath no gainsaying : So merrily trip and go." The early-rising moon still sees the villagers on that green of Shottery. The piper leans against the May-pole ; the featliest of dancers still swim to his music : " So have I seen Tom Piper stand upon our village green, Back'd with the May -pole, whilst a jocund crew In gentle motion circularly threw Themselves around him." * Weclkes's "Madrigals," 1600. f Nicholas Breton. J " Henry VI.," Part II. Browne's " Britannia's Pastorals," Book ii. Second Song. CHAP. VI.] HOLIDAYS. 45 The same beautiful writer one of the last of our golden age of poetry has described the parting gifts bestowed ^DOU the " merry youngsters" by " The lady of the May Set in an arbour, (on a holy-day,) Built by the May-pole, where the jocund swains Dance with the maidens to the bagpipe's strains, "When envious night commands them to be gone."* [Shottery.J Eight villages in the neighbourhood of Stratford have been characterized in well- known lines by some old resident who had the talent of rhyme. It is remarkable how familiar all the country-people are to this day with these lines, and how inva- riably they ascribe them to Shakspere : " Piping Pelnvorth, dancing Marston, Haunted Hilborough, hungry Grafton, Dudgingf Exhall, Papist Wicksford, Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford." It is maintained that the.se epithets have a real historical truth about them ; and * Browne's " Britannia's Pastorals," Book ii. Fourth Song. f Sulky, stubborn, in dudgeon. 46 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK I. so we must place the scene of a Whitsun-Ale at Bidford. Aubrey has given a sen- sible account of such a festivity : " There were no rates for the poor in my grand- father's days ; but for Kingston St. Michael (no small parish) the Church- Ale of Whitsuntide did the business. In every parish is, or was, a church-house, to which belonged spits, crocks, &c., utensils for dressing provision. Here the housekeepers met and were merry, and gave their charity. The young people were there, too, and had dancing, bowling, shooting at butts, &c., the ancients sitting gravely by and looking on. All things were civil, and without scandal."* The puritan Stubbs took a more severe view of the matter than Aubrey's grandfather : " In certain towns where drunken Bacchus bears sway, against Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide, or some other time, the churchwardens of every parish, with the consent of the whole parish, provide half a score or twenty quarters of malt, whereof some they buy of the church-stock, and some is given them of the parishioners themselves, every one conferring somewhat, according to his ability ; which malt, being made into very strong ale or beer, is set to sale, either in the church or some other place assigned to that purpose. Then, when this is set abroach, well is he that can get the soonest to it, and spend the most at it."t Carew, the historian of Cornwall, (1602), says, " The neighbour parishes at those times lovingly visit one another, and this way frankly spend their money together." Thus lovingly might John Shakspere and his friends, on a Whit-Monday morning, have ridden by the pleasant road to Bidford now from some little eminence beholding their Avon flowing amidst a low meadow on one side and a wood-crowned steep on t"he other, turning a mill-wheel, rushing over a dam now carefully wending their way >-.. [Bidford Bridge.] through the rough road under the hill, or galloping over the free downs, glad to escape from rut and quagmire. And then the Icknield Street t is crossed, Miscellanies." f " Anatomy of Abuses," 1585. The Roman way which runs near Bidford. CHAP. VL] HOLIDAYS. 47 and they look down upon the little town with its gabled roofs ; and they pass the old church, whose tower gives forth a lusty peal ; and the hostel at the bridge receives them ; and there is the cordial welcome, the outstretched hand and the full cup. But nearer home Whitsuntide has its sports also. Had not Stratford its " Lord of Whitsuntide 1 " Might not the boy behold at this season innocence wearing a face of freedom like his own Perdita ? " Come take your flowers : Methinks, I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals."* Would there not be in some cheerful mansion a simple attempt jat dramatic representation, such as his Julia has described in her assumed character of a page ? " At Pentecost, When all our pageants of delight were play'd, Our youth got me to play the woman's part ; And I was trimm'd in madam Julia's gown ; Which served me as fit, in all men's judgments, As if the garment had been made for me : Therefore I know she is about my height. And at that time I made her weep a-good, For I did play a lamentable part : Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight."f Certainly on that holiday some one would be ready to recite a moving tale from Gower or from Chaucer a fragment of the " Confessio Amantis" or of the " Troilus and Creseide :" " It hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves, and holy-ales."! The elements of poetry would be around him ; the dramatic spirit of the people would be strugglij|g to give utterance to its thoughts, and even then he might cherish the desire to lend it a voice. The sheep-shearing that, too, is dramatic. Drayton, the countryman of our poet, has described the shepherd-king : " But, Muse, return to tell how there the shepherd-king, Whose flock hath chanc'd that year the earliest lamb to bring, In his gay baldric sits at his low grassy board, With flawns, curds, clouted cream, and country dainties stor'd : And, whilst the bagpipe plays, each lu&ty jocund swain Quaffs syllabubs in cans to all upon the plain ; And to their country girls, whose nosegays they do wear, Some roundelays do sing, the rest the burden bear." The vale of Evesham is the scene of Drayton's sheep-shearing. But higher up the Avon there are rich pastures ; and shallow bays of the clear river, where the wash- ing may be accomplished. Such a bay, so used, is there near the pretty village of Alveston, about two miles above Stratford. One of the most delicious scenes of the " Winter's Tale " is that of the sheep-shearing, in which we have the more poetical shepherd-<^